Motion Essentials: After Effects Face Rigging

1. Intro: Hi, I'm Remington. I'm a motion designer and I've gotten to work on projects for clients such as Facebook, IG, and Spotify. In my free time, I like to design a lot of my own characters, and that's exactly what we'll be doing in this course. You can follow along with me and design the same character as me or you can design your own and at the end we'll rig the character for easy animation. This class is for people new or intermediate after-effects users. I'll be displaying the keystrokes on the screen. So if you've never used the software before, you should be able to follow along but I'll post an essentials class in the description below in case you want to get familiar with the software first. Rigging characters is an excellent way to speed up your animation workflow so that you can spend more time polishing your animations and getting them to look the way you want. Please post your progress in the comments below, and I'll do my best to keep up with you. Thank you for considering my class and follow if you'd like more information. 2. Sketching: In this video, we're going to go through some of the basics of character design. In the next video, we'll go through the specifics of how to draw those character and Illustrator. If we want to set a character up for ease of animation, then we should be thinking in simple shapes that are going to be easy to animate. Rarely will you get exactly what you want the first time. I think it's great to make a feature list so that you have a group of eyes and a group of noses, and then you can pick the best nose with the best eyes. That experimentation also opens up your mind. Usually, by the fourth or fifth shape you've put on paper, you're thinking more creatively and outside of the box, to create a character that's more unique or better fitting to your theme. As you can see here, I'm just sketching out different ideas that I think might work for the shape of a head. Another aspect to consider when designing your character is visual contrast. Visual contrast makes your character more appealing to the eye. Some ways that you can achieve that are through proportional contrasts. You could have a really small head and big body. It can also be through straight and curved lines. Putting a curved ear next to the straight side of a face can add some visual contrast to your character, strengthening the design overall. When designing your character, I think it's important to remember that shapes equal personality. If you have a very scary character, there may be a lot of sharp angles. If you have a very goofy character, they may be tall, thin, and lanky with a tall, thin, circular head. If you're doing a brash character or an immovable character, they may be more short and boxy. Just think about the shape you're using when you're designing your character and think about what that shape makes you feel. For our character here, I'm going to use more round shapes because I want it to be a friendly looking character. Now that we have a basic sketch of our character, we'll take that over to illustrator and use that as a guide to draw our character and prep them for animation and after effects. 3. Designing Your Character Part 1: Here we are in Illustrator and I've picked a couple of colors that we can use. Now, we'll be providing these project files below, where you're more than welcome to choose your own colors or just follow along with your own character. We have our sketch here in the background, we'll be using that as our reference image. We're going to recreate this sketch in Illustrator so that it'll be vectorized and we'll organize the layers, and then we'll be able to import those in the After Effects and convert those to shape layers for easier animation. We're going to start off with the square, we're going to make his head here. I'm going to get rid of that film and then I'm going to make this line a little thicker, so that we can see it a little bit better. We'll be filling some of these things in later. Now, we're just going to drag these rounded rectangles there. It doesn't have to be exact. Now for these ears, I think we can get away with just circles and that'll make it easier when we're doing head turns to move them in and out from behind. I'm going to "Alt" click and drag that to the other side to duplicate and let's see. For these eyes, we'll do just some regular circles. Again, I'll click and drag that eye over there. Now again, for his hair we'll once again just use some circles and this is all intentional that we've chosen really basic shapes because in the long-run this will make him a lot easier to animate because we'll just be animating these little shapes around rather than the entire character's facial shape, if that makes sense. Now, you're more than welcome to do that and when you do that, you get him the more frame by frame animation, which is an art form on its own. But here we're aiming for a simple [inaudible]. Now for this nose, we'll take the pen tool, we'll hold "Shift" and click down here and click there. Then we'll take that and just round that off there. Now, we need to create this shape and side of his face. What we'll do is, I use this