ULTIMATE Character Rig

1. Intro v1: I, Jared with Backwoods animation. And this is the ultimate character rig in after effects. I've taken all my years of experience in creating character rigs to cram into this one jam pack tutorial just for you. This is a comprehensive hands on learning experience where I simply walk you through each step that it takes to create your own fully functional rig that can rotate 360 degrees. So you can animate in any angle. If you've ever worked on your own character rig or how to use somebody else's, you understand the challenges that come into a character when you have to turn them sideways or to the back. This course is a must if you have ever worked or plan on working character rig. The tools that you will need are Adobe After Effects, Adobe Illustrator, and I use Duk bastle, but you can use a newer version as well. Some optional plug ins are joysticks and sliders, and limber. Joysticks and sliders is going to give you some of that facial animation that I think is crucial, but it's not necessary. You can get by without it. And limber is just a way of creating limbs that I find to be the most fluid form of creating limbs. I hope this course offers you everything you're looking for in a character rig. And I thank you for coming on this journey with me as we create the ultimate character rig. 2. Step 01 - Character Design: I've cheated already and I drew my character. This is an old character that I've already drawn. Lucky for you, I'm going to redraw it. You'll probably do some preliminary sketches before you can get. Anyway, that's on you to figure out what your character is going to look like. So let's look at what I did and then we'll get into it. Let's have a quick look at my character sketches. I just wanted to walk you through what I've started with. This is the first character I did. I really hated him. He does not look good. Nothing about him cries character. But I knew I wanted to be a postman. This is a postal worker. I wanted him to be maybe like a more defined chin, and I just wanted to get an idea of what his body would look like. I gave him some stronger features, don't mind my fingernail, but at the end of the day, when I finished it, he looks a little bit too much like a cherub here out. Then I wanted to soften his features. He ended up looking a little too young. I didn't want to be a child. Then redid this version and I came up with a way better concept from here. I wanted to see what he would look like with a full body pick. When I did this sketch, it's like super clunky, Not a fan of the silhouettes at all, all in all his body anatomy. Just wasn't diving. Then I wanted to simplify that. Then I came up with this guy all in all, that's who we're going to do, that's the guy I'm going to sketch. All this being said, never settle on your first sketch. Always experiment and see where you come up with and you'll end up someplace way better than where you started. Let's get into it. I'm gonna draw this guy. Let me just go ahead and jump into getting the head turns, and then we can move on from there. I'll start with my circle. Draw in our little perspective lines. And then from here we're going to draw on the chin. The chin is going to move from the center over a little bit. It's going to wrap around. I'm not going to draw the facial features. No, no eyes draw ear because I'm going to use all of these. The eyes, the nose in the mouth, and I'm just going to be moving them over to that head. If I draw all that stuff here, it's just going to clutter up my drawing, which I do not need. We're just going to just what we have. Does that make sense? What I'm just talking I'm rambling. All right, let's go ahead and we'll draw this over. It's got a very short hair or low hair line, I should say. Cool, Let me ink that one in. Hopefully this table will cooperate. I'll probably pull this out just a little bit so that the ear has a place to land. All right, that looks good. Now let's move on to the, this is a 34. Let's look over to, now we're going to do a side profile from here we'll have an eyebrow ridge. This chin is going to be a lot more flat because it has moved forward. The ear is actually going to come forward too. And then the hairline will move behind the head. Okay, that looks good. So let's go ahead and ink this in. Draw this hair, it comes around down behind the head. There we go. Front three quarter right profile. Now we are all set, we can move it into Illustrator and we can start to have fun. Let's do it. 3. Step 02 - Illustrator: There's no easy way to do this Designing this character took about 2 hours. You don't want to sit through 2 hours, nobody wants to watch 2 hours of somebody tracing a sketch. What I'm going to do is fast forward this footage. You can watch the whole thing from beginning to end and I'll just talk over it. I have an overview section to where I'm going to walk you through everything that I designed, all the different layers and all the different parts of the character. That's a separate video. But if you want to watch my process to where I actually outline every single shape, you can watch it here. I'll just talk over. Let's get into it. When you open up Illustrator, what you're going to do is make a composition of 1920 by 1080. You just need one artboard. Next, you're going to place the drawings that you have and you're going to put them inside the artboard and start designing your character. I like to use simple shapes. I start with circles for the face. This way you can keep perfect symmetry when you are designing your character. For the ears, I leave them open so that the bottom section, when it comes in front of the face, it has a nice flow to it, there's no harsh lines. Then you're going to also be layering each of your components or your body layers In a separate layer, you're going to have a nose layer, ear layer, a layer for the eyes, a layer for the pupils, and a layer for the face. I'm adding a chin just below the nose. You're going to create a chin layer that follows the shape of the face. This way, we can actually have our characters jaw compress and stretch when they talk. Using the sketches that I have, it was very helpful to get the head transitions for the rotation. It was nice to have that. And I suggest that maybe you do those sketches just in case. Now for the neck, I make the neck a little longer than I need to. It comes down into the chest. And the reason for that is we're going to mask out the neck using a mask tool or shape layer in after effects. This way it will look like it's going inside of the collar and it's going to make a really cool effect. Again, using simple shapes, I can create that symmetry for our character. Don't worry about this part, I was just trying to see if my original drawing matched. Working on that front pose is very important because this is the starting point for your character. We're going to jump off of this particular pose and start doing our body rotation. It's very important to make sure that you have good symmetry from left to right. Now we're going to start to work on a left turn. This is a torso left. It's just rotating a little bit. As your character rotates, their shoulders, which are the widest part of your body, will start to come in because of the perspective switch. Now make sure you also create enough space for your arm as it rotates. Something that happens a lot is that as the character rotates, you think, oh, it's just getting smaller in a way. It is getting smaller as they rotate. It's compressing, but you also have to make sure you have enough space for your shoulder because your arm does not get smaller, it still stays the same size. Just make sure you have a really wide berth on your collar. I just made different layers for each one of the torsos. I have five different torsos to create my turn. Now making the arm, I'm just using simple circles because these are going to be the points that we rotate from. The shoulder has a circle, the elbow has a circle, and the wrist has a circle. And make sure that each your upper arm and your lower arm, they have the same pivot point for the elbow. That's going to be very important. Once you have designed it, you can copy those layers, paste them into a new layer. So there's going to be a left upper arm, a left lower arm, and a left wrist, right upper arm, right lower arm, and a right wrist. You do the same thing for the legs. There's going to be a left upper leg, left lower leg, left foot, and then same with the right. Just have fun with your designs. Make sure your shapes are appealing. You want to make sure that you have enough space for just things to function properly. These are cartoons. Don't make things too small. You want to have them exaggerated just a tad, so that it reads Well, I'm just laying out the legs here. What are some things to note? Now I'm going to create hands. The way that I do my hands is I create all of my hand shapes on one layer. You can make as many hand shapes as you like. The more hand shapes you have, the more ability you have to actually act with your character. Because the hands are so expressive, they tell a lot of emotion and they can tell a lot about how that character is feeling. And the point is that they're trying to get across. Having expressive hands is really great. If you have a hand sheet with just different hand shapes, feel free to use those. Bring them in and then you can trace those. I was just going off my head. I have a problem to where I don't ever use reference. I just think of something and then I start to fiddle with it until it looks right. The problem is I end up fiddling for way too long. You can tell right here with his fist, I had no idea what I was doing was like, why doesn't this look right Eventually I got it. But using reference is key I suggested, don't make my mistakes use reference. Essentially, I only made eight hand shapes. Technically it's only four hand shapes, but it was a front and back version of both. I might go back in later and create a bunch more dynamic poses just to really get the point across of what my character is thinking. But these are the general basic hand shapes that we have. It was an open hand, closed fist, something else? Yeah, this will get me by. If your character only has one hand shape or two, like a front and the back, that's fine too. Do as many as you'd like. If you notice as the hand rotates from the palm position, the hand is really wide. But if you do it like this more of your razor's edge, the hand gets super narrow. And that's because we have a wrist with two bones in it that rotate. What I realized is my wrists were just way too big. I went back to my character's arm and I scaled the wrist down just a little bit, so that the hand would fit in both directions. No matter what rig you've made or how many you've done. It's always a learning curve. There's this experimental process where you have to figure out what it is that needs to happen. There's always going to be problems that you figure out that was one of them. The next thing that I'm doing here is I'm creating rotation points on my layers. Using the circles that I created for the shoulders, the elbows in the wrist, I'm just scaling them down to the perfect center. And then I'm making them like a bright color so that I can really see it. The reason we're doing this is so that when we import our layers, we know the exact point on that layer that will rotate perfectly around that circle. That's going to be super helpful. Later on, I just put those circles directly onto the layer of the elbow or the lower arm. Now right here, same as the hand, all in one layer. What I'm doing is I'm creating a rotation for the feet. Because the end goal is that we want to create a character that can spin 360 degrees. Well, the feet need to spin with it. I'm creating just about every possible position that would need to be rotated. I have a left version, a three quarter version, front version, and then a three quarter version the opposite way, and a three quarter version backward, And then a heel version, which is what I'm working on right here. Once you get all those different versions, what is it? Six different versions. That should be enough to get the body or the foot rotation. Now, that was the end of the design portion. Again, I was sped up. I know it was maybe hard to follow, but if you had a little trouble understanding what I was doing in this section, watch the next video. The next video is the overview. I made some changes to the actual character design and some of the layers. I'll walk you through exactly what I did and I'll go layer by layer to explain to you how to set your character up. And we can go from there, check out the next video, and then we'll continue on. 4. Character Overview: Now I'm going to do an overview of our character design in Adobe Illustrator. This is going to give you a good idea of exactly how the layers need to be labeled and positioned. You can move forward into the after effects version where we make our rig. Let's take a look at this. A few changes that you might notice is that I changed the color of his shirt. I added a few highlights to the ears and the nose, and a little shadow to the neck. Now let's work our way from the top down. Nose is, like I said before, it's on its own separate layer. All the different parts of the body need to be on their own separate layer. When making a nose, I like to choose either a left or right profile that just transitions to the next head state a lot better as we do our head rotations. If you have a nose that is dead center, it makes it very challenging to take that nose and position it to a three quarter and then to like a side profile. It's best to visualize your nose already at a turned angle to start with. Next we have the eyeballs on their own layer and then the pupils on top of that. It's important that the pupils are separated. Otherwise, your character will not be able to look around, they will not see any danger coming. Next we have the, let's look at these ears. My ears, I like to start here at the crest, spiral around down to the ear lobe, and I leave it open. I don't close off that gap, because as the head turns and the ears come in front of the head, it makes a nice, seamless transition from the ear to the face. This little piece right here. The sideburn is critical. It's important because this adds a nice transition from the ear up into the hair. This can be as long as you want, you can even cover the ear, or you can even shorten it just a little bit. But it's nice and important actually to have a little bit of the hair coming down in front of the ear. That just helps with the head rotation. And then it makes the layers look better when they interact with each other. All right, next we have the neck. Now you'll notice the neck actually comes down below the collar. That's important because in after effects when we create our body rig, we're going to mask out the bottom of this neck so that it looks like it's going inside of the collar, it's going to make a really cool effect. Just make sure that your neck is long enough. Also, make sure it's tall enough that as the head rotates left and right, you don't see the top of the neck from behind the head. I think it's important to point out I don't have any eyebrows and I don't have a mouth. That's because in after effects we're going to make those using joysticks and sliders. We're going to create some really expressive eyebrows. Then we're also going to be able to create some really organic mouth shapes that move and transition between seamlessly. That's the way I like doing it creates the best result, in my opinion. If for some reason you don't have joysticks and sliders or you don't want to do that method, you could simply make some eyebrows here and then just have some up and down movement to them as we import them into after effects. It will work just fine, but it's just going to make a very simplistic version of eyebrows. Then you can do the same thing with mouth shapes as well. If you decide that you don't want to use joysticks and sliders, you can make a bunch of different mouth shapes here on this character, just like we're going to do with the hands. You can transitions through those mouth shapes. It's really up to you. But what I'm going to do is make that stuff in after effects. I actually think it's important to point out this too. Character has bangs or hair that comes down in front of the face. You can create a new layer, I don't know why that's all caps here. You can whatever shape your bangs would be, then we'll import that into after effects. You can move that around. Now, just keep in mind that depending on how you make it, it can complicate things in such that if the head goes forward, it might break through the top of the head. Or if it goes up at my break through the top of the hair. You just have to make sure that when you set up your rotations that your bangs move accordingly to the position of the head. But if you have that, go ahead and make a layer for it here. And then I can show you how important and animate that later on. Another thing that I did, I originally had a new layer for each torso, but what I realized is I have space here in my composition or my artboard to where I could put all of my layers for my body rotation on one layer. That's what I did. I just spaced it out evenly, that there's no overlap, there's no close touching. You want good space between each body because we are going to transition this layer from one image to the next. We need to have space to move it. I was just thinking that this would actually make importing files a lot easier because we're just importing one file that has all the body rotation in, as opposed to five files that we have to navigate. Feel free to do that. It's a new experiment for me. I'm not sure how it's going to turn out, but I think it's going to be great. Let's move on to the limbs. I'll turn off my torso. Like I said before, your limbs have to be rotating on a perfect circle. It's probably not as important for something like the shoulder or maybe even the wrist. You want to be pretty close to center for those, but the place that rotates dead center, and it has to be dead center, is the elbow. If your elbow does not have a perfect center anchor, it's just going to get so wonky. When that arm comes up and bends, you're going to start to see the elbow break through. The fore arm is going to rotate on an off angle and it's not going to be good. The way to do that is you see I've added these little red dots at the dead center point of my joint. The way that I do that, because I made everything from a circle, all you do is copy that circle and then scale it down. Dead center, holding shift and alt. Once you get it there, make it a nice, fun, bright color and you're good. You do the same thing with the elbow. Just scale it down and make one for the wrist. Then go through and do that for all of your limbs. Left side, right side. Same with the legs, they all need that joint pivot point. Those pivot points are going to be on the layer that they're specified with. The shoulder joint will go to the upper arm, elbow joint will go to the fore arm and then the wrist joint will be on. The hand hip joint will be on the upper leg knee joint will be on the lower leg ankle joint will be on the foot. Speaking of feet, let's look at what we got. Because we're doing a full 360 rotation of our character. We need feet that match that rotation. We have to have some spinning feet starting with this as like a jumping point. I have a full side profile of a foot, That's what I've started with. Then I move into a three quarter version. This is an interesting topic. Some people, when they design their characters, they have a ground plane. And you don't want your character's feet to break through the ground plane thing needs to stay flat, that's fine. Or to give a little bit of depth to your rotation. You can break that ground plane to give almost like a foreshortening effect. That's what I did here. I'm not entirely sure if it's the smart or right move, but it just felt right. So I did it. We've got a three quarter turn here. We have a front foot, that's the toe facing us. Then we have a three quarter view on the opposite side. This one is a three quarter view of the back. We're starting to see the heel. And then finally we have a heel view. All of these feet shapes are on the same layer and we're going to cycle through them as the character turns. I'll show you that, we'll get into that later. A very similar system is what we're going to do. For the hands, I only did eight hands. I would suggest doing as many as you can. It's really up to you on complex and how many you do. It just seems to me that hands are the most expressive part aside from the face on your body. You emote a lot of character through your hands. The more hand poses you have, the more emotion you can get out of a character. That's why I say more is better. I only have, technically it's only four hands it back version, one front version, they're both the same. Maybe I'll go through and make some more later on, but right now this is what I got just because of time. That's as far as I'm going to get. This is our character. Hopefully your character design looks, or your layout looks very similar to this. It's important that you follow these layers in these steps almost to a T because it's going to make it easier for you when we go into after effects and start to rig it. Let's get into that section right now and have some fun. 5. Step 03 - Body Rig: In this part of the tutorial, now we're going to get into some rigging. This is the fun part. We're going to start off by rigging the torso and then we'll work our way out from there. Let's get into rigging the torso. Once you've opened after effects, what you're going to do is we're going to import our files. Go file, import file. Then you're going to go and find the illustrator file where your character was designed. When you have it selected, come down here to import as composition. This is going to do is it's going to import all of our layers separately so we don't have to do it one by one. And it now what it did was it created a composition for us based on our illustrator size. It brought in all of our different layers. I'm going to go inside of character one composition. If you hit control K on the keyboard, it'll bring up your composition settings. And you should notice that the frame rate should be at 29.97 That's typically what I animate at roughly 29.97 Some people animate at 12, others animate at 24. My preference has always been 29.97 Your duration doesn't need to be very long. You could probably just drop it down to 1 minute. But what you should also notice is that the width and height is 1920 by 1080. That's what we're going for. What I'm going to do is I'm going to find all of the different layers that are associated to the torso. For me, that is the torso, That is the neck. I also added a bag, that's another thing you might notice, it's different in my original sketch to bag with them. I put it in there. Once you have those three selected, do