Transcripts
1. Intro to Character Animation: Hi. My name's John Fry Tag and I've been in the animation industry for just over seven years. Primarily is a freelance animator. I mainly focus on character, intimation and the basic of any good character innovation. Start with the character rig. That's why this course I'm calling the fundamentals of character animation. In this course, we're gonna use after effects to design your own character, rigged that character and animate a simple walk cycle. It should be fun, and I'm excited to get into it and see what you guys come up with. Thanks for watching.
2. Design Legs: before we start, I just want to say thank you for taking this tutorial. Taking this class. It really means a lot to me that you would take the time out of your day toe watch what I'm doing. I hope that I can have some wisdom for you and that this process is simple enough that we can create something really cool at the end. So there's two things we need to get, and we'll get into it right now before we start before we get started. There's two things you're gonna need. One is after effects. That is a must must must. You cannot take this tutorial unless you have after effects. If you go to adobe dot com and then it's like ford slash credit cloud plan, blah, blah, blah. Find your way to after effects. Now you can purchase after effects for $20 a month. Or you could get the whole bundle of creative Cloud for 50 to 99. That's up to you. Download what you want and then follow the guidelines as how to install that. I'm not going to show you that now. The next thing you're gonna need, um, it's called do it, Bassel. In order to get there, you go to rain box lab dot org's, or you could get just Google. Do it, Bassel. And then I'll take you to this page where you can download it for free. If you really like the plug in and what they're doing, feel free to donate. It is a A free download program. But if you would like to support, please feel free to do so. Once you have those things in place, then we can begin. So when you open up after effects, you should get a screen like this. This is your opening project work space. Right now it's an entitled document and we need to remedy that by going file, Save as save as. And they're gonna find a place somewhere that you want to save it. I'll just do my desktop for now, but you should always have a file location to save it. And I'm gonna call this animation basics part one. Saving it is key, so always remember the same safe, safe. Next. What we're gonna do is we're gonna set up our composition so appear at the top click composition, new composition, and I'm gonna make mine a width of 1920 in the height of 10. 80. That's your standard high definition, uh, ratio or format. And I'm gonna leave mine at 29.97 frames per second. You can select any frame rate you'd like. It's really up to you in the style that you're going to try to achieve. I like to use a higher frame rate so that I can go backwards from there anyway, So hit, OK, And now we have our composition because I'm gonna be doing this very quickly and simplistically, What I want to do is I'm gonna create a circle, and this will be the body of our walk cycle. So if I hold control shift, it creates a circle right in the center of where I clicked it. So I'm gonna drag it up until it's as big as I want it and hit V on the keyboard. You don't need to be um so then come back down here, select your say player. And if you don't have these, um, attributes on the side, like ideo, come up here to the top, click this double arrow and you can pick whatever layout you'd like I typically just to animation. Um And then from there, what we're gonna do is we're gonna find the align tab. If you don't have the align tab, then you come over here to window, find a line right there at the top and clicking on make sure there's a check mark. So then we'll come back over here to our online attribute, and I'm gonna click this one here, which is a line horizontally, and I'm gonna line it vertically. So now my circle is perfect center. I'm gonna rename this body. Now that I have this made, the next thing I wanted to you is you can go, um, shift control, see, to create a new composition or or you come up here to layer all the way down on the bottom and click pre composed. This will be where we create our own composition based off of the body composition. And I'm just gonna call this one body. Then I'm gonna go inside of that composition, and I'm gonna re scale the size of this one. Easy way to do that as you come. You come to this. No, that's not it. Come to this little guy right here, This box within a box called the Region of Interest. And you just scale around your object, get it to the right composition size. And then what we're gonna do is we're gonna go composition, crop comp to region of interest. So now we have a composition size that is the size of our shape layer, which is what we want now coming back into our comp one, which I will rename Walk, Rig. So now we have a composition that is the body, and we can center it out and always make sure that you are centered and true. Collapse some of these. Okay, so I'll send her back out. Another thing you wanted to you is right here in this box. This is a continual raster ization. Click that and that maintains a crisp line on your shape layer when you scale it up so it never loses that crisp line. If I was to turn it off, you will get blurry. You do not want blurry lines crisp and clean. Okay. Next, What we're gonna do is we're gonna create some legs. Uh, I like to start with and make sure your clicked off of your composition and we're gonna come here and I'm gonna create a circle. I'm going to change the color of this circle to you. I don't know something more interesting, actually. Right now I have ingredient. I want a solid color. I'm going to change the color to something more interesting. I don't know something like that. And this will be the top of our hip. The next thing I'm gonna do is with the shape layer selected. Hold control. Click that circle and do you control deep. Now that gives us two circles. This will be my hip joint. This will be my knee joint. And let's see, we want to make sure it doesn't get too big. The space between the joints. I think that'll do just fine. Next, I'm gonna take this rectangle tool, and I'm just gonna cut this circle in the middle. And then I'm going to scale down to the center of the bottom circle and then I'm also going to remove the stroke. Ah, Stroke. Adding a stroke is a whole nother beast when it comes to trimming paths and making sure that the stroke doesn't intersect with certain lines So to keep this simple, I'm gonna omit the stroke and just go with solid shape colors. Next, I'm gonna hit. Why on the keyboard and I'm gonna drag this to the center. Another thing to do is you can come over here to this solo option. Click solo it on Lee. Shows are shape, layer, And then I can come up here to snapping. Turn that on. And this will give me true center of the circle, which is what I want. I'm having trouble getting that. I was zoom in and you want to find Where is it? That can't be it. And again, if I'm having trouble getting truth circle, I can just turn off all of these guys so that I find the true center. Here we go. So now it's a true center. So when I rotate, the circle stays in the middle so I can unseal, though, and I can also turn off snapping. So now I have a leg joint that rotates perfectly at the top. The next thing I'm gonna dio is it gonna rename this, uh fyi that I'm going to click it again, Do control D and that gives me what I will call my calf or Shin Lord, Lower leg. Whatever you'd like to call it that I had V, uh, I'll turn snapping on for this one, too. And I'm going to lower it so that it locks in at the bottom. There. Look at that. You can already see it starting to work. It's a little turn off snapping, and I'm going to attach my calf to my thigh. So now when I rotate my thigh, my calf moves with it that I'm just gonna position this leg in a better location on the body. McGill. Then the next thing I want to do is I want to create a foot. So using the same principle, what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna duplicate my calf, that I'm gonna rename it foot. If I should actually be renaming it the proper left right channel. So this will be, um, right foot. Then I'll rename this right calf, and I'll rename this right thigh now coming back to the foot. What I'm gonna do is I'm gonna delete this circle, appear and delete the square shaped there, which leaves me a circle perfectly aligned with Shin. So this is the true way to get perfect, um, shapes that intersect and bend around each other. Next, what I have to do is I need to put this anchor point down into the center of my circles in in terms snapping on. I'm gonna lower it down right into the middle of the circle and to make sure we are true center hit w on the keyboard and just rotate and look at that. It looks clean and perfect. Next, I attached right foot to right calf, and then I'm gonna need to ad ah, hell in some toes to this. So I am going to make it very simple. I'll do. I'll do a foot like this. It could be really small foot. Um, and I'll do that for now just to keep it simple for you guys. Uh, I'm gonna re color this foot just like a gray color. Maybe I'll lower it down so that we don't see anything. Okay, so now we have one leg done. The next thing I want to do you is before I rig anything using Do it. I'm gonna duplicate all of these guys. Dropped him down below, and I'll change the color, which is just simply select the color square and change it to a color. You like all the green. And to keep things color coordinated, I'm gonna change. Um, if you'll do read, I'll change the shapes to match the colors. I want to make the limbs. So now that I have my my duplicate leg selected, I'm just gonna move it over to position that works, and I'm going to lower it below the body. So this will be behind the body. I'm gonna rename these guys only left foot left calf and then left thigh. So I hope this is all making sense to you. Also feel free to have your own design. If you have a character in mind that you want to create, do your own shapes. Do your own body shapes lake shapes. Have fun with it. But if you want to be safe and do it, how I'm doing it, that's perfectly OK to, um, just make sure that you're having fun and you stick to the guidelines that we're setting up now. Um, yeah, Feel free to ask questions. If you have any questions about what we've done so far, I'll try my best to get back to you and answer them. Um, that Let's keep going, see where we go.
