Transcripts
1. Introduction: Character animation is one of the more complex things you'll have to do as a motion designer. That's why I've
created this very simple and easy to follow class. I'll teach you how to animate a walk cycle all inside
of D after effects. I recommend this class for someone who knows
their way around, but has never done
character animation. For absolute beginners, I recommend taking one of
my beginner classes. Your class project is to create your own
character animation. Can't wait to see
what you create.
2. Getting Started: For this class, you're going
to need adobe Aftereffects, Adobe Media encoder to Export. Download the artwork from the
Project and Resources page. I will also be included a
completed version of the class. Feel free to download
that as well. Your class project is to create your own
character animation, and feel free to post
your projects to the project gallery so everyone can see
what you've created.
3. Drawing the Legs: The first thing we're going
to do is draw the legs. Zoom into 200%. Turn on the grid. Get the pen tool. I'm using
a black stroke, 15 pixels. Make sure there's no fill. Click somewhere around here. Remember to hold the shift
key to draw a straight line. Something like that
looks good enough. Toggle down the layer
contents, shape, path. Change it to round cap. Now we have our first. To create the second leg, we're just going to duplicate our first leg. Click Control D. Now press P to bring
up the position, and we'll drag it over
somewhere around here. Move the doughnut layer
to the top of the layers. There. I think that
looks good enough. I
4. The Basic Walk Cycle: Now we're going to animate
the basic walk cycle. Turn on our grade again. Zoom in to 200%. We can turn off our second leg. Toggle down our
leg one, Path one. Make sure you have
path one selected. Select the two foot points. Holding the shift key, drag over the foot
to around here. Okay. Press the stopwatch
to put a keyframe. Now move to exactly 1
second on the timeline. Place another key frame. We want our first
and last key frames to be exactly the same. Now moved to halfway at 15
frames on the timeline. Again, make sure your
path is selected. Select the two points. Hold the shift key,
drag the foot over. Now we've got our foot
moving back and forth. Around halfway through
our foot moving forward, we're going to lift our foot up. Again, make sure the
path is selected. Select the two foot keyframes and lift it up about
one square on the grid. I think that looks good. So now we have four key frames, our feet moving back and
forth and our foot lifting. Our first leg is done. Now we can turn off leg number one and turn on leg number two. We're essentially going to
do the exact same thing. Toggle down the contents, shape. Make sure path one is selected. Select our two foot points. Holding the shift
key, move it forward. Toggle it down,
press the stopwatch. Go to exactly 1 second
on the timeline. Place another key frame. Move to 15 frames. Select our two points. Now, holding the shift key, we're going to
drag it backwards. I think somewhere around
there should look good. Now, around halfway through
our foot moving forward. We're going to again
lift our foot up. Select the two foot points. Lift it up around one square. There we go. We can turn on our other leg, and now we can preview what
our walk cycle looks like. Let's trim our work area to 1 second to preview
our walk cycle. Now we've got our
basic walk cycle.
5. Refine the Walk Cycle: Now we're going to
refine our walk cycle. Turn off leg two. Zoom into 200% again. Turn the grid on. Select leg one, move over
to the second keyframe, the keyframe where
our foot moves up. Toggle down the layer. Select path one, This time, we're only going to select
this one key frame, and we're going to drag
it up just a little bit to make it look like
our foot is bending. Now, select your pen tool to create a new point in
the middle of our leg. Drag it out just a little bit. To make it look like
our knee is moving. Again, we're going
to turn off leg one, turn leg two on, and we're
going to do the same thing. On the keyframe where
our foot is moving up, select this one point. Drag it up just a little bit. Select the pen tool again. Around halfway through our leg, we're going to
place a new point. There we go. Let's preview. I think that adds just a bit more realistic look
to a walk cycle.
6. Body Animation: Now we're going to animate
our donut moving up and down. Select the donut layer and press P to bring up
the position property. Move to the second
keyframe on our leg one. Now, select our donut
layer, press the stopwatch. Now move to the second last
keyframe on our leg two. Press the keyframe button. This is going to be our up
position for the donut. Now go to 15 frames
on the time line. Select the donut layer. Now using the down arrow key, we're going to move
our donuts body down. Or you can type in five
50 into the y position. Now move to the beginning
of the timeline. Select our middle keyframe. Control C, Control V. Now go to the end
of our walk cycle. Control C, Control V. There, now our Delonut moves up
and down as it walks.
7. Extend the Walk Cycle: First thing we're going to do is easy ease our key frames. It'll make our walk
cycle a little smoother. To extend our walk cycle, we're going to be doing a
lot of copy and pasting. Now, let's extend our work area to the end of the composition. Make sure you're on
the last key frame of the doughnut by
pressing the arrows here. Now, select all the keyframes. Control C, Control V.
Do the same thing. Move to the last keyframe. Select all the keyframes. Continue doing this until it
covers the whole timeline. Make sure to do only
one layer at a time. After ffects doesn't let you
copy paste multiple layers. So, for our leg two, we're
going to do the same thing. Move to the last
keyframe. Copy paste. And finally, we're going to do the same thing for our leg one. Now, our walk cycle will loop
throughout the timeline.