trick a lot, we're going to copy this and we're going to paste it. Let's just give that a different color for now so that we can see it. We'll go up to Object, Path, Offset Path. We'll click "Preview" so we can see what we're doing and I'm going to set a large number here so you can get an idea. If I click that other field it'll update. Here you can see that it's offsetting the path around the path we've drawn by whatever pixel amount we insert up here. In this case, we want to bring it in. It looks like about maybe negative 75 pixels and there we go. It fit almost perfect. We'll hit "OK" there. Double-click this, we're just going to edit this path. Let's see. We don't need these bottom ones, so we're going to delete those. We'll grab this, we'll bring that up. We're going to grab that pen tool again and connect this bottom. Then we will grab these two points down here and round those off of it. Now, if you remember from my previous course, I talked about doing straight lines and curved lines and you can see that we have a lot of circles here, a lot curved lines matched with some straight lines here and that offers a lot of visual contrast. Now, we have all of our base shapes down. I'm going to turn off the reference layer. For the face, we're going to switch over to a fill. We'll fill that in. We won't need the outline. We're going to send this one to the back. We'll select those eyes and I'm going to make those filled in with a darker blue. For that nose, we'll make that a dark blue. For these ear, we'll switch that over to a fill and let's do a dark purple and we will send those to the back. A matter of fact, let's just drag that one over and delete the previous one. Now, we want to create his beard and his hairline out here. The way we will do that is we will copy these two. We're going to hit "Control, Shift, V" to paste those on top, "Control, G" to group them. We'll go inside of there and now we can just edit this section as we see fit. We will select all of that. We'll come over here to our shape builder tool or press "Shift, Down" and then this allows us to quickly and easily build shapes. I'm going to hold on to this section. I'm going to hold "Alt" and click and that will remove that. I'm going to exit out of that. By pressing "Escape", we no longer need this outline in here. Delete the outline. Now, we can change the color of this to his beard. Now, we will grab the hair back here. We're going to bring this to the front. We're going to fill that and get rid of those lines and you can see how we've built up our character here. We're going to come over here to our Stroke, we'll make that a little bit thicker. Looks like 15 points, it looks good. We'll click Stroke and we'll click this little cap button here and that's going to round out the caps. Now, I feel like there's some room for improvement here. He is still looks like a monkey. What we're going to do is we're going to bring this up a bit. We will shrink that in and totally delete this one. This is part of the Illustrator process, is you're going to bring your sketch in and you're going to play with things and once you start putting these basic shapes, then you may find things that you think work better or worse. Your experimentation with the look of the character doesn't need to stop on the sketch paper. We can continue on the computer. Now, let's give him a mouth. We'll make the mouth the same color as the ear's. We'll the pen tool. I'm going to hit "I" for the eyedropper. Go back to the pen tool and let's just say that we click here on the center. We'll come up here a little bit and then we'll just drag that to hung to give them a little bit of a smirk. Now, we're going to steal the stroke width from here, but apply the mouth color there. I think his mouth will still be a little thicker and so let's go ahead and make that 25. But I want to keep unity stylistically across, so we're going to grab his nose and make that the same line width for consistency sake. I'm going to go ahead and give him a different color background. I'm going to send this to the back. There we go. Now, for a character that'll be pretty simple to animate. I do want to touch on one other thing and that's going to be mouth shapes, which we will get to in the next lesson. 4. Designing Your Character Part 2: [MUSIC]. When we go to rig our character, we're going to create a mouth rig, which will let us cycle through all the different mouths that we have. What I would encourage you to do is to create a new art board and take this mouth and copy it over here, and then what we're going to do, is take that mouth and drag it over here. We're just going to start making different shapes. Then I'm just going to go ahead and fast forward as I make a bunch more mouth shapes, these will be included in the project file so you can use them. Then I'm going to number each one of these mouth shapes, so that I have a guide when I'm using my mouth rig, to know which mouth is which, which will make more sense later when we rig it in After Effects. [MUSIC] Lastly, we need to organize these layers for After Effects. The way we would do that, is we're going to go through, and we're going to take our individual elements and we're going to put