control shift C, that's going to bring up a new composition that you're going to create. You can label this one torso and then hit Enter. Now we're going to go inside the torso. The first thing we can do, we don't need all of this size to our composition. Right down here, there's a little square and it's called region of interest. When you select it and you also select a layer, we'll select the torso. We can drag a little box around our torso. You don't want to make it too tight around the torso that you're making, but we're just trying to trim off some of that size because we don't need it. Once you have a nice little box like this around your torso, what you can do is go composition composition, then crop comp to region of interest. I was thinking I got ahead of myself. You don't need to select any layers. We were just in the composition. Okay, now we have a smaller composition, This is perfect. Now you select your torso and we're going to mask out our torso because we have so many different torsos associated with this one layer. We need to define the one that we're going to be using right here. In this front layer, I'm going to draw a mask around it. Actually, solo it out so we can see it. We're going to draw a mask around it. You can keep it tight. Then what we're going to do is we're going to key the mask path and then hold shift P on the keyboard. Then we're going to hit, we're going to key our position. Now we can hit you while torso is selected and these are our key frames. What we're going to do now, this is cool, because this is where we create our rotation. We're going to work on that layer by layer. Let's turn on our action safe. I want to make sure that the torso is in fact centered. Mine is just a little bit off. I'm just going to move it over now. The next thing we can do is hit page down. We're going to hit Y on keyboard and we are going to pan. Over to our next torso. And to make sure that these are in alignment, meaning that they don't jump back and forth, but they actually spin on themselves. You can do page up and page down just to make sure your alignment is pretty good. It doesn't have to be absolutely perfect, but you want it to be pretty close. Now I'll do page down again and we'll just move it over. And we're going to continue this until we get to the end. Then this is my final one. Look at that, those hind quarters then. Because the front and the back are the same shape, you can make sure that they are in alignment. One thing we need to do, and I got ahead of myself, is wick. It looks at the slider or the joystick in a beginning and end. The middle state is where it defaults to. This is where it puts that joystick. Because it puts it a default in the middle. You want the middle to be the front of your character. In order for the front of your character to be in the middle, that means that our first frame has to actually be the back of the character as we transition on our timeline. This way it would go to the center or the front of our character goes from back to center. What we have to do that was a long winded explanation is we have to put our center here. Then now it rotates and we have to turn our character to the other side. Now it's confusing but just follow with me. So what we're going to do is I'm going to go back one hold control, I'm sorry. But we do need to save it. I'm sorry. Alts shift desk on A do I know after effects, I don't know. Hold shift X. And we're going to key it the middle. Now our scale is keyed. Then we're going to hit Page up to a section where we don't have any key frames. And we're going to put this three quarter turn here but facing the opposite direction. What we have to do is we now have to scale it to the negative. And I'm going to position it back to the middle and hit Y. Now we can put our three quarter view in the opposite direction. You see what's happening now. I hope that made sense. All we're doing is scaling. We scaled it to the negative. And now we're going to go backwards from here to the beginning. Now keep it on y. And we're going to continue this transition till we get to the back of our character. By the end of it, it will be a seamless transition from the back of the character to the front of the character and then back to the back of the character. Let's just make sure these backs line up. All right, that looks good. Then we can just move this over one key frame. Now if we go to the beginning of our character, and then to the last keyframe. And hit When we play it, it should do a perfect circle. Boom, doesn't awesome. All right, we did it, now we have our character spinning. But there's one thing we have to add. We need a neck. I'm going to hit you. Keep those open. I'm going to go to the middle key frame and I'm going to turn my neck on. I'm actually not going to animate the position of the neck at all. I'm going to keep it here. Spinning in the body will just spin around the neck. But what we do need is that mask. Remember how we talked about a mask? I'm going to get my pen tool. I'm going to start to create a mask at the bottom of my collar. This is going to mask out the bottom of the neck. What I can do is I select the neck, hit toggle switches. Then right here there's something called track Matt. If you select this one and hit the shape layer, you'll see it masked out the neck, but it's in the opposite direction. That's simple to fix. You just come right over here and we're going to invert the mask. Now we have a mask on it. Just make sure it all lines up nicely. You get a nice, you can see the stroke on it and everything. One thing that's going to happen with the neck is you have limitations. For me, I have a caller, at some point, the neck is going to run into the collar and you're going to see that split, it's going to intersect with the collar and it's just not going to work. There are limitations. Let's hit Y on the keyboard with neck selected. And what we're going to do is find this anchor point and we're going to put it right down here where we think the neck is going to start to rotate. You don't want it too high because the neck going to do a full spin in the middle. You want it down low, so the neck rotates around the sternum. You can see I have neck movement, but I have limitations. That's because my collar is so high. If I didn't have a collar at all, then this would work a lot better. But my collar limits me from moving my head too much. I could probably pull this in a little bit. That might help. Let's see. Not really. That's okay. Typically, my neck doesn't move a lot when my characters are interacting or talking. So what we're going to do is we are going to key frame this shape in your shape layer or your mask. I'm going to rename it, we'll call it neck mask. What we'll do is we'll go into the contents, the shape, and we're going to key the path as we page up and page down on the keyboard. The body is going to rotate and we can move these shape layers back into position. For my collar, I have to bump this one up and this one out. We'll pull this one in. I'll probably just pull this out too. Yeah, that's fine. Let's hit page down one more time. Make sure that it is staying in line with our shape of our neck. The shape of our collar. I'll just pull this one all the way down that we're going to tackle something different here. Because the neck cannot be in front. You could change the shape layer to mask that out. But I'm going to do something a little more simple now. We have to go back to the other direction, key frame, this shape, pull this out, and then one more and then we'll be done. All right, so the neck mask is finished. What we have to do at this point is we're going to duplicate the neck and then we are going to put neck two below the torso and then neck one. We're going to hold shift or just man, I'm having the worst trouble with these shortcuts, Okay. And then as soon as the torso turns, see the back. We're going to turn the opacity off. We'll key it 100 and then we'll turn it off here. You see how it switches like that. I'm going to move forward, we'll key it here just before it turns off. We'll go forward one and then we'll turn it off. Neck two in the back, opacity stays on all the time. Neck layer in the front is only on when the front of the chest is visible. Now we have this beautiful thing spinning around the neck. Next thing I want to do is we're going to create a new null object. I'm going to hit y on the keyboard and just center out that anchor point to the middle. Then I'm going to push it just to the bottom of my torso. What I'm going to do is call this squash in stretch. Then I'm going to create one more null object. I'm going to put the anchor point to the middle. And I'm going to put that right at where my neck is going to spin or not spin but rotate. And then I'm going to call this neck rotate. And then I'm going to attach my neck to it so that as this spins, the neck will spin. Then I'm going to take, now, I'm going to take the torso to rig my bag later. That's another headache that I don't want to get into right now. But I'm going to take torso bag and neck rotate, and I'm going to attach it to squash and stretch. On squash and stretch, I'm going to come right to the middle. I'm going to key the scale at 100. And I'm going to come all the way to the beginning. And this is where I'm going to stretch out my character. I don't want to stretch too much. Let's see if, maybe, let's try 95 in and then 110. Okay, that feels good. And then let's go to the end frame and we're going to reverse it. So we'll go 110 down to, I don't know, maybe 90. We forgot to, I'm sorry, you have to attach the mask also to your squash and stretch. Okay, so this probably looks pretty funky right now and you're wondering like, okay, so you've got all this stuff, but you know what? Another thing that we have to do is we have to create control points for our shoulders to rotate with the body. The body is spinning. But we want to automate a system to where the arms stay in line with the shoulders. What we're going to do is two more null objects. I'm going to center out the anchor points. I'm going to call this one left arm. I'll duplicate it and call this one right arm. Just so that these are not like getting in the way too much, I'm going to scale them down a little bit. Right arm is what is it on this side, and then left arm is on this side. I'm going to key the positions. Hit P on the keyboard, keys. I'm going to move this scale for a second because actually I'm just going to delete it. We'll come back to that. I think I jumped the gun a little bit. As it rotates to what is it to his left. I need this shoulder to come over. We'll do four and this one will come back. Maybe we'll do four and we're just going to continue this process each, so moving backward and the other one moving forward. This is a big jump actually. That one's going to come way over here. This one's going to come way back here. Which makes me wonder, now that's good. Then there's a big jump. Then we move to the back. Now the thing about the back, the shoulders should be in the same position as they are when they're in the front. What we have to do is not the same position, opposite positions, but in the spatial position. If that makes sense. Right arm will actually be where left arm was. So we can copy that and put it here. The right arm will be where left arm was. Then we'll copy that. Put that there. Now we have these null objects that rotate perfectly. Now we have to go back to the opposite direction. What we'll do is we will continue our trajectory. We do four movements, or however many it takes you, I'm not sure how big your character is, or how small they are. Then we have a big jump, big jump, big jump. Then finally, back to where they started. Perfect. Now we have these null objects that are rotating with the body. It's beautiful, This is where it gets tricky. We have to separate these dimensions. We have the null objects traveling on an X plane, but the way the processes the information, it has to separate the X from the Y. We need to separate our dimensions, so that moves independently of the Y. Select our positions. Then what we're going to do is right click and we're going to separate dimensions on our Y positions. We're going to delete those. We still have the movement in the X. What has to happen now is right here in the middle. We're going to key our Y position right here where we're going to scale. We have to move our shoulders up to match the stretch that we're trying to achieve. That as we stretch the body up, the shoulders which our arms are connected to move up with the body as it stretches, what we're going to do is we're going to move this upward. I'm not entirely sure. This is going to be a little trial and error to figure out how high it needs to go and how low it needs to go. 14144. It looks pretty good. Let's do that here. Now it goes up and it comes all the way down because we are squashing the body. Remember at zero in our timeline is stretched all the way to the end of our time line, which is squashed. Now we're going to go in the opposite direction. We'll squish it down. 184. Let's try that. That looks good. 184 up and down movement in our shoulders, we have left and right movement in our shoulders. This is the most complicated part, Very difficult to think in that mindset of separating dimensions. I hope you get it. Watch this over and over if it doesn't make any sense. But finally, what we need to do is, well, one, we need to take all of our key frames. Actually we need to do our squash and stretch again, Right here in the middle, we'll do zero, 100% We'll come all the way to the beginning of the time line, timeline, 95 to 110, and then we come to the end, 9110290. That looks pretty good. Let's look at, oh, see our shoulders move up, they come down to the middle. And then the squash, Is this a good visual reference for you? So the shoulders come up and down with the body Squashing and stretching. When we connect everything together and it's rigged, it should make more sense. Is there anything else we need to do? The same thing with the the legs, but thankfully we don't have to worry about the up and down because the body is only squashing and stretching from the hips. The legs are not going to go up and down. I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to add a left hip and a right hip. And I'm going to do the same transition thing as I did for the shoulders. Now I finished the hips. I have a pair of hips that rotate around the body, as well as a pair of shoulders that rotate around the body. Next thing we need to do is we're going to select all the key frames. Right click, we're going to do toggle key frame hold. With the exception of one thing, squash and stretch does not need to be toggle held. You can control click to turn it off so that it is a smooth up and down transition. The other thing we're going to need to do is all of our layers, they need to have a beginning key frame and an end key frame in order for the connection to work. If you come to zero on our timeline anywhere, there is not a key frame. Make sure you put one in. There we go. Now come to the end of our time line. And then make sure you put a keyframe wherever there is not one. Also, make sure that those key frames that you just added have a toggle. Hold on them. Okay. Now, another thing I forgot to mention, make sure that your rasterized layers is turned on on all of your Adobe Illustrator files. Okay, coming into character, one composition, what you're going to need to do is possibly you'll need to locate your body. Mine is way out of whack. And that's because I did not do a great job aligning my character to the center. I'm just going to reposition it back to its original resting state. That looks pretty good to me. Okay. Now that that is done, what we're going to do is de select all of your layers. You're going to come over into **** Basel. When you open it up there's going to be an option called inside of rigging, it's called links and constraints. Go ahead, click on that. Then down below is something called connector. To the right of connector is a circle. Click on that circle and what we're going to do is create a two slider control. Click on that and it's going to make one like magic, boom. This is what's going to control or power our body rotation. Right now it does nothing because nothing is connected to it. With it selected, make sure you select the red circle, the two de slider. Come back into your torso position and we're going to select all of our key frames, with the exception of squash and stretch hold, shift to deselect and anything with a Y position. This goes for our arms. De select the Y position for your left arm and the Y position for your right arm. Those three things need to be deselected again. Y position for right arm, Y position for left arm and squash and stretch with everything else selected. Come back into, actually you don't need to come back. We're going to come over to **** Basil. Right here is an option called Connect to Properties, and we're going to click that. When you click it, it's going to connect all of these key frames we made. And connect them to our slider or our joystick. Now when we rotate it, look at that, it does the magic. The next thing we need to do is now select all the key frames that we didn't before, Y position. For the shoulders and squash, and stretch. Coming back to **** Basile, there's an option here under Access right now. It's selected at X, we're going to go to Y. Click that and then connect the properties. Now when we come back, our joystick should be working perfectly. We have up and down squash and stretch and a body rotation. Look at that. We did it part one, Step one done. We have our body rotating and squashing, and stretching with all the control points. We need to get started. Now we're going to go on and work for the head. We're going to connect the head up the same way we did the body. We're going to connect that to the body and make the rig even more fun. Let's get into that. 6. Step 04 - Head Rig: Step four, we're going to be creating a head rotation. As we have a joystick that moves left and right. The head will follow and transition all the way to the back. There's going to be two different versions of the head rotation. There's going to be the key or like the set position. Then there's going to be a joysticks and sliders version, which is the subtle ***** and head rotation that you can use for acting. Let's get into it and get started. Back in our character composition, I had created something just to use as a template. I have a head rotation here that I'm going to use to see and make sure that I set up closely to this. Each one of these is just the same layers within my original AI file. Let's get started. The first thing that I want to do is select all of the layers that are associated to the head. We have bangs all the way down to chin. I'm going to go ahead and make sure that rasterized layers is turned on the next hole control shift. And it's going to create a new composition. I'm going to call this one Head. Going into your head composition. It is too big. I'm going to scale it down just so it's easier to work with here. We're going to crop the region of interest. We're going to put it just around our head. That looks pretty good. Then we go composition crop comp to region of interest. Now we have a front profile of our head. All of our layers are still there, You just can't see them. If I do chin, you can see the switch out. Chin actually needs to be above. There we go. Next thing I'm going to do, select all my layers. One more time, control shift C, I'm going to call this one head front. Now what we're going to do is we're going to nest a bunch of compositions inside of our head comp. And each one of those new compositions is going to be a different version of the rotation starting off. This is going to be our first one, the head front. Let's go inside. What I want to do is select our head layer, which is this one. I'm going to mask out this shape here. I'm going to do the same thing for the chin. I have a rotated version of my bangs just off center. That means that I too have to mask out the bangs. Now my character, the final character probably won't have bangs. But just for those of you who have bang, for your character, I'm going to show you how to set all that stuff up. That is it. The next thing I'm going to do is our character has eyes. Select everything associated with the eyes, that's the people in the eyes. Hit control shift, we're going to call it now. We have a set of eyes that we will rig up later at a different point. For now, I'm just going to get them set up as a composition. Now, with our head front created, we're going to go ahead and start to create our other positions. I'm going to duplicate the head. I'm going to call this one. Head left, three quarter. I'm going to drop it on top, then I'm going to go inside and we're I'm sorry. Sorry. I had my mind wouldn't blink. No, this is not work. What the heck have I done? Okay. There you go. Oh, did I just copy the head or No, I did the head front. Right. I am confused. I'm going to delete D three quarter. Going ahead, we have head front. Must have duplicated that one. I'm going to duplicate head front. There we go. And I'm going to change it to head left 34. Thanks for bearing with me on that one. All right, now I'm going to drop it down on top and then go inside. I'm going to start with the, I'm going to select this head layer, hit Y on my keyboard, and I'm going to slide it over using the original chin as. A reference point, I'm going to push the head out just a little bit, because as the head rotates, it comes off the neck a little bit. Now let's do the same thing to the chin. Find the right version. Move it over. The nose will come over this way. The eyes will move over this way. Now for the ears, it's a tricky one. You can have one ear here. Just move it forward and that should be fine. And you can see, I need to lower my like side brow region. Let's see. May move that in, save it. Does that clean it up? Yeah. Okay. As that ear comes forward, you technically don't really need an ear on this side. But if you really want one, what I would suggest doing is maybe scaling it down just a little bit and then moving it in just a hair. Another thing you can do is if you want your eyes to parallax with each other, as the head rotates, one eye will come in front of the other one. What you could do here is duplicate the eyes and you'll have a mask, one eye and a mask around the other. Then you can just pinch them together just ever so slightly that might give you a better effect for what you're trying to go for. It's really up to you. Perfonal preference, personal preference. All in all, that's looking good. Last thing we need to do is change the bangs it y on the keyboard, I have my rotation view of the, more of a profile view of the bangs. And we'll put that here. Cool head left, three quarters done. Now I'm going to duplicate that, drop it into our head composition. And I'm going to rename this one head profile. Let's go inside of this one. We do not