How to Draw and Animate a Character in Photoshop and After Effects

1. Introduction: animating characters is a great way to connect with your audience, whether it's a commercial or in a video game or even a big film project. Hi there. I'm Sam Conklin, and I'm an animator with over five years of experience animating characters. One of my favorite ways to animate characters is to do it digitally. You can draw your character and photo shop and then bring those components into after effects to bring that character to life. For this class, you will need Photoshopped after effects and media encoder. A drawing tablet is not required, but I do recommend it's that you can have a bit more control when you're drawing in photo shop again. You don't need any artistic skills or experience an animation to complete this class, and this class will serve as a fantastic foundation for future learning and animation. Thank you so much for watching, and I look forward to seeing you in my class 2. Sketching: All right. So the first step we're going tohave in the process here is to open up photo shop. I'm gonna go to file new and we're going to open up a canvas with a size of 1200 by 1200 pixels. I find that this is a nice size because if you want to do something fun with it later for animation 1200 is divisible by a lot of different numbers. We also want to make sure that our color mode is on RGB color and this all looks good. So we're going to say create. And here is our beautiful canvas that we could make so much beautiful art on if the movements I make with my stylist here look very clean and precise. It's because I'm using a drawing tablet if you don't have a drawing tablet or if you're not used to using it. No worries. You don't really have to be an expert with a drawing tablet In order to do things. We'll see what I did down here is I tapped down in this little ah symbol right here to create a new layer. It will create a layer for you, right on top. Aiken, delete that. I can show you again. Click down here, creating new layer. I'm going to name this by double clicking. This is going to be my sketch layer. The first thing we're going to do is sketch our character. But how are we going to sketch her character if we don't know exactly what we want them to look like? Well, I want my character to be a human character with two arms and a head and torso. Basically, I don't want it to be anything too complicated. Especially since I want you guys to be able to follow this along. So I'm going to pick a nice, pretty color like this bright pink, and I'm going to go up here to choose my brush. I have a lot of my own presets here, but basically, I'm just gonna choose something, so I'm gonna go with the size of around 14. Feels a little small. I like to draw really thick lines. So this parts up to you. How big you want to make it hardness on 100%. That's great. I like to draw by sketches with obnoxiously bright colors so that I can see them. If I'm working with dim lighting or something, it's easier to see these things. They pop a lot more than, say something darker. So I'm gonna make sure I have this layer right here selected and I'm going to go to my opacity. Turn this down So I have my sketch layer over here and I want to make sure that that is visible and it's selected. If it's not selected, it will look like this. But here I have it selected. You can press be for the brush tool and just doing some scribbles. Make sure it looks how you want it to look that's working pretty well for me. Awesome. So now I'm going to drama character. You can follow along. This is pretty simple. I'm just going to do oval for the head and then sort of this shape right here, and I'm going to draw. I'm actually going to move this up because I think I want more room for their arms so going toe press V and click and drag and move that up and then go back to be for the brush tool. I want their shoulders to be here, so I'm just gonna sketch this out. This doesn't need to be perfect. This is just the sketch as well. I like to draw sort of tubes for arms. I think they're very simple and then spiky fingers because, you know, spiky fingers, air charming on. Then the next thing I'm going to do is draw the other arm. Just going to sort of figure out where I want that toe look. All right, there we go. They're only gonna have four fingers. This is this is how they're gonna be. And maybe we'll give them some pants or something down there. And then I want to give a little bit of hair just on top there and an ear and beautiful I want Make sure this person has clothes, twos. They're gonna have a long sleeve shirt. So these sleeves are gonna be the same color as the shirt. And there we go. That's my character, who I'm going to animate. In fact, I think they're a little large. So get I pressed V to make sure I could move it around. I'm gonna put my mouse over here on Thecornerscores and then just dragged downward, and we're going to scale that down a little bit, and there we go. I think that's a nice character to anime. So that is the sketch. All right, So you have your sketch done, and the next thing you want to do for this lesson is we're going to save this. I'm going to. Since I have a Mac, I'm going to use a shortcut. Command shift s to save as, and I'm going to save this as simple puppet character. You can name this file. Whatever you like. It's going to save is a dot PST or a dot photoshopped file. I wanna go to my desktop and I have my own special place. I