3. Rigging Legs: So for this part, you need to have do it. If you haven't got it yet, go to the do IQ. Page it rain box dot org's and download it. Now you will need it for this part of the tutorial. We're gonna get into some more advanced things, but I'm gonna walk slowly and hopefully everyone can keep up. And hopefully I don't confuse anybody. Let's get into it using Do it. There are two different ways to rig the legs. Um, the first way and it's the way that I'm going to show you is using this auto rig and I k. That's the easiest way to do it. Um, and it causes the least amount of problems when you want to do things like switch the foot from left to right the other way, which is the more involved version. And it actually gives a better flow to the rig, meaning you could do foot rolls, two roles, all kinds of stuff with the feet that really ground the body and make it look awesome. But there's one drawback to it, and that is, if I was to come here, click on the leg. It creates all these bones for me, which is perfect. And then you simply just line it up simply. Just line it up with all your other shapes. Let me just turn these guys off. You line it up with all your shapes. Um, the foot goes in the foot, the toe goes to the toe and then the hell goes to the hell. I think I did this right now. Wait. Okay. Well, I don't have a toe, but I could make one just to show you. And then the hell goes to the hell which is right there. So if I was to create another object like this toe here, it's moving into place. We'll call this right? Chose, I think Make sure this lined up. This how it goes. I know I should be the teacher. I should be teaching you, but I don't know. And that goes there. Okay, we'll say that's good. So the way to do this is you attach all of these things, um to the associated bones. So calf, we'll go to caf. I thought I will go to die. You can see I spelled thigh wrong. You're welcome. I'm an animator, not ah writer grammar. All right, and toes go to toes. OK, so next, What we're gonna do is we're gonna select all these guys. I'm gonna go auto rig. It creates this little foot here. You can see I didn't quite take the time to line it up. So now I've got some breakage in the knee, which I don't care, because I'm not gonna use this style. But look, let me turn snapping off. We have a limb that works, and by all means, it's a great rig. Here's where it gets really cool. I don't cook this fact. If I want to go to my tippy toes, look at that. Animated just like that. Even cooler option. Um, foot roll. Look at that. That's, like, really cool. If you if your character goes up onto their tippy toes, this is perfect. So you have a really great dynamic with this rig. The issue is if I have a character walking this way, Allah, Allah, he's going from left of the left of the screen to the right of the screen. What if I want that character to turn around and go from right of the screen toe left of the screen. Unfortunately, there is no way to do that. With this rig. You cannot rotate. You cannot scale. It does not work that way. It does not read it. Okay, so all of your foot rolls and all that stuff, it just doesn't It doesn't interpret it. So the other option for that, which is the more simplistic way and the way that I prefer to do it is just doing an auto rig without all these bones. So how do you do that? Well, you select your foot and your foot's rotation. Um, I think that's a good place to rotate for the foot, actually, Maybe all raise it up here and see what that does. No, I don't like that. All right, that's a good spot. So the way that you do it is you select a foot left or right, which everyone you want to start with, You come here to the hand, which is the creek. Create controllers, and we're gonna do a move and rotate option. So in it creates a little controller for us that I'm gonna rename it and make sure you rename it. This is imperative that you rename it this one is the right foot. So I'm gonna go right foot and hit. Enter. So from here on out, make sure that everything is parented to the proper limb. So the foot connects to the calf and the connect the calf connects to the thigh. Now the magic begins in this order, and it has to be this order. So follow along very closely. Right foot, hold control, calf thigh. And then finally your controller in that order. That's how you select it. Then you can come back over here, and this is called links and constraints. Click it and we're gonna go Auto rig. Boom, boom, boom! Look at that. Now we have a limb that moves. Look at this. It's going the wrong direction. But that is OK, so right here is where you reverse. So I k foot hit reverse. And that changes the direction of your need. Yeah, Looking good. Okay, so now we have one leg rigged up. We will do the same to the opposite Select left foot. Come to the hand trance, move and rotate and we will rename it left foot using the same hierarchy. We go foot, calf, thigh, and finally left foot control, then back to this little links and constraints button, and we will auto rig boom to do to do. All right, that was going backwards. All right, we have two legs. Look at that. Looking great. The next thing we get to Dio is I'm gonna create another control for the body. I'm gonna move my rotation position down to the hips and I'm going to create a control right here, and I'm gonna call it. We'll just call it hips. I want to attach my body to the hips and I want to attach right thigh in left, thigh to the hips. Now watch what happens when we grab that control. You will have hours of fun with this. This never gets old. Every time I created rig, This is the most fun part Just going Whoa, look at me. Go. Yeah, I want to do something about this body. This color is horrendous. I want to just do a solid color. Well, maybe we'll make it. We'll make it blue. Can we do that? Coming? Making blue. I will take this stroke off to and so we can differentiate from the legs. I'm gonna make thes maybe green. Okay, I think that's like the foot and change that too. All right, so now we got some cool colors going on. So now we can see left, right, and body and everything is very clear. So this was the fun part creating the rig. Um, and obviously you guys can create whatever you want as faras the design of your character, the design of your legs, the design of your feet in your shoes. If you have a foot and you're like, Well, I I want my character have some toes to you That's easy. Create toes. There's nothing stopping you. This is the beautiful world of the creative mind. You can do whatever you like. Just rename it toes, attach it to the foot, change the rotation point and boom. You have some toes. It's we matched that color. So now when you move it, you have a foot that rotates, and you have some toes that rotate to You will not be able to get that cool foot rotation that we had with the other form of I K. Um, that's just something you have to sacrifice for. May I don't mind, because people are not looking at the feet that much when your character moves. So now that we have this, let me walk you through the reason why I did the body in its own composition. Because now we can do anything we want inside of this comp to create a new character you can add, Um, not a big I hear. Turn this into Mike Wazowski and you can create any character you want. So it's easy. It's it's nice to have a composition toe where you could do that, and so that's why I did that. So now we have Mike Wazowski, um, dancing around Teoh. So I really hope your rig is working is the more complex technical aspect of creating rig Um, and it can get pretty confusing, so I hope that you could stick along with it. If not, feel free to ask questions in the comments section, and I will try my best to answer them. Let's keep going
4. Leg Animation Blocking: All right. Now the fun part. Time for animation. This is where we get to put a walk cycle into use. It's gonna be fun. Um, and remember, use your own creativity. Think about how you want your character walk. I'm simply giving you an idea and a frame of reference to understand what you're doing is up to you to be creative and make your own fun walk, So just follow along. But have fun with it. Let's get into it now. This is the fun part. By far the coolest part is making the character walk. So let's get into it and we'll start by. We'll start by turning off his back leg, which is the green one and will leave the front one. The red one on the beauty of a walk cycle is that your legs work in unison and so one mere one leg just Miers the other one. So all we have to do with the animate one foot and then we can copy all that stuff to the other leg. So starting with this front foot will do. We'll push it back and we'll keep the hip words at so with the thigh layer selected p and then key that position with the stopwatch. And then with the foot selected hippie holds shift and hit our and that will give you your position and rotation, which is what will key in that position right now. Um, an average walk cycle is roughly one second long to do, um, a loop, because this is a cartoon character. I'll probably do it a little bit faster. Um, and if you can always keep your frame rate relatively easy, are not your friend, right? But you're your, um, key frames at an even number so that they can dissect equally. So I'm going to do 24 frames, So find the 24 frame mark and hit and on the keyboard, and this will give us a loop of 24 frames. So with that mind, I know that ADT frame 12. That is my halfway point, which means that this leg will be forward and this hip we'll also be forward. Um, now you don't want your you don't want the gate between your steps to be too far. Um, if you're step with gets a little bit too wide, then it makes your character look kind of clunky and awkward, so I might actually pull this forward a little bit. Keep the keep the leg. Not super extended when he walks. That looks pretty yet. Okay, so now I have a forward movement and all I have to do you has come to frame 24 and I'm gonna copy and paste the original frame. So now when we walk, we have some movement. It doesn't look right, does it? Nope. We have to step the foot has to step up and go to the Ford position. So what we're gonna do is we're gonna find those key frames which manipulate the upward movement, which will be key for him one. And there is a little handle here. When you click on the key frame, it shows you the handle, and we're gonna lift it up. You wanted to kind of be this almost like airplane wing shape. So it spikes up high and then tapers into it's resting position. Okay, so that is looking pretty good. Another thing we're gonna do is we need the foot to rotate downward as it comes up. So I'm gonna go forward maybe about four frames or three frames and rotate down. Keeping in mind where my my ground plane is, Um, so that looks pretty good. If I was to rotate way down, it might not. Look is good. See, the foot starts to slip backwards, so do it appropriate to what your character's design is. And then as it comes in and hits right here, we're gonna do. He'll contact. So it's gonna hit like that. And then there's gonna be maybe one or two frames where it snaps down to the ground. Boom. So as we make contact here, it for him, 12 with the he'll go forward to frames and make the foot flat. So now when we watch it, let's see if it looks a little bit better. That's not too bad. It's looking good. I I do think that I wanted to be forward a little bit more. So what I'll do is I'll push the leg forward and then also grab the hip shape layer. It pushed that forward a little bit too. Okay, that is looking better. So now we're getting some nice movement in the leg. There's a weird pop there. Um, I think that's just because the leg is extending farther, then it's designed to do typically an animation. You don't want the limbs to pop. So if you have, have, like, a jarring movement or it's like bent in one frame, that opening the other, that's called a pop, and you want to try to minimize or just get rid of it all together. Um, in this instance, because I know that I'm gonna be messing with the timing of things. Um, I'm not gonna worry about it right now until I have my final timing of the foot movement. I don't worry about popping later, but this is looking pretty good. Now we're gonna talk about the body so the body moves along with the foot, right? Oops. And so the way that this the way this works, is that when your feet are separated and I'll turn this other foot back on when your feet are separated, your body is at its lowest point. Okay, It's not until you have what's called the, um oh man, what's it called? I mean, the animator should know this. It's called, uh, the passing pose so you're passing poses when your limbs or your legs come to the center of your body in my passing poses. Probably around frame six. That's halfway between frame zero and 12. So frame six is my passing pose. So, with