need both eyes, so I will delete one, the head layer again. This will come forward as well. We'll bump it over here and let's change the chin to match. Then the eyes and the nose. We'll come to the front of the face. We can delete that back here. Let's pull this ear over. The bangs might get tricky here. Let's see. Yeah, they break out of the head a bit. We might need a third version of the bangs just to wrap that part around. I do have a third version. Let me see. I might want to do something like this. Maybe it's save then on the bangs. Let's go ahead and find that new version. Put it here. Cool. I love it. Okay, now we're going to start to do our turns to get to the back, let's go ahead and duplicate left profile. I'm going to call this left, maybe 34 back. I'll come back into my head composition. Put it on top. Let's go inside. I think I can leave everything as it is. I don't need to change too much. I do want to put the eyes behind the head. I'll move them over. Put the nose behind the head. Move that back a bit. Bang. I probably won't need. And I'll put the hair on top. Next we'll put the ears on top. And I'm just going to move it over and scale it down a bit. Maybe we'll try 70. That looks pretty good. Okay. All in all that feels pretty good. We have the left in the back. Everything on this head might start to move from the profile back a little bit because we're moving the head in a circle. So maybe I'll push it back just to touch. Here we go. Then we're going to final, we're going to end it with head back. I'm going to duplicate head front, and I'm going to rename it back. I'll put that here on top, and we'll go inside And things we don't need, Don't need bangs. Don't need nose, don't need eyes. We do need ears. Hair is going to come to the top and boom. That's simple. This is the back of our head, not too bad. Now we have a full rotation of our head. I can see that there's a bit of a jump here between the profile head and the back three quarter maybe. What I'll do is I'll come here and keep moving this three quarter back until yeah, it's a little bit more clean. With that transition, that looks pretty good. Okay. Now you're probably wondering, we have a full rotation from the front to the back going along the left side, but now we need the right side. What we have to do is we cannot just copy all of these compositions. Duplicate them, and then scale them to the other side. Because of the way joysticks insiders works, if we did that, everything on our copied frames that were scaled negative would work inverse. If I move my joystick this way, the head would go that way. That's not what we're trying to achieve. We have to make new compositions, but we can utilize the ones we've already made. Starting with left three quarter, I'm going to duplicate it. I call it right three quarter. I can drop that on top. Actually, I drop it to the bottom. Go inside. Then here what we can do is we can create a new null object. We're going to attach everything in this layer to the null object. Hit scale here, we can put it negative. The only thing that we're going to have to counter as of right now is the eyes. Unfortunately, these eyes have to be scaled in the opposite direction. We can delete the null. We no longer need it, but as you can see, the have been scaled to the negative side. What we want to do is scale them back to positive 100. We'll just move them like, okay, now we have eyes that are not backwards because that's important too. When we go and put joysticks and sliders to our pupils, we wanted to follow the joystick. And if this was negative, it would go the opposite direction of where we put our joystick. Cool, we fix that. Now we need he left profile. We'll duplicate it. We're going to call this one, you guessed it, Head right profile. And I didn't even get it right. There we go. Right profile. I'll put right profile at the bottom Again, let's do null, null, object. Add everything to it, scale it negative. And our eye needs to go, we can delete that. No object needs to be facing the opposite direction. We'll just put it back to where we found it. In fact, we might want this eye instead because that is his left eye and he is facing to the right, so the left eye would be showing. Next we are going to do what have we got? Three quarter back. Duplicate it. We are going to call this one head right three quarterback. We're going to drop it into our head composition. Come inside and we're going to do null object, just like the other ones and attach it. Once it's attached, we scale it negative, we can delete that. The e has to scale to the opposite direction, back to 100. Again, it's probably, probably, it is this I that needs to be here. And we'll just put it back into position. Coming back into the head. The last thing we have to do is duplicate head back. It's a nice little head sandwich. It starts with head back. Goes through all the turns, and then it ends in head back. The reason for that is because we are going to be, we're going to be changing opacities. Remember how I said when we did the torso? It starts on the back, goes to the front, and then ends on the back. We're doing the same thing with the head. I'm going to hit on the keyboard. We're going to key the opacity at 100. For this, go down one frame and turn it to zero. Next, I'll select these and we'll do toggle key frame hold. I think there was eight in this whole transition, so I'm going to key that zero as well. Next what I'm going to do is copy these keyframes. Come to my three quarter back, paste them, and this has to be moved forward, one actually, as that is still off. Okay? On the off then this one. Okay, I'm confusing you guys because I'm confused. This one needs to be off. Here we go. It's going to be off until it goes to this key frame. Then it comes on and then it can turn off and it should be off there too. Cool, Now we're starting to get somewhere. I'm going to copy these keyframes, and this will really be the set that we use the whole way. Hit V, hit on the keyboard, and we're going to move this over just one. Then we're going to paste those key frames. Hit on the keyboard. We're going to move this over offset just one. Then we're going to paste those key frames, offset just one. Paste key frames, it offset just one. We are going to paste those key frames offset just one. We are going to paste these key frames. It looks like this is not going to be my ending. Let's just see where my ending is going to be. Where do I end up? Is it here? Let's copy these. Let's paste. Get ten. Now we have a head rotation. Which one's going off? This one needs to be on here. Oh, come on, you. I got to move all these over just one. So now it's going to go bump, bump. I think I can leave that. Does that work? I don't know. Maybe we have a head rotation. Look at that. And we have a key frame. So it starts on the back, it starts to rotate around, comes all the way around, and then back to the other side. There it is. In case you don't quite understand it, let's look at everything we've got. Let's fix these up a bit. We have almost everything off except for the last key frame. Then as we move forward, last keyframe goes off, and then this one comes on, then this one goes off, and this one comes on and so forth the way up until we get back to zero. I think we can do that. We'll move these over to nine. There we go. Okay. Now that this is set up, it's looking really good. We have all of the states of our head in perfect rotation. Now what we're going to do is go back into our character. One, I'm going to reposition the head while I'm here, I might as well turn on my proportionate grid and notice that I am not centered at all. That's just because I did a poor job making sure that layers were centered. All I have to do is select everything. We haven't really rigged anything yet. That's the plus, I'm just going to move it to the center, center out my character, so everything is nice. And even the next thing we're going to do is we're going to rig up the head. Now we have everything set up, it's looking good. I'm going to hit Y on the keyboard and move my anchor point of my head to right around where my mouth will go with the head selected. We are now going to come into Du Basel, hit our links and constraints option. Then what we're going to do is come to the connector option and hit the circle. Next, we're going to hit the create slider control. Then it's going to create one. It's already automatically going to call it head because our head was selected. That is perfect. That is what we want. Now we are going to select the red circle, the head control. If you don't have these options or these values already set, and let's say that these numbers are graded out. What you can do is select your head circle for your slider, and then just select this Eyedropper tool and then click that, That's going to load all the properties of that slider control. Next what we're going to do is go back into our head composition and we're going to select all of our key frames on the opacity. Let me come back to basil. Instead of connecting to properties. We're going to connect to opacities when we select that, everything should work. Let's find out when I move this. Look at that. But what did you believe? That I have them going the wrong way. Okay, I figured out what the problem was. Your key frames need to be going the opposite direction. The head needs to rotate from this direction to the other direction. It doesn't really make sense to me. For whatever reason, that's what we got to do. So that's what we're going to do. I'm going to switch all the layers around. Head front stays in the middle, everything else around it, we'll switch. Then these need to be switched as well. Then we'll do head back up here and there. Now we have head front and then it goes three profile back back. Then he left 34 profile back. Now change our pasities. They need to be going in the opposite direction. What we're going to do is starting with this bottom, I guess we'll start from the top because it's easiest to see. This one will be off, then at this point it will be here, starting on the other side, and we'll keep it on to there. There's no easy way to do this. Maybe we'll go backwards. Then this one will turn here and then turn off. Then we'll just move these key frames all around until they make a nice sequence. Essentially, we just need to reverse literally everything, okay? This one starting will be on, the bottom back head is then it will turn off, Then this key frame will turn on, and then it will turn off. So what's happening? So I've got on and off. I feel like something is not right. How are these all off? Okay, there we go. But this doesn't feel right either. Okay, so bottom off. And then these opacities sequence through appropriately. Now that we have this done, let's go ahead select all of our key frames and then we're going to connect it to opacities. Now with their fingers crossed. There it is, We did it. Oh my gosh. Okay, that's looking really good. Now that we have a head that rotates and we have a body that rotates that's looking real good, we have accomplished what we set out to do, which is get the head to rotate appropriately. There's still a couple things that we need to do to set this up. We're going to tackle those in our next tutorials in this Torial. We're going to go ahead and start setting up our facial features. We're going to tackle things like the eyebrows, the mouth, and the eye movements in the blinks. Check out the next one. Let's get into it. 7. Step 05 - Face Rig: Now we're going to get started out on rigging the face. We're going to do things like eyebrow movements, blinks, pupil movements, and the mouth. Let's get started on that. All coming into our head composition. This is where we are going to start adding some things. Let's jump into head front. I'm really just working my way through the compositions until I get to the eyes once I come inside the eyes. Going to tackle this from the easiest problem to the hardest problem. Right now, our easiest problem is getting the pupils to move. If you do not have joysticks and sliders, which I highly suggest you get, there are some ways around this, you could create a new null object. Just put it in the center. Okay, Some of my eyeballs are not in the center. I'm not going to worry about that right now. Put it in between the eyes. What you could do is just attach the eyes to this no object and you can move them around like that. Something else you might see as they break through the pupil right there. A way around that in a way that we're going to actually do this is toggle our switches down here at the bottom. We are going to use the eye layer as a track map. Then you switch it here. Don't switch, we just turn back on our eyes. Thankfully, this new version of after effects, you don't need multiple layers to create mats. That was such a headache before. I don't know why, they never thought of the solution. But now we have eyes that are being masked by a layer that's already there, genes, that's one way to do it. And you can see when the eyes break through to the other side, they're still there a way around that would have to be creating two sets of eyes and two sets of pupils, which we're going to do anyway. Once you have one, you're going to designate that I to the other left or right. We'll mask this one out, and then we'll mask the other one out. Now we have two eyes, one on the left and one on the right. The same being said for the pupils, we need to mask one pupil to the left. Let me re center this. I'm going to turn off these mats. All right, grab your masking tool. We'll do one on the left side of the head and then one on the right side of the head. Now the right side and the right side. These two go together, then these two will go together. This pupil need to be masked out by this E. And then we'll turn that pupil back on. This pupil needs to be masked out by this eye, and we'll turn that eye back on. Now when we move the eyes, they will only be visible. The pupils will only be visible the eye that they are associated with, cool. Now that we have our eyes set up so that the pupils can move and not break out of that shape, and this is where joysticks and sliders comes in. We can actually separate the eyes so that they move more consistently the way that the eyes rotate. That being said, I'm not using the null object version. I'm going to select my pupils, hit P on the keyboard and I'm going to key their position. Now, joysticks and sliders, you can only have a series of five key frames. Those five key frames are all you have to play with with a left or right up and down movement. At the starting frame, we have to have a neutral pose. This is your center pose going down one key frame, this will be them looking to their left. So I'm going to move it till the pupil just touches the edge of the eye. I'll do the same with the other one. Now going down one key frame, I'm going to move the pupils to the other side. They are just touching the edge of the pupil. Now on this next key frame, this is going to be them looking up. I'm going to just recenter these and then I'm going to move them up. Just the pupils and move them up. Then finally move them down. Cool, now we have pupils moving, everything looks good. Let's go and select those key frames. All five of them. You must have five key frames. What we're going to do is come into our joysticks and sliders options. We're going to click this little box to create a new joystick, and I'm going to call it eyes. Automatically. It puts this giant thing right in front of our viewing area. I'm just going to tone down the opacity. Let's see. Oh yeah, that's what I'm talking about, eyes that work. Cool. Now that we have that, let's move on to the blink. For the blink, I'm going to create a shape layer. It's going to be a rectangle that comes just below the eye. I do want to make sure that it comes below the eye. I don't want it kissing the edge of it because that might show up at some point, we don't want to ever see it. Then I'm going to add one point stroke, then holding Alt. I'm going to move an upper eyelid above. These are my eyelids. I'm going to rename it lids. Now I'm going to select one of the eyes. This is the white part of the eyes. I'm going to duplicate it, but I'm just going to bring it up above the eyelids and remove the mask. With that being done, I'm going to select my eyelids and I'm going to do a track mat of the eyes that I just put above the head coming inside of each rectangle. I'm going to do the transform and select position. Go inside rectangle, transform position. Now with the transform of each rectangle keyed with a position, you can hit you on the keyboard. And we're going to go forward one frame. Hit page down. At this point we're just going to bring the eyelid up from the bottom and then down from the top just until they overlap. That is our blink. If you don't have joysticks and sliders, you can always animate these blinks, just like you would have to do it manually in this section. But because I am using joysticks and sliders, and maybe you are too. What we're going to do is we're going to create a slider for the select these key frames, go into sliders, we're going to call this now with our blink slider, we can animate that blank look at that. This is looking pretty good. But I want to take it a little bit further. What we can do is with our eye mask, remember this is the one that the eyelids are being cropped out with for the circle. What I want to do is come to effect Matt simple choker. And we're going to push it in the opposite direction. What this is going to do is it's going to expand our eyelids outward. And this is going to give us that nice line under the eye. As our character starts to blink, it gives us an eyelid, which is really cool. If we come back into character, obviously you can see his eyelids should not be green. What I like to do, we don't need to Never mind. Scratch that. Go to character for this. Then pick the color of your character's skin. Then going back into the eyes, you can select the eyelids and change the color. Now our character has matching eyelids. And they have this cool effect where the eyelids have a stroke tube that expand beyond the eyes. Now if you come into the three quarter view, look at that. Everything is connected because we are using the same eye composition. Now that's working, it's looking good. The next thing we need to do, let's take this eye blink and put it in the middle. And I want to try something. This is something I've done with other characters. I want to open up the effects in the slider control, and I want to attach the slider to the scale. Did it work? Maybe I have to amplify it. Let's see if we come in here, maybe go times 100, okay? Maybe that's not how I did it. I hate it when I do things and then I forget how I actually did it. Times maybe negative 100, something changed. Let's try negative one. All right. Never mind. That did not work. Just going to just forget I did. That battery is running low. Okay. So now we have this blink, but we need to get that blink into our parent comp, which is our character. So what I want to do is here, come back into eyes, go to parent. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So put it no, there's got to be a way. Can we put it here? Oh, character one, did that do it now, why didn't you work eyes, the parent. All right, let's try this again. Scratch. All right. So now what we have to do is we have to actually take this blink control and bring it over to the character one composition. Now we're going to have to be going through quite a few series of compositions to get there. Here's our blink. I'm actually also, while I'm here I'm going to bring over the eyes. I'm going to try a method. Let me see if this works. If I come here to joysticks and then I go into my parent comp is character one, I want to see if I can transfer, with my eyes selected. I want to see if I can transfer that to the parent. Yep. Let's see if it worked. Character one. Nice. That's an easy way to do that. Let's make sure it does function. Cool. The eyes are functioning. This just saves me a step of going from the eyes to the head, to the head comp and then into my character. That works great. Now back to the Bs. For some reason the blinks don't work that way. Not sure why sliders doesn't function the same way. Unfortunately, we just have to keep going until we get into we can turn that one off. Now let's go into our head comp now. Let's just parent this one into our parent comp and then we can turn it off. Now, it should be here. Here's our blink. We'll just move that around. Let's make sure it's still set up. Functions. Nice. Cool. Okay, now we have blinks, we have eye movements. The next thing we need to set up is our eyebrows. We want to get some eyebrows at work. We need to think about this. If I put eyebrows on this layer, will they work well when I move into different head views, eyebrows should work well here. It's here that I don't think that they're going to work very good. Let's just try it. I want to see if it does work. We're going to create one shape layer. This is going to be our eyebrow shape layer right here. I'm going to create a shape. This will just be like a neutral eyebrow position for my character. This one does not need a fill. And the stroke can be as big as your eyebrows need to be. I'm going to put a little taper on it. We'll come into shape and we'll go stroke. And let's check out our tapers. Start length, maybe we'll put at zero and then end length. Maybe we'll do the same, maybe not quite as much. Then we can play around with some of these settings till we get a nice look to our eyebrow. It looks pretty good to me. What I'm going to do is I'm going to duplicate this eyebrow, and I'm just going to trans scale it to the negative side. Now we have eyebrows that are on both sides of our eyes. The next thing we need to do is we're going to create a mask. This is what's going to cover up the eyes, as the eyebrows move up and down over. If we have a character with a really evil look to them, this will fix it. The way we're going to do this is I'll start with a point here. Over and then up we're going to create this forehead look. Then right here, I'm going to click at the corner of my eyebrow and I'm going to match pretty closely the curvature of my eyebrow. There we go. Maybe we can pull this one out. Okay, this one does not need a stroke. In fact, we need to make this our same skin color as our character. Next what we can do is pull this to the bottom so the eyebrows are on top of it. Then we're going to keep our paths for all three of these. Hit you on the keyboard and move these to the first key frame. This is going to be our neutral pose. We're going to move forward one key frame. This will be when the joystick goes to the left, you can come up with your own expression. Typically what I do is I do like a, I don't know what you would call this, really intrigue almost or maybe what would you call that? Intrigue? Perplex. I don't know. Either way, it's a good look. Now we move this mask layer to follow the