like to save these things. So I'm going to have class files, simple puppet and save, or you can hit Enter. So this is just the sketch. In the next lesson, we're going to go over how you can draw your character and have some final art that looks nice and is something that you can work with in after effects 3. Tracing: All right, So now we're going to go over how to draw this character with final art and pieces that we can manipulate in after effects. What super important here is that you want to look at the layers panel and make sure that everything is nice and organized. This is super important. For if you want to change something in the future, you can easily find which file and which which layer you need to change in order to make that update. Or if you found you've made a mistake, it will be a lot easier if you have everything on separate layers and having things on separate layers also plays out into exporting, which I will go over in a future lesson. So we're gonna hit a folder and I'm just gonna make a whole folder for the whole character . We're gonna go character normally, what I would do not in this one, but in a lot of art that I make. I will have a folder for the character, and then I will have a folder for the background, maybe some or environmental pieces, because I like to have file separate, just in case I want to change something like I said before. So what's important here is to know not only what pieces should be separate, but also what order thes pieces need to be in. I want this arm to be the first thing Number one that's gonna be on top. I know that because looking of his person, they're on a slight angle. And I know that this arm would technically be slightly closer to me. And you can also see that's how I actually drew this sketch. So that's gonna be our first layer on top there. And then that would mean that the layer that's furthest away would probably be this one. So I know that those two layers are going to be separate pieces. And I know that because I want the arms to move separately from the body and then the body is going to be in between. Those and I could also draw the legs. Legs could be part of the body or not. That's up to you. And I also want to have the head be. It's only er, the head in the ear and the hair and the face. Those can all be the same layer, so I know what I want each piece to be. And I pretty much know what order I want them to be in. So I'm gonna go ahead and draw my character. Now I like to use this brush as you've seen. It's pretty thick. I love these thick lines. I think they're cute and cartoony and fun. I also like to draw in a dark purple. Black is OK. Gray is okay. You know, whatever you want to do, whatever color feels right to you, I recommend a dark color because that looks good for thinking and it stands out pretty well . So the character I'm going to draw I just created a new layer double clicked to, um, rewrite the name and wouldn't name this right arm right arm. And I don't do it Based on what I see, I do it based on what the character is. This is the characters, right? Arms. So that's what I'm calling it. You got to take that folder and I'm gonna put it under character. There we go. So I did. There was I took the folder and I dragged, Have right arm highlighted, dragged it to character, and it's right in there. So with that right arm folder selected, I'm going to create a new layer. And this layer is the one in which we're going to draw the arm. So I'm gonna have this all be one layer. Whatever you make, make sure it's confident. And I actually have a setting on my stylist. I use that if I draw something and don't like the way it looks I can undo actually did. Like the way that looks. I'm gonna keep that there. So that's going to be there, right arm, and I'll label that as the line work or lines. I don't need to look at that. And I know underneath that I want to have the other arms, so I'm going to click away. Wanna go left arm and I'm gonna show you a short cut to use all the time. I'm gonna do le l on the arm. And I know as the creator, I know what that means. I'm gonna drag under here and boop It's right there. Create a new layer. Let's draw the other arm Now. I could draw this in separate layers, but I think I'm gonna keep it as one shape just to keep this lesson and this class very simple. So let's just draw the whole arm here and we have elbow. And that comes up to this nice little sleeve and the hands we have that finger finger finger boom. So similarly, I'm just going to go through and continue to fill out my character. Next thing is the torso I used. Torso was used. Torso is a generic term to refer to the entire middle body. Because sometimes your character has a body, sometimes they don't. Oh, no. My lions look like they're going to get her meshing together. I want to go to right arm turned down that capacity. I'm gonna go toe left arm turned down that opacity. And now I can see sort of clearly where my line is about, as opposed to the ones that have already drawn this concomitant very handy. When you're animating lots of layers and especially if you're doing post oppose, um, hand drawn frame by frame animation on photo shop. Beautiful. Maybe I'll give them a little pocket will give him a little flare. How cute is that? All right. So in addition to turning the capacity down, you can also just straight up, turn off these layers now, on top of the torso. I'm going to draw the head. I'm gonna label that head and create that layer. I'm going to draw this all is one. Always one object here. Some good to start with hair, cause that's on top and cute. We have a little We have a little friend. All right, let's turn on the rest of these layers. I clicked on right arm. We're gonna hold down shift, and then click on left arm. I have all those selected, and I won't make sure the opacity, all of those is 100 0 awesome. 