8. Animate the Background: Before we animate
our background, I just want to give you a look at how I created the background. Go up to composition
composition settings. You can see the size of
our main composition, 1920 by ten 80. Now, let's head into
our background layer. Head into background original. You can see I created a composition the same size
as our main composition. Let's close background original. Here in the background
composition. You can see what I've done is
created a composition twice as long as our main composition
with one background, a aligned to the left, and
one line to the right. Now, let's animate
the background. Drag our background layer to
the bottom of the layers. Press P to bring
up the position. Head to the beginning
of the timeline. Now, let's align it to the
left using the align panel. Press the stopwatch
to put a keyframe. Now let's move to the
end of the timeline. Now we're going to
align it to the right. This places another key frame on the timeline automatically. Now, let's see what happens
if we preview our animation.
9. Eye Blink: For this blessing, we're going to animate
the yes blinking. Let's head into our
doughnut layer. Select our yes layer. Make sure our anchor point is
in the center of the eyes. Press S to bring up
the scale property. Make sure the scale is linked by clicking this button here. Press the stopwatch
to put a keyframe. Move over three frames, type of value of five
into the y property. Move over another three frames. And let's put the
value back to 100. Select the keyframes,
press F nine, to add some easy
Es. Right click. Let's go to keyframe velocity and type of value of
50% into both values. This will add a little bit
more energy to our blank. And that's pretty
much it. You can copy and paste throughout the timeline to add as many
blinks as you would like.
10. Shadow: Another thing you might want
to do is create a shadow. To draw our shadow, we're just
going to use our pen tool. Remember to hold the
shift key to draw a straight line.
We can rename it. Remember to press enter
to rename a layer. Move it to the bottom
of our character. Press T to bring up the opacity. We'll bring it down to
something like 20%. But we can open up
our layer contents. Shape, stroke. Let's change it to round cap. So to animate the shadow, we're going to
make sure that our anchor point is in the center. You can use the snapping tool to make sure that anchor
point snaps to the center. From there, we can
press S to bring up the scale, unlink it. With the doughnut
layer selected, press P to bring
up the position. And our doughnut character
is in its down position, we're going to want our
shadow at its longest. So let's put a keyframe
for our scale. And let's move over to when our doughnut is in
the up position. We can shrink our x value
to something like 75%. I think that looks good enough. And from there, it's just a
matter of copy and pasting. Move over to the next
doughnut position. Copy and paste our
first key frame. And we can keep doing that till it covers our
whole timeline. If you want, you can
easily ease the keyframes. There we go. We have a shadow.
11. Boil Effect(Hand Drawn Look): In this lesson, we're going
to create the Boyle effect. This will give our animation a little bit more of
a cartoony look. We're going to create a
new adjustment layer. Rename it Boyle. I effects and presets, search for turbulent displays. Add that to our
adjustment layer. We can turn our
amount down to five. Turn our size down to ten. Complexity to two, Toggle
down evolution options. I'll click on the
random seed stopwatch. In the field here, we can
type in our expression. Random, 10,000. This adds a little bit of
animation to our boil effect. To make it even
better, we're going to duplicate our
turbulent displace layer. Turn the amounts to 30. Change the size down to
two, complexity to four. And that's pretty much it.
12. Final Thoughts: Another thing you
might want to do is give your walk cycle
a little more style. An asy way to do that is you can select all your keyframes. Right click, head into
keyframe velocity, and you can up these numbers to something really
high, let's say, 80%. That gives your walk cycle
a little bit more energy. It's up to you if you
want to do that or not. And maybe your boil effect isn't as extreme as
you would like it. Maybe you would
want to go with a more squiggly line look. You can always go
into your boil layer and change these amounts. Play around with them until
you get a look that you like. I'll give it a more extreme
squiggly line look. But it's up to you
what you want to do. Anyways, that's just about it. Feel free to post your project
to the project gallery. I love seeing the stuff
that you guys create. And that's just about it.
13. Export Using Adobe Media Encoder: Now we can export our animation to share in the project gallery. You don't need to export the
full ten second animation. I'm only going to export the first 5 seconds
of the animation. I'm going to drag the
end of my work area. Now we can go to File, Export, add to Adobe
Media and Coder Q. We'll click on one
of these links to bring up the properties. Besides the presets,
I'm going to choose Tube ten 80 P full HD. Click Okay. Now, click the
green arrow to Export.
14. Outro: Congratulations.
You just completed your own character animation. Now you can share your project
in the project gallery.
15. Bonus Lesson - Walk On: Let's say you want to make the donut character
animate on the screen. So the biggest drawback
of this type of animation is that our legs aren't actually
connected to our donut. The easiest solution to this is to simply just precompose
our character. Select all three of
our character layers, right click, precompose. Bring up our position property, can drag our
character off screen. Put a key frame, move
over on the timeline. Drag our character
over. There we go. Obviously, you'll have to play
around with the keyframes to decide how fast you want
your character to be walking.
Tyler Bennett, Motion Graphics Designer