them each on their own layer. Right now everything's resting on their own layer. What we will do is we will create a new layer by clicking down here. We'll name this, right ear. Then we will copy his right ear to that layer, we will want to put that in the back. We will move this to a background layer. Then we will go on and continue to do that for the rest of our elements, we're going to want to break apart all three pieces of the hair will want the head on one layer, and want the eyes on their own layer, the nose on their own layer in the mouth. I'm going to go ahead and fast-forward through that process and then after that we'll work on importing it to After Effects. [MUSIC] Great, so now we have everything organized and I'll go ahead and do the same things for the mouths before carrying them over to After Effects. Now we'll head over to After Effects with this organized Illustrator file and it'll be pretty easy to convert it into Shape layers. 5. Importing: Okay, now that we've created our character in Illustrator, it's time to import them into After Effects and convert them to Shape layers, which will make it easier to animate. Now, luckily, Adobe's made that very easy for us. So here in After Effects, we're just going to double-click in the Project which opens our Import window. We're going to pick the "Face" Illustrator file, and I've saved just the Face layers into its own file. Going to hit "Import", going to choose "Composition" as my kind, "Layer Size" is my Dimensions and hit "Okay". Now I'm going to open that composition and we'll see that all of our layers have been imported into here and that the names match those that we gave them in there. We're going to select all those layers. We're going to right-click, hit "Create", "Create Shapes from Vector Layer". Then now we have all of these converted into Shape layers. We're going to go through and delete these Illustrator layers. Now we have just the Shape layers left over. Now, it should have gone through and auto-centered the anchor point to each layer. But there's some that you may want to change the anchor point to, so if we press "Y" and we can grab the anchor point and change this over the nose, we'll put that up there. The ears look good and the background looks good. The eyes look good. The hair, they each look good. With that, I may move the mouth down to right there. Move the nose back up to here. There we go. Now we're ready to get started rigging. 6. Rigging Part 1: Okay, so here we are in After Effects and we're ready to rig our characters. Normally, the first part of rigging would be to go around in position to anchor points and all the layers. We did that in the last lesson, but the reason we do that, is so that when we grab layers like our nose here, we can see that it rotates around the anchor point. Now those becomes incredibly useful when you're doing things like say, moving the anchor point on this head down here so that it rotate at the base of the neck. But let's move on to rigging the face. Now first, we're going to take this background layer and we're going to lock it by clicking that little lock icon, and then let's move onto our face. Here, we'll take the head outline we're going to solo that by clicking the little Solo button here. Now, this could have been done easily in Illustrator, but I wanted to do it over in here in After Effects because I believe this method can be useful in a lot of situations. What we want to do is we want this face to move independently of our head shape so that we can move it around and it'll give the illusion that the heads turning and looking around. We will duplicate the head layer, we'll rename that face, and we will solo just the head layer. We're going to twirl that down and open the contents. Now, want the face to be on the top layer, so we actually want this whole thing to be of the same color as the beard. What we're going to do here is click our groups, twirl down this group, take the fill color here, that beard and hair color, and you put that back up. We will turn off our beard and hair layer which leaves just the head shape, go up here to refill, we'll take that hex code that we copied from before and we'll put it there. Now, we have that as the background for head, now we want this one to be just the face. Here's that method I mentioned earlier. We're going to go to Add here and Merge Path. Now we don't need a stroke, so we'll delete that stroke toward on the Merge path, and there's all different ways that it works, but we're going to click Exclude Intersections. The way that Merge Path works is it looks at the content before, in this case group 1 and 2, and then re-applies this calculation. Here we hit Exclude Intersections, so we have the face here being excluded from that. What we'll do is we'll twirl down this, we're going to steal that skin color hex code there. We'll come up here to the group and we'll put it in there, and now we have our face. If we Solo just these two layers, we can click her face and move it around and see that it works independently. Now we're going to attach that to the head layer with this little Pick Whip and we can drag it down there and that'll parent it to that layer, so that when we grab our