eyebrows. At any point that your eyebrows move, this mask layer needs to move to. We'll do it just looks good. Now I'm going to reset. All of my poses. So I'll come back to joysticks and hit Origin. It's going to put all the key frames from the beginning into this point on the timeline where I'm at now. Now for my next position, this will be going to the left. In that direction, I'm going to do a sad look. This will be eyebrows curving inward and coming down. You can really push it because you don't have to do the full extent of the pose that you've created. You can find a variation that works. Make sure the corners of these eyebrows follow the shape of your eyebrow. There we go and we'll do origin again. We're going to move the eyebrows upward just a little bit. A lot of this is going to depend on your character and what you can get away with. I have a feeling this might be too high. Let's just check that pushes the boundaries of what I can do. I think I'll keep that. Let's come back into the eyes now. We have to move all of these pieces back to match. And that's it. I'm sorry. That's not it. We have one more now. We're going to do anger. Let's just go back to origin. We're going to select these key frames. Move these key frames and move them. You can this one quite a bit. You can exaggerate it because we don't to use all the anger that we create, it's better to have more ability and more flexibility than you need, then be limited by the amount of expressions that you can convey. We're going to, there we go, now that's all we need. Now we are five key frames, total of 15 keyframes. We're going to select them, we're going to create a new joystick and slider, and I'm going to call this one eyebrows. Now what I'm going to do is scale this down, change the opacity so I can see what we're doing. Let's just see how it moves. There we go. You can be sad, then you can be angry, and you can be confused, happy. Now that I'm thinking about this, I think I might want to separate the eyebrows from the mask. Let me call this one eyebrows. I'm going to duplicate it. I'm going to call this one eyebrow mask. I'm going to move the eyebrow mask just down here on my eyebrows. What I can do is just turn off or delete shape three. That's that big mask part. Now all I have our eyebrows. Then on the eyebrow mask, what I can do is delete the two eyebrows that we created. Then using this eyes, we can create a mask. We have where is it eyebrow mask, which is going to be masked out by layer eight. Now when we move our eyebrows, that all we see is the shape as it gets covered by the eyes, as it goes over the eyes. Next what I want to do is come back into character one, or I'm sorry, let's go into head and we're going to make sure that character one is selected at our joysticks and sliders. Remember this is the trick. This is the way that we get around having to go from this up to this comp, to this comp, to this up, and then into our character comp. We're going to jump over all of them. What we're going to do is with eyebrows selected. We're going to make sure and don't do the dropdown because that character one will probably disappear. We're just going to hit to parent, can I not selected? Let's select eyebrows. And then to parent, there we go. Now I can turn this off, we can come into character one. Here they are. Is that it Lets the eyes, here it is, here's my eyebrows. Let's see if they work. Yes, they do. He's looking so good. All right, while I'm thinking about it, let's go through our head rotations and just make sure our eyes are looking okay. And it worked beautifully on this one. It works okay there and then back. Okay, that works, and so forth. I'm really pleased with how that turned out. Aside from this tiny little dot, I don't know what's going on. All right. We'll figure that out later. 8. Step 06 - Mouth Rig: Now we're going to get started on the mouth. Using joysticks and sliders, we're going to create different mouth shapes that we can control with one joystick seamlessly, and it'll give a very nice organic flow to the mouth. Let's jump into it and see what we create. I have already sketched out some mouth shapes that I want to use with joysticks and sliders. You can only have five mouth shapes, which does limit us. Not all the mouth shapes technically need, but we can get pretty close Using this technique, it gets a good, seamless transition from shape to shape. What you sacrifice in mouth shapes you gain in fluidity. I prefer it. I think that it's a good solution. The first shape that we use is a natural resting shape. If your character is happy, they're going to have a happy open mouth shape. This is a, a generic shape in between you start off with this, then we're going to move into the shape. Obviously this will be for sounds like maybe even a confused or shock shape, like oh my gosh, what's happening next is going to be more of like an sounds. Then finally will be our shape. This will be our smile. If your character has a smile, this is where you put it. If your character is grumpy, perturbed, or just negative disposition to the world and they don't smile, this could be just a straight line. It doesn't have to be a smile. It could be just a straight line. Then finally we're going to go into a or a shapes. This could be also expression of shock, horror, fear, but with the mouth shapes, for words, this is a sound. If you don't want to look so shocking and scared, you can tone back on that. We're going to take these five mouth shapes and we are going to create our joysticks and slider mouth rig. Let's get started. I'm going to copy this and I'm going to move into head front. I'm just going to use this as a template for the shapes I would like to create. Also, mouth size is very important as well. You don't want your mouth too big because then it's going to cause problems with the rig as we go from different head spaces. You don't want it too small? I don't know. Well, maybe you do. It's really up to you. I would say you can go smaller but don't go bigger just because it's going to get complicated or maybe not. Let's see, is that good? I think I'm Gale mine back to the original size. Yeah, that looks good. Maybe down just a little bit. All right. First thing we got to do, there's really going to be about three parts to the mouth. There's going to be the back of the mouth, the teeth. Then there's going to be the lips. I use a stroke, obviously, for my mouth shapes. If yours doesn't have a stroke, then maybe you just need two mouth shapes. The back of the mouth and the teeth. But let's get started here. In the middle, I'm going to pull out curve around and then come right to the bottom. We're just trying to make the smoothest shape possible. We want this to be very bean like big old jelly bean. And thankfully, with the mouth, because it's an organic shape, it doesn't have to necessarily be perfectly mirrored. You can get away with pretty good and not perfect. I'm going to go ahead and put a one point stroke on this. I'm going to call this lips. Then I'm going to duplicate it. I call it mouth. Mouth will go below the lips and then we're going to fill it with something more of like a mouth color like that. I'm going to turn it off for a second so I can see my teeth coming above the lips. You want to start your teeth trajectory, then I want some nice smooth edged teeth. Again, your teeth design will probably be different. Have fun with it. Feel free to explore different options. You could do just a straight up around twink like I did, or you could add actual individual teeth. It really depends on what your preference is. You could add something like this to your shape, But I'm just going to keep it simple. When you have your top teeth done, the next thing we're going to do is now you can either make new bottom teeth or you could just duplicate, duplicate the teeth that you do have. Bring the anchor point down and then just rotate it into position. And that's what I'm going to do. Bottom teeth are actually probably going to be a little bit smaller. What I'll do is having a hard time here, pull these in, flatten it a bit, and then pull these in. Then I'll reposition it. Okay, So now we have the teeth done. I'm going to call them teeth. Teeth. There we go. The teeth will go behind the lips. Now we can turn our mouth back on. What we're going to do is we're going to take our teeth, hit toggle switch modes, and we're going to mask out our teeth with our mouth layer on. The teeth come over here to the track mat and we're going to go select mouth. Then we get to turn mouth back on. Then you can see we now have teeth that are masked out by the shape of our mouth. We're ready to go. One last thing that we have to do is we are going to take the mouth shape, come into the contents, shape one and expand to the path. Then open up your lips. Do the same thing. Open up to the path we're going to pick. Whip the mouth shape to the lip shape. There we go. While we're here on this first key frame, we can go ahead and key the path of the lips. Now what's going to happen is anytime we move the lips, the mouth shape will follow with it. They are parented together, our teeth shape. The only thing that we need to key is the bottom teeth. Make sure your bottom teeth go below your top teeth. I'm going to call this bottom teeth just so I know we're going to key position. Let's go to position key. And then we can hit you on the keyboard. Same with the lips hit you on the keyboard. Let's bring our time line in. There we go. We have our first key frame. Now we're going to page down to our next shape. Let's move this over. What we're going to do is we are going to pull the lip shape way in. We actually want to pull it down below the teeth. I do not want the teeth exposed. We're clearly just using the sketches as a reference. We're not trying to copy them exactly just as a reference. Here we go. Remember, those top teeth never move. Don't ever touch your top teeth because they are attached to your skull. Your skull doesn't squash and stretch. The only thing that moves, it's your bottom jaw. And your bottom teeth are connected to your bottom jaw. They're the only thing that's going to move. All right. This is looking pretty good. I like to make shape. You can make your shape a perfect circle if you'd like. I tend to like to make mine. What do you call that shape? Like a beat of water sitting on a table or something. That's too big. Let's keep making it smaller. I really want to tighten it up. All right, that looks better. Now we have these two shapes. If I page up and down between them, that's looking good. We might even be able to, let me just make sure that this is center on my teeth, looks pretty good. We might want to pull the bottom teeth down just a hair because as you do that ooze shape, it extends the jaw bit. There we go. Actually, while I'm thinking about it, one other thing we have to do is create that little bottom lip shape on the lips. We're going to just create this lip and then we're going to key that too. We'll open up the contents and key the path. Then it'll change it here to tighten up around the lip. Go. All right, next shape that we have is this G or this shape. I'm just going to move it to the side so I can see what I'm doing. If you select your shape layer like lips, you can come over here and joysticks and slider and hit origin and it'll put your right back to where he started. That's very helpful for getting your mouth shapes closer to what you're aiming for in this one. Remember the top teeth don't move. We're going to pull the bottom teeth. We get this teeth clenched, then we're going to move around the lips so that they have this opposite shape. Instead of going up for like a smile, we're going to come down, maybe expose some more of those top teeth. All right, that looks good enough. It's not quite like the sketch, but you get the idea. Keep pulling that one up that what I want. All right? And then this little guys up here, kind of tiny. All right? That looks pretty good. Next shape, we have a smile. Teeth again will come up, so we can probably key the position. Smile. The smile is a little tricky, we want it to be in the middle of the mouth. These two will come together and this will turn upward. If you hold control alt on on a curve, a bezier curve, you can break the connection to get two handles. You could do a full mouth smile, if that's what you're going for. I'm going to go for a little bit of like a crooked smile that goes to one side. I think it just adds a little bit more character. Also, if the control Alt click doesn't work for you, you can always come up here to the convert vertex tool. I don't need to tell you this, I'm sure you already know, but that does the same job. Okay, so we have our smile. Looking pretty good. Let's move this little bottom shape, this little curve here on the crest of the lip. It's challenging. I'm not sure how I want to tackle that yet. How do I want to do that? I wonder maybe I put it on the mouth. I'll come back to that. Okay, and then our last shape, we're going to come over here and this is going to be a, I can't believe this tutorial is taking so long, that kind of panic horror. Here we go. Top teeth, don't move bottom teeth. I'm going to keep them there for now. We'll see exactly how far down we want to put them. I think I'll lower that a little bit. We want the corners of the mouth to really drop down. A lot of the weight and expression is going to be at the bottom of your teeth, not at the top. If it's too high, it's going to be like, oh, you don't want that. It's going to be a horse trying to eat a carrot, or you want to keep it down curl in this bottom section. Let's change this up a bit. There we go. Now let's lower these teeth like that right there. That looks good. I like that, so there's not a lot of teeth exposed. I had too much teeth in my sketch. Look at that. All these shapes are amazing. All right, let's turn this off. Cool. Now we have a total of five key frames that's important. You have to have a keyframe on every single mouth shape. If you have something that doesn't change, like your teeth position don't change, so you go, oh, I'm just going to take these key frames out because there's nothing happening. You have to have key frames, so make sure you have a keyframe on every single shape. Once these are all done, before we rig it up, I'm going to select them and I'm going to copy these because these are going to go into our other head shapes and it just makes it easier once it's rigged. Now that I have my layers copied, what I can do is select the key frames. Come over to joysticks and sliders in this little square here. On joysticks, we're going to create a new controller called mouth bot being botta, Boom. Let's see how it goes. Here we go. This is our neutral pose, this is our smile. Oh my gosh. It's so good. Then this is our 000. Okay, then you'll notice in between, we can create some unique shapes. This is more like a smirk, just the way that they blend together. It creates different. This could be like an, even though there's only five shapes, the blending of the five shapes actually creates four more different shapes. Here in the corners. It's truly cool and you can get creative with it and learn different things. Let's see how it looks on our character. A, Yes, I think looks great. What do you think Character? Oh yeah, I like it. That's what I'm talking about. Cool. Now what we get to do is we're going to take these shape layers that were already copied and we're going to put them into the other heads. Now for some reason, if you didn't copy them or it doesn't transfer, here's what you do, you select your mouth controller, come over here. This is our separate, what's called unbind. We're going to unbind these layers. If you click it, what it's going to do is put your keyframes back onto your shape layers and then the controller does nothing. Now you can select these, copy them, and then we'll paste them. Then also, once you're ready to bind them back together, just select your key frames and hit this link. This is going to bind them back to your controller, but just make sure you have the right controller selected. They are now bound to the mouth controller. Let's go through and I'm going to add these mouth shapes to the rest of the heads. All right, I'm back now that I've put all of my mouth shapes into their corresponding heads, the way that you're going to rig all of these things together is we're going to go back into our head front, which is the original one we set the rig up in. When you select your mouth, what we're going to do is we're going to do our, here's how we do the hack. For the joystick, we're going to go into into head one which is the comp that has all of our heads. We're going to find the parent comp which is character one. That's where we want our final resting place for our joystick to be. We're going to select it here. Going back into head front where our mouth controller is. We're going to not do the toggle down on this parent because we're going to leave it loaded and we're going to select the parent. Now this is going to jump over our head comp and into our character. One comp. Let's see if it works. And it does. With that being done, now what we're going to do is come into our head front. We're going to copy our joystick and slider. And we're going to paste it inside of here. Once we have it pasted, now we can select our key frames and we're going to bind everything to this metal object or this joystick. We're going to do the same thing for the other heads. Let's move on in, Paste it. You to expose our key frames. We're going to go ahead and bind it up. Hit you on the keyboard to expose these key frames. Then we're going to paste our joystick in. Then we are going to bind them to the mouth. Let's do the same thing here. We'll paste our joystick, expose our key frames by selecting these layers and hitting you. Then we will bind them to the joystick. All right, now we have all of our head shapes with the mouth as we rotate, this mouth or this head, the mouth shape should rotate with it. All right, that looks great. And each one will be moving the same as the others. Now if you do that crooked smile like I did, you might want to rotate the mouth in the other direction as it goes to this side of the face. We might want to scale. Let's go ahead and see if we can just scale it like this. If we scale, transfer it to the other side, that should work. And we'll do the same thing to head profile. We'll attach these to the mouth. Hit scale and we'll go in the opposite direction. All right, that should be everything for our mouth. Now we have all our mouths connected. The joysticks and sliders is working perfectly for the mouth shapes. And we have them in all of the heads. It's all looking great. We have one more step to do now for the head. That is create the subtle movements using joysticks and sliders to create the acting that we're going to need. In this next step, we're going to go through all the heads and we're going to set up the different head rotations that we'll need. Let's get into it. 9. Step 07 - Limbs: Now we're going to start working on our limbs. We're going to rig up our arms and our legs. Yeah, I'm going to show you two methods to doing that. One of those methods is using limber, which I suggest. But let's jump into it and see what we got. If we come into our character, you can see I'm starting to clean up some of my controls, my joysticks and sliders. If we find our, let's see where we are. Let's do, maybe we'll grab these. I'll just duplicate them and pull them over. The easiest way to do this is using ****. If you've never used duck before, it's a free program and it's extremely powerful. But it does have its limitations. Let me show you how to set this up. This is the easiest version of rigging the limb. If you grab the upper arm, which is this part here, hit y on the keyboard and we're going to move our anchor point right to this. Do you want to get as close as possible? Once you have that anchor point in position, we're going to move on to the forearm, which is this arm portion here. Hit Y on the keyboard, make sure everything is in position right in the middle. If you're not sure, you could always do this to rotate and see how it looks. If it breaks here, it will break when you rig it. If it rotates and looks good, you're good to go. Finally, we are going to set up an anchor point for the wrist right here on our dot, there we go. Coming into it, you're going to go into the rigging options and hit the hand control with your hand selected. We're going to create this little circle with a cross or plus sign. Then you can leave where it's at. I'm going to move it down just for the sake of ease. Next we're going to parent things to their parents. Left hand will go to the lower arm, and lower arm will go to the upper arm. Once you have everything parented to the layer above it, you're good to go and you have to select them in this order. Follow along. You select it with left hand, lower, left upper arm. And then finally your control which is left hand. Now. You can move over to Wick right in the middle. We're going to click I. Yeah, the links and constraints. Then down here at the very top, auto rig. Click at once, you can turn off this line and you're done. You've created a lamb Slim functions perfectly. There's nothing wrong with it, per se. You can move it around, everything looks good. The only things are it breaks when you pull it apart. If you want to switch sides, for your elbow to bend the opposite direction, there's only one switch and it's hoggles on and off. Those are my only complaints. If you're going to switch the direction of the arm, you have to make sure it's basically open. And then you can click it and now open the opposite direction it works, but it's not my favorite. Another option, I'm going to delete this. Let's grab this limb and I'm going to do it again. Another option is using limber. In order to use limb, we have to create a limb. If you come over here, select and taper, we can just click. You can call it what you need. I'll call this right. It's going to create a new limb for you. Now one thing you could do actually, is just simply use the limb that they provided. If your arm is simple enough, all you'd have to do is Match the arm as closely as possible to your existing arm. You can turn off the shape and then line everything up. You'll be good to go. Then that's it. It's literally that simple. Then you would set up your sizes to match. There you go. It could be that simple. There's a few things you can do to fix to make it match your limb a little bit better. One, you can select the skin color, actually that's the skin color. Then you can select the shirt color, and then you can change these things around to match. There you go. Finally, if you need to come into your limb, we're going to find the objects we need. Proximal upper, what we can do is add. We're going to come to this option here. We're going to add a stroke. We'll make it black, then we'll make it one point instead of two. Then we can copy that stroke and then add it to other things