the hips selected, I'm gonna hit P on the keyboard, all pull the hips down, maybe a little bit and all key the position and then at frame six, I'm gonna push the body up just a little bit and maybe I'll push it forward, Teoh. They will try that, and then it from 12. It'll come back down to where it started on. Then what I can do is select these three key frames and then at frame 12 do control C control V and that will get me my up and down movement. Now, everything still looking really robotic. And that's OK, because we're going to clean this up and just a little bit, and we're gonna give it some really nice fluid movement and put some life into it. So it's not like this robot clunking around. Um, and also at this point, I know that I'm gonna change up the timing of my foot movements. But just for just for the sake of seeing what it looks like I'm going to copy these key frames over to the opposite foot, so we'll start with the thigh. And the way that you do this is we're gonna come to the end of this right thigh. We're gonna control C control V are key frames, and then I'm going to select. I don't I don't want to select this first key frame because we need these things to be moving opposite. So what I'll do is I'll come forward one key frame, select these guys, control. See? And then I'll copy everything to the left thigh. So now we have a loop where everything's opposite. Now, let's do the same thing to the foot. So I'm gonna select the key frames and paste. Um, I'm gonna come to the halfway point. So, like those key frames control, See that? I'm going to copy everything to frame zero. Perhaps not that I need the controlling foot, and then I'll hit you to see what we're looking at. All right, look at that. So this is a looping walk cycle is not great, but we're gonna fix that. Um, with both these things going, you get a better picture of kind of how the movements looking, and I think I want the legs to separate a little bit more. So what do we do? Well, I'm going to select this key frame and I'll push the foot back a little bit more, and then, as it comes forward, pushing forward a little bit more, maybe I'll do the same with the hip. Put your back. Um, And so since I adjusted the first key frame and then also the middle key frame, I have to line up the ending key frame so that it matches keep from one. So just to keep things in a perfect loop, I'm gonna come right here it from 24. And I'm gonna copy and paste from zero where it needs to be. And there we g o and let's see if that looks better. I like that. That looks a lot better. So now I need to know need to add the new key frame in the new movie movements to the opposite leg. So we're just going to start again. We'll copy and paste all this stuff. I'll get rid of that. I don't grab these guys minus the first key frame because we need offset by half a step. Now, let's adjust the hips and I grab these guys and find my new hips. Okay, that's looking much better. Okay, so with the with the bear construction, this is like the the framework for what we're gonna do to give this thing some character. Um, So once we move from here, we're going to get into the curve editor, and this is a little a little bit tricky, but if you stick with me, I'm going to try to walk through it. It's simply as I possibly can and show you exactly how so. We've laid the foundation of what our character is going to be walking like, um, So if you have any questions or was confused at all, please feel free to ask me questions on the comment section, and I'll do my best to get back to you. Other than that, it's time for clean up, and this is where it gets a little more tedious
5. Graph Editor Polishing: so we're wrapping up, were reaching the end. This is where we're gonna mess around with the curve editor. We're gonna play around with things like timing and timing is crucial when it comes to character animation. You want the timing of your character to be very fluid and have a nice snap to it. Um, if it's too linear, meaning it goes B B as to robotic, and people get really bored watching something that just has the same timeframe. You want to have some good fluid movement to it. So we're gonna work on that. We're going to see what we come up with, so let's get into it. What I'm gonna start with is the hips, because they're pretty simple, relatively easy. So with all of your key frames for your hips selected mines only adjusting the position at the moment I'm gonna hit F nine on the keyboard. What F nine does is it gives an easy East all your key frames and with them still selected . If we come into this graph editor icon here, you'll see this. It's like some mountains. If you don't see that in yours is like red and green, right click on your graph and you're gonna click. Speed graph, edit speed graph. You're probably on value graph, but make sure you go to edit speed graph. So the way that this functions is that right here we're doing that pixels per second right here. Weird zero. Which means there is nothing moving. You're your character or your control point is at zero movement, and then it eases in to this speed here. So now it's moving at, like 150 pixels per second. And as you begin to crunch these in, you'll see it moves much faster. So there's this. I'll do this to even give you a better idea. So this is like a really long ease into a big movement. And if you can see for a really long portion of this, um, key frame here, it's moving at like zero frames per second and eases into a big movement. This is how you adjust your timing, and this is how you play around with, um, making your character feel a little bit more lifelike. Robots. They don't have that ease in and ease out per se, but humans do so as we move our arm in a big waving gesture. It eases in, it eases into the stop. It doesn't just abruptly stop unless we hit a wall or something. So using these these ah raff, editor points, we're going to start to adjust the timing what I like to do. And again, you can select your key frames and hit f nine. Also, if you're wondering, maybe why these are positioned the way that they're positioned if you look there in alignment with your key frames. So these air simply just telling you where key frame is on the timeline for him. Six. I have a key frame at friend 12 Have a key frame selecting all of these guys. What I'm gonna do is I'm gonna crunch them in just a little bit. You don't want it to be too spiky. If you get it too spikey like this, then it becomes a little bit robotic again. But you just want a real rial. Gentle, subtle settle, ease in and ease out. Let me do this again. So just a little bit here and there, and we'll see if that changes the hips and yeah, maybe a little bit. You could start to play around with it and see what you like better. Maybe you wanted to spike up quickly and then ease back down. You know, I think that's probably a little bit better. And also, if you're if yours pops off like this, try your best not you haven't lock into place with the rest of them. And if you're having trouble with that and if not doing it for some reason, this right here is your snap, this little magnet guy. So turn that on and then, Oh, snap right into place. All right, we'll call that done, and maybe we'll come back to it. Maybe we won't. But now we're going to adjust the foot and I'm going to start with the red foot because it's in the front and I can see a little bit better what's happening. So if you bear with me, it's going to get a little chaotic here. But I'm going to try my best to walk you through it smoothly when the foot is in the back position and as it moves to the front. This is where we get to have fun. We can play with the timing we can have it snapping quickly. Move slowly. You can do whatever you want with it. The area where you have no leniency with the timing is when it goes from front to back, this has to be uniform, even in robotic meaning. Um, when you come into the graph editor, it has to be a perfect straight line, just like it is right now. If you start to adjust it and it gets any any change in the timing, you're gonna have your feet sliding all over the place. What you do not want? If you want your character to be grounded and walking uniformly through a scene, you have to make sure that it is flat. Having said that, I'll show you what I mean by that if you're still confused. So with these two key frames selected, this is my back to front key frames. I'm gonna hit F nine and I'm going to adjust the timing. So I wanted to kind of he's into the movement, but I do want it to be really snappy, so it'll kind of slowly move out, and then he's gonna kick in. Boom. Another thing we can adjust what we're looking at. It and I'm gonna lift it up a little bit. Okay? So that looks pretty good. And then you'll see here. Now, this is where it hits, makes contact and then goes backwards. But you can see it eases in and then speeds up. You don't want that. So what we're gonna do is we're gonna grab this controller here. We're gonna lift it up until we get a flat line. So now we have a nice movement here. Boom. And then it has a uniform, more robotic movement to the back. Um, so now we're gonna play with the rotation a little bit, so I'm gonna grab my key frames and hit at nine. Let's see, that looks pretty good. And then as it comes forward, you can see it. He has toes pointed down. At this point, you don't want us to point it down. Do you want it up? Like he's waiting for impact with the heel? The way to fix that is here in this speed editor, we're gonna pull this in because what it's doing is it's creating the bulk of the movement right here at the peak. You can see it's gonna really spike up and then ease into position. If you have it the other way, the bulk of the movement's gonna be right here on the opposite end, which is where you don't want it to be and so ramps up real quickly as it goes in. Um, so that's looking pretty good. Since this is here, I'm going to speed this little clap a little snap up. So he hits in and he moves. Now, let's see what this looks like. Okay? It's not too bad. Um, I think that maybe the the leg, uh, snaps Ford a little too quickly. Right here. So what? I'll do you pull it in, see what that looks like. That looks a lot better. I'm gonna just this foot rotation, though, because I wanted to snap down a little quicker. So as it's down in a rotate and so what I'm doing is I'm using this graph editor to manipulate my movements this way. You don't have to come in here and be like, Oh, well, his foot should be down more. Let me rotate it down. You're gonna end up with so many key frames and it's gonna get cluttered, and he's gonna get confused. So my advice is always uses is minimal amount of key frames as possible and then adjust everything in the curve. Editor, you're gonna save yourself so much trouble. Okay? So maybe I wanted to be gone a little bit more here, and it will snap into place right there. Let's watch that. All right, that's looking pretty good. Another thing we can see that's happening. Released, I can see is this line is not straight. So as as the foot goes backwards, um, and holding Ault, if you hold down Ault and then grabbed the handle, you can manipulate the handle without manipulating the opposite side of the handle. So now is the foot goes backwards. It's going to stay flat of our ground plane. Okay, so that's looking pretty good. Um, where this starts to get a little confusing is we have to match up. We have to match up key frames, one at the very end to keep from zero. If we were just a copy and paste is throughout, it would possibly get a little strange. So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna copy these and paste them back here. Then in the graph editor will see. We'll see what we're working with. Okay, so I'm gonna grab my position, and you can see what it did. It threw it out of whack, so I need to grab this guy put flat again. I'm gonna delete these behind it. I don't want those, and then I'm gonna look at my rotation. See? It looks fine. Okay, so this one should be set up perfectly to just copy and paste. So it's see control, See? Oh, no, it's not. So we're still having some issue. Let me see what that issue is. So you can see it drops off again, which is not what we were intending. So let me pull it up. So it's flat, and now I'm going try it going the opposite way. So I'll copy this. Pasted it. Zero. So now we have it. Go up, down, up, down. And that should be good. But just to be sure what I'm gonna dio I'm gonna copy, and then I'm gonna based. And there we go. It does look good. So we we've cracked the formula. It just takes a little tweaking, going back and forth. Another thing that we need to you, which I have not done. I'm surprised I didn't do it. Is I'm gonna select the hip hit F nine and then I'm going to adjust the timing of these guys just a little bit that might throw off some of our knee bend. Um, forward. We'll just