head, our face will move with it. Now when we rotate our face, we want it to be able to slide across and not just float off into space. What we're going to do is we're going to duplicate our head layer, we'll name that Head Matte, put that above the face, select the face, we'll click over here and do an Alpha Matte. Now, when we drag our face around and looks like it's turning and we're looking out, we're looking down. Let's reset that back there. Now let's do the rest of the face. Now, we have a lot of layers here and it's going to get a bit difficult to know which layer we're clicking on, especially when we're over here later animating and doing key frames. What we're going to do is start color coordinating them. Let's just select everything we have associated with the face. Our face, our eyes, our mouth, our nose, and we're going to make those all red. Let's take our Head Matte, we'll make that yellow. Now, let's solo all of our face elements. Add them to that Solo list. Let's take all of our face elements and parent those to the face. Now when we drag our face element around, we see that they're moving with it. Now, we don't want our facial features floating off into space. We're going to take this Head Matte, we're going to duplicate it once, put the eyes, duplicate it once, put the new mouth and duplicate it once above the nose, we're going to take all those base elements, we're going to come over here and make them Alpha Matte, let's click our face to make sure that worked, and there we go. It all looks [inaudible] looking up, and again down and of course we want to animate the eyes. Or we can give them a head turn. That'll be incredibly useful later. Let's see, let's turn our Solo layers off. We're going to want to parent our ears to the head, and let's make those dark green. Let's take all the hair, and we'll parent that to the head, and let's make this pink. There we go. Now we have all of our layers color coordinated and everything parented. 7. Rigging Part 2: Now, the most useful part of rigging, but also the most complicated thing we're going to go through, is we're going to do a mouth rig. If we go over here, I've created a mouth comp. In that mouth comp, I have the mouth comp resized to the size of the mouth. You can scroll through here and see that I've imported all of our mouth shapes from Illustrator, using the same method we did before. I've made each one one-frame long and stack them in order. You can see that we have 14 frames. But with After Effects, it adds a frame at the ends. We technically have 15 mouth shapes. That's how the mouth comp setup. We're going to go back into the face comp. We're going to replace this mouth with this comp. We will drag that down. Now it's interrupting the mouth, so you can't see. I'll just put that on top. There we go. I'm going to adjust the anchor point here. We're going to delete that mouth. We're going to put this mouth back in its place. We will attach this to the head and we will turn the Alpha Matte on. Now, this method that I'm going to show you will allow us to attach a slider control to this mouth comp and then we'll be able to scrub to that slider control and change the mouth from out here and we can keep framing that. We're using this to do a mouth comp so that we can make him speak or just animate his mouth to look surprised, happy, or sad. But it's important to realize that this method can be used for a lot of aspects or rigging. We're going to jump into it now and I'll explain some of the other ways it's useful. We're going to right-click, hit "Time", enable Time Remapping, and drag that out, so it just reaches the end of the comp. We're going to go up here to Effects and Presets, and we're going to type in slider control, which is an expression control. We're going to put that on the mouth layer. We can just rename this to Mouth Rig. We will take this Parent from the Time Remap and drag it up to the Mouth Rig. But first, we need to "Alt" click and drag it up to the slider. You can see here, now that's attached to that effect. Now, we want to turn this into a variable and we do that by hitting "A Equals". What this tells this layer is that A equals and then these controls here. Now, what we're going to do is column that variable with a framesToTime, and it has this little list here. You can auto fill in and we'll put that A in there. What this does is lock this frame right up here, more down to the mouth shapes. You can see here, it's already working that if we drag through, you can see the mouth shapes moving. I'm going to twirl down this slider because I think it's a little easier to use the actual slider controls. But you can see here that it goes through all the mouth shapes and stops right there. It's just difficult because that's a tiny little space to drag in. We can actually fix that by right-clicking the slider here, not the title, the little slider right there, and then Edit Value pops up. Let's set a custom range. We have 14 frames in there, so we'll hit 0-14. Now, you can see that that goes across the whole way and it's a lot easier to control. We can keep framing this and just cycle through all the mouth shapes. With that, we have our character fully rigged. I talked