4. Coloring: So now I have the line are done for all of the's And I'm gonna show you the easiest way to color in something that you've drawn Let's start with the head when hit w for one tool and I'm gonna make sure highlighted on this layer We're gonna click outside of the layer and then we're gonna go to select because we just selected everything outside that layer I'm gonna pick. Um ah, human like skin tone. I'm gonna hit G Now g is the bucket paint bucket tool. I'm gonna show you what this would look like a fire to do this right now. So we painted everything except for the head. And the only thing that shows is the right arm because all the other layers air underneath and as you work with photo shops would become a lot more clear as you keep working with this. So I did the one tool I cooked outside, and then we're gonna go to select because this is a selection we're going to go to modify, expand, expand by four pixels. Because I used a pretty thick brush. You'll see that it actually moves on. The selection expands a little bit. I'm going to create a layer underneath, but you can do by hitting, holding down command and clicking a new layer. And now we're gonna hold hold down command shift and I to select the inverse press G and click inside the selection. And we have the face. Now I want their hair to look different. So when I wanted to you is actually highlight inside the hair and do a similar thing is before modify expand four pixels. Wonderful. Let's give him some green here. Let's do like a turquoise kind of green G for people to and there we go. All right, so for the rest of the character, we're gonna go with same method here. I want there close to be read, actually, so I'm gonna pick more of a reddish pink would be cute, but let's go with this, right. This is a pretty red. Well, I looks like I'm gonna have to do a little bit more work in order to color this in. So let's I dropped. Grab this orange. We're going to command click of this layer in order to select all of it. And now I can't paint outside, but I can paint inside the layer, which is handy. I'm gonna paint this neck area right here, and then I'm going to paint their pants like a purple coat. Color feels nice like a greyish purple or something. Keep it simple and then wonderful. So finally, we're gonna We're going to do the same method for the other arms. So the right arm Whoops. Going to wand select with the one tool, but clicking, Modify, expand. Okay. In verse, new layer beneath I I dropped that red G click boom. Do this here again, optional. You can click on this layer and you congest use. That is a bit of help for clearing in something. So I'm just using the same method for all of the rest of these limbs here. And so if you have more layers, you have. If you have more limbs, toe work with, that's great. You can use the same method due to color in all of those. Yeah, it's up to you. How complex was simple. You want to make this? As you can see, I have my beautiful piece of artery here. The magic of animation actually is You can draw the simplest thing, and it makes people so happy to see it alive. It's fantastic. All right. So we have her character all set up in everything. We have Oliver layers labeled on nicely. In the next lesson, I'm going to go over how we're going. Teoh, export these layers and make sure that they are ready for after effects. 5. Exporting: all right, so we have her character drawn. We have all of our layers beautifully labeled and organized, and now it's time to export and have things ready for after effects. So here are my tips Before you start exporting, these is there's a difference between J Pegs and PNG's. P and G's are transparent or have transparency, so we have her character all drawn and ready to go. We have each of the characters layers, beautifully organized and labeled off on the side. So when this next step, we're going to export these all individually. If we were to export this right now, there would be white all over the character, and that's not what we want. So I'm going to turn off the background layer and you'll see this checkerboard pattern means that that part is transparent or invisible. I'm almost ready to start exporting. I also need to make sure I turn off my sketch layer. So what we're gonna do is turn off all of these layers. I'm going to start at the bottom. Ah, highly recommend that you either start the bottom or the top and then just go through all of the layers wanted a time to make sure you don't miss anything. So the only layer I have on right now is my left arm. Let's go to file export Quick export as PNG. If you don't have it as PNG, you can go into your export preferences. Make sure that says PNG and transparency is checked and everything else pretty much should look like this. So just leave it on your default settings, and you'll be fine as long as you can. Export is a PNG with transparency. That's what you want. So export quick export is PNG. Now I like to do with ease is I like to label character. I liked a label what the project is, what the character is. Example. This character