Intro to 2D Character Animation in Adobe After Effects - Basic Face Animation with no Plugins

1. Introduction: Character animation can look overwhelming, but this easy intro to character animation will show you that it can be easier than it looks. I'll walk you through how to recreate this intro animation, how to properly rig and animated face, and other tips and techniques to get you started in character animation. This is an intermediate level class. For students that are new to motion graphics, I suggest taking one of my beginner classes. Can't wait to see what you create. 2. Getting Started & Class Project: For this class, you'll need Adobe After effects, Adobe Media Encoder to export. You can download the character artwork on the project and resources page. Your class project is to follow along and complete the face rig animation and then take what you've learned and create your own animation. You can download a completed project file on the project and resources page and be sure to post your projects to the project gallery. 3. Import the Character Artwork: In this lesson, we're going to import our character artwork. Once you're inside after effects, you can right click Import, file, locate the character artwork file. Make sure you import it as a composition. Footage dimensions, you can leave it as layer size. Click Okay. We can go ahead and click here to enter our character ready to animate composition. 4. Parenting the Layers: In this lesson, we're going to parent our layers together. First thing we're going to do is duplicate our character animation composition, press Control D to duplicate. We're going to rename it. Press Enter to rename a layer. We can rename it character artwork. This is so we have an extra composition with our character artwork just in case we ever need it. So now let's select eyebrows, press the shift key, go all the way down to nose, and we're going to connect all these layers to the head. We can use the pick whip. Or you could use the drop down menu. It does the same thing. Now, select the ears and the hair back. We're also going to connect these to the head. We'll select our head connected to the neck. And our neck layer will connect it to the body layer. And now for the second part of this lesson, we're going to need to change our anchor points. Go up here and we'll select our anchor point tool. Make sure snapping is enabled. This will make it much easier for us. So eyebrows, eyes, mouth, hair front, and nose all seem to be good. For our head, we're going to have to change our anchor point. I'm going to zoom in a little bit, select our anchor point. We'll slide her down to the bottom of the head. And remember, since snapping is enabled, it should snap right to the bottom of her head. The body anchor point looks to be in a good spot. For the neck, we're going to have to change its location. Again, select our anchor point tool, drag it down. There we go. Ears are good. Now let's select our hair back. Get our anchor point tool again. We'll drag our anchor point to the top of her head. Now that all our anchor points are in the correct spot, our character should rotate properly. I 5. Body Animation: We want our character to spring onto the screen and then rotate back and forth before finally resting into the middle of the screen. This is what we call overshoot. Select a body layer, press P to bring up the position. Holding the Shift key, press R to also bring up the rotation. Right click on the position. Go to separate dimensions because we're only going to be animating the X position. At the beginning of the timeline, let's change our rotation value to 90%. Press the stopwatch to put a keyframe. Then we can move over 15 frames on the timeline. We'll change our rotation value to a negative number. Negative eight looks good. Now let's move over to frame 23 on the timeline. We'll change our rotation value to a positive number. Let's try 3%. Now let's move to frame 28 on the timeline, and we can change our rotation value back to zero. Select our keyframes, press F nine to easy Es. Now let's head into the graph editor. For this animation, I'm going to be using the speed graph. For the first animation, I'm going to drag these handles all the way to the left. And for the second two animations, I'm going to drag the handles into the middle. We want our character to animate fast onto the screen, and then her animation will smooth out on the next few keyframes. I There we go. Now our animation is a lot smoother. Now let's animate the position. Let's drag our position until our character is off the screen. I'm going to type in a value of 1,400. Place a keyframe. Now let's move to frame 15 on the timeline. Now, let's drag our character onto the screen. Let's try a value of 525 for the position. Now let's move to frame 23 on the timeline. Move our character back to around 555. A Then let's move to frame 28 and we'll have our character move to our resting position, which should be 540, which is exactly the middle of the screen. Just like our rotation animation, we're going to select our keyframes, press f9d ETE's, head into the graph editor. And what we want to do is ease these keyframes very similar to the way that we eased our rotation animation. It doesn't have to be perfect, but we do want the animations to be very similar. Now let's preview what that looks like. They are much better. 