about this mouth rig slider control expression and how that can be used in a lot of ways. It's great for mouth rigs and especially for lip syncing. But it can be used to really change out anything inside of a comp. We could use it to give him different hairstyles, different ears, or make it so that's eyes blink, or that's nose gets red, or sneezes, or anything. When you think about these methods, don't just think about how I'm applying them to this character. Particularly, I'm trying to teach you methods that I think will be useful to you and a variety of ways when you're rigging your characters, that you can set up much more complicated rigs than this and be able to easily animate them and quickly animate them, so that you can spend more time focusing on polishing your animations. It's also important to remember to create a cheat sheet for whatever shape layers you're putting in these rigs. If you remember earlier, you saw that I was labeling all the mouths with a number system, so that when I'm scrubbing to the slider, I know which mouth shape I'm doing. I just chose to number these, but you could also put additional notes on them and label your mouth says, happy, sad, or the different sounds and shapes that your mouth makes when you're speaking. You can label one as an /oʊ/ sound, and then if you're trying to lip sync, what you do is you would look in the mirror and the shape that your mouth makes, when you're speaking in saying that portion of the word, and then you would just animate accordingly to the shapes on this list. Of course, you can make your own shapes and do that as well. There's a lot of cheat sheets and guides online for doing lip syncing, mouth sheets. At this point, I'd really encourage you to post anything you have, progress-wise, in the class notes below, and I'll do my best to review everything. I'm really excited too, what you guys are doing, but we're going to get into the fun part and start animating next. 8. Animation Part 1: Now that we have our wriggle setup, we can begin animating. Let's just double check that we have everything the way we want. I think that I am going to make the mouth follow the face because I think that'll be a little easier for what I want to do with this animation. Now feel free to follow along with me or create your own animation. We're going to do a simple head nod. So let's open faces position properties by pressing P or insert any key frame there. I'm going to go up to frame twelve, which I have my frame counter on. You can change that back to regular time by control clicking this and going back and forth. So let's go to frame 12. Select the face, pull that up, and then we will move forward, and let's go to frame 18 and copy that first frame. That's boring right now, but we're going to spice it up. Let's animate the hair next. We will open the position key frames on the hair. Move those back to the beginning, and then here we want to bring that hair up all the way. I'm going to select these so then move up about the same. I'll do that, and then it will copy all the originals here. Let's look at that. So we have our hair moving. Still boring, but we're going to fix that and just bear with me here. So let's go down to the ears and position key frames for those. Go up to the top here, and these are actually going to get a little lower as the head tilt back. Then we'll bring it back to normal here, copying those key frames. Now we should have a very basic head tilt. Let's do a little animation with the facial features. So we'll start with the eyes and the nose. Before the nose will do the eyes, will just go ahead and insert a key frame here as well. We want these eyes to go up just a little bit, and then come right back down. Let's take that nose up here, insert a key frame here at the beginning, and here at the end. When it gets here, you're going to move that nose up a tiny bit before the eyes, because it's closer to the camera. So over technically, move up the most with the hair, and let's see what that looks like. You can see by offsetting the positions according to what's closest to the camera's going to move the furthest and what's furthest away from the camera's going to move opposite. So we have the ears dropping back and then we had the nose and the hair moving, and you can already see that it adds a little bit of dimensionality there. We're going do a couple things to accent that. But first, let's take care of this mouth. Take this mouth P, sort of key frame, drag that over and I'm going to drag this up a bit. I don't know if I want to not move quite that much because it's moving as much as the nose right now and the noses stick and not move more like the eyes. For the sake of demonstrating, our mouth rake will give him a little bit of a mouth animation. So what we'll do is we'll come up here,we'll insert a key frame with the slider, and I'm just going to pick some random mouse shape. We'll give our own frame too there. We'll go ahead and once it gets up to the top, looking on this larger mouth, and then we'll come back down and copy that original frame and see what it looks like. As you can see, it's animating through out the mouth shapes, which of course is not what we want. So what we're going