is just character we're gonna do character and then left arm Boom. Let's go on to the next one torso, which looks very graphic not intentional by me. I'm sorry. That's, um a bit much, but we're gonna go into character and tour, so tour, so it helps if you spell it correctly. Now I like to usually have things typed as lower case in order to keep it quick. And then I capitalize things to make them stand out look more important. Another way to speed up this process is to actually select. And then copy. I'm doing command. See on my Mac to copy that. Ah, word there. Save the head, which is adorably wonderful Expert is PNG paste. What we just copied and that's going to be head. You can leave now. You can label these files however you like. This is just my method to make sure that everything is nice and organized and all works out very well. All right. All of my files are exported and they look wonderful. Here's what my here, what my files look like in my skill share folder. So we have our simple puppet and we have the head. I'm gonna preview this. You could do this on a Mac. It's really cool. Just select it. Don't double clicked a single click hit space and boom. There it is. And you could see that the background around it is just transparent. So this is precisely what we want. And in the next lesson, I'm going to show you how we can bring these layers into after effects, how we can put them together and then animate them 6. Assemble and Rig in Ae: all right. So for these lessons were going to be working and after effects to animate the character that we made in photo shop. First, let's make sure we have after effects open. Then we're going to create a new project. Wonderful. So this is what our screen looks like here, Over here in the project panel. This is where we're going to be working with files. Down here is the timeline. And over here we will be able to preview what everything looks like. So let's get our files in here. I'm going to file import. Well, im going to import multiple files. So let's try that. I'm going to make sure that I go to the folder that I'm looking for. So I have the folder here where all of my files are located. I want to bring in the arm, head, torso and left arm, holding down shift and clicking so that I can select all of the's. Let's open up those and that's it. Cancel. We're done. We're good to go so you can see a tiny little preview appear of what those look like. We have the arms and the head and everything that looks wonderful. The next step is to create a new composition. So let's click this button right down here, create a new composition. So let's name our composition. I'm going to name mine Que carrot character. I love me some alliteration. Let's make the size 1200 by 1200 pixels to match the photo shop document that we started off with. The frame rate is going to be 30 and the duration of this I'm going to put at four seconds . That's just four with the two zeros after it and look like this. And the rest of this looks great. So okay, this is the composition that we're working with. Mind currently, doesn't have a background. And you can toggle that if there is no background, there's nothing here. You can toggle that by pressing this button right here. So this is technically transparent. And if I click this and make it un activated, it is still transparent. But it looks white. So it depends on how you prefer to work. When I'm working of my character here. I'm just gonna leave it like this. This will be fine. As you see over here, we still have her assets and what I like to do is keep things separated and organized. So let's create a folder and call this assets and then going to click. Highlight all of these and drag them in there. Now are assets right there in that folder, and our composition is right there nice and separate. Let's bring these into our composition. You can do that by highlighting them. You can either bring them down here into your timeline, or you can bring them here into your composition. Now this looks good, but these files are a little out of order, so let's work on that. The torso. I believe I want to be on the bottom and that left arm, since it's the characters left arm is going to go behind the torso. And there we go, right arm, head, torso, left arm. That looks great. Now, sometimes any bring these objects in depending and how the files were exported, there might be a little out of place if you need to move them around. All you need to do is make sure you have this tool, selected the selection tool or V click on the correct layer and then drag it around to where you need it to go. But my looks pretty good, and yours hopefully will, too. Now we're going to rig each component. Let's start with the right arm. You see C when I have the right arm selected, there is this little symbol right here that appear is just about in the center of the composition. We don't want that to be there. What that is is the anchor point for this right arm. If I were to press W for the rotation tool and rotate this, it would rotate around that point. But we don't want that. We want it to rotate around the shoulder, so we're going to go to the pan behind tool, which is why click it on that symbol and you could just drag it right over. It's super important that you do this before you do anything else. Let's do that for the rest of our layers. The head as well. We're going to move that just the bottom of the head there. We contest that with W for rotation tool that's