like the distal upper. Then we'll come into the lower group and add it to proximal, proximal lower. What we'll need to do is switch these around. The upper group will go below the lower group. Next, we need to take off or increase that, the lower split. What else do we need to do? We need to get rid of that circle. On the lower group, there should be a, I guess it's not going to work. I guess what we'll do instead is add a trim path to this. Then we'll have to take away the stroke here in the elbow that looks good. And now it bends and functions properly. That's another way we can just mimic what we already created an illustrator. And the reason that that is beneficial to you is because of a couple options. One, you can stretch it, it shouldn't break, but maybe we can fix that a little bit. This trim path is functioning a little weird for me, but it has some good stretch to it. You can go pretty far without breaking it. Number two is if we want to switch the elbow to the opposite direction. This is what I love the most here in dynamics. You can switch the clockwise and you can bend it smoothly to the other side. That is crucial, especially when you want to get smooth fluid movement in your animation. I love it. I've spent so many, countless hours animating characters with wick that only had an elbow that popped left and right. I've spent so much time trying to find ways to hide that so you can't see it now, you don't have to worry about it. That's another option. This is one that I will probably use. Another option is coming back to our limbs. What you're going to want to do is the left upper arm and left lower arm. If you right click and we'll create shapes from layer vectors. Now we have two shape layers made from our AI files, which is really cool. You can use that at any point. If you import something from Illustrator and you create those shape layers, no matter what it is, it's going to put different layers of all the things that you've made in illustrator. Now as shape layers in after effects, you can key those, you can animate them, which is really cool. But what we're going to do is we're going to take these shape layers from our Illustrator files and then we're going to attach them to the limb that we just created in limber. The best way to do this is to turn off your limber limb. And we're going to move our, we're going to move our joints to match our points right here. Why is that in trouble? I just want you to stick in the middle. Come up. That might be close enough. Is this one close enough? All right, let's say that's close enough. The thing that's going to matter the most is when you look at the limb. This is just an outline of the limb that's created. And you can see that the circle of it, it's not in the center of the pivot point on the limbs that we created. We need to adjust this. What we're going to do to adjust it is simply make the upper arm a little bit longer. Let's try one oh five. Then the lower arm a little bit smaller, since we went five on the upper, we'll go five for the lower. What that's doing, it's increasing the upper length root and shrinking the lower length. It's trying to move that center point right over that dot. Let's see if we did it. That definitely looks better. I think that might be good enough. Let's find out. We'll turn this back on. Then what we can do now is you select your limb and your other limb. Then we're going to select the limber limb. We come over here to rig and pose, and when we click it, it's going to ask us a few things. It has these layers already predetermined within the program. The script is really cool, so that we can take our upper art layer. Look, our upper arm is already selected. It already knows our lower arm is already selected. We are set up perfectly when we hit. Okay, going to take those shape layers and put them onto our limb. Now what we can do is we can proximal and distal lower, and then we'll turn off upper and proximal upper. Now these are our shape layers. This is the exact arm that we had made. It bends great. You can see we didn't quite get that center point perfect. It would take some toggling, niggling to get it right. But it has all of the same attributes. We can now switch clockwise rotate. It has, this one has full stretch because there's no trim paths on it. The only issue is you can see it stretches out my shoulder like crazy. If I'm going to pull any stretch into it, it would just be a little bit. But because my arm is simple enough, I'm not going to go with this solution and I'm not going to go with the Du solution. I'm going straight up making my own limb. I'm just going to delete these back to the original limb that I had and call it. This was a very long winded explanation, I apologize, but hopefully now you get it. Hopefully you find a solution that works best for you. With that being said, I'm going to take this arm and I'm going to match it to the positions of my original arm. I can go ahead and turn these off so that when I move this around, I can hopefully just put it right where it needs to be. We're going to move this back below the torso, and that looks pretty good. All right, so I have a functioning arm now that seems to work. All right. Now what I can do, and this is another cool part of limber. As I can select my arm, I can come over here and just duplicate. And then I'm going to name this one. Left arm, just like that. It copies it super easy. Then I'll just move it over to match. I'll pull this stuff down. I actually don't need to pull my controllers down because these guys, I like to keep all my controls up top. Let's have a look. See at this, I just want to make sure everything is in perfect alignment. And it looks like it is now that I have my limbs created and I'm happy with the way they look. What I'm going to do is I am simply just going to delete all of that stuff. Left hand, left hand, right hand. Okay. So all of my stuff is on that one was what was that like A shoulder. Okay. So let's get rid of these arms and hands. So now that that stuffs all made, where's this arm? Get out of here. Arm. Okay. Now I'm going to go ahead and do the same thing for the legs. All right? I have all the limbs rigged up and ready to go. Everything is now functioning just the way it should. These are all looking good. One thing that you can do, let me explain this real quick. Let's say for instance, I have these socks on my character. You might have a question of, well, how do I get socks onto this limb if there's no option to add those colors? The way that I've added these socks is very simple. If you have anything that you would like to add to your limb, let's say it's like a band aid. Okay, What you can do as you can take any shape layer that you've created, you can attach it to your limb. All you do is find what you want or design it in a position that's going to transition well into your limb. And then you find the limb that you want to use. I'm going to use this right leg and I'll select my band aid. And then you can select and pose and then attach it to the part of the limb. In this case, it's going to be the lower, and all you do is hit. Okay. Now what happens is this band aid is now stuck to the body. Pretty cool, huh? I did it the same way for the socks in case you're wondering, now that we have the limbs rigged up ready to go, we're going to start working on the hands and the feet all in. All this process should be fairly simple. What I'm going to do, I'm going to get these limbs back to a neutral pose. Just going to line them back up together. Okay, And then I'm going to select my hands and I'm going to create a new composition. And I will call this left hand. It's actually the right hand, but that's okay. Then just for reference, what I'm going to do is I'm going to create a point here in the middle of my composition. This is going to be my wrist. This is really to get an idea of where the hand is going to be going. If this is my wrist that the hand rotates around, I want it to look something like that. Now what we can do is we can scale the composition size down quite a bit. We're going to go here to the region of interest and we're going to mask out just around the hand you want to make sure you have enough room that if your hand does something crazy, it's not going to break out of the composition. Now that we have that done, what we're going to do is mask just this hand. Okay, What we're going to do is key the position of the mask path. An old shift hit. And we're going to key that position and hit you on the keyboard. That's going to bring up our key frames. Now if we go page down, we can now scroll to our next hand pose. You just want to make sure that it is right on that wrist. Nicely. Okay. Now hit the page down again. And we're just going to do this over and over until we have all of our hands lined up perfectly looking great. We're going to move over to this side now. Then we'll come back. The more hands you have, the more keyframes you're going to need. Finally, this is the end. When you get to the end of your key frames that you're going to need, hit N on the keyboard and then we can go ahead and trim right click And we're going to trim comp to work area. Now we have all these guys transitioning. The next thing we want to do is select our key frames. Right click, and we're going to toggle hold those key frames. Now coming back into character one, we're going to take this right hand and we'll move it above the right arm. We can move it out, we're going to put our rotation point right here. And it really doesn't matter actually, because we're going to be putting the hand attached, rotate it down, and we're going to put it right here in alignment with this controller. Next we're going to attach it to the right wrist, which is this one. Now when we move our hand, our arm, we have a wrist that's attached to it. For some reason it doesn't let you rotate. I don't know why hit R on the keyboard to bring up the wrist rotation. And then all click to take off whatever was hindering that. Now we can rotate and we have a hand, let's turn it off. Just make sure our pivot points and everything look good. That looks pretty good. What we can do is just turn off this template shape. Don't need it anymore. Let's see how it functions. That works pretty good. If you page down, you'll see all of the different hand shapes. I might be able to move the hand out just a little bit. Let's go and rotate. Okay, so these are all looking pretty good. I need, you can see on my arm, we'll take away this line and also add a stroke around the outside of that wrist. But before I do that, let's just set up this simple rig. The way to set it up is very simple. So what we're going to do is come to our hand right click and we're going to go time enable time remap. And it's going to push us all the way to the end of our time line, which is exactly what we want. Then right here on our risk control, what I want to add is we're going to go to expression controls and we're going to add a slider control. Add that there. Then I'm going to call this hand shapes, okay? The next thing we need to do is expand that effect down hand shapes so that the slider is visible down here on the right hand. Make sure that your time remap is visible and we're going to pick whip all the way up to our hand shapes slider control. Now whenever we toggle the position here, it's going to change the value of the hand and switch the shapes. But before we do that, these values are way too big and it's just going to go to zero. And we're going to miss what the hand does. What we have to do is right click and we're going to edit the values starting at zero. We're going to want to go up to something like, I don't even know, maybe 0.5 We can start there and see how it goes. Now we're going to slide it up. Okay, there we go. Now we are transitioning through our hands. And it stops right here, was about 26. We'll go back to edit value and we'll do 0.26 And that is the entirety of all of my hand shapes. There we go. Now this one is functioning beautifully. The cool thing is now we can just duplicate this hand. Then we are going to put it over here onto this wrist. And we're going to scale it in the opposite direction. Now we're going to do a negative scale. Here we go, then our rotations. Let's see if we can zero, we want to go to 90. Here we go. We are just going to attach this to our left wrist. Now this one is going to go to left wrist. On left wrist, we are going to need to add, here's my left wrist. Here we go. We're going to need to add a slider control. I will call this one hand shape shapes. I'm also going to just edit the value because I already know 0.26 is where we need to be next. I'm going to expand the effects until I find my hand shape slider. Then on this new hand, I'm going to find my time remap, then I'm going to pick whip, this time remap to my left hand. Now when I use the slider, everything changes in the opposite hand. We're using the two hands or the same hand. It's just a negative value, we just connect it to a different slider. It's a really great option. Now we're going to do the same thing for the feet. Who? All right. Cool. That looks great. What I can do now is trim the composition of the work area. Select your key frames and right click toggle key frames. Another thing we haven't done yet is we are going to this composition. Now we'll go back into character one, put this foot on top of our leg. Where's our legs? T's bring these down. There we go. Then we're going to attach this to this will be the right leg. I have what? Right leg? Wrist. It's not what it should be called but that's what it is right now. I'm going to move, there we go. Then we're going to do time enable that time. I'm not sure where that time remap is going to go yet. We'll have to figure out how to set up. I think of that I want it to connect to this body. As the body rotates, maybe the feet and the legs will start to spin with it. That will probably be the easiest option. It doesn't give us the most control, but it's the easiest option just to connect it to the body rotate instead of having a body rotate. And then the left and right foot rotate so that we're controlling three. I don't know, or maybe we just do. Maybe what we can do. This is going to be tricky. So now, all right, let me switch this foot to left leg. No, that's not it. There we go. All right, so now we've got these legs all connected. Everything is looking pretty good. I'm just going to add a slider control just like I did for the wrists. This way we can spin the feet individually. So I'll add a slider control. We'll call this foot shape maybe. And then we'll come down to our foot. Which foot did I have that? Yeah, this one. That's two. We'll expand time remap and we'll find this. We're going to rename this one. It should not be called right, like wrist, ankle, we'll call this one that shoulder, we'll call it a hip. For this hip. All right, with this ankle open, we're going to find the effects and go to foot shape, we're going to pick whip our time, remap up to this foot shape. Then we're going to have to set our values. This one is a little bit bigger than the last one. Let's try like 0.3 and see how that does. Now when I slide this, it will come all the way around. We were close, Let's try 0.26 value point to six. That looks pretty good. Now I'll just find the proper foot shape for this one. I'm going to copy that. I'm going to paste it onto here. And then I'm going to grab the other foot. Time remap. Let's just connect everything up. We've got foot shape, pick whip slider. Then I'll move it back to the position it was in. Just by zeroing out this. There we go. Now we have a character with feet and a character with hands and legs. There we go. Now our limbs are all set up. We have hands that function and feet that function. The next thing we're going to work on is we're going to now connect our limbs to our body rotation. That's going to be a fun one, that way we're going to actually start to see our character take shape with the movements he's making. Let's get into that. 10. Step 08 - Head Rotation: Now our next step is to actually rig up all the heads so that they can move using joysticks and sliders. We're going to have to go through each head individually and set up the different positions that we want the head to be moving in when we attach them to the joystick and slider. Let's get into that and set it up starting here at head front. What I'm going to do is we're going to start position. We're going to select all the things that are going to be moving and we're going to add key frames to them. Let's attach the lips in the teeth to the mouth hit. Then we'll open up positions for all of our other layers. We're going to key the position on the first key frame. Then we're going to page down to the next key frame. Key frame one is our neutral key Frame two is going to be moving the joystick to the left, to the right, to the right. Which means we want the head to turn to the left. As it goes this way, the head will turn. Starting with the mouth, we'll go over maybe three clicks. We'll move our bangs over, nose will come over, eyes will come over, head and chin will move over. Maybe one click. We don't want to go too far. Hair will actually go the opposite direction. And ears, we'll move over one, let's see. Okay, there we go. We want the ears to be above the hair. Okay, that looks all right. Let's see if we can push that just a little bit more. Okay, so it looks okay. This ear here needs to be doing something different. So I think what I'm going to do is I'm going to duplicate the ears. I'm going to mask out one side from the other because this ear is sticking out too far. And we actually want to go back. There we go. That looks a lot better. Now we have some good movement toggling to the character's left. Now we need to move the character to the right. I can select, I'm going to move these up. I can select all my layers. We should be able to get back to our origin. There we go. Now I'm going to move everything to the opposite side. I think that one was four moves over. I think Bangs, four moves over as well. No, this is where it gets a little tricky and we have to sacrifice some things. Unfortunately, with joysticks and sliders, we can't change or flip the position of the nose. You could do that using something called a switch template, but those are just so confusing to use. They end up creating these little throw away files that aren't technically used in the composition, but they're used as like a script on the back end. If you end up deleting any unused files, those go with it, and then you end up losing your ability to switch. For these purposes, we're just going to have a nose that stays in one direction but moves into a position that it probably, and we'll see how that works. I think it's going to be just fine. All right, let's keep moving the stuff around. How many was it? Just one. Okay, We'll move chin over one head over one. Here, Going to push this one behind the head. And this one will come forward one and hair will go back one. All right, there we go. We have a head that's looking back and forth. Now we need a head that's going to go up. So we can select all our layers again. Go to origin. Let's move, Mouth up. Maybe two bangs. Nose, eyes to do chin. One head, one ears will come down and then hair will come down. Let's see if that looks pretty good, Obviously, you can see the bangs are not quite where they need to be. Let's go do that. Yeah, that works. Now, maybe I'll move the eyes back down just a little bit. And then move the mouth up just a little bit. Where's mouth? Okay, that looks good. The way that this function, things in the back of the head will tilt, Things in the front of the head will tilt up. It's doing this as the head moves. This is an exaggeration. Our ears don't really move that much because they're pretty much at the pivot point, but this just gives the illusion that the head is going up. You could also add some scale to these things. If you decide that you want your eyes to squish in like they're being rotated, you could do that as well. You just have to make sure you anchor points are at the exact center of where your object is. I try not to mess with the scales if I don't have to. Adds a step that I just don't want to deal with. Okay, so now we have our, let's do our down position. So we'll select our layers, do origin. And then let's push everything. Starting with the mouth. We'll do two clicks. Bangs. We could try to see what happens. Nose will come down. Let's move mouth up, one, we've got nose, eyes. We'll do one click down. Head, one click down. Ears will now go upward. We'll do one click, and hair will go up. This might have been a little bit too exaggerated, but let's just see. Okay, how does that look? I want to say maybe the head in the chin. I need to come up a bit. Okay. Maybe mouth can come up as well. Let's push the mouth up just a little bit. The mouth is already pretty high. Let's see. I'm going to say that's good. Now we have one of our heads set up that what we can do is the same thing we did for the mouth. So what I want to do is I'm going to take all of my keyframes, select them, and we're going to come to joysticks and sliders. And click that square to create a new joystick. We're going to name this one Head Rotate. Let's have a look. See and how it rotates. Does it work? When I move this way, the head goes there. It goes that way. You know what? This works, great. Look at that. Oh my gosh. Awesome. We have a head. It's rotating. Next thing I want to do is come into my head composition and remember going to do our little hack where we jump some compositions. I'm going to select my character one. I'm going to go back into head front. Then we're just going to move our joystick over a composition and into our character ones. We're going to go to parent, boom. Next thing that I'm going to do is I'm going to copy my joystick and slider that's inside of my head front. Then I'm going to move it into each and every one of my head compositions. And I'm going to set up all the movements for those and then connect them to this joystick. I'm going to run through that. I don't think you need to watch this. It's all intuitive. Just like I made the first head do, It feels right for your character. Then when I'm done with that, we'll go through and we'll connect everything together. All right, stay tuned. All right, we have all of our key frames set up now. We have to attach everything to be controlled by the one joystick and slider. Let's go into our character. One, grab our head, rotate. That actually might not be what we needed to do. Let's just go through here. That's right. We're going to go through each individual composition for our heads and we're just going to select all of our key frames, making sure we have a keyframe for every single position. And then we are just going to attach, working our way through, make sure that everything is connected. We're just going to do this real quick. I don't know about you, but I found this to be a very tedious process. But now we're done. We get to see the magic happen. Once