6. Head Animation: Now for the head animation, we can close our body layer. Let's select our head layer, press R to bring up the rotation. Let's move to frame 32 on the timeline. Press the stopwatch to put a keyframe. Now let's move over to frame 36 on the timeline. Change our rotation value to four. Now let's move to frame 42 on the timeline, place a keyframe, because we want no animation to happen between these two keyframes. Now let's move to frame 46 on the timeline. We'll change the rotation value to negative four. Now we'll head all the way to frame 64 on the timeline. Press the place keyframe button, again, because we don't want any animation to happen between these two moments in time, then we can move over to frame 69 on the timeline, and we'll change our rotation value back to zero. So this is what we have so far. But it still doesn't look quite right. We're going to select our keyframes, press F nine to ess, and we'll head into the graph editor. For our first head movement, I'm gonna drag these handles all the way to the left. I'm going to do the same thing for the second movement. And the same thing for the third movement. So right now, your graph editor should look like this. There, now the animation looks a lot smoother. I 7. Eye Animation: Now we're going to animate our character's Is position. We can close our other layers. We'll select our eye layer, press P to bring up the position. Press the stopwatch to put a keyframe on frame 32. Now we'll move over to frame 36. We'll drag our position to around 180. So now our character looks to the right. Now let's move over to frame 42. Press the keyframe button to put a keyframe because we don't want any animation between those two keyframes. Now we'll move to frame 46. We'll move our position to around 140. So now our character looks over to the left. This is what we have so far. We'll move to frame 52, press the keyframe button. Move to frame 56. This time, we'll move our Y position down to 235. Now our character is looking down. Move over to frame 64, press the keyframe button so that there's no animation between those two points. And now let's move to frame 69 and copy and paste our first keyframe. So we go back to the original position. Here's what we have so far. To make the animation smoother, we're going to select our keyframes, press F nine, head into the graph editor. For our first three animations, we're going to drag our keyframes to the left to have a fast animation. And for the last animation, we're going to keep it at the default ease so that the eyes have a smoother transition back into the final resting place. There we go. This is what we have so far. And 8. Eyebrows, Nose, & Mouth Animation Using a Null Object: I Now we're going to animate our eyebrows nose and mouth. First, let's head to a point on the timeline where there's no animation frame 70. We'll create a new null object by going to layer new null object. Let's rename it face controls. Remember to press Enter to rename a layer. Now we're going to connect our eyebrows, mouth and nose to our new face controls layer. And we'll connect our face controls layer to our head. Now let's start animating. On the face controls layer, we'll press P to bring up the position. Let's bring up our I keyframes just for reference. Remember to press U on the keyboard to bring up the keyframes. On frame 32, we'll press the stopwatch to put a keyframe. We'll move to our next I position. Now let's change the X position of our face controls. We'll drag over our position. Let's try 185. We'll move to our next I position. Press the keyframe button because we don't want any animation between those two keyframes. Move to our next I position. Now let's drag our position back. Around 160 looks good. Move to our next I position. Press the keyframe button. Again, move to our next I position. This time we're going to change our Y position. Let's try 300. Move to our next Is position. Press the keyframe button. And finally, we'll move to our final resting position, and we'll copy and paste our first keyframe to go back to the original position. Now let's select our keyframes, press F nine to eases, head into the graph editor. Remember, I'm using the speed graph. For the first three handles, I'm going to drag them all the way to the left. And then I'm going to leave the fourth as the default. Let's preview what that looks like. 9. Ears: We're going to have our ears move in the opposite direction of the rest of the character's face. So let's keep our eyes and auditions open just for reference. And we'll open up our ears position by pressing P on the keyboard. We'll move to our first I position. Press the stopwatch on the ears to put a keyframe. Move to our next eye position. Now we're going to drag our X position in the opposite direction of our eyes. Somewhere around 158. Now let's move to our next I position. Press the keyframe button. Again, move to our next I position, and we'll drag our position in the opposite direction. Around 172. Move to our next I position. Press the keyframe button, move to our next eye position again. This time we're going to drag our Y position on the ears to around 210. We'll move to our next I keyframe, press the keyframe button on our ears, and finally, we'll move to the last keyframe on our eyes, and we'll copy and paste the first keyframe on our ear layer. Select the keyframes, press F nine to eases. And again, we're going to ease these keyframes in a similar way to our earlier animations. We'll pull the first three animations to the left. And leave the last one as the default. There we go. 10. Blink: So the first thing we're going to animate is our character blinking as she comes onto the screen. With our eye layer selected, press the S key to bring up to scale. We're going to check the unlink button. Place a keyframe at the beginning of the timeline. Let's move over to frame ten on the timeline. And we'll shrink our Y property to 15%. Now let's move over to frame 15. Change our value back to 100. Select our key frames, press F nine to Easy Es. Our second Eblink will start at frame 28. Press the keyframe button, move over to frame 32. Again, put our Y value to 15%, move over to frame 36. Change our value back to 100. And our third eblink will start at frame 64. Press the keyframe button, move over to frame 68, change our Y value to 15. Move to frame 72, and we'll change our value back to 100. 