to do, select those key frames, right-click it toggle hold key frame. Now we'll toggle hold key frame does is it removes all [inaudible] between key frames. So if I actually click this over here in the graph editor, we can see that the values constant until it reaches that. So as you can see here, it doesn't change until it hits that key frame, gets a little bigger and then drops down. Maybe he's nodding his head because he's hoping for a breath and that's why his mouth's getting there. Now we have this head nod and I think I'm actually going to move that mouth key frame back. Here we go. Now that's so important that when you're animating, you're not going to be able to just sit down and plow forward. It's going to be a lot of experimentation, placing key frames where you think you may want them, realizing it doesn't look great and bouncing back and forth. It's great to save often and it's a great to experimental a lot. A lot of times I'll save a version, every major update or major change, and the one I'm doing, incremental changes, all those kind of save, and you can come up here to file and revert back. If you click this button here, that'll revert back to your classes. So for experimenting and don't like the way you go, you can always revert back easily that way. So it's always great to experiment when animating. But we need to add a little bit of life to this. Now, we're going to do that through a little bit of secondary motion, and then we're going to adjust the easing as well. 9. Animation Part 2: Secondary motion is when your character moves and then let's say that his hair would bounce. His head is the primary motion and his hair would be the secondary emotion. It's that secondary emotion, that adds a lot of life to animation. Before we do that, we're going to do easing. For easing we'll come into the face here. We're going to select those key frames, and we're going to press the graph editor. We're going to right-click this. We're going to separate dimensions so that we can control our dimensions in there. We don't need to have any animation on the x position for this particular animation. We'll select our y position. We're going to press this, so that gives us some handles to deal with and see what that looks like right now. It goes up. We're going to focus on just the face and the head right now. That looks a little better than before. It looks a little more lively. Whenever you add ease, you're going to get that ease in and ease out and that adds a lot of life to your animation. A lot of realistic motions have good easing. If you're doing a robotic motion, it'd be more linear. But let's take these handles, drag them out. We'll make his head stay at the top by dragging these handles out here, it's going to stay at the top a bit more. Let's see what that looks like. There we go. He raises his head up and he rest and then he snaps down onto place. If you're not familiar with the graph editor, I'm using this to change the easing on the keyframes. I took this and I drag this out a little bit so that we would ease into it. Then here I took these keyframe and drag both of these far out in either directions so that we would linger up here and then snap back down here. But I also took this and drag this out a little bit so that we would ease back into that final motion. Then you can see how much life that adds. To compare to before, we'll just convert that back to linear by clicking this button. So you can see what that looks like versus this. Now, if we un-solo this layer, we'll now see that nothing else matches because all the other keyframes are on linear keyframes. There easy needs to match in order for them to all synchronize together. Now you could go through and you could try and manually match all of them. That would be very difficult. You could also go through and you could select all these keyframes, and you could right-click "Keyframe Velocity", and you could copy these numbers to each. But that would also take a long time. So what we're going to do is we're going to use a script called EaseCopy. This makes this process extremely easy, hence the name. This script is actually pay your own price. I recommend that you give them some money because it is a great tool that once you start using you'll probably use all the time. But if you don't have the money, you can get it for free. I will post a link in the description below. What we're going to do is we're going to copy the ease from these keyframes. We'll select those keyframes, will hit "Copy", we'll select these keyframes for Paste Ease. Now those match. Then we'll come up here and do that to these. We don't want do it to our time remapping because that'll screw up our expression and we don't want to do it to the mouth slider because that's on hold keyframes for a reason. Then we'll ease up there. Now the easing should match and everything. Now you can see that all that motion matches. Great. Now we can start playing with doing a little bit of secondary motion. For example, we can grab all this hair, we can drag that over one frame so that it delays one frame. Great. We can take that big hair and we can drag that over an extra frame and we can see that now that's got a little bit