looking pretty good. Maybe I want to move the head down slightly, so let's press V and move that down and w That looks good, all right. And one final pan behind for the left arm that's going to go somewhere around there again. That contest that with rotation tool. Wonderful. So this is looking pretty good. Now my character is almost ready to go. The last thing I want to do is use parenting and linking right down here. So how this works is each body part is connected to the next body part. So imagine if you picked up this character from their torso. What parts would move with it so the torso wasn't going to be attached to anything? The torso is gonna be our base, and you can can move this anchor point if you want to, or you could just leave it there. That's up to you. That doesn't matter so much as everything else. So the right arm is attached to the torso. Let's take this squiggly line from the right arm and attach it to the torso. Now you can see there's, um the layer right here should match the name of whatever. You just wrecked it, too. That way, when I move the torso now that are moves with it. So let's do that with the rest of our layers. Take the head, drag the squiggle to the torso, and then the same thing with the left arm drag the squiggle you let go. Does a funny animation take the squiggle from the left arm and drag it to the torso. Now, if we move the torso, the whole thing moves with it. That goes with rotation, the for moving, but even goes for some of the other aspects that we can play around with here. The different transform tools, but that's for the next lesson. 7. The Transform Tools: all right, someone this lesson. We're going to be reviewing the transform tools now. If you are familiar with the transformed tools, that's great. Feel free to stick around and watch this one if you want a refresher. But if you're new, you definitely want to make sure you watch this one so that you can see what the transform tools are all about. So the transform tools they live under each layer just like this that's click on this little arrow down here. Transform. And here they are in order there, the anchor point position, scale, rotation and opacity. Let's play around with these and see how they affect what we have here. These are going to be affecting the right arm of the character, the anchor point, as you saw before, when a select the right arm the anchor point is you saw before. Is this right here? That's the point around which the arms scales and it moves and everything. We can move that around and you'll see if you pay attention to the numbers down here, both position and the anchor point move, so let's put that back. You can also move around the anchor point by clicking and dragging these values here, it's moving the anchor point relative to the arm, but the arm is moving because the position is the same and the anchor point is moving. If this is too complex, don't worry about it. You don't really need to worry about the anchor point once it's already set for the position. It's pretty self explanatory. That is where the object is located on the composition you can with this around and you'll see the numbers change. You can also type things in here, so those are the different methods you can use to adjust these values Now. Scale, scale is how large the the asset is in your composition. So they're always going to start off at 100% both X in the X direction horizontally and in the Y direction vertically. You can click and drag these to make it smaller or larger if you like, and you can even scale them separately. If you click this right here, you can unlinked these values, meeting that you can change how wide it is or how tall it is separately. But if you want those to stay together than make sure that that looks like this and there's , Ah, chain link in there. Rotation is held Germany X plus, however many degrees, so you can click, click and drag on either one of these. I can click and drag on the 0.0 here to rotate around now. I could seemingly put the arm around back where it was. You'll see that it's not quite back at zero. It's actually almost totally at a full 360 rotation. I'm gonna put that back now, so what you can do, actually is you can type in like, five. Let's say five rotations, and this looks exactly the same, except it technically has been rotated five times. So keep an eye on this. And finally, opacity opacity goes from 0 to 100%. No more, no less. Well, no, no less than zero and no more than 100 capacity is fun to play with if you want some nice smooth transitions. But I don't think we're going to be using it much in this animation 8. Using Keyframes: So those are all the transform tools. I'm also going to cover how the key frames work, so we've played around with ease. But how do we make them move this bar right here is the current time indicator, and you can use it to you indicate what the time is. Currently you can see is I scrub through here that the numbers change both here and here. So you'll always know exactly where you are in your animation, especially if you want to make some precise adjustments. Let's start with rotation. Let's just do a quick test. I'm going to climb. Going to First of all, make sure my current time indicator is at the very beginning. We're going to click this stopwatch. That means it's going to drop a key frame. As you can see. Right here, there is a blue diamond off a click away. It'll become gray de selected. This diamond represents a key