have to see. That's not too bad. There's a little pop in there. But, you know, this is just for fun. Okay, That's looking pretty good. And once we transform, once we transfer all of these key frames to the opposite foot, it's gonna feel a lot better. It's gonna be way more snappy. It's going to just flow really good. So now we can start to copy and paste these key friends to extend it. And I'm gonna grab all of these guys on left or the right thigh, and I'm gonna pace them on the left thigh, and then we're going to move to the feet so that I'm gonna grab this foot, which is the right foot, and I'm gonna paste it to the left foot. Let's see. That's not too bad. Okay, it's looking good. So another thing we can dio now that our timing is feeling better. Um, maybe here at the hips, what we can do is, well, well, kind of art. Get around. We'll move it around a little bit. So how do we want to do this? Well, if you want to manipulate it, control point. But you don't have the controller to do. So. Um, what you're gonna dio is your grab this little guy up here, it's called Convert Vertex Tool, and then you condone drag it out and manipulate the curve to your liking, and then we'll just copy and paste back to zero. So let's see if adding that little little curve into it makes it look a little better. It looks a little funky, and that could be with the timing. So I'm just gonna reset the timing. So I select my position key friends and just hit at nine. Yeah, I don't know. I don't know about that. All right. Tell you what. I'm I'm gonna undo that. There's okay and yeah, we'll just call it. Let me hit f nine again. Just see how that looks. Sure, Why not? That looks good. Another thing to give a little bounce. We're gonna just the scaling of the body shape or the body composition. The hip controller, You're not able to adjust the scale that is locked in by an expression that they put on. You might be able to erase it, and then it just scaling. Yeah, that adjusts. All right, Don't touch that. So what we're gonna do instead is we're going to adjust the scale of the body. So right here, because I know it's in the down position because the feet are apart. I'm going to scale it out just a little bit and down just a little bit. I'm gonna have a key thing. And then at six, we're going to scale it up just a little bit and in just a little bit. And then at 12 loop. All right, so then I'm gonna copy and paste those. And now we have full looping adaptation, our bounce. I'm gonna push these Ford, like, maybe two frames, maybe even three. And let's see if that bounces. Yeah, there we go. Looks pretty good. There's a nice little balance in there at the top. That makes it look pretty good. That was it. I hope you guys enjoyed it. Um, feel free to ask questions. If I lost you anywhere, I will try my best to answer them. But remember, this is the part where you take the most amount of time and you continually improve it. Um, all my animation starts off pretty terrible. And it's in that last 10% maybe even 5% where I'm tweaking it. And that's what I come up with, the better version of the animation I had before. So if you're animation is not looking like you want it to, that is okay. It's perfectly fine. My stuff looks terrible before I polish it. So spend is much times you can in the polishing section, because that's where it's gonna really shine. So no pun intended. Or maybe it was really. Take the time to smooth out your movements and smooth out your timing. Once your fundamentals are in place, it's all about the finesse in between. So I hope you enjoyed it. And, as always, ask questions and I will do my best to answer them. Thanks for watching
6. Arm Rigging: Welcome to the arm rigging portion of this tutorial. We're gonna be designing an arm much like we did with the leg and rigging it using Duke Bassel. It should be pretty simple. So let's get into it. The first thing we need to do is create an arm, and I'm gonna do it the same way that I created the body in the legs. First, I'm gonna start with a circle or the lips. This will be my shoulder. Next, I'm going to duplicate that circle within the shape layer and drag it down to create the position of my elbow. Uh, then I'm gonna fill in the center, so I'm just gonna grab a rectangle or the rectangle tool and fill in the gap. And if you can try to be as precise as possible so you can see right here I'm out of alignment with the circle. Um, so I need to scale it a little bit. Um, and for these fine tunes scales, it's OK to squish it in a little bit. All right. Looks pretty good. And maybe you can come in just a tad. All right, The next thing I'm gonna do is I'm gonna remove this stroke, because again, we're not using any strokes. And I'm going to give this a different color. Maybe I'll color it like a darker purple. Something like that. All right, I'm gonna rename it. Um, this is his right upper bar. Then if you hit, why on the keyboard you can move the anchor point, but we want to get that anchor point right in the center of this upper circle. So I'm gonna turn off everything except for the upper circle, then selecting my shape layer, turn on snapping hit why? And then center the anchor point right into the middle of the circle. And if you hit W on the keyboard, you can rotate it and make sure that it spins perfectly in the center and then just controls the done deal. So now we have an upper upper arm that rotates perfectly at ease, shoulder joint. Next, I'm going to duplicate this layer. I'm gonna drag it down and solo these and see if I can snap it into place. Did that do it? That looks pretty good. Okay, So what I'm gonna do is rename this one. I'll call it right. Lower arm now I can unsold low these, and I'm going to attach the lower arm to the upper arm. I'm gonna pull it up. Um, the the way that ah human arm functions is that the elbow is roughly right at the bottom portion of the rib cage. So if this is my characters body, this is where his rib cage would be, and then your arm or your hand comes down to right about where your crotches. So if your arms are too low and you can touch your knees, it might look a little funky. So make sure your arms don't drop too much unless that's the design of your character. Um, so for now, I'm gonna gonna leave it at that on. The next thing I'm gonna do is I'm going to duplicate the right lower arm, and then I'm gonna delete everything except for the circle where the hand is, make sure snapping Zaun. And then we're gonna center that pivot for that anchor point and we're gonna call this one right hand, okay? And I'm going to go into detail about his hand in the next section. But gonna Ruffin maybe a finger or two. I don't quite know how I want this handled. Look, um, but I'm just going to give it a general in general shape. Okay? So we'll just say that that's like a pinky or something of these fingers across just to give the outline or the appearance of a hand. Okay. And again, I know that's not good. It's not gonna be right. But just for now is a placeholder. I'm gonna leave it. So once we have these things set up, um, one thing I'm gonna do that's kind of tricky. And I'm doing it this way because I plan on. I plan on creating a hand rig, and I just don't want to shape later, but I want to have the ability to manipulate the hand. So what I'm gonna do is you can go control shift see on the keyboard recon. Do you, uh or you can dio layer, come to the very bottom, go pre compose, and I'm gonna call this one right hand. The next thing I'm gonna dio is you can see that this composition is very large. We don't need all this space, so I'm gonna come to this thing is called the region of interest. Click it and just drag it around your hand. And once you have that selected, you are going to go composition, crop comp to region of interest and out re skills your composition to fit more accurately the size of the hand. The next thing you need to do is come to your line. Um, option down here on your what is your attributes or whatever. We're gonna center out the hand completely so it's perfectly in the center. And now when we come back into our walking regar basically our rig composition, you can see that we've really move this thing around and another bummer is the anchor point is no longer perfectly in the center of that circle. So now we have to realign it. Um, so way to realign it. Let me see if this works. That's not gonna work. May see if maybe if we turn off these fingers that at work, if we turn off the fingers and just have the circle there we go. So hit why? And then make sure snapping is on, and then it will find the center of that circle in the composition. Oh, sorry. One other crucial thing. You have to click this continual raster ization button once it's turned on. Then you confined your perfect center, and you can turn it off for now. Or you can leave it on. That is fine. It's up to you. You don't turn my known then coming back into the right hand, I'll just turn these fingers back on. Now we can reposition the hand. Also low these parts out and let's see if we can get a snap to where it needs to snap. Is that right? I don't know. No, it's not. So it needs to come up, you know, I'm sorry. I'm gonna turn these fingers back off. Let's see if we can get the better snap. Okay, That might have been in okay for the last time. Now I consumed the fingers on. So now we have an arm that's been set up. The next thing we need to do is we need to Rick it. We didn't make it moveable using do it and create a I K system. But before we do that, we want to make sure that we duplicate these layers. It will save us some time in the long run just to have a spare copy. This will become our left arm. For the time being, I'm going to change the right arm to a different color. Why not orange or actually able to purple? Since it's kind of a purple color and maybe I'll do orange for this guy So we'll come over here and we'll let's create like, uh, lighter orange color, and then you'll see that we have the right hand. But it's just duplication of the original cop. So if I was to come inside of this composition and change it toe orange, you'll notice it changes the other hand as well. And that's because it's just it's like a mere or its copying, an instance of the original composition. So this is true for any composition that you create. If you ever want to have, like, a duplicate asset of something you've created, the only way to make it unique is to come up into your project settings and duplicate it in here. Now we have a new, um, a new hand composition. Well, you're saying, Well, that doesn't help me, because now it's it's not updated down here, and I have to go through all the steps to create this new thing, you know, line it up and change the color. There's a way around that. So if you select your right hand, which were actually it's the left hand. So let me change it so that you're not confused. So now if you select your left hand and come up here, I'll rename this one as well. Toe left hand, Select your left hand, Come down here to your composition, select the left hand, and you're gonna ault, click Hold Ault and drag it on top. And now that updates to this new composition so we can change it to whatever colors we want . Um, I'll do my little do my little trick just to keep it quick. So use your character. I drop Select the color you want coming here and just select that color. Now you don't have to memorize their copy and paste and it updates Now I gotta update this hand as well. So let's update this the purple and hit. OK, so now we have two arms. So this is where the rigging portion comes in. So make sure your hand is parented to the right lower arm and the right lower arm is parented to the right upper arm. Now, coming into my duke Bassel, I'm going Teoh, selecting the right hand. Come over here and create a controller for it. I want to rename this to see right hand makes you rename it before you rig it because you cannot rename it after the fact. So in this order, select right hand hold control. Select right, lower arm, right upper arm and then hand control right hand. And then we're gonna come into this Links and Constraints and Auto Re Guy K. So let's see if it worked and it did. All right, so now we have an arm, and that's looking good. I'm gonna make sure snapping is off. And I'm gonna do the same thing for the other arm during the same exact, um, method. Make sure everything is in the right hierarchy. So, like the left hand, create a controller free name it left hand, and then start to a, uh and then start to select your objects and then auto rig. And that is that. Now we have two arms that we get to animate and have some fun with it. I hope that was easy enough for you guys. Uh, just like the leg we rigged the arm. So now we have up and down mobility, and we can go out and around, do all kinds of fun stuff with it, So have fun with it. Play around. Yeah. Let's get into the next part.