11. Hair Part One: In part one of the hair animation, we're going to animate our character's hair as she animates onto the screen. Let's select our hair front layer, press R to bring up the rotation. Let's move to frame seven on the timeline. Press the stopwatch to put a keyframe. Now let's move to frame 16. Let's change our rotation value to a negative number, maybe negative seven. I'll turn off the hair back so we can see what we're doing better. Now let's move to frame 23. Change our rotation value to a positive number, positive five. We'll move to frame 26. Type in a negative number, maybe negative two. And finally, we'll go to frame 29 and we'll change our value back to 0%. Now let's see what that looks like. Now you can see the hair swinging back and forth. Let's select our keyframes, press F nine to Ess. I'm going to use the speed graph editor. For our first handles, we'll drag them all the way to the left. And for the remainder of the animations, I'm going to pull the handles into the middle. There we go. Now we're going to do the same thing for the hair back layer. We're essentially going to do the exact same animation. So let's head back to our first hair front keyframe. Let's click on our hair back layer, bring up the rotation by pressing the R. Press the keyframe button. Let's move to our second hair front keyframe, and we'll change our rotation to a negative number, maybe negative five. I think that looks good enough. Now let's move to the next hair front keyframe. Change our hair back value to a positive number, positive three. Again, let's move to our next hair front keyframe. Change our rotation to a negative number. And finally, let's go to our last hair front keyframe and we'll change our hair back rotation value to zero. We'll easy ease our keyframes with F nine, head into the graph editor. And we're going to do a very similar easing as we did with our hair front layer. And this is what we have so far. 12. Hair Part Two: In the second part of our hair animation, we're going to animate our character's hair as she looks back and forth. Let's start with the hair front. Let's move to frame 32 on the timeline. Press the key frame button. Now let's move over to frame 36. We'll type in negative two. Turn off the hair back layer so we can see better. We'll move over to frame 42. Press the keyframe button. Move over to frame 46, type in a value of two. Now let's move over to frame 64. Press the keyframe button. Now we'll move to frame 69 and change our rotation value back to zero. Let's head into our graph editor. Zoom in. And again, we'll drag our handles to the left. And we'll do that same thing for the next one. And again, for the third animation. So now let's do the same thing for the hair back. For this one, we want our hair back to be going in the opposite direction. We'll turn our layer back on. Move to frame 32, press the keyframe button, move to frame 36, change our rotation value to four. Now let's move to frame 42. Press the keyframe button. Head to frame 46. Enter a value of negative four. Move to frame 64. Press the keyframe button. And now we can move to frame 69 and put a value of zero. Head into the graph editor. Again, we're going to drag these handles to the left for all three of them. So now that our main hair animation is finished, there's just one more thing I would like to do, and it's animate the position on the hair front. Let's select our hair front layer, hold shift, and press P to bring up the position. Let's go to frame 52, press the stopwatch to put a keyframe. Then we can move to frame 56, and let's type in a value of 41 into the Y position. Move to frame 64, press the keyframe button. And finally, we'll move to frame 69, and we'll copy and paste our first keyframe. So now the hair moves down as she looks down. Select our keyframes, press F nine to easy Es. And for this animation, I think I'll just leave it at the default easing. 13. Final Touches: Now let's add some final touches. First thing we'll do is create a new background. We'll go to layer new solid. I'm gonna choose a blue color for the background. Move it to the bottom of our layers. We'll rename it. Press Enter to rename a layer. Now let's create a new composition. I'm going to name it Main. You can copy my settings, width of 1920, height of 1080, frame rate of 30, duration 600 frames. In our new composition, we can create a background. I'm going to choos a light blue color. Again, we'll rename it background. Now, let's create a circle to put our character in. We'll use our Ellipse tool. Pulled shift to create a perfect circle. Let's rename the layer mat. Center our anchor point using the anchor point tool. Now let's align our circle to the center of the composition. Now let's drop our character into the composition. Obviously, our character is a little too big, so let's bring up the scale with the S key. Scale it down to 50%. Put it under our mat layer. Let's use the Track Matt pick whip. I think our