delay. Awesome. Let's do the same thing with the ears. We'll take both the ears and we'll drag them over one frame. Let's actually try taking the nose over one keyframe this way. Yeah, that looks better. The things closest to the camera are going to move the furthest and slightly offset. That's what we're trying to give the illusion up here is depth. There's one last tool I want to show you guys. It's actually an expression that we're going to use to add some inertia to some of our motion here. It needs to be used subtly, but when used subtly it can add a lot of life to your animation. This is another free one. Let me type in gray machine inertia bounce. I'll put a direct link to this. But it's this top five after effects. He is graciously giving away all of these, so maybe you can send him a tweet or contact him, and they can verse work. I'm going to copy this expression here for this inertia balance, going to head back to After Effects, and I'm going to press P on the face, going to Alt click this, which allows me to insert an expression, I'm going to copy that expression. Let's see what that looks like at the start. You can't see much because the amplitude is set to really low. Now, it's going to take into account the easing. The fact that we ease into here, it's going to take a lot of amplitude to really see an effect. Here, you have three main factors that you can edit in here. You have your amplitude, your frequency, and how quickly it decays. You can just experiment those and see what it does. Let's go up to one and see what we get. There you go. You can see here we're getting a little bounce on the face there. Great. Let's take that. We're going to copy that over to the hair. We will alt P click that. I'll scroll up here and let's make the hair really bouncy and see how that looks. We'll set that to two. There we go. That looks great. Let's take that and let's copy it to the rest of the hair. I'm going to press P on both of those hairs, Alt click, paste, Alt click, paste. Let's see what that looks like. I actually want those little hairs to move up a little bit more, so we're going to select that and then hit three. There we go. Lastly, I think I'm going to add a little bit to the ears. I'm just going to select everything there, press U to open up the keyframes and you again close them, I'm going to hit the tilt a key to enter into this view. I will take these, I will hit P. Alt click that one and paste, Alt click that one and paste. I think it'd look dopey if his ears moved more, which I think could be fun. So let's up that amplitude to three. Close that, tilt the key back, and preview your animation. Great. You can see how offsetting our frames and going in and adding that little bit of inertia balance really adds a ton of life. Now that we have our animation polished, we're going to work on exporting it and converting it into a GIFs where we can share it online. 10. GIF: Now we have an animation ready to export. So we're going to go to File, Export, Add Media coder. We're going to export it as an mp4. So we'll go here and select H264, do match source, hide their grade. And then we'll choose where we want to export that. So I'm just going to leave mine named face and will export. Now, most web applications online are going to use mp4, but in case you want to use a GIF, we're going to go through the photo create one. Most people will use Photoshop to make GIFS, but I have another method that I believe actually works a lot better and yields a lot better results. We'll go to this website here. It's called an ezgif.com. Again, I'll put this in the class notes. Then we'll go to the Video to GIF option, and click "Choose", I'm going to navigate over to my export, going to select that and uploaded, there is a 100 megabyte limit. Just click Upload. And once you're here, you can set some options here. I'm going to choose the original size, 800 pixels wide, and for our frame rate, I'll choose 25 because that's closest to 24, that they have. Click "Convert to GIF". You'll see it working down here. We've finished making our GIF, and we can see that it's only 674 KB, but we can also optimize that and make it even smaller. In this case, we don't have that many colors or many frames, so it doesn't really take up much space to save this as a GIF. But let's say that we were dealing with a larger file size. We can then click this optimized the GIF option. It'll take you over here. You can choose your compression level. By default, it gives you 35 and you can go all the way up to 200, but we'll just leave it at the default 35, click "Optimized GIF". That saved us 34 percent. So then now we can right-click saving the jazz, and then I'll just save it to the same folder that I saved my export. I'll just name this Face GIF, and there we go. Now we have a GIF to share. I find this to be a lot more efficient than Photoshop, and it's able to save to allow smaller file sizes, making them easier to share online. 11. Outro: Thank you for taking my course and I hope that you'll learn some things along the way. I'm really excited to see what you guys made. Make sure to post them in the comments below and follow me if you'd like to see in future classes on topics similar to this.