7. Hand Rigging: Now we're gonna be rigging the hands. There's gonna be a simple rig. It's gonna be very basic. We're gonna create five fingers and upon and then we're gonna rig each finger so that it can move individually. It'll be easy and fun, so let's get into it. Let's go into the right hand and we're going to duplicate their right hands. So now we have two layers, one on top of the other. I'm gonna turn off the top, Blair, and with the bottom layer selected, I'm going to delete the fingers. I don't need them because I'm going to use this top layer to create a finger from that so that I can select all these layers from the top layer. And now I'm left with one finger hit. Why? On the keyboard and we're gonna change the anchor point to right around where the joined to the finger will be. So something like that, I'm gonna pull pull the fingers down a little bit. I'm gonna rename this one. It was called Pointer. I'm gonna duplicate pointer, moving over and down just a little. Rename it middle, Then we'll do the same for the ring finger on the pinky. All right there. We g o Now they have all the finger separated. We can select all our fingers and are on the keyboard. This brings up our rotation. Um, one thing we're gonna need also is the stuff. So I'm going to duplicate the pointer, pull it down to the bottom, and we'll call it in the thumb. Some moves. Kind of like in the middle here, but it's in the back, so we won't be able to see it. And we'll put the rotation for that one too. Then clicking on, uh, this is where it's going to get a little confusing. A little tricky. So I'm gonna do my best to go slowly, but grab your composition here, and we're gonna move it right under here to where we get this elongated trap. Is oId as like, a purple color? Drop it there. So now we can see our composition for our hand. But then we can also come to the composition with our rig. Once we've done that, select your right hand control. So that red circle selected. Then we're gonna add some slider controls to it. So go. Um Go layer. I'm sorry effect. And then you're gonna come down here to expression controls. Once you have expression, controls highlighted, go down to slider control and then we're gonna duplicate this four times. 1234 So this will be a controller for each finger and just rename them to coincide with the fingers that you do have. So we have pointer Middle, bring Pinky. And finally we have some. That's why. Okay, so then now coming back down here to our walking composition, we're gonna find the hand. We're going to expand this attributes we can collapse. Contents were going to go to effects. We want to expand all of the slider controls that we just created. So when you click this arrow, you'll see it has a stopwatch in a slider value right here. So starting at the top, we're gonna grab pointer. So right here a pointer. There's a rotation stopwatch, and there's this little pick whip symbol right here. Click it and drag to your stopwatch slider section. So it's right on the word slider, drop it and then do the same for all of the other layers. Ringo's to ring and Pinky goes to Pinky. And finally thumb goes to thumb. There we go. Then we can click this right hand composition and drag it back down into our our main project thing. Whatever. Now, coming back into the walking rig with this selected, we could start to manipulate the rotation of the finger. Look at that so we could start to pose this hand in, different in different poses. But right now, if we expand the if you expand the slider control, it goes from 0 to 100. So that's only giving us a front or like a neutral down posed to a curled impose, which might be OK, but if you want to get a negative value, right, click on the numbers go added value and slider range. We're gonna set to negative 100. So now we can go backwards and go forward. Okay, so I'm going to do that all of these fingers, So slider range negative. 100 all the way down. And make sure you don't do it in the value setting is not gonna mess anything up. It's just not going to give you the proper range that you're looking for. Negative 100 and negative 100 and finally negative 100. Now, all of my fingers have have a good mobility. But I can start to move around in a way that I like so you can do things like expand the pinkies and ring fingers out in the thumb. The thumb. You can do whatever you want with. All right, So this is just a very simple way of creating hand rig. We could also go the other way so that we could kind of crush the fingers in a little bit. If that is a position that you're looking for, Another thing you can do is select all of these and movement once. Look at that. So just depending on the hand ship you want go for it, have fun with it. Um, And again, this is just a very basic basic hand rig. So it has its limitations, but the end of the day, it gets the job done. So we're gonna do the same exact thing to the other hand. I'm going to select all of these. The point to the middle, All of these slider controls control C, and I'm gonna copy and paste them, um, to the left hand control. Then coming into the left hand, I'm going to do what I'm gonna do. I'm actually going to duplicate all these fingers from the left hand, and I'm gonna pace them in the right hand that I'm gonna change the color so that they are the orange color. And then I'm just gonna delete all the fingers here, delete, um, and this hand because we're seeing the back of the hand, we're gonna move all of the fingers around, so the thumb is actually going to be on top. And this will matter later when we go into designing our characters. Right now, it doesn't matter because you can't see anything and you can't tell. Um you can't tell what fingers which. But right now, as it goes, it's supposed to go thumb, pointer, middle ring, pinky. And then finally the handshake. The next thing I'm gonna dio is I'm going to select all my fingers hit are on the keyboard and on this stopwatch, I'm gonna drop it down. And where it says layers, See, right hand. I'm just gonna change that to capital l left hand, and it's really that simple. And now everything on the left hand will control all of the all the elements within this left hand. So we're doing a little bit of scripting here, guys. A little, uh, in a little techie. Does it feel feel pretty cool, don't you? Going into the inner belly of the beast and you're tackling it One letter at a time. All right, let's see if it worked so well, go back into these walking rig. Um, and we can start to manipulate some of these things. It worked, so you can see that this pinky moves. But this one doesn't. That's exactly what we want. Okay, so now that we have the hand done So now we have these arms and they are moving and we have a hand and fingers that we can control. And again, it's very basic, but that is OK. We're not creating a hyper realistic character. So I hope you guys have fun rigging the fingers. Um, hopefully, you guys came up with something unique to yourself in your own style. So play around with it, have fun. And if you have any questions at all are confused. You please ask away. And I'll do my best to answer those questions. Now let's move on to the next video
8. Torso Build: Now we're gonna redesign the torso. So right now we have a big round body. Um, that was just a temporary placeholder because I was trying to focus on the legs. How are we gonna make this character walk and move? So now that we got that out of the way, we can kind of start to develop your own style of what our character is gonna look like. So we're gonna redesign with those hips look like I'm gonna add a torso. So now we're gonna add the body, and we're gonna start to really flesh out this character. Let's get into it. The next thing I'm gonna do is I'm going to build a torso. I don't want my character to be just a ball. He's not a beach ball. He's gonna have a torso and hips. Um, so let's do that. I'm going to create a very simple torso to start with. It'll be something like this very basic, okay? And I will change the color. Teoh. I don't know. I don't know what color. Maybe pink said too much purple, you know, do purple. Why not? Okay, I'm gonna rename this torso and just for continuity sake because I did this with the hips. I'm gonna control shift. See, I'm gonna call this torso. We're gonna put it in our own composition and the going inside this composition, I'm going to scale it again, using this region of interest gonna crop it to be more of the size of my torso. So then composition cropped a region of interest. Finally, make sure make sure that you are aligned properly, so we'll come down here to a line and center it out. Uh, it is in this. It's in this section that we can kind of create more of a, um, torso shape if I come down. It's my rectangle tool because I used the wreck, the rounded rectangle, I can adjust the path and within the path, I can adjust the roundness. So maybe I want to go a little more round up at the top of the shoulders. Um, but maybe you're saying, Well, I want the bottom to have, like, a crisp line to kind of separate the upper body from the bottom of the body the way that I would do that, Simply put, as I would just take my rectangle tool and draw in a square at the bottom. So now we have kind of this belt line in this rounded shoulder. So if I come into my walking rig now, I'm going to reposition this guy Teoh, match the body. Um and then I'm going to drop hit. Why the keyboard and drop the rotation of him right around where the hip control is, so his body will be able to rotate around the hips. Um, and I think I want the torso to go behind the hips, which I actually have called body. Um, but then I'm gonna go. I'm sorry, dropping behind the body. Then I'm gonna go into the body, and just to keep the scaling all the same, I'm going to select my torso shape, copy it with control, see and go into the body and then paste it with control V. And if I center out that shape and then drop it right around here, you can see what I can start to do. Um, is I'm going to start to scale the size of this. So that's Onley. It's only his hips. I want to keep the same with, but I want to lower the height. Then we'll move it down a bit on May be all. Maybe I'll keep the roundness the same. Um, but let's just turn this off and see what we're starting to do here. Okay? I'm gonna move this in alignment with the torso. Let me just so low these guys out, okay? That I'm gonna move my anchor point right to the middle here. Kind of in line with this little box there. So now when I wrote take, I don't like that. Maybe I'll move it up a bit. Right there. That's better. Kind of breaks a little bit. Ah, I'm going to change the torso to the same colors the body shape I had and then turn it off again. Okay, that's kind of better, I think. Another thing I'm gonna deal. Oh, I'll scale it down a little bit more, but I'm going to do the same treatment that I did on the torso. I'm gonna add a nice line here. And in fact, I could probably add another one here. And this could be his. Maybe his belt. I'll just do a darker color. All right, so let's turn that off. And I'm not getting too technical with it at the moment because I want this to be I'm just blocking out the character. I'm not finalizing my design yet, So now when we rotate the torso, you can see it moves. It breaks a little bit, but that's okay. We can only just move that up, maybe even higher. I just move this up all the way. Uh, oops. I think that's too high. All right. I'll deal with this more later. Maybe a quick fix will be just to turn that off. Yeah, that's better. OK, so now I have a torso that doesn't break from the bottom, and I can move a little bit. Okay, so now that I have my torso and I have my hips kind of place where I need them, the next thing I'm gonna do is I'm gonna drop my arm, shape my orange arm, which is the left arm. I'm gonna drop it behind everything behind the leg, by the torso, all that good stuff. Next, I need to attach the torso to my body so that as my body moves, my torso moves with it so I can rotate my torso, and that moves. But then I can also rotate my shoulders. And that just gives more mobility to your character. Finally, we need to attach the arms to the torso as well. So I'm gonna select right upper arm, attach it to my torso, then also leg, right? Uh, Poth right upper. I'm sorry. We can rename that. I'm gonna attach this one torso as well. And just so that we could be clear. I'm gonna change this to left lower. Uh, and I'll change this one to left up There are. So now when my character walks, you can see the bodies moving with it. The arms haven't been animated yet, but we will get there. And in fact, there's something very strange going on here. I don't know what it is. Is the hand connected? What's going on here? All right. I don't like that. What? Oh, it's cause it's scaling. That's the problem. So because it scales because this body is scaling, it's scaling my controller. I'm gonna get rid of the scale on the body. So you say CIA scale and I'm gonna re re scale this back to 100 and that mess that up. And that's because I connected it and an odd odd scaling. So I'm gonna go back before I connected it, or I'll just go back to here and a new attach or detached. Sorry, I'll detach the upper arms from the body. Then I'll come back to the body, delete the scale, put it back to 100 on both X and Y, um, dimensions, and then I'll put these back to the body. I'm sorry. Torso, Nobody torso and finally torso. So now when our tor torso rotates, the arms, rotate with it. And then when our body rotates, the torso rotates with it. Okay, so now we have movement. Nothing strange is happening. Um, it might be looking a little strange, but we'll get we'll get into that walk cycle and will fix it a little bit later on. Right now, all I wanted to focus on was getting this torso built and everything rigged up. So I hope that was simple enough. I hope you guys were following along, and you guys were able to create a basic torso and a body shape that's unique to your own character, and it fits what you're trying to create. So I look forward to seeing when you guys have, But let's move on and get into the next part, which is Army animation. We're gonna animates of arms.