we have connected everything up, we've still got a few more heads. Then we are going to go into our composition. Let me explain this to you real quick. What I did for the head profile, where the head is completely turned to the side. I have a left and a right to, but as the joist goes up, I want the head to look up as it goes up and look down as it goes down. I just created this null object and I put the rotation of it right about toward the back of the neck would be attached all my layers to it. As it goes up, I have it rotate up. And then as it goes down, it rotates down. That'll give a cool effect. Now let's go into here. That's our head rotate. Let's see if it's connected. Does it work? That one works, there it is, See how it rotates. But it also has this left to right movement as well. I'll tell you what I want to do. I just want to show you what we did and how cool it is. What I'm going to do is solo these and then we have a where should head back. Go Maybe over here, Profile. All right, so although it took a lot of work to get here, I think it was worth it because this is going to give us something so unique. It's going to give a character that's just so in depth in versatile. Now check this out. We have heads that move. It's a little slow because they're all here. But look at that. Pretty cool, huh? All right, now we have our heads that have been connected. Joysticks and sliders working for every one of our head comps. Next thing we have to do is do our limbs. Let's get into our limbs and create some arms and legs, and we're getting close to the end. All right, let's jump into. 11. Step 09 - Connect limbs: Now it's time to attach our limbs to our body. As the body rotates and we use our joystick to turn, the limbs will move with the body. We're going to do the arms and the legs. Let's get into it. The first thing that we're going to need to do is here in our main character composition, we're going to create a few null objects. I'll start with the shoulders, just so we can keep it easy. I'm going to name this one left shoulder, and then I'll duplicate it and name this one right shoulder. These are going to be burner controls. These are controls that we are only using for labels. We don't actually have to worry about where they are. The next thing we're going to do is hit P on the keyboard to open up the positions. When you have them open, select both positions, right click, and then separate dimensions. Find your torso tab, then we're going to pull it up right to here. This little section in between our main composition and just above our time line. This is going to bring up both of our compositions so that we can actually look at the controls in each, and we're going to connect them from one to the other. Looking at, we're going to find our right arm and our left arm, and then hit P on the keyboard and it's going to bring up our positions. These have key frames in. One thing that you might need to do is select your Y positions on both of these and make sure that they are not toggle key frame hold or toggle holds. You can just control click them and then take them back to normal key frames. The next thing you're going to do is here in your character comp. We'll start with this one by one. We'll start with the right shoulder. Select your position, Pick whip to the right arm position. Then get your Y position. And pick whip to the Y position. And do the same thing for the left arm to the left arm. What ends up happening? You can pull it back down. What ends up happening is your controllers are now parented to the position of the controllers within your torso comp, but it throws them way out of whack. If we were to have attached our arms to those before we parented our controllers to the controllers, our arms would have jumped and there'd be no way to get them back. But now that the controllers have jumped, all we simply have to do is attach our shoulders to these new controllers. We're going to take the right shoulder and we'll attach it to the right arm. Yeah, right shoulder. Then we'll find the left shoulder and attach it to the left. So we can even turn those off and put them all the way to the bottom and lock them up. We don't ever have to touch those or look at them again. Let's see what happens if we select our torso control and move it. Let's see what happens. Look at that, shoulders move with it perfectly. Next thing we're going to want to do is because we want our wrists to follow along with our arms. We're going to attach our left wrist to left shoulder and right wrist to right shoulder. Now the arm will move perfectly with the body. Next thing we have to do is as the, as the body turns to his left, the right arm will come in front of the body. We're going to have to actually key up some opacities to the arm. What we're going to do is we'll serve with the right arm. We're going to serve with the right arm in the right hand. Where's our right hand? There it is. These two, I'm going to select them both duplicate. And then I'm going to move this set above the torso and the head as well. Now we have an arm that's in front of the body. I'm going to hit T. On this one to bring up the opacity. Now we have to think about this controller in a certain way. If the controller here is the neutral pose for the body, that means if we come all the way to this direction, the controller would be here. Which means that our arm would be off. We wouldn't see the transparency at all. We're going to keep the opacity there to zero. Then I'll come here to our middle section, which means that our controller here in the middle, neutral pose, the arm would still be off. It would be behind the body, so I'm going to key it at zero. But then our next transition, which is this one right here, we want our arm to be visible. I'm going to go page down one into our next key frame over. And I'm going to turn it all the way up. This arm is going to be visible all the way until we get, we have 12, then this last one, it's going to turn off again. Then right here at eight or whatever years might be, we're have a key frame with zero opacity. If we select these key frames, right click, toggle, hold. The next thing that we have to do is select your body slider. We're going to come into Duck Basel or whatever your Duc might be. Then we are going to use this property tool to make sure properties here are the ones from our body rotate. The next thing we do is we'll select these key frames again and then we'll connect to properties. Hopefully now as I rotate this torso, there we go, Our arm transparencies work great. Then we're going to have to do that to the next arm. But before we do that, I'm going to hit on the hand and I'm just going to parent or pick, whip the opacity of the hand to the opacity of the arm. Now, I don't have to do key frames or anything, it will automatically follow along with what the arm is doing. Let's do this to the other arm. We'll have our right hand come down to our left arm. That should actually be changed. Well, I'm here. I'm going to do that. I'll just call this left hand. Now we're not confused. I'm going to duplicate these and I'm going to pull them up above the body. Now I'll hit on our left arm, we'll just follow along. This one is basically going to have the reverse of this one. As the controller is all the way to the left, the arm will still be at zero. But as it comes up to the next key frame, it will jump up to 100% visibility, all the way till we get to the middle frame where it will turn back off. Then it will stay off all the way through. Let's see, did that properly. So we'll select these. Right click, toggle, hold. Let's see what happens. I'm going to connect these two. Hopefully everything should still be loaded from the last one. I'm just going to connect the properties. Let's start spinning things around and see how it works. All right, arm comes on, stays on to here, and then it goes off. Perfect. All right, look at that. That's simple. Now all we have to do is hit on the hand, pick, whip the opacity to the opacity. The next thing is you're going to notice as the arm comes in front, depending on the style that you have, you might be okay with having this line come across the shoulder. I am I want that gone. I'm not a fan of it, only here on the front of the arm. What I'm going to do is we are going to slow it so we can see what we're doing. We're going to go in here and we are going to trim paths on the shoulder so we do not see. Called proximal upper. And what we're going to do is with it selected, we'll click this little arrow to the side and we're going to add a trim path. Let's see here. Possibly. Yeah. Actually we'll do the start transition and we'll go like, okay. Typically, I think that it's okay to have a little bit of a higher back side to the arm, but the front side, I like lower. Let's see how that looks. There we go. I like that. As it transitions through, it will stay a small sleeve. Then here you can see the back side of the shoulder breaks through a bit. Not necessarily what I want possibly a way around that is maybe these arms could be a little too high. Let's see if we take left and right shoulders, move it down in the touch that's too far. Maybe as we rotate our body, that looks good. I actually want to see also as the arm moves, how does this shoulder move? Perfect. Stays just behind the collar. That's exactly what you want. This one feels a little funny. It feels like maybe the arm is too far forward. If your arm is not tracking along with the body, exactly how you would like. The way to fix that is we'll have to go into the torso. You find the key frames we are working on. The left arm, which would be, I think this keyframe here, you start, that was the wrong arm. Let's try this one. You start moving your arm around until it gets to be in the perfect position. I think that's pretty good. I like that one. Looks pretty good to me too. Let's see here as it rotates forward. Okay, you can still see the arm a little bit from the backside if it's really an issue, something you could do. This kev opacity of these limbs. Again, it gets a little tricky because then you have to think about, okay, when are these guys switching on and off? In reality, it should be opposite of whatever this one was. Where is it? If this one is off here, this one would be on. If this one is off there, this one would be on. Then if it goes on there, then this one would go off off there. This one should be on. I have no idea if that's going to work. Well, let's try it. Right click, toggle, hold and connect properties. Let's just see what happens. Okay, It looks like the arm went off, but let's see if it comes back on when I go to here. Okay, and it goes back on. Let's just follow through and see what happens. There we go, and it stays on. Okay, So that's a way around it. And then all you have to do is hit T on this hand and then parent it. So hopefully that made sense. It gets tricky. I know I'm all in all I'm quite pleased with the way that these are functioning. Again, if they're not quite lining up perfectly for you, you'll have to go into the torso, find your right and left arm shoulder positions, and start to tweak those. Start to tweak them just to get it perfect. Let me look at the other arm just to see how it lines up. I'd like that if you look at the right arm, you can see it lines up pretty nicely to the back of the body. I'd like the left arm to do the same. That means I may have to move it back. If we come into torso, we select the left arm. I have to keep in mind that my controller has moved in this direction, which means that on the time line, I have to move forward in this direction. If this is my neutral pose, this will be one over. I just want to push this back. Maybe two, That's good. I feel like it might break through a little bit. Tap it forward just to touch maybe a little bit more. Okay, let's try that. And I'm going to, or I'm going to do a trim path on this arm as well. We'll go contents I'll find my limb. It's going to be the upper group. And what did I say? Proximal upper. Let's add a trim path. Let's go ahead, let me slow it so I can see what I'm doing. Here we go bottom being about a boom. Remember how I said, I like the back to be a little higher than the front right here offset. You can tweak it. What I'll do is I'll keep tweaking it till, oh my gosh my mouse. That's good. Leave it. Don't touch it. Okay, let's have a look. Oh, that looks great. Let's move forward one more. Let's see. Again, I think that's too far. So if I come into the torso, if this is where I was before, I've moved forward one transition state. I'm going to move this one back now and move it back. One more click. Okay, Let's see how that animates, okay? It looks pretty good. Looks great. I think right here, the shoulder feels a little low. It would just probably take a little animation to fix that. But I think if the arm ever came up like that, I'd like it to be a little bit higher. Okay, that looks good enough. Now we have to do the same thing. I haven't done that. We have to do the same thing to the legs. Let's go ahead and create two burner controls. So we're going to go layer new null object. I'll call this one left hip. I'll duplicate it and name this one right hip. Hitting P on the keyboard. We're going to select the positions, right click and separate dimensions. I'm going to pull my torso tab up, then I will find my left and right hip. That's right, we don't need to separate dimensions, we're just right click, unselect dimensions. Right hip, right hip, left hip. We'll pick whip to left hip. We'll pull our torso tab back down. These two will turn off, we'll pull down and we'll forget about them forever. Goodbye old friends. What we're going to do now is find our hips. I have right hip, which will go to right hip, then I will find left hip which will go to left hip. Now I'm going to parent my ankle to the hips. Left ankle goes to left hip, right ankle goes to right hip. This just seems to be the easiest solution we'll find out. Let's see what happens when we rotate. Okay, oh perfect, that looks so good. Now, the hips come way too far on that side. I'm assuming they'll come way too far on this side too, I'm not sure why that happened, but we'll fix that. In the torso, what we need to do is we need to do opacities for the legs, just like we did for the arm as they transition in front of the body. Let's go ahead and do that. Now I'm going to find one of my legs. We can just do this in whatever order we like. It doesn't really matter. Let's start with left leg, arm just straight up left leg. Then we're going to go ahead and do this the same exact way. I'm sorry, find those, Duplicate them, and then bring them up above the body, but below the arms. Now, right here at this neutral pose, we'll turn them off. Key it now for this leg, remember as the body turns, or as the joystick goes to the left, which would be backwards on our time line, it's going to become visible. I'll turn this up to 100. And it will stay 100 up until it gets to this first key frame. Then it will be turned off the same here. It will stay off all the way throughout. Then it'll key that. Then I can select these key frames. Right click, toggle, key frame hold. Then I'm going to, it looks like I'm no longer selected. So make sure you select what you're trying to connect to. You can do this eyedropper to get the values loaded and then we can re select our opacities and we'll connect them to properties. I'm going to go ahead and put the foot here just so I can really see what's happening. Now let's rotate this guy this way. Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful, beautiful. And then off. And then it, well, we got to do the other legs. So let's go ahead and do the other leg. Now, where's my legs? Here we go. Let's go ahead and push this back to the center. We'll grab our legs. Duplicate, We'll pull it up here. This one will be the opposite. Well, we know here in the middle it's going to be off. We know that for effect, key it. Then as this one goes, I'm on the foot. Let's go. All right, I know the leg, it's going to be off key as it goes to the right. It's going to turn on. We'll come here forward one, turn it up, then it'll stay on up until it gets to the last keyframe. We'll turn it off. This one will stay off all the way through. Then we will key that. Select right click keyframe hold. Then I'm going to connect to properties. Now I can just take my foot opacity and parent it to the leg opacity. Now let's see if it works. Leg comes on, looks beautiful, then it comes back and looks beautiful. All right, now that we're in this and I'm looking at these legs, I have no idea why it came out that far. Let's go ahead and see if we can fix problems that we're having here at zero. Where's that key frame? Yeah, that's the same key frame. Or maybe not. Yeah, I'm confused. Okay. So basically what we're going to do is we're just going to move this in and see what we can do. That's just bizarre that that happened. One more click. One more click in. Scrunch in on those butt cheeks. Okay, that looks better. Now let's move it to the other side. Actually, before I go there, these key frames right here also need to come in. I'll do maybe two clicks. Two clicks, let's see. Okay, that looks better now we'll move to the other side. We'll go all the way over here. Come back into torso. These guys I think I did four clicks in. Then we'll go four clicks in and then also come forward one frame and I'll do, what was it two clicks in or something? Let's just see. Okay, those look good. Let's come over to this guy that looks pretty good too. All right. We now have a body and limbs that rotate beautifully. One thing that I would like to have happen, this might just be its own separate tutorial trying to figure it out, is I'd like for these feet to automatically rotate with the body. But you know what, I think it might be good to keep it separate this way if we're ever having him walk or do some separate pose, you have the flexibility to change those feet independently. Let's just keep it like that. We want to keep the flexibility. That's a good idea. All right, this is looking good. There is one more thing I would like to do, actually, before we do that, we have to jump into the head, because this head is not connected to the body. What we're going to do is go into torso. Okay, here's our neck. What I would like to do is get the rotation of this neck to attach to the position of our head. As our head moves, the neck will rotate to align with it. Let's find the head. Here it is. We're going to come to Duke Basil and we're going to click on this hand. Next we're going to find this rotation controller because our head was selected it properly names it is head, which is very useful. The next thing we're going to do is we're going to open up position, we're going to take torso, move it up in here and then we are come back into character one. Then we're going to pick whip the rotation of the neck to the position of the head. Then things are going to get wonky. Our neck is going to drop. It's going to get all crazy. But that's not all we have to do. We'll fix that in just a second. But what we really need to do is the rotation of the neck. We have to get the speed right. What we're going to do is we're going to open up our rotation expression. We're going to come into this little bit of script here, Hit Enter, then we're going to do shift eight to get a times, and we'll do 0.6 Let's see how that does. Depending on your character, you might need to either adjust that value up or down. Next what we're going to do is we're going to select both of our neck layers, the front and the back. Then we're just going to rotate them back up. Let's put them straight on into the middle. Looking straight up. Now let's pull this down and see what we did as we move our head. We haven't connected our head to it. Okay. Now find your head and we are going to parent it to our head control. Now when we move our head, we have a neck that moves beautifully with it. Oh, that was perfect. Awesome. Just like that. We have rigged up our neck to our head just so you know, there are some ways that it can break if you pull the head off of the neck, it doesn't stretch. I think that's really the only way that it breaks. Obviously for me my neck breaks through the collar which isn't great. Possible my neck is not moving fast enough or I've just pulled it down too far. Let me see if I can speed that neck up just a little bit. Let's go back into torso and in order to make it go faster, you go up on the value. Instead of 0.6 I'm going to try 0.8 That's going to throw my neck all crazy. Before I rotate it back, I want to make sure that my head is perfectly aligned, align it, come back to the middle, then I'm going to just zero out the rotation. It doesn't feel centered to me because it's not all right. I'm going to call that center. Okay, let's go back into torso, rotate back up and cross our fingers. Let's see how it moves. Yeah, I think it moves. Okay, let's try the other side. I mean, that looks good enough. I'm just going to say that's good enough. Okay, cool. So now we have our neck rigged. What are some of the other things that we want to do? I think I'm going to call it quits for now. We'll clean up some of the stuff in the next tutorial. As the body rotates, maybe what we'll do is we'll trim paths on this leg so that we don't see that, we don't see the top portion of it. We don't want to see this little cap. I don't want to see it. Maybe I'll do it now. Let's just go ahead, come in here. This is going to be the upper group. Is it proximal upper? Yes, it is. We're going to add trim path just like we did with the arm and let's see what we can do. Oh, that is not what I want, let's see if we move it above my shape. All right. So it's trimming my shape path, maybe if I put it. All right, so that's it for the connecting of the limbs. That's it for connecting the limbs to the body. We have a body that rotates in the limbs, move along with it. In the next tutorial, what we're going to do is we're going to go ahead and clean up some of the mistakes that we have within the rig. And we're going to do some other things to the head so that as it rotates backwards, the head will go behind the neck and we'll have to figure out a solution for the layering of the head, neck and hair. We'll clean all that up, then we'll keep going from there. We're going to fine tune it and tweak it. Let's get into that. 12. Step 10 - Clean up: Now we're going to clean up our character. I'm going to go through and any mistakes or small defects that are happening. I'm just going to fix them and clean them up. Now if your rig is perfect, beautiful, and exactly how you want it, skip this. You don't need to watch. But odds are if you followed me, you're going to have some mistakes. Let's get into it and clean up what we've done. I'm going to start from the head and work my way down. Let's just look at functionality just to make sure everything is flowing properly. Let's have a look, why can I not grab this head rotate? All right. As the head rotates, that's all looking