frame. It means at this point in time, this assets is in this position. You can click over here to go between your key frames. So at this so at zero key frames, this arm is rotated zero degrees. Now I can move this anywhere throughout the timeline, and we can have a different key frame. Let's do that. Let's click and drag. And then now we have two key frames. This one is at zero, and this one is that far more than zero. As you could see, as I scrub through the timeline that the arm is moving, let's press space and see how it looks. Not bad. That's a pretty decent start, so the possibilities are really endless with this. Let's say we want to have its scale scale here. Let's move it over here. Let's make it bigger, Then over here, let's make it smaller. Then over here, let's put it back at 100. Let's see how it looks now. Now that's pretty wild. Something else you want to keep in mind is if you want your animation to look smooth, for example, let's put this key frame here. And at the very end, let's make sure that the rotation is back at zero and zero. That way they go from over here and back. Now, if I just play this like this, the arm animation doesn't look very smooth. It looks a bit robotic and stiff which is fine if your character, if that's the sort of character you have. But foremost animations for most characters, you're going to want to follow one of the principles of animation that being arcs and easing, specifically easing. Easing means that as something moves from one place to another, it slows down and speeds up to make it feel more fluid and lifelike. So let's take this key frame. Click it, Let's Right Click and Key Frame assistant Eazy E's out. You'll see a changes shapes into a boomer ring. When it's opening up like that, it means it's easing out. Let's take a look at what that did. It looks almost like the arms sped up. Now that's interesting. Let's do the same thing here except instead of these outlets have ease in. Let's see how that looks. You can see that the animation now looks a lot smoother, but for this key frame in the center, we're going toe. Want to do both. So instead of easing or he's out, let's do Eazy E's. Now we have an hourglass shape, which means, as the arm approaches, it will slow down season, and as it leaves, it will slowly and then more quickly and quickly speed up. This is the secret sauce to good animation. You can see it's a very simple character right now, but the animation we just made is pretty straightforward, and it looks very nice. Another note about key frames You can easily copy and paste them, and the current time indicator doesn't even have to be on top of them for you to do that, just click it. Make sure it's blue hit command, See on Mac and you can paste. Now the arm will go there. It will stay and then it will come right back. Feel free to play around in your own timeline and see what kind of animations you can come up with. Or if you like. In the next lesson, you can follow along with me as I fully animate the character and see how lifelike and fun and expressive we can make it 9. Animating with Keyframes: so I kind of already like this animation for the arm. I think that looks OK, but I also want to animate the other portions. So let's animate the left arm. Maybe you want the arm. Teoh, do a little wave, so I'm going to hit stopwatch on rotation. I'm going to hit that for each second. I would do that at zero. One second, two seconds, three seconds and just about it. Four seconds Now here at about 15 which is half of our 30 frames per second at 15 frames, I'm going to W for rotation tool and make sure have the correct layer highlighted, and we're going to rotate that. And now I'm going to command, see, and I'm going to make sure I have this. The right place at one and 15 were going to command V to paste to 15 command V paste and 3 15 commands command the paste. Now the other arm is moving as well, but again, these look a bit choppy. So we're going to use Eazy E's would select all of these right Click and Eazy e's. I have two more things I want to do. I want to animate the head. I think I will rotate this one as well. We're just gonna have one beginning one of the end, these air both again at zero. Because I haven't done anything yet. And I marked them with the stopwatch. And then we're gonna go to two, and I'm going to rotate the head a little bit. Now, you'll notice that sometimes if you make a change in the middle here, you don't actually need to click the stopwatch to make it. The program already knows to change it for you. So I can actually copy that key frame and paste it over here. That's pretty cute. All right, so let's select those again. We're going to you Eazy e's. The final thing I want to do is move the torso. Let's take the pan behind, tool on the torso and let's move that down to the very, very bottom. And I just want to zoom in here, use the hand tool to move up and make sure that looks okay. I think that does. I want it just below the image and I'll show you why in just a moment. So now if I scale the character down, everything comes with it, but that's not exactly what I want to do. I don't want to scale both X and Y. I want to scale them separately to make a sort of bounce effect. So let's hit the stopwatch at the first frame and the last frame to make these key frames, and I'm gonna hit one more for here. I want the character to do a little balance at the beginning of the animation. So let's say at 01 and the final frame, you