9. Arm Animation: So now we have a torso to arms. Let's get into actually animating those arms and hardly gonna function flow with walk cycle . We're gonna block it out and have some fun with it. Let's get into it now we're gonna block the arm movements. So with my right hand selected, I'm gonna hit, are on the keyboard and pee on the keyboard looking at my legs. I'm going to use them as a reference to tell me where my arms should be because my right leg is in the back position. That means that my right arm should be in the forward position. This is simply because our arms and our legs moving move opposite of each other. So as our legs are hips turned left our body or upper body turns to the right, and then I'm just gonna move this guy forward a little bit as well and over a tape. So now I have a pose for this arm. So I'm gonna keep framed the position and rotation here, a key frame zero. And then I also have to remember this is a 24 frame walk cycle. So that frame 24 that's where I'm going to stop my timeline by hitting n on the keyboard. A miss is where our key frames we paste it. So this is our beginning. This is our end. And then right here it from 12 is where everything will go back. But before we do So I have to remember I need to key my upper arm because I want to animate it. So I'm gonna hit P on the keyboard, and then I'm gonna paste it. Copy paste right at the end. There we go now at frame 12. This is where I'm gonna do my back pose so the shoulders should move backwards in the hand . Should move backwards as well. Oops. All right, That looks pretty good. The hand will also rotate backwards. So we now have a nice blocking pose for our hand. Is it perfect? No, not at all. Can we fix it? Absolutely. So that's what we're gonna do. We're gonna take some time. We're gonna fix it up so it doesn't look so robotic. Make sure you always block your animation. And first to get the timing down and everything looking right. So now we can go into the polishing section of this arm the way that we're gonna do this, cause I'm going to select my arm where my hand attributes the rotation in the position hit F nine on the keyboard, and that's going to give it some nice ease in and ease out. But that's not going to give it character. So come here into the graph editor. Select your rotation in position points, and we wanted to move kind of swiftly around the center points. I'm gonna pull in the starting key frame, and I'm gonna pull in the landing key frame or the ending key for him. We're gonna see if that time is a little better. Okay? I think the time is a little better, but we also want to adjust the position of the hand. So right here, let's see if we can find a anchor point. No. Okay, so with your key frame one selected for position, we're gonna come up here, hold down on the pencil, and we're gonna go to convert Vertex Tool. Find this little green square, which is your key frame, and we're gonna manipulate the path that this hand follows these air all might in between key frames each dot here, and they specify the position of the hand on a given key frame. So now we can start to look at the way that this hand is moving and it stretches out maybe a little too far here. I don't know that I want it to go down. Um, another thing we can do is to really maximize our our path that we follow So we can add another one here, grab it, and we're gonna start to really manipulate the way that this head moves and we'll see if we can come up with something cool. There's kind of this s shape. Let's see it if that does it say, I don't like it extended right here, Um, so maybe I can pull it up and there is such thing as over animating. So I might be over complicating. I'm definitely over complicating. So this is the very subjective portion of this tutorial. It's all about, um what do you think? Works. And it's all about what is work. What works for your character. For me, this is dropping too much. And what I'm trying to do is I don't want this arm, Teoh. I don't want to extend down so much. And I feel like maybe it's holding a little too long, uncertain part. So I'm gonna pull this back. I'm gonna make sure that my snap is on. I don't want it sliding off course here. Okay, I'm gonna pull this one back as well. So with this kind of with this kind of formula here, it's a spike into the position and then eases in. So it's gonna move quickly out of the position it's in right now, and it's going to gently ease into this position back here. All right, so I I like that a little better, But the movement is not quite how I'd like to be moving. Okay, so I guess that's a little better. It's still kind of very robotic, But again, I'm trying to make it perfect on this one because I'm going to copy all of these key frames over to my left hand. So once the right hand is looking good, I can just mere this onto the left hand. Let's see some. Maybe we can have it go up. And this is kind of the fun part where you get to play around with your character. You get to see what works and what doesn't work. Um, for you? Absolutely. Maybe you want your arm to extend down. That could be something that you're looking for. Okay. And honestly, it could be something I'm looking for. Let me just give it a shot. And I guess that doesn't look too bad. Go ahead and grab the shoulder of the upper arm hit F nine. I'm gonna do the same thing that I did there. Understand? Ease the's in. Okay, I'm gonna start to adjust the hand. Maybe I'll rotate it out a little more in the first key pose and rotated back a little more in that last key pose. And again, I got to make sure that I copy and paste the first key frame to last. I'm gonna offset. So select your rotation key frames and offset it by, like two. And that'll give a nice little little sway back and forth to the hand. Another thing we can do because we do have controllers set up for the fingers. Weaken. Select all of our fingers, hit this little stopwatch to give a key frame. I'm sorry. Then we'll come back to our right hand control and hit you on the keyboard. And that's gonna bring up all of your key friends. Now, if we go to frame 12 I'm sorry for Go here to frame five Will say, select all your key frame, Earl. Your I'm sorry. Select all of your finger controls. We're going to expand them forward. Then right here. A 12 will pull them all backwards. And then right here at 24 we'll just copy and paste the key things where they need to be. Um and maybe maybe right here will pull all of these guys back even more. Now I'm going to select my finger key frames and hit F nine. And then I'm gonna offset them also by two. And that just gives more flopped to the hand. It might be too much. It might be perfect. Who knows? I'm just gonna leave it for now because it is something I invented. And you can also offset the fingers. So if you want to have even more delay to everything, you can offset some of these guys. Uh huh. Then we'll just see what it does. It doesn't Doesn't do too much. All right, I feel like it's kind of sluggish. There's something weird about it. This hand. So I'm going to go into the position on the rotation, come back into my graph editor, maybe old. I don't know. Maybe I'll pinch it all together some more. Okay. They don't pull the rotation in one. Okay, let's I'm gonna just maybe some of the distance that this arm travels that would come to this back pose. We'll see how this does. Oh, I like that. So much better. His arm was just not moving far enough. Um, that looks a lot better. So by now, your character is starting to take shape. Maybe it's looking pretty good. Maybe it's not. Don't worry, It's not looking good. We'll get there. But we have the basic armed flow in the arm function with walk cycle. Now we're gonna copy those key frames under the other arm, and so stay with us. Let's get into the next tutorial.
10. Copying Keyframes: So now we have a one second walk cycle. We don't really want one second walk cycle Instagram, you need at least three seconds to post a video, so we want to extend it to at least three seconds. And also we want extend that animation from the right arm to the left arm, and I'm gonna get into that and show you how I do that. It is a very simple process, so let's get into it. Sorry, I don't want to offense up. Let's get into it. All right, now that we have the are moving in a position in a way that we like, what we can do is now we're gonna copy the rotation in the position, and we're just gonna extend it by 11 2nd Now you can see this guy shot out of place. So by holding Ault on the keyboard and grabbing this control here, I'm gonna pull it back down to where it waas next. And this is kind of Ah, it's kind of a bummer that we have to do this, but we're gonna copy the last key frame and paste it in the first. Now, that should give us a symmetrical movement, and we can just continue to copy and paste and our curves no get thrown out of whack. Um, don't ask me why it does this. It's a bummer that it has to be that way, But you just you just gotta do what you gotta do. So I'm going to select the fingers. I'm gonna hit control C. And then I believe because I'm on the closest key frame here. If I hit paste, it should work. If I'm on the farthest key frame here and I paste it, it does not work. So it always it functions off of the key frame that hits first, which is this one, Which means that it ends first. If it doesn't work, toy around with it, so you figure it out. All right, so now that I have now that they have all this, um, keyed, I'm going to select all of my key frames Control. See that I'm gonna come into left hand, and then I have to select both my rotation, my position, and then I have to expand all these guys. So this is kind of Ah, the more tedious part because it's not set up yet, but select your rotation, your position and then control, select all of your sliders for your fingers. Now we can paste all of the attributes from the, uh, right hand to the left hand, and it should be Yep, it's moving in unison. Next, we have to find the center point of our of our movement. So if this is one second, the middle of one second is right here, and I'm gonna pull this in. The next thing I gotta do is I got a copy, the key frames from this and extended by another second. Copy those key frames, all of them. And then I'm gonna pace them to the right upper arm, which I thought I renamed. But I guess it didn't stick. So a copy and paste then hit you on the keyboard and I'll move it forward one frame. Now, when I watch, we got some movement here, and it's not looking too bad, but I think that the, uh, the left arm is moved back a little too far. So with all my key frames from my position, select and I'm gonna move it forward so that the shoulder has a farther forward movement. Then I'm gonna grab my my left hand control, which is this guy. I'm gonna grab the position, and I'm just gonna move it forward as well. All right, There we go. So now we have a walk. That's working pretty good. Okay, now we have a walk cycle, two arms, two legs of body moving. We're missing something, though. Yeah, they had. We gotta have a neck and head, and then our character is going to get there real quick. So we're wrapping up pretty soon, and I just stick with me and it's going to look good. Yeah, I look good.
11. Walkcycle Polish: So in this tutorial, we're gonna clean up our walk cycle. It's looking pretty good now. Maybe it's blocked in. Looking a little rough. Also could be, I don't know, but we're gonna clean it up. So stick with me and I'm gonna show you stuff like the graph editor. And I'm gonna curve editor. Whatever you want. Call it and we're gonna work on our poses a little bit more. Teoh, make that walk really shine. So let's get into it next. I think that it's a little jerky. Still, I think that is This hip movement is not working quite right. And it could be it could be the actual amount of key frames themselves. It could be the position of the key frames. Or it could just be the timing in the graph editor, which the timing is uniform. So I don't know if that's the problem. Um, or it could be this curve how it curves in and up. But I want to play around with it and see, Maybe I can find a solution that works a little better. Maybe I pulled back down Navy seals. I'll save these key friends and delete the rest Um, So let's go ahead and see now. All copy and paste got a pace that first or the last key frame in the first? No, that's still didn't work. Telling you guys, sometimes it's funky and you just got to find a way around it. So if I select these key frames and paste, it throws this little controller off. So if I move it back, then I copy and paste that guy there. Delete thes. Now I should have a uniform little thing. OK, so now let's watch this. That looks better. It's not. It's not as jerky. I think it's a little smoother. Okay, maybe another thing I want to do is because the arms being widened, it felt better. Maybe I want to widen the the legs, so maybe I'll go. 12 You push that back, push this forward, never push it forward. One the middle. Copy and paste that. And don't do the same thing with this leg. Here. 12 All right. That feels better. All right. I like that. I think that why didn't widening the gate between the feet and the arms gave it more of an energy to the walk cycle, so I'll keep that. So now, since I like it, I'm just gonna copy and paste all of these key frames over and over to get my loop. I'll do the same here. Okay? And the reason I'm extending this is because you are instagram. If you plan on doing an instagram post, you need at least three seconds of a video clip to post it. If you're just posting a gift for Jif or whatever you wanna call it, you just posted an image. Doesn't matter how long it is. Um all right, Something weird happened with this leg, you be so you can see the green leg, That foot rotation. There's something strange going on now I get to fix my air. What happened? I don't know. Yeah, I feel like that key frame cannot. That came out of nowhere. What is this key friend that fix it. Okay. I hope you walk cycle is really starting to take shape. I'm really happy with how mines turning out. And I hope you're happy with how yours is turning out to Just takes a little bit of tweaking a little polish and finesse. I just keep going with it. You know, if you need more than 20 minutes to do it, do it. By all means. These things take a long time. Take me a long time to, and I've been doing him for many years. So keep with it. Keep polishing it until it's perfect and let's move on to the next tutorial.
