Character animation is one of the trickiest techniques in After Effects. It’s become a very popular technique for all sorts of animations, especially things like explainer videos and shorts. But creating great character animation starts with great character rigging, and this is something that takes a little work.
There are some tools out there to make this easier. We’ve covered a few in our blog, like the RubberHose plug-in and the bq_HeadRig script. But the process can be much more complex and you can get a lot more out of your character rigs with a little work.
Today, we are going to highlight some great character rigging tutorials that will help you build great characters for your animation needs.
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Character animation is so popular now that Adobe is building their own character animation tool called Character Animator. It’s bundled with After Effects CC 2015, and it’s designed to make character rigging and animation easier.
The team behind the tool has created a 30-minute tutorial outlining how the Character Animator tool works and how you can use it for your animations.
First off, this tutorial isn’t strictly a character rigging tutorial. In fact, the premise behind Character Animator is that you don’t have to rig your characters within it. Rigs are automatically generated just by creating your layers and properly naming them.
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With Character Animator, a user can create a 2D “puppet” in Photoshop or Illustrator, then name the layers and the app will do the rest.
The tutorial does an excellent job of showing how this process works along with some of the basics of how animation works within the tool, using things like face tracking to quickly animate mouth and eye movements.
In Matt Wilson’s first tutorial, he tackles the process of rigging a 2D character in After Effects using the free Duik plug-in . The 200, 000 views prove that he’s done a pretty good job at it.
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In this 40 minute tutorial, Wilson shows off a fun and quirky character that’s free to download, and he explains in detail the process for rigging and animating his character that you can follow along with.
Wilson walks step by step through the process of each layer in the character build, using the puppet tool to identify pivot points, and how to use the Duik plug-in to rig everything together.
Duik is a great free tool for rigging, but it can confuse new users, and Matt Wilson does an excellent job of demystifying the whole process.
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Daniel Gies is a master of 2D character animation in After Effects. In fact, we’ve highlighted some of his beautiful work in our industry spotlight of his studio e.d. Films.
In this relatively brief tutorial, Gies outlines his process for creating a rig based on Adobe’s puppet tool and null objects. No plug-ins are used here. Just some old fashioned null objects and precise pinpointing.
Daniel Gies has several other tutorials on his YouTube channel that deal with other aspects of rigging and character animation, all worth taking a look at.
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If you are looking for a tutorial that is for total beginners, this tutorial by Ross Plaskow is a great place to start. For one thing, Plaskow is highly entertaining in his approach (but be aware of some salty language).
While this tutorial does get into the process of rigging in After Effects, Ross actually goes all the way back to the basics of how to design and layout the initial character in Photoshop (including the all-important mouth movements). This is a step that many other tutorials skip or glaze over.
Plaskow uses a very simple method of rigging with anchor points and parenting, but it’s effective and easy to understand. It’s a great way to get started with rigging and character animation for beginners.
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In this short but sweet tutorial from Ryan Boyle, we see Boyle’s technique for creating and rigging a 2D character. Although some designers may not be as familiar with Illustrator, Boyle shows how he designs his characters in vector form so they can be scaled to any size.
Once his character is designed and layered in Illustrator, he also uses the very simple approach of adjusting anchor points and layer parenting to rig his simple, yet effective characters for animation.
Each of these tutorials uses a slightly different approach for rigging 2D characters for animation in After Effects, and each has its own merits. Try following each tutorial to see which method works best for you, and you’ll be a character animator in no time.
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Let us know your preferred character rigging method in the comments below. And if you have a tutorial that has helped you learn to be a better 2D character rigger, link to it so we can all learn some new tricks.2d Animation is nothing but 2 Dimensions; for 2d animation, we need to have good drawing skills; else, we need to have a good idea of the anatomy of a character. We need to draw every frame in 2d animation, Flash software has mostly used for 2d, but in After effects, we have more comfortable options to create 2D animation, so many people started using After effects for 2D animation. There is a lot of ways to create 2D animations in that; we are going to use one option that is the walk cycle, we are going to create a cartoon to walk.
Here we can see the option merged layer or choose layer; in the merged layer, we get a single frame with all layers merged. We have all our PSD layers; we need to import all the individual layers.
Here we can find a cartoon character; each layer is individual in this cartoon. With the individual layer, we are going to animate the character.
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To create a walk cycle, we need to move legs, hands, head, and body; if we rotate legs and hand, it won’t move correctly, so we need to change the center points of legs and hands now.
Step 8: Select Pan Behind Tool; we can use Y as a shortcut. This tool is used to move the center anchor point. Here we use this tool to change the center point of hands and legs.
This tool lets you pin a point in the image, and each time we can move it, this pin acts as a smooth joint; we can find a puppet pinpoint on the face as it acts as a smooth joint to move the head according to the moment of legs and hand.
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Step 13: First, we start animating legs, so select the legs and press R on the keyboard, which is a shortcut for Rotation. Click on keyframes of rotation and move the legs.
Step 15: Select the hands and start keyframes for rotation, each point where we created for legs the same place we need to create points to move hands.
Here we find the legs keyframes, and we need to place our hand keyframes in the same place to create animation naturally.
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Step 17: For the head, we have a puppet pin, so we move the pin according to the moment of hand and legs; we do not have to create the keyframes for the puppet it creates on its own whenever we give a moment.
Step 19: Here, we created a complete walk cycle, and we can find the center points which is fixed like joints to the character, but the walk cycle we created in a particular position which walks in the same place without changing the position so we need to change the position of the character.
Step 20: Select all the layers and move the cartoon on any one side. I move it to the left side; now, we need to move the cartoon from one position to another. So we select position by pressing P on the keyboard, now the position is selected to all the layers.
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Step 22: Now, take the cartoon to the next position, where we ended the walk cycle. Here we can find the starting and ending position.
Here we created the walk cycle of a cartoon character; in this process, we imported the layers of the cartoon character individually hands, legs, head, and body.
We created a solid background, changed the center points of the parts according to our comfort, moved the hands and legs by creating keyframes, and moved the body and head with the help of the puppet pin tool the whole process; we gave position. Here we learn, how to create a walk cycle of a 2D cartoon, how to use the puppet pin tool.
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These points act like smooth joints; if we hold anyone point, it moves individually without disturbing another; these points act like bone fitting.
Step 4: When we hold the CTRL-key, we can find a watch symbol on the cruiser; by pressing CTRL to hold the left- click on a certain point and move. The cursor will move and give keyframes automatically. We can find an outline moving as shown in the below image.
When we release CTRL keyframes, it automatically stops, and the cursor comes to the first position, and a gray line of the moment is visible on a particular point.
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