good. Transitions all look good, in my opinion. Something that you're probably going to want to do that I think I fixed, but I didn't mention it. When you go inside of your head and you start to get into the areas where you've masked out the eyes, just make sure that your mask is high enough to cover or to expand out past your eyebrows this way. When the eyebrows move, obviously they're not getting masks and you don't see them. Just make sure that those are high enough. Now, as far as the blink goes, as this comes down and that looks good, I want to see something with the eyebrows. I want to make sure that yeah, you see with the eyebrows, there's a little bit of coming through that you can see. What I want to do is go inside my eye composition. I think what I'm going to have to do is duplicate the eye layer. We're going to have layer eight right now is masking out both the eye lids and the eyebrow. But what we have to do is I'm going to duplicate the eyes then instead of having both of them on the same one, I'm going to put the eyebrow mask to my new eye layer. This way what I can do is I can now expand my eyebrow mask to make it bigger. We won't see that line coming through, which is from the eye lid. We're just going to expand it outward until it covers up that eyelid now should fix the problem. Just move it around until you find one that works for you and everything else should be functioning perfectly. I'll just zero out this blink. Another thing you can do with the eyes is if you want, you can add a little squash and stretch to the eyes just to give a little more character. As the character blinks, I have this null object in here which actually has the slider control on it. What I can do is select all of my layers, just attach them to the blink. Then here on scale, what I'm going to do, let's see, I'll scale it here at 100. Then I'll come forward one frame and then I'll squash this around. It doesn't have to be much. Maybe something like that. Is that one Ones like maybe we'll go 95, maybe we'll do 90.12 Okay. Then you can select these. Let's go into joysticks and sliders. Come to sliders, we're going to attach it to the blink. Let's go ahead and lock it up. Now, when we come to have our character blink, the eyes will squash down. They will open. That gives just a little bit of squash and stretch to make it feel a little bit more squishy, right? You can exaggerate that as much or as little as you'd like. Another thing, let's see what we can do if I create a null object to open up position. Then I move the eyes over here and then come into my character comp. I'm going to find my null P on the keyboard. Then I'm going to parent or pick whip the position of that new null to the blink. Now remember that's a burner control here in the eyes. That control I just made is now shot way off screen. But what I can do is, how do I want to do this? I can attach eyelids to this new null object. Now when I come to character, I can move this and it's going to move my eyelids so that I can get more expression out of my character. Just having a blink is nice and that works pretty good. That doesn't give you the ability to the eyelids up to make them look really happy or to move them down to make them look a little bit more sleepy, droopy, whatever it is. This is just a little bit more flexibility to add into your character. That's pretty cool. Let's see how the squash and stretch works. Does still work? Yes, it does cool. What else do we want to do? We have this mouth that's looking really great. Another thing we can do is as we cycle with our character left and right, if we come into this we can tweak the mouth a bit. You can also obviously change the mouth shape if you would like to give it more of that three quarter. This is just a simple solution. I didn't really want to move things around too much. Something you could do is maybe move the teeth back a little bit to make it look like we're seeing more of the inside of the mouth That could possibly give you more of a three quarter look. Coming to this one, maybe what we could do is scale the mouth inward a little bit like that, and then also move the teeth back. That seems to look pretty cool. If you want to do something like that, I think that's a good solution as opposed to making a new mouth set for every head. Just go ahead and tweak the one that you have. See, this one actually broke out. That's not what you want scale. Let me see what I scaled the other one at a 91. Let's scale it down to nine, negative 90. Then we'll move it back just a little bit. Here we go, and then we'll grab the teeth. We move these back, that should be it. Now as our characters head moves around, it has a nice little perspective shift on the teeth, which is cool, adds a little bit more depth to it. Let's move down to the neck. I just want to make sure everything is flowing properly. I think I'm going to change the speed of my neck a little bit more. I think it's too fast. Let's come here, maybe I'll try seven. See how that does rotate my neck up. I'm not really sure why the position of the neck is moving. Yeah, I don't know. All right, let's come in and see how this works. Sure, that's good. Okay, I like that. Next, let's look at our shoulders. See how they function as the body rotates. That goes forward, comes around, and then back to zero. Now, all in all, it looks good. I think that this solder moves out a little too far. Let me see what we can do for our shoulders. That is his right shoulder, right arm. And that's on this key frame right here. Maybe I'll move it in one move. There we go. That looks good to me. Let's move this back to center. I've given this a lot of thought and there's no easy way to do this. Getting this head to transition behind the neck, but also maintain the hair being in front of the neck is a challenge. Unfortunately, there's no easy solution. But I'm going to try to make this as simple as possible, follow along, and let's get into it right above the torso. I'm going to duplicate a head layer and move it up in front. I'm just going to rename this. Now that doesn't really do anything other than rename the head layer. What we have to do is come to this head layer, duplicate it, then we can rename this one. Now holding Alt, I'm going to drag this right over the hair layer right on top. Now we'll switch out for the new head. That being said, we need to think about which head layers are going to go in front of the hair. Now, the front of the face, it doesn't need, we don't need the front of the face. We don't need the three quarter and we don't need the profile. I'm going to delete all of those. The only three layers that we actually need are the rear three quarter, the back of the head, and then the other rear three quarter. I'm going to everything in the middle that all we're left with is this back three quarter, be a head back, head right, three quarter, head left three quarter and head back again, Starting with a head back. What I'm going to do is find head back and I'm going to duplicate it and I'm going to rename it hair back. Then selecting the head back in my new hair composition, I'm going to click hair back and I'm going to replace them by dropping it on top. Then I can go inside and all I have to do is solo out the layers I need, which are the hair in the ears. You could even delete the other layers if you need to. Going back into hair, let's do head right, three quarter, let's find head right three quarter. We're going to duplicate it. We're going to rename it Hair right three quarter. Now I'm going to click, drag and replace. When I come in here, all I need are the ears and the hair. Everything else can be muted or deleted. The last one we need is head left three Quarterback, find it. Duplicate it, rename it, we'll call it hair Alt, Click, drag and replace. Now going inside, all we need again are the ears and the hair. Everything else can go. Bye bye. I should mention though, keep all of your joysticks and sliders control. Do not delete those because those are still going to be powering the head to rotate. Coming back into our character. One comp, I'm going to close. Some of these guys just have too much. Step open. Here we are now you can see what happens. The hair now covers up the neck, all we see. The face on the other side of the neck and the hair on the front side of the neck. Let's see what happens when we move it and there we go again. Sorry, There's no simple solution. That's really the easiest thing that I can think of. Let's just double check and make sure it works. Yes. The neck moves with it smoothly behind it. There we go. We that fixes the head problem. Another thing I want to do is let's go into the torso. Before we go into the torso, I want to show you what the problem is. Whenever I move my torso up and down, everything squashes and stretches nicely. The only thing that doesn't is the head. I would like for the head to move up and down with the torso as well. Maybe not a whole lot, but enough to see some movement. I want the head to be moving a little bit. At least what I'm going to do is I'm going to come in here, we'll do layer new null object. I will rename this one, maybe he movement. I'm really just going to eyeball this. Hit. Remember right here in the middle is our neutral pose. All the way to the left at zero is our pose. Maybe I'll do 23. Maybe I'll do four clicks. They'll come down to the last key frame and we'll do maybe four clicks down. Coming back into this composition, if we were to simply attach the position of the head rotation to this, that wouldn't work. What I'm going to do is we're going to create another burner null object. I'll call this one head movement as well, just so we know. We'll open up the position for this one move our torso and then we will attach the position of character one head movement to the position of our torso head movement. Now when we come back into character one, if we attach our head to the head movement is going to mess up our neck. But I just want to see if the head moves. Let's have a look now. It doesn't. Why is that? That's why. Oh my gosh. The reason that didn't work is because we have to attach this movement to our torso movement. With that selected, come in and do it, Basil. We're going to select the property here of this control and go back into torso. Now we can connect it. It's been a long day now with it connected, let's see, does it move? It's been a long day. I'm going to cut all this out, call it head movement. So now that we have that creative, what we're going to do is select our torso control, make sure that the properties are selected, and we'll come back into the torso and select our key frames. Now instead of moving on the X axis, which is not what we want, we want to move on the Y axis, select the y value, and then connect properties. Now coming back into our character one, we can now parent our head to head movement. That's going to mess up our neck just a little bit. That is okay. I just want to make sure that our head moves when our torso moves. Now with our burn of control made, we're going to move torso up here. What we want to do inside of character one is we want to parent our position to our position within the torso, head movement position in character one, parent head movement position in torso. Now that they're connected, what we can do is go into torso, find your key frames. Character one, make sure that your torso movement is selected. For this one, we are going to be controlling the Y axis. We're not going to be using the X axis, just the Y because we want the up and down movement. Make sure the properties are selected as well. Switch it back to Y. Then here in torso, which you can do is select your key frames and connect the properties. Now let's come back to character one. What we can do is select our head and we are going to parent it to the head movement. Now these guys are connected, it's going to throw your neck out of alignment, but that's okay. I just want to make sure that the head is moving with the torso, there it goes. It is moving now. That looks great. Perfect. All right, so what I'm going to do is go back in the torso, select your neck layers, We're just going to rotate them back up again. Honestly, I have no clue why the neck keeps moving back and forth. Is it makes no sense to me? I think maybe this squash and stretch might be doing something, but I have no clue. Anyway, get your neck back into position. Rotate it to be straight up. Let's look at our character. Let's make sure everything's functioning properly. We have stretch, we have a squash. The neck moves with the head, The head rotates behind the neck. Beautiful. The last thing we need to do is find your torso, select it, hit Y on the keyboard and we're going to move the anchor point to right around where the belly button is. For me it's going to be right around where the belt buckle is. I think that should be good. Coming back into do it, click the hand and we're going to create a control. I just want to attach the body. So you're going to attach your torso, you're going to attach a few other things. We'll attach the torso, we'll attach these hips and the shoulders up to your torso. Oh, no. Now what we're going to do is it's going to get a little hectic, but bear with me, what we're going to do is select our hips and we're going to them from their controls. Hit none to remove at all. Now what we're going to do is with the torso selected, we're going to come up to Duke Basel. Click click the hand to Create Controls and we're going to click on this guy right here. Now what we want to do is take our torso. Is it just one? Yes, we can parent that to the torso control. We also want to parent our. Let's do one more thing. We're going to remove head movement from this. It's going to throw the neck out of whack once again. And we're going to parent head movement to torso. Now you can put head back to head movement. And the reason we did that was because whenever you parent a control that has constraints in a different composition, it's going to move it somewhere else. When it moves it somewhere else, if your neck or your head is attached to it, it's going to throw your head over there with it and you'll never be able to get it back. You have to disconnect those connections and then you can reconnect them once they're configured. Let me show you another example. And our hips currently, they don't have any controls, they don't have any parents. But when we come up here and parent them to the torso, they're going to jump somewhere else, somewhere new. When that happens, if your shoulders and hips are connected to them, they're going to follow along and it's going to throw everything out of whack. But now that we are done, what we can do is we'll go left to left, right shoulder to right, left hip. You left hip. Oh, I'm sorry. Right hip and then left hip to left hip. We'll fix that neck in a second, but I just want to make sure that everything moves. Oh my God. Okay, it works. But what we have to do, and this is the bummer, is we have to disconnect our ankles. Unfortunately, the ankles are following along, and that's not what we want. Now we have some movement here. The only problem is that when we rotate our torso, the feet will not be moving with it all in, all at the end of the day. That's not such a bad thing. It's not perfect, it's not great. It just is what it is. You have to go through and animate those separately. Let's go into the torso. Fix our neck once again. Sure enough, it's off center for whatever God forsaken reason. There we go. We have a torso that we can now rotate, give our character some bending, bend, bend. One thing that we might want to also do is disconnect the hands from the shoulders. Doing this is going to give us some more ability to animate our torso separate from our hands. Let's say your character, put their hands on a desk or they're holding a lawn mower or whatever it might be. You can move the body and the hands are going to stay put Again, you lose some of your ability to maintain that transition with the body rotation. But honestly, that's probably better because when you start animating a character and you realize that you have to have their hands planted for some reason, there's no way in the world that you're going to be able to counter animate your character turning. If I have my character here looking at something and all of a sudden someone walks in and I want them to turn and look. They can do that now. Whereas before they would have done this and their hands would have slid off the desk again, you can automate certain things, but at the end of the day, they are not going to be beneficial in the long run. Let's just leave it at that. That way we can have some mobility in the body to do things like bending and rotating. That's going to be more beneficial in the long run than having your hands connected. All right guys. All in all, I believe that the clean up is done. Last thing, I'm going to quickly remove this band aid from his leg. He does not need it. That's fine. The other leg, you do not need a band aid. All right. Cool. All in all, I'm happy with this, we were able to accomplish all of our clean up goals. Fixing the head, attaching it to the body. What else do we do? That was a different one. All right guys. That was the clean up. Stay tuned for the next one and the next editorial. I have a little surprise for you. Let's get into it. 13. Bonus - Hips: All right, so I have a little bonus pop quiz, special extra credit tutorial for you. Now, at first I wasn't going to do this because I thought it would overcomplicate things and I wanted to keep things super simple. But after getting through it, I believe you guys can handle it. What we're going to do is we're going to create some hips. I'm going to create a little control to make the hips rotate back and forth. And I think it's going to give us a lot of extra flexibility in our character and just make our character shine that much more. Let's get into it. The first thing that we have to do is going back into our illustrator file. You can see we have a character with a torso. And that's it, for simplicity's sake, that's what I was going for. But now that we're here, let's go ahead and we're going to name a new layer right above the torso, and we'll call it hips. For me, this is a fix, super simple solution because I have this belt which dissects my body perfectly. I can create some really good hips. If you do not have this, let's say that you didn't have a belt, you look something like this. Then what you would do is do the whole process that I'm doing now. But instead of having the hips on top, you're going to have your hips on bottom below your shirt. Okay. Does that make sense for me? Because my belt dissects everything. I'm just going to keep it. You know what? Never mind. What I'm going to do is I was thinking that the belt would rotate it. I don't think that's accurate. I'm going to select my hips below the belt. All of them. Every single one, even the butt crack. I'm going to copy it and then delete it. Now on my hips layer, I'm going to hit control. Then I can move it below the torso. Now I have separated hips, and this is perfect. This is going to work great. Now what you can do is save this file and then it's going to update your after effects and we're going to lose the lower half of our body for our character. Sorry buddy, you no longer have a crotch. Then real simple, all we have to do, it's not that complicated. Go into torso, we are going to duplicate the torso layer and we can move this one behind it. Then we're going to find our layers here. And we're going to file, import file, find our character one Adobe file. We're going to go until we find our hips. Once you find hips, okay and import now with torso two, seed and hip selected. We're going to a click and we're going to drag right on top, just like that, our hips are back. If you come into the character, everything is going to functions the same way it did before, except we now have two layers. In order to get these hips to rotate, what we're going to do is create a null object. We're going to put it down here where the hips will rotate. And I just want to put the hips onto this. And I want to see how the rotation will work. Okay? You can see it breaks through. And this just means that we will only be able to get a certain amount of movement to the character. So we can only go so far until it breaks. Let me just try something else. If I was to put the hips above the torso, then if I was to select my belt, copy it, then delete it. When I put it here, then obviously I would need to fix this so it's below the belt. You have to remember the way that rotations work best is when they rotate around a perfect circle. If I could get a perfect circle right here around my torso. Let's see what happens when I turn the hips on. Yeah, it works. You can see it breaks through right here. Which should be simple enough just to move the hip over a little bit. Then if I turn this off and move it over, okay, all of that is lining up nicely. So let's see what happens when I merge these layers together. Okay, so this one and this one, we'll just flatten out. And I got to push everything behind. Let's go and do the same thing. Push everything behind the collar. Push it all behind the collars. Never mind this collar needs to go behind. Okay, And then merge. Push it behind that far. All right, now we have this nice circle to rotate around. Let's look at our hips, make sure everything is lined up. We just want to cover up the torso that's under there, finally. There we go. All right, let's save that. Now let's see what happens inside of torso if I take this like so now when I rotate my hips, let's see what happens. All right, it breaks through props to lower this. Yeah, that's a better solution. The problem is the point where the circle is supposed to be, it's just not working out. What I need to do is select these and go maybe just one click up. If this is where it rotates, right here at the buckle, that's where you want your widest point of your circle to be. That means for me, if I select all of this and just do shift up one, move, shift up one, shift up one, and shift one, save, Hopefully it should work a little bit better. Let's look. Okay. Yeah, that works a little bit better. You can see it breaks into the torso a little bit, but all in all, we're not trying to get like super jiggy with it. We don't need too much. Just a little bit. Goes a long way Now with that working out great, I'm going to call this hip rotate. Then what I have to do is take our hips here and attach it to the hip rotate. Now whenever I rotate this, the hips will move with it. Let's go ahead, come back into character. They jump out of the screen. What do we need to do? We need to select our hips from anything. We'll go hip. Remember this is left hip, right hip. We're going to go none. Then we're going to take these hips and put them to hip rotate. Next thing we need to do is create a controller that can actually rotate the hips separately. What I'm going to do is hit scale. I'm going to scale this one up, never mind. Let's come back into