12. Neck Rigging: Here's where we rigged the neck and I'm gonna hopefully open up after effects to you in a whole new light. I'm gonna be doing some things. They're kind of unique and fun simple enough to understand. But I hope that it's something that you've never tried before. And it makes you think about after effects in a whole new way. So next I'm just gonna roughly at a head shape. I don't quite know what kind of a head I'm gonna or what kind of character I'm gonna have. I want to make sure you leave some room for a neck unless you don't want a neck. Then you just move it down to the torso. Um, then finally, I'm just gonna call this one head and you guessed it Control shift, See? Call it head. It's now in my head. Calm. I'm going. Teoh Crop. My region of interest around the head. That would go a little bit bigger in case I have big ears, the noble composition crop to region of interest. Finally, make sure you are centered out with your head, and then you can kind of start to design whatever it is you want for Now, I'm just going to do a simple shape or a simple color that I'm gonna come back and put the head right around where I want it. And the head? Oh, put it down here above the body. I'm gonna attach the head. Well, I'm actually going to have a neck, so let me go ahead and create a neck. Okay? Let me hit while the keyboard. Well, select your neck it. Why move the rotation or the anchor point to the bottom of the neck and maybe we'll just rotate for it a little bit, And then I'm gonna pull the neck down just below my torso and I'll change the color of the next so I can see how differentiates from the head. I pulled the head forward a little bit more. And, um, what I'll do is I'll move my rotation of my head down to right around at the bottom, and this is where it's going to rotate. You can see that it gives kind of a natural movement to it, right? It feels like a head looking up or head looking down. The next thing I want to do is I'm going to just create a simple controller for it. I'm gonna call it head. It's already cold head Perfect. So then I can attach the head to the head control. Then I'll rename this shape layer neck, okay. And so this is where it gets kind of cool is I'm gonna hit our while selecting my next a player hit our and then I'm gonna come up to my new head control and hit P. So with those two things open, grab this Pickwick pick whip at the rotation of the neck, and we're gonna drag it all the way up and parented to the position of the head control. Now it's gonna throw it out of whack and can see that it is moved out of position. But the cool thing if you start to move your head head rotates with it Pretty cool. Well, a way A way to fix it. First of all, it's not gonna be moving in line with, um what I have so something that I need to do is right here at the very end. So you have this line of code here. The very end of the code holds shift eight to get the Astra's and then we're gonna do 0.5. Yours might take a little bit of playing with it. Could be 0.6 or could be 0.4. Um, play around with it until you find the setting that works perfectly for your rig. With my rig, I think that 0.5 will do the trick. You can see it's still not lined up properly. So what we're gonna do is select the neck, hold control, and then click the shape with in your shape layer, and we're just gonna rotate it back into position, and we're gonna move it where we need it. So that looks about good and see if it worked. So if I select my my head control, look at that. You can see it's moving the way that it needs to move. All right, that looks pretty good. And what's cool about this? This is like a bigger detail that you might not quite understand, or it might not even matter to you. But if you take this character's composition and put it into another composition and you want to scale it up, I'll just go in and show you, um and you want to scale it up. Let's say that you scale him up really large. It looks pretty good. Except you can see it's kind of blurry, right? The image is not very crisp. Well, the way around that is, you click this rest continual Rastra ization button. Um and then you can see the neck has gone clean blur clean, blurry, clean. My head and my body are not being clean because I don't have that selected. So you have to make sure that these guys are all selected. So now when we go back in, it should clean up. Um, a way that most people do the neck and myself included. I did it for a very long time was I would create a shape layer and then I would use the puppet pin tool to parent two pins to move around. When you use the public pencil, you can no longer use this continual rastra ization It basically rast arises the layers so that it becomes blurry when you scale it up. So in doing the next this way, you set your help. You set yourself up for success. You can do more with the rig. Uh, and it's just it's less labor intensive on your computer. So your rig is much easier to use now. Yes, there are flaws. You can see that the head breaks right there so it doesn't stretch with it. So keep in mind, this is not stretching. It's simply rotating to kind of orient itself to the, um the head control. There might be a better way. I I don't know if this ah three D point controller angle control, they might do something. I don't know, but for now, this is This is good. This will work just fine. So what does that mean? Well, we have a rig. Uh, and, 01 other thing we need to do. So we need a parent, the neck to the torso, which is the upper part of the body. So now that's moving. And I guess what we can do also is, well, parent, the head. I guess maybe we'll parent the head to the torso also. Or maybe we should create a rig or not a rig, but, uh, control for this? Yes, that's created control for the the, um torso, and it's attached the torso to that. And then we'll attach the torso control to the hip control. So now this control will rotate the body, and this just keeps it clean so that we can, you know, instead of animating shape, layers and controls will just animate the control. Um, but now we have to parent the head to the torso control. Okay, that's weird. So it's still moving. I don't know why the neck did that, but a way around it control, click, and then we'll just rotate it back into place. It probably had something to do with the parenting or something like that. Anyway, let's see that it still works. Yes, it does. Does this work? Yes, it does. Okay. And we can get a little squash and stretch in here to look at that. So with that said, Let's see, Doesn't animate. Yes, it does. We have some movement in walk cycle, so I hope that was easy enough for you guys and have you understood it? And, um, I hope your next are working, you know? Good. Well, if not, ask questions, and I'll do my best to answer them so And if you have a better way of doing the neck or more simplistic way, by all means, do it. This is your rig, your character. I'm merely here to suggest my opinions on how I might do it. So have fun with it. If it doesn't work, ask and I'll try my best to fix it.
13. Torso and head animation: all right. I bet you thought you were done with animation. Now we're gonna and meet the body, torso and head. We're going to give a little squash and stretch so that when it walks, he's not just a robot burn where you know, the body and the torso, they have some compression in them. So we're gonna animate and give it a little more character in life to it. So stick around. And hopefully this is the father the polishing touches your character needs. The reason it looks a little bit odd and robotic is because there's no movement in the body or the neck. So let's add a little movement to the body. So in order to get some movement, what we'll do is we'll key the position of the torso. What key from one. Then we'll move forward here. We'll move the body up, maybe one. And then at 12 which is our center point. Remove the body back down. Uh, and I think I want key for him one to be down a little more to see you. All right. And then I'll just select these and paste it copy and paste, and then I'll select him all in hit F nine. So we have some movement. You can see it's going up and down, but it's not going up and down. Um, with any real physics, it's just kind of like elongating and squashing. So the real physics come into play when you start to mess with the timing. So the way to get the timing gown is you have to offset it. So the torso is reacting to the position of the hips. So as the hips come down, there's a delay before the body comes down. So we're just gonna extend that delay, and this is where you start to see a little of squash and stretch. There we go see that he's going up and down. But if we do one more key fame, it's looking pretty good because we're getting, like, really far off of the initial key frame and zero I'm going to go. What am I gonna do? Well, I'll worry about it later, but then we're going to do the same thing to the head. So we want some squash and stretch in the head. And this these air, the small details that bring your character to life all those subtle movements, and it makes it feel more squishing and fun. You know, that's what animation is all about. It's about having that life in that, um, really fun kind of movement. So the head will come up. Or maybe I think that's will come up a little bit. But I want to squash the head down here, too. And then at 12 which is the halfway point, I'll copy and paste back to zero. And then I'll copy and paste those to extend it, select a mall and hit F nine. Now, the way this works is that there's a hierarchy, right, so the hips animate first in the body and then the head. So if that's the case, that means that our key frame for our head needs to start just past the body. Okay, but you can see there's like a pop happening, and that's because there's no animation until it starts, like almost around for five. Um, so we want Teoh. We want to keep the the last frame at the beginning, and I just moved forward a little bit on. I'll do the same with the torso. Copy and paste that just move it forward a little bit. Okay? That does not look good. Um, I think it's because I need Oh, that's what I'm sorry. So I need Teoh copy and paste the frame in front of it back here, and then I'll select all of these guys a movement here. I don't do the same with ahead. It's basically duplicating these two frames Here are the same. So we want to make sure that if this is a down frame, the frame in front of it should be an up position. So now when I move it over, we should get a better loop. There we go. All right, we're getting some good squash and stretch in there because he is really getting bouncy and it's all a matter of animating everything at the same time. So if everything goes up it, it'll all go up at the same time here, and I'll come down at the same time. And then the way to get that nice washing stretch and I'm probably just beating a dead horse here is to offset everything. One or two frames from each other and then it starts to bounce. So we could also add a little rotation if you want. Um, sometimes you don't want the head to be moving and bouncing too much because you still wanted to be grounded in reality a little bit. But let's just see what happens if we do rotate so the head will rotate down here, and then at 12 it will rotate back up, hit of nine, copy and paste. And then let's offset these guys. How are we gonna offset? Sometimes it's just a matter of finding the best frame that works and actually could just be right there. So I hope your character is looking really good. Um, we're getting the walk cycle down. It's blocked out and polished, so that should be it. We're missing one final piece. The design. The design of our character is not quite there. And you're probably wondering, why did you wait till the end? Because I'm having fun. It doesn't have to be structured in any way. I want you to see that after effects is completely changeable. If you start off with one thing, you can always change it to something later on. There's no set in concrete formula to some extent, so the reason I did it this way is because I didn't want you to focus on the character. I wanted to focus on blocking it out, blocking everything out until the end. Some people would probably say, Get your character done first and then rigged them. Um, but because I'm just having fun, we could do it at the end. I'm gonna show you that it's possible in this next tutorial. So we're wrapping up here. I hope you've enjoyed it so far, and I'll see you at the finish line.