character is still a little bit too big. So we'll bring up the scale again. Scale it down to 45. There, that's a little better. Now let's add some texture. I'm going to create a new adjustment layer. I'm gonna rename it Boyle going to add a turbulent displace effect. Change the amount down to 16, the size down to six. We can change our complexity to two. I'm going to add some animation. Hold the Alt key and click on the Random seed stopwatch. In this field, we can type in our expression. Random 10,000. I there we go. To make it better, we're going to duplicate our turbulent displace effect. We're going to change some of these settings. We can change the amount to 30 and the size down to two. We can also change our complexity, change it to four. There we go. This will give our animation a little bit more of a hand drawn look. Another thing we can do is add a little bit of paper texture. I'll put a link on the project and resources page to a website where you can download free paper textures. I'm going to drop in my paper into the composition. And I'm going to change the mode to multiply. Now we have a nice paper texture overlay. One more thing I'll do is create a border. I'm going to create a new solid, layer new solid, use the color picker. We'll make it the same color as our circle. Now I'm going to create a mask over our new solid layer by choosing the rounded rectangle tool. We'll double click on the rounded rectangle tool, and that'll add a mask to our solid layer. We'll toggle down the mask and we'll go to mask path, shape, and here we can change these values. Change the left to 55, top to 55, right to subtract 55 and bottom to subtract 55. We'll change the masks mode to subtract. There we go. And 14. Final Touches 2: Circle Animation: This lesson is for anybody that wants to animate the circle. First thing we'll do is select our MT layer, press Control D to duplicate. With our new MT two layer selected, we'll go to the fill option, get our eyedropper tool. We'll make it the same color as our circle. Now let's turn our layer on so it's not invisible anymore. We'll rename our layer to circle. Remember to press Enter to rename a layer. Now we'll select our character layer and our MT layer, and we'll move them down the timeline just to get them out of the way for now. We'll go back to our circle layer, press S to bring up to scale. At the beginning of the timeline, we're going to set our scale to zero, press the stopwatch to put a keyframe. We'll move over 12 frames on the timeline. Set our scale to 125, so our circle gets big. Move over to frame 20 on the timeline, set our scale to 90, so our circle gets small. Move over to frame 26, set our scale to 105, so our circle gets bigger again. And finally, we'll move to frame 28, and we'll set our scale to 100, the final resting place. Select our keyframes, press F nine to Ess, head into the graph editor, make sure we're on the speed graph. The first two handles we'll drag them all the way to the left. For the rest of the handles, we'll drag them into the middle. Head back to our timeline. We'll go to our last circle keyframe with our layer selected to hold Alt and bracket to trim our layer on the timeline. And we'll move our mat and character layer down the timeline just as our circle layer ends. And there we go. A 15. Final Touches 3: Text Animations : Mm hmm. We don't have to use the same text as in the intro. Let's type our names. We'll align our text into the middle of the composition. I'm gonna turn my grid on, nudge my text up a little bit. Turn the grid off. Now we can start animating it. Toggle down our layer, go to animate, scale. Gonna rename it scale one. Remember to press Enter to rename. Change our scale to zero, toggle down range selector one, toggle down advanced, and we're going to change it to ramp up. We can change our E's low value to 90%. And we're going to animate the offset. We'll set our offset to negative 100, press the stopwatch, move over 30 frames, change our offset to 100%. We're going to take that scale one and we're going to duplicate it with Control D, with our scale two, we're going to change the value 125%. And we'll drag our keyframes over ten frames on the timeline. Now our text gets big and then small again. We can change our Es high to 60. Change our Es low to 60 to get a smoother animation. Now let's preview what that looks like. So as you can see, our text gets big and then small again. As a final touch, I'm going to duplicate the scale again to get three scales, toggle down our scale three, change this value to 90%. Bring up the keyframes bipressing U. We'll drag these keyframes over another ten frames. And under the advanced tab, we'll change our Es high to 40 and our E's low to 40. Now let's see what that looks like. So our text scales in, gets big, smaller again, and then goes back into its normal position. Now let's animate our second animation. We'll type out some text. Align it to the center of the composition. Turn our grid on again. I'm going to nudge my text using the arrow key. I think that looks good enough. Turn my grid off. Think I'm going to start this animation around around frame 67. We'll toggle down our layer. Go to animate. Position. We'll set the Y position to 100, toggle down our range selector, toggle down advanced. Gonna change this one to ramp up as well. Just like our first animation. Change our Es low to 90%. And again, we're going to animate our offset. Change it to negative 100, press the stopwatch to put a keyframe. Move over 20 frames. We'll change our offset value to 100%. We'll rename our animator one to position one. Duplicate it. Change the second position in negative 45. We'll move these keyframes over ten frames on the timeline. Toggle down our range selector one. Toggle down advanced and we'll change these values to 60%. Now our text shoots up and then comes back down again. Now let's duplicate position two with Control D. Change this value to 20. Toggle down our advanced layer, and we'll change our Es high to 30 and our E's low to 30. Bring up our keyframes by pressing. We'll move these keyframes over five frames on the timeline. We have some text that shoots up, goes down, and then goes back up to its final position. The last thing we're going to do is on our position one, we're going to add an opacity. Set the opacity value to zero. Now let's preview our animations. 