have key frames of the scale being 101 100 at 10 frames. Let's make her next key frame. What's unclip? This little chain here and I want the character to be do a little squash and stretch, So I want them to squish vertically, and maybe they get a bit larger horizontally. That already looks pretty forehead. I love that, actually kind of want to keep that effect going. So let's put that here. Let's copy both of those and paste them at two and then paste them at three. Now I could. Now I do want to see what this looks like with easing. I'm not sure if it needs it but let's check just in case. Sometimes you want easing. Sometimes you don't. It depends on the effect you like. You'll see what happens is this place will very quickly before. Actually, let's say I move something this please very quickly. And then suddenly it will play normally. That's just the program going through and making sure all the frames are ready to be displayed. So this is pretty cute. It's simple. It's fun, It's easy. And, yeah, have fun with it. Keep it simple. Do one thing at a time. Make sure it makes sense to you, and I look forward to seeing your projects. The final thing we need to do is to make sure that we could export this file. Now, remember the beginning? I talked about there being a transparency, grit? Well, there's still technically isn't anything behind this character, and you can either keep it that way or not. I'm going to have a background here because I don't want to cover in this tutorial. Maybe in a future lesson that can talk about how to work with video files from after effects that have a transparent background. But for this one, I'm not gonna worry about it. I selected the rectangle tool right here and making sure that the Phil is white. Okay, and let's drag over the whole thing. It's important to make sure you have none of your layers over here selected while you do that. Or you could end up doing something else by mistake creating a mask. Let's take the shape layer and move it beneath all of the character layers. And now we have a background. This looks pretty good. All right, so the very last thing that we need to do is export this file. 10. Rendering and Exporting: that we created in after effects. We will take the composition and make it into a playable video file that you can share just about anywhere. All right, this looks good. It's from 0 to 4 seconds long. It's looping. It's gorgeous. It's It's a work of art. Let's be honest. So I'm going to go to file export. Add to Adobe Media Encoder Que. I'm going to be using Adobe Media Encoder so it might take a moment, but your project will pop up in Adobe Media encoder. There are ways to export it from after effects, but this is the way that I found. I get the most control and most consistency. These list the format that the video will be exported at. This is the preset, which is part of the format, and then the output file, which is where your filed with the exported and what it will be named by default. Your video file will be named the same as your composition. Mine is cute carrot character. Let's click here and make sure that this is the right file type. All right, so for the export settings, we want the format to the H 264 Not Blue Ray, just the regular one. That's the most versatile and high quality file that I've learned to work with, so we'll go with that one preset. I like to go with match source. High bit rate. There are plenty of others. For example, if you wanted to optimize for Facebook or Twitter or video or YouTube, all of those presets air here. But we're just going to go with match soars. High bit rate. Sometimes I make an animation file. That's just that doesn't quite fit into any one of these categories, and that's okay. We could just go with this one, and we can leave the rest of us the way it is. It looks pretty good. We can say export video and audio, but we don't have audio. We don't need to worry about that. And the output name. Cute carrot character. Let's go to my simple puppet and photo shop in after effects Save their okay, so I haven't actually done anything yet. This file hasn't actually exported. That was just me looking at the settings. This all looks good, so I'm going to hit play to start rendering when the computer renders a file. It means it's taking the file from all the information that you plugged in and after effects, and it's 10 turning it into a playable videophile. The more effects and the more layers and the higher quality video and audio you use, and the longer the file, the more time it's going to take Teoh Export or render this file. 11. Review & Class Project Details: So let's review in this class I showed you how to draw your own character and photo shop. Bring those assets into after effects, animate thumb, and then export that file using media encoder into a video file, you can post on any social media. The project for this class is to follow the steps that I have given you and make your own animated character. Remember that you can make your character as simple or as complex as you like. Have fun with it. Remember to review this class on skill share and follow me on skill share for future classes related to animation. For inspiration, Follow me on social media. I love to post things that I make. I make animations, music, comics, all sorts of things. And I love when people say hi, you can find me almost anywhere as at Sam Conklin. Thank you so much for watching, and I look forward to seeing your projects