our icon and I'm going to make this one bigger. Not 300, no way. Maybe I'll leave it at 100, then I'm going to I'll just do this. Rotate one, I'll click that, it's going to put it right on top. What we can do is change the color because this is confusing that. Let's go green. Then we can just parent it to the torso. Whenever the torso moves, this control will move with it. Next thing we have to do is let's try. Let's see if the rotations stay the same. So if I move character up here, I'm going to rename this one. See hips. I'm going to open up the rotation inside this torso. If I can put the rotation of this to the rotation of that, let's just see what happens. I really hope this. Oh, thank God it works. All right. Finally what we have to do now is come back to our hips. Left hip will come all the way down to left hip. Right will come all the way down to right hip. Now, when we rotate our hips, nothing happens. Why didn't that work? These are moving, where's my hips get out here? Okay, here they are. Oh, it's because they're attached to torso. This is probably going to mess up. Well, let's see what happens. Let's attach it to hips. I hope nothing happened. Let's see what happens when we rotate. Yes, Oh yes. Oh yes. We got the hips. We got the hips. Okay, It looks a little funky. But, you know, depending on what we need to animate and how we need to animate, this might just, again, we're not going for some crazy hip movements, we just want some subtlety. I want to have the ability to do that if I need to. Let's just make sure all of our controls are working. Let's see what happens when we do this. Okay? Yep, we go. I don't know what you're going to need it for, that's for you to decide, but now we have a hip rotation. I think that's it guys. This is really the last thing I wanted to do was add the hips here. Now that we have it, I really can't think of anything else to do. What you can do is continue to define and redefine and make new hand shapes, maybe new foot shapes, whatever it might be. Or if you're done, go animate and have fun. Thanks for watching guys. It's been a lot of fun. 14. Call To Action: All right, now it's time for actionable steps. We must appease the skillshare gods and give you guys something to do. Creating a rig is not enough and now you have to actually apply the skills you learned. What we're going to do is create this rig to spin in 360 degrees. That was the goal of this whole tutorial, was to give you a functional rig, but it needed to rotate 360 degrees. We're going to see how you did. We're going to animate it and we're going to put it to the test. Let's get into it. The first thing that we have to do is we need to actually reset up some of our character. We had taken the ankles and the wrists, deselected them. They're not parented to anything, we have to re parent them to those hips. The ankles will go to their corresponding hip. Left ankle, left hip, right ankle, right hip. It looks like my wrists are already connected. Obviously, the reason for that is when we rotate our character, we want those limbs to move with it. Now that those are connected back up, you could do that without connecting it. You would just have to animate the feet and the hands. This way is just simple. Just for the sake of this course, we're going to connect them. Now what we can do is we'll move our body joystick all the way to the left. We'll key the position. Let's go forward. I don't know, what do you think? Should we try 15? This might be too long. Let's just try it. And then I'm going to move it all the way to the other side. Now when it rotates, I have to set something back up. When you guys weren't watching, I tried something. I'm not a big fan of how it turned out. Let me show you what I did. Instead of having the shoulders locked in position using the toggle hold keyframe, I broke the toggle hold just to see if I could get some rotation. It works. You can see here it in some instances it might be okay, but the torso seems to be transitioning before the shoulders are in place. It gets that nice movement in the shoulders, but the torso, the alignment is just not working. If I was to play around with it a little more, I might be able to find the sweet spot. But I'm just going to go back, I'm going to toggle hold my hip movements and then I'm going to go back and toggle hold my exposition position. Not exposition. Okay, those are back to normal for that detour. Let's get back on track. So I'm going to push this all the way to the left, and then it will rotate beautifully to this direction, back to the back. Let's just see what happens. I don't want full screen, half resolution. Okay, So it comes around and then starts over. Does that feel too fast? To be honest, I don't remember what the last one was. Let's try it. 1 second, It might have been 1 second. Let's see how this spins. There it is, that looks better. Now, there's a little hold here. I think that's because there's like a little bit too much slop here on this side. I'm going to move this over right before it's about to jump into the transition. And then I'm going to go back one key frame now that clean up my spin so that there's not a hold on the back. There we go. That feels better. Okay, now let's go ahead and do the same thing to the head. I'm going to move it over just before it transitions to the next direction. There it is. And I'll go back. Hit P on the keyboard key that frame, and then I'm going to move it all the way to the right. Now, let's watch. All right, that's looking good. Now there's one more thing I want to do to really clean it up and this is where it gets a little bit tricky. The head is rotating in this direction. What I'm going to do is I'm going to key frame, maybe with an offset here. Key that position. I'm going to come forward right before it switches. That's only one frame for me. I'm going to leave that. Let's try this now. I'm going to go forward, right before it switches. Okay, there's where it switches. Now I'm going to move this joystick. It's going the wrong way. I'm sorry, guys. Okay, I'll move it on this side. When we're right here, the joystick will be on this side. And we want the head to look like it's rotating towards us. We'll move it that way when we animate. We'll go forward to here. We'll move it over. Then we'll do page down to the next key frame. Let's select the key frames we've made. We're going to copy and paste them. Now as we move down, it's going to look like that head is moving perfect. Now let's copy and paste those. We'll paste it. It's right when the head transitions. You put a key frame and then you move forward to right before it transitions, and you put a keyframe, and that's where your animation happens. Does that make sense? The head transitions Right here I have a key frame, then the animation of that joystick is going to happen up until it transitions. Transitions here I'm going to paste my animation again. Hopefully you can see what's happening. All it's doing is adding just a slight subtle movement to make it look like the head is tracking in 360 degrees. There we go. It's very subtle. It's not going to give a perfect rotation, but it's helping to sell the effect. That's all we're doing is trying to sell the effect. All right, here you can see it jumps before my key frame is finished, I'm going to move this keyframe over and then I'm going to paste my new animation. There we go. We can paste this one moves the other way. Now what I'm going to do is move the key frame to the other side of the controller, the joystick. And then as it moves forward on the timeline, I'll have this joystick move back the opposite direction, it reverses here. Then we transition. I'm going to copy the key frames I just made, and I'm going to paste them. And let's see. All right, let's see how that looks. Now we dude, that head looks so good rotating like that. You see the joystick just going okay. So far, so good. The next thing we can do, you don't have to, you can leave the arms down like that. But what I do is in order to give them that pose look like it's spinning, I'm going to move my arms out. Then you key the position. Key the other position as it gets here to the middle. Now you want to pull the arms, you want to animate them, out the opposite direction. I pull this one out. You want to make sure the hands are relatively in the same spot, front to back as it turns. Let's see how they line up. It looks like the back position, they're a little bit farther out. Let's push it out. Maybe one frame that looks good. Then right here, back at the end. We're going to paste our key frames. Now let's watch that, see how it does. Okay, there's a bend in there that we definitely don't want. I want these arms to be straight. Let's see if maybe hitting nine does anything. No. All right. I think what we need to do is add a dip to it. We're going to pull this down. There we go. I'm going to redirect this one back down. Remember we're using the convert vertex tools to do the drop down. Get that little arrowhead. That should be good. Let's do the same thing to the other one. All we do is select this first little anchor point. That's weird, come on. All right, maybe we need to grab the other side. Let's grab this side. All right, that works, okay, and once you've broken the connection, you can just hit V on the keyboard. Pull it down. And I'm just going to remove this one. I'll collapse that back into itself. All right, let's see if that helps. Yeah, I guess that works. It looks like he's maybe flapping his arms a bit. I'm not sure. Maybe I'll take the E's off. Just go back to normal key frames. I think that looks a little bit better. Okay, next thing we're going to do is we're going to change the hand positions. We'll rotate these hands outward a bit. I'm going to key frame this hand position because that's a good one we need under the same thing on this side. Then hit you on your layer to expand the key frames we've made. Then I'll move this way. As it rotates back this direction, I think right here at the jump, actually, I'm going to do the palm of the hand on this back hand, I can see like the hand rotates. I'm just going to move forward. Is that the one I use? Do I have a better one? I don't think I have a better one. That one's pretty good, but it's maybe a little too open. Let's let's try that one. Sure, That looks good. Okay. We didn't keep the rotation hold shift and hit R on both of them. Right here in the middle, we'll the rotation. And then at the end, we'll rotate our hands back out to match. Then with this one selected, all we can do is we'll copy, oh yeah, let's copy our rotation to the first key frame. Make sure we do that. Now let's work on the transition of this hand. What I want to do is have these hand sliders. I want them to have a toggle hold. It's not transitioning to different hand shapes as it animates the right here where it transitions, we're going to copy and paste that hand shape. This one is done. Now let's work on the other hand to get the hand shapes working properly. This one I'll move to there, it's looking good. We'll make sure that we select all of our key frames. We're going to right click and toggle hold. This is good. And then it's going to transition. Maybe I'll have a transition right there. Boom. So I'll move this one forward. Nice. Where am I going to? Should I do it here? Let's see how that looks. Wait a second. Hmm, that's weird. Why is it transitioning? You shouldn't be doing that. Something strange is happening. All right. I've just got a copying paste that didn't work. I'm confused. Okay, is this one wrong? Okay, so now we have the hands set up. Another thing I can see is I think it dips too far. So I'm going to ease up on that little dip. We'll see how that does. All right, now let's watch this rotation. All right, not too bad. Next thing we have to do is now we have to animate the feet. So we don't have to worry about animating the position of the feet. All we have to do is animate the rotation of the foot. Think, starting off here in the middle, everything looks good. I think I might try this 1 ft at a time. I'm going to work on the left foot. As this foot moves, I'll straighten that out. There we go. I'm just going to move forward to each transition of the body. And we'll see if we can get this to look, right, there we go. And this will be maybe the back of the foot. And then here will be the three quarterback, three quarterback quarterback. Okay. Then we'll paste it there. Move forward to our next transition, which is right there. I think this should be a forward facing foot. There we go. Oh nice. That actually transitioned for me, so I'm just going to key that frame. I like that. It's like doing all the work for me. I didn't change it. Nice. And then I'll move this one here and what we can do is grab all our key frames. Right click, toggle, hold. That one should be done. Oh, that looks so good. Okay, now let's do the same thing to the next foot. We'll start here in the middle, I'm going to key the slider frame thing, whatever. I'm going to move forward and start to animate this rotation. And I'm just going to keep going like I did on the last one. I can see using this as a reference where my transitions are going to be, so that I can just jump to that key frame. Move the foot into position, oops, wrong foot. I'll jump here to 25, rotate it should I do a three quarter. I guess this 13 quarter, I should one be straight. Should we put it here? Yeah, I want to pro would be straight. All right. And then I'm going to come back to the front. I'll copy this keyframe here and then we'll move forward one and this should go fote's the back foot. The next transition would be maybe sideways, three quarter. Let me see. Oh yeah, there is a three quarter. All right, now this one will be front. Then we're going to hit here and be back to where we start. So let's select these right click. We'll toggle that hold now let's watch it. Oh, that's looking great. All right, and that's it. That is how I animate that rotation. Hopefully yours looks very similar to this love. In the next thing that we can do, because we actually have to create something that we can share, and watch, and view, and have everyone else love it. We're going to go ahead and create a new composition. Right down here. You can click this guy, It's going to bring this up and we're going to call this whatever you want. I'm going to share like subscribe. Then we can do, I can't remember anymore but is it 3 seconds? Does Instagram require 3 seconds or something like that? I can't remember. We're just going to make it 3 seconds. I'm going to do it 1920 by 1080. That have to do a scaled version, or a square version, or a vertical version, We can use this one. But if you ever have to do a 16 by nine version and you don't have it, this is a nice way to start. Okay, so now that we have our composition set up, I'm going to bring my character one which is rotating. I'm going to bring it into here. The problem is we only have 1 second what we can do. Before I get too deep into this, I'm going to go to 1 second. I'm going to all of my key frames go to 1 second. Now they do. Next thing I want to do is hold Alt and click. I'm going to start here just to make sure that what I'm doing works on this one. We're going to type this little expression called Loop Out. We're going to put it there if you want, you can copy that little code then. I'm just going to. Yeah, it still works. Cool. Now what we're going to do is anywhere we have key frames, we're going to hold Alt, going to click. We're going to come to the end of this little script and then hit Enter and then we can paste our loop out. We'll do that for all of our key frames. What this is going to do, if you don't know already, is it's literally just going to loop all the animation that we did for eternity. Which is helpful so that this one doesn't have a key frame. Let's keep that now. Let's try it again. Now when we go back into our composition, that is a three second long composition, the animation will continue for the entirety of that timeline. I accidentally got rid of that. All right, now let's go back into our share subscribe play and make sure that it loops perfectly all the way through. Oh, I can see something's off. His head is shaken. Okay. The feet look good, the body and the hands look good. But that head is not looking right. Let's come back to our joysticks sliders, which is this one. Let's see, Maybe it's because I don't have a keyframe here in the beginning. Yeah, that's probably the problem. Okay. So I didn't have a key frame, but now I've added it. Let's make sure we'll just watch it one more time. Here we go. There it is. Okay. Now what we can do is we can make a nice pretty background. I'm going to use a shape layer. Just make a rectangle. Pick a color that either matches our character very well, contrasts our character very well. Usually a nice, solid, bright color, not too saturated, but nice and bright usually works the best. Sure who doesn't look green. Another thing is right here, you want to make sure your character is rasterized. We click that, it's going to slow down your program heavily. If you want to scale and move and adjust your character here, I would turn that off, then I would scale your character. And once your character is exactly how you want them, then you can turn that on. Another thing we can do is right click. What we're going to maybe add is not a glow but a light. We'll add a light, we'll do inner shadow. Come on down into the settings of inner shadow. We'll change this to white. Then we're going to change multiply or the blending mode to overlay. Then here we can change this light around. This is the distance of the light, this is the angle of the light. I like to do 90 a lot of the times, but it's really up to you. If you have a defined light source, then you're good, then the size is really just the fade of the light. For a cartoony style, you can put it down to zero. I'll put this distance down to ten maybe, because it's Halloween time, or whenever you're watching this, you could be watching this at Valentine's Day. Why would I say that? I don't know. Okay. We can make some cool colors too. Let's see. Maybe not saturate color, just play around with it. Whatever works. Whatever you like. Whatever fits your needs. I don't like that. I'm going to go back to white overlay. All right? I'm going to say that looks good. I love it. One other thing you can do to your character because we can make a nice circle by holding control shift. We're going to click here at ph. We're going to do radial gradient. We're going to pull this little guy out and we're going to change the adjustment settings. All right, for color, I'm going to make it white. White on both ends. Here in the middle, the opacity will go to 100. And then at the end, the opacity will be zero. Now when we click it and we put it behind our character looks like it's flowing. Another thing we can do just to make it match our background a little bit better, we can do an overlay. That's it's going to take the background color and it's going to make our color look like it's on top of it. That's why it warmed it up. We can also do ad, which is going to really brighten it up. All these things are doing is they're taking it from being just like a white circle, and they're making the colors interact with each other. This one might be good because it gets that nice warm glow. The only problem is, it might be a little bit too much. I'm going to change the opacity. Let's see what 60 looks like. I think we'll try 70, 75. All right? We can also increase it if you'd like. Maybe with it being bigger, I'll try 60 again. All right? I like that. Now let's hit play. Let's watch what we got. All right, everything's looking good. Head rotation, solid body rotation, solid feet rotation. So got a background done Now all we have to do is export this file. I'm going to go ahead and make sure gradient rasterized layers are on. One last thing I do need to do, I know for a fact they're not selected. Make sure that everything is continually rasterized. If it's not rasterized here, it's not going to just automatically rasterize in your next composition. Let's go into my share, like subscribe. Now what we get to do is here in your project files, we're going to find the composition that we want to render. Select it, there's two ways to do it. You can go composition Add to render Q, then you can get your settings, I do 264. You leave everything as is, and then you specify where you would like it to go. Then you just hit Render and it will do its thing. The only issue with that is when you're rendering project and after effects, it locks up your program. You cannot use after effects, which is a bummer if you have extra work to do. Another option is you find your composition you want to render. Go to composition, add to media encoder. Media encoder does all the same work that after effects does to render, but it does it in a separate program. Which is very helpful because then you no longer have to worry about your program being locked up for rendering. Sometimes renders can take long hours or even days. I've had some long renders before. Then here you can find the codec that you need. Again, I do H 264. I always like to do match source, medium bit rate. What that's going to do is it's going to really compress the file. You're not going to lose quality or clarity, but you're going to get a much smaller file size. Then we can go and find a nice place to save it. And then you hit Render. With that, your render will come out and it will look beautiful. And then you can share, you can tell your friends about it and you can make skill share very happy when this is done. I'm not going to make you sit through it, but thanks for watching this guys and onto the next part. 15. ThankYou: Congratulations, You did it. You finished the tutorial. You made it this far. Trust me, it was no easy task. I am beyond exhausted. This rig was a beast. It really was the ultimate rig. We laughed together, we cried together. I feel like I lost some hair and went gray in the process. This was a challenge even for me, and I've done this rig many times. I just want to thank you from the bottom of my heart for taking the time to watch this video. It's because of your support, people like me and others that create these videos that is progressing the animation industry. I believe your ability to make a rig like this and go out and create your own content is only making the animation industry better. I want to thank you for your progress and thank you for your support and effort. Now, you might have some questions about the rig. Feel free to ask me anything and I'll try my best to answer that. If you were even able to take one little piece of advice or technique from this and throw the rest of it away, that would make me happy. I just want to see you guys take something out of this, turn it into something incredible. And I can't wait to see what you guys have created. So feel free to share, like comment, ask questions, and I look forward to making more tutorials with you. Thanks for watching, guys.