14. Head Design: so designing a character can be a grueling task. Could take hours and hours, which it did, by the way. So I'm not gonna go into it in this tutorial. Sorry, that could be a whole separate tutorial on how design a character. What I am gonna go into is how I designed the head. So I'm going to take the time to show you how I designed it, made it, created it. And you can apply these techniques to the body as well. So let's get into it. So when creating ahead, there's a few parts to it. There's the cranium in the jaw. And then there's all this room around here for, like, years and eyes and nose and things like that. So if we want to take it down into parts, you start with the cranium of your character, Okay? So maybe I'll make it a little bit bigger. So this is my cranium. That's the dome where all the knowledge happens. All the thoughts of thinking boom right there. Then off of the cranium comes your face, your jaw line. Everything that comes up or is is associated with the face. So what we can do is, we'll scale this in a little bit and we'll go like so So this kind of sets up. Where are hairline is where our jawline is and all that good stuff. So we'll start off. Actually, we'll start off with some eyes. This is gonna be very simple Rig, can you guys? So I hope you're not too disappointed with how it turns out. But if this is gonna be our I, I'll fill it with White. What I'll do then, is I'll duplicate that circle, scale down the pupil and move it over just slightly, and I can remove that stroke and make it black. So there's one I boom, easy peasy. Next, I'm gonna duplicate thes shape players. And this is where you create the space between the eyes. How Why do you want your eyes? All of this matters because it depended, determines what your character will look like, right? That looks way different than if the eyes were down here. I'm gonna go a little bit more normal, and I'll put the eyes like so and I'll just squeeze this one in. Well, I'll keep it forward, and maybe I'll move this one for a little more. That's fine. Um, so then I'm gonna rename this eyes, right? That one. His head. And I'm not gonna worry about that one for now. So now that I have my eyes set up now, I can focus on the years. So the top of the ear comes up to the top of your eye so creating here and is going to be roughly the same size is your eyeball okay? And I always I always leave it open. So I started one side come around and then ended. And don't close it, because you can now take the color of your character and then just add a stroke to it. And you don't have to worry about trim paths. Okay? So I might I might make that you're a little bit bigger rounded out. Okay? You know, also, I had a little on a little bit of, ah detail to the year. Not too much. That might be too much. I'm gonna delete one, and I'll just make it very subtle, Okay? And then I'm gonna add some eyebrows Now the eyebrows are gonna be very basic. Just gonna be a stroke. First a player I'm gonna turn off the Phil. I don't need it. And I'm gonna increase the stroke. Maybe like you like that. And then I will coming here and duplicate that shape layer, and I just moved it over. You go. And you can just have fun with it. You know, this is your character, and you want to look at your alignment. You can see my eyebrows are not aligned. Um, the space here where the eyes is is where the space for your eyebrows needs to be. Okay, so try to keep everything symmetrical, and then I'm going to round my cap. Okay? I'll do the same for the other stroke round cap. If your character needs a but cap for, ah, eyebrow, that's fine, too. All right, then. Next, I'm just gonna change this color to the great that we're working with, and I'll do the same for the cranium. Where the head. Okay, to be honest with you guys, I don't know exactly what I'm gonna end up with. You know, it could have just been that square shape that I started with and ended with, but I don't know, I like to continue to have fun. So now I'm gonna create a nose. I just do like a pointy, simple nose. Change that down to two. That's looking pretty good. I'm gonna call it knows, and I'll rename these eyebrows, and here we'll call this one his right here because the left ear will probably go behind the body lift here. All right. And then I'm going to scale this ear to negative 100. It's gonna put it right there, and I'll drop it behind the head. Next, we'll do a mouth. What kind of a mouth should this character have? I'm going to create a very simple mouth. This is not a mouth rig. This is simply a mouth shape, okay? And it's gonna be very, very basic, and I'll delete this ville. All right, What do you think? And even the position of the mouth will determine what your character will look like. So for now, I'm just gonna do that. What else do we need when we have ears, eyes and nose in the mouth and eyebrows? Well, he's missing some hair, isn't he? Um, maybe I'll pull this here in a little bit. We actually probably don't even need to see it, but we'll just know that it's there. What if we did? That looks pretty cool. So the thing about the thing about ahead, our foreheads are there for a reason. They are. They're kind of like, what? Hold the brain in place. And so if you're starting the lack of forehead, your character is not gonna look a good. So you want to make sure they have enough enough, um, stuff on top of the head so that it doesn't look odd. So I'm going to select everything, and I'm gonna move it down a little bit just to make sure that we we keep this cranium intact, we don't want to lose it. And then this jaw, I'm gonna I'm gonna change a little bit. I want to be a little smaller this way. But I wanted to be in line with the cranium here. So I'm looking at this section here so that I can continue to see my stroke around the head . And if I had a stroke, you can see it now breaks through the cranium, which is not what you want The way around that is a trim paths so that I'm gonna trim from here. all the way around until, I don't know. Maybe about right here. But you can see trim paths is not perfect. What's happening is it's trimming everything, turning the Phil and the stroke. So I'm going to duplicate that rectangle, put it behind my other rectangle. I don't need the stroke. I'm just looking for the Phil, and then I'm gonna delete the trim path. So now that gives me a jaw line and Phil behind it. So these are two separate layers. So I have a rectangle with my stroke, and I have a rectangle with my fill. Okay, so let's get into the walking ring, see how it's looking. Okay? Not too bad, I guess. All right. Um, I'm always looking at design and style. I'm going to continue with head, though. Let's finish up the head, and then we'll move on to other parts of the body on this jaw. Do I like the jaw? We'll leave it hair. Let's give this character some hair. I do not know what kind of hair I want to give him gonna move this year back a little bit, but we want to give him some kind of haircut that works, so I'm just gonna start drawing. It's kind of like my typical hair shape, a little little bangs going on, little curl, little fluff. And you want to make sure we have We have some, like sideburns. Okay. And then the hair can come back down around the ear, and then it will pick up back here. So what do we want? We want someone really big. Kind of weird here. I don't know. Maybe. And this will come right down here. All right? I'm just just having fun with it. I don't know how it's gonna look. I don't even know gonna be right. It's had a stroke. And let's change the color, Teoh. I don't know. Maybe White. Call it hair. Let's move it into position. So it needs to be below the ear below the eyes. All right, That's good enough. You can see. What have I done now? The neck is not quite in the position it needs to be, or the head's not in the position needs me. So I'm going to move forward and line it up with neck a little bit better. So I hope that tutorial supplied you with some principles to use for your own head how to design and create it. Um, And hope it was fun for you. So keep going. I'm sure it looks great. I can't wait to see it. Let's move on to the next part.
15. Adding eyelids: So in this part, we're gonna create some eyelids. Are character needs to blink, so we're gonna give him some the ability to do that. We're gonna have some square shapes and, uh, covers eyeballs. Let's get into it. It's come back into my head, and then what we're gonna view it's gonna find our eyes on. We're gonna create just two rectangles, but all in one shape. So I'm gonna pull it out, like so V, and then I'm gonna duplicate one up top. I'm gonna select him both to make sure that they're they're the color of your skin. Whatever your skin color is, keep it there, and we're gonna call it blame. Are we called eyelids? Pull it down above the eyes. Then we're gonna duplicate the I layer, pull it up above the eye lids, and then make sure you have this toggle switch down here. Uh, if you don't, there's I believe you can like, How do you get it? It should be there. So toggle switches till you see this called mode and track matte. And we're gonna change the track. Matte on the eye lids to Alfa. Matt, look at that. We have some eyes now or some eyelid. Sorry. And then if you come here into the eyelids, you can manipulate how that goes and what kind of a blink you get. Another thing we're gonna do is we're going to expand the stroke on the eyes, too. And what that's doing is it's unmasking mawr of that island shape, and we want to do it just a little bit where the black line is not being seen and there's just a little bit of an overlap with the I I I live Okay, so that's looking pretty good. So now your character has the ability to blink open and close its eyes, and I hope it was easier for you. If you have any questions about the Alfa mats and how they work, please ask questions, and I can choose. I will do my best to answer those. So let's keep going. We're almost there. Were in the home stretch you guys
16. Final Overview: So this is it. This is my final character. The character that I created is gonna look a little different from the last time you saw him. And that's because I took the time to actually design. His body is head and everything that goes along with my characters designed, Um, I hope you can take the time to do it yourself and create a really cool character that's fitting to your own style. So let's get into it and see what I came up with. So after a lengthy exploration and what I thought my character would look like, this is what I came up with. Um, since it's winter time here now, I thought, you know, put a sweater on him and put some jeans because it is cold. That's kind of how I'm dressed. But just have fun with it, you know, work on some shapes that feel organic, and they feel full and robust and, um, in your character will look great. You can see that I tapered his legs in quite a bit. I may have been smaller, but then I gave it kind of like a bell curve at the bottom. Um, that gives him some structure, so it makes his legs feel thinner. But it makes his body feels sturdy because they have a wider base. So that's kind of why I did that. I did the same thing with the arm in the sleeve. Um, and his sweater kind of has this pillow pillow Penis to it. One thing I did differently as I put the neck on top of the torso. Um, this way I can have we get all these guys back on this way, I can have the neck moving around on top of the body, and I didn't have to mask it off or anything. And I just added this little turtleneck to his his neck. But the whole neck rig, it turned out really good. I'm really impressed with it. Um, And then I added a little shadow there under his chin. What else did I dio and see? Um, not much. I mean, I move the hands below the arms. So now the hand is below the lower arm, and, uh, yeah, I played around with the scaling and some of the design, and, uh, basically, if you're wondering how I did some of the stroke work. Um, like, here for this upper upper leg. Let me see if I can find it. This thigh here, I just retraced this shape. So it's one shape and I did not close in the top. So it starts here with the pencil, comes around loops, follows this circle, and then hope comes back to the top. But I leave it open. Um, it's just one shape in the thigh. And then when you go into the caf portion, I did the same thing around my lips. I have since deleted my circles, so I no longer have them. But this is just kind of how it how it functions. And now this one is the same as the thigh, but it lays on top of the thigh. So, um, that's kind of the way to get that that look to it. But anyway, I hope you guys had fun with it. I know I did. The character I came the way that the character turned down. I'm really happy with really pleased with it. Um, but yeah, I can't wait to see what you guys have come up with. And if you have any questions at all, please feel free to ask. So that was that. I hope it was easy enough for you guys to fall along with. I hope you enjoyed the tutorial. And I hope you enjoyed producing your own character animation. Which is awesome, by the way. Congratulations. Really proud of you guys for sticking with this long. You've made it to the end of the tutorial. Bonus points, bonus points. So thanks for watching. And I'll see you next time.