16. Export: Created text animation, first thing you're going to want to do is move your text layers to under the boil layer. Now we're going to have to trim our work area. I'm going to make my animation 4 seconds long. You can press N on your keyboard or just drag the work area. Now we'll go to File, Export, add to Adobe Media Encoder. Once Media Encoder is open, we'll click here to bring up our setting. Beside the preset tab, let's select YouTube ten ADP, OHD click here and we can name our file and where we're going to export. Since we chose a preset, we don't have to worry about any of the other settings, so we can click Okay. Go to the Green Arrow to Export. 17. Outro: Congratulations and thank you for taking this class. Now you can post your project to the Project Gallery. I can't wait to see the animations you created. 18. Bonus Lesson - Extra Mouth Animation: So here I am back with yet another bonus lesson. I want to make it clear that these bonus lessons are completely optional and are just to give students some extra ideas for what they can do with their animations. So let's say you want to add a little bit of extra animation to your mouth animation. Let's say you want to make your character's mouth frown as she looks down. One way we can go about doing that by right clicking on our mouth layer, going to create shapes from layer. What that does is it creates a new layer called mouth outlines, and now we have a path that we can edit. Going to zoom in a little bit. As you can see, now there's points on our mouth layer that we can edit. I'm going to bring up the face controls just for reference. We'll move to the point on the timeline where our character starts to look down. Frame 52. I'm going to press the stopwatch on the path, and we'll move over to frame 56. And now we can start editing our mouth. I'm going to select these points, drag them down. Gonna drag this handle up a little bit. Gonna select the other points on the other side. Again drag this handle up a little bit. Maybe drag these points a little bit. Of course, you're going to have to go through this and fine tune it to get it to look the way that you want. There, I think that's good enough for this tutorial. Of course, you can fine tune it to look however you want. This is just an example. Then, of course, move over to frame 64, press the keyframe button, and then move over to frame 69, and we'll copy and paste our first keyframe to go back to the original. There we go. Starting to look the way that we want it. And of course, we'll select those keyframes, press F nine to Ess. And then, of course, you can go into the graph editor and edit the points however you would like. But I think that's good enough for this tutorial just to give students an idea of what they can do. 19. Bonus Lesson - Optional Nose Animation: And Here's an optional nose animation. We'll select our nose layer. We'll duplicate it two times with Control D. We'll move to frame 33 on the timeline. With our first nose layer selected, we'll press Alt plus right square bracket, and then we'll drag our nose layer on the timeline to frame 33. Now let's select nose two, and we'll press Alt left square bracket. Now let's move to frame 43. We'll press Alt plus right square bracket. Drag the layer to frame 43. Now let's select nose number three, and we'll press Alt plus left square bracket. Now we'll select our nose two. Right click, go to transform, flip horizontally. Now the nose will give the illusion that it's switching angles as she moves left to right. 20. Bonus Lesson - Optional Eyebrow Animation: Here's another optional lesson. We'll move to frame 52 on the timeline. We'll select our eyebrow layer. We'll duplicate it twice with Control D. Now we'll trim our original eyebrow layer by pressing Alt, right square bracket, drag the layer. Now let's trim our eyebrow two and eyebrow three layers by pressing Alt left square bracket. With our second eyebrow layer selected, get our rectangle tool and we're going to draw a mask over our layer. We'll do the same thing for our eyebrow three layer. We'll bring up the rotation for both layers by pressing R. Press the stopwatch to put keyframes. Move over to frame 56. We'll enter a value of negative ten. And then the other layer we'll enter a value of positive ten. Move over to frame 64. Press the keyframe button for both layers, and then we'll move to frame 69. And we'll copy and paste our first keyframe. We'll do the same thing for the second layer. Now let's select our keyframes. Press F nine to add some EZ Es. And if you would like, you can go into the graph editor. I'm gonna pull these handles to the left for the first animation, and I'm gonna leave the second animation as the default. Do the same thing for the other layer. Now let's preview our animation.