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Make eyes blink in AE
Sorry for the bother again but I have a question about using masks to simulate eye blinking on a character I am animating. In flash I simply used a mask that was the shape of the actual Eye Lid and fired a shape tween when I wanted to simulate the eye blink. I cann’t find a way to do that here in AE. I am thinking that I will not be able to use masks on the layers like I did in Flash:)
Thanks for any help.
Joe Stenhouse
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6 Replies
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I don’t speak Flash so I can’t make a direct comparison of the methods, but I can tell you that you absolutely can do this in AE … many different ways, in fact. To do it using masks, you’ll just need to animate the masks … using hold key frames will make it easier.
Sorry I don’t recall the details so I can’t offer specific directions, but I’ve also done eye blinks in AE using various distort effects.
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If your character blinks more than a few times, it will be far easier to use an Expression to reference the blink and unblink eye layers. Then all you have to do is keyframe the Expression controller. This is also one of the easier ways to animate mouth parts for phonemes.
bogiesan
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Wow ok. Yes it will be blinking many times. I will look up “Expression” in AE help to see about that.
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What do you mean by “hold key frames?”
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[Joe Stenhouse] “Wow ok. Yes it will be blinking many times. I will look up “Expression” in AE help to see about that.”
Sorry, it was a bad recommendation.
You’re not ready for expressions yet.
But, to give you an idea of what will happen…you will se tup an expression slider that moves between 0 and 9. Each of the 10 stops on the slider will reference a different eye image. Your 10 eyes could be open, open wide, open left, open right, blink, unblink, left open right closed, right ope, left closed.Yo place markers in your storyline track to indicate what eyes you need when and then set your expression controller at each of those points. It’s incredible. And it’s not that difficult to do since the Expression Controllers are stock effects and basic expressions are simple to program using the pickwhip. Advanced expression and scripting are so weird they have their own forum here and dedicated support systems on the Web.
bogiesan
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You are correct. I have not been using After Effects as long as flash. I’ve been using flash since MX but only in the last 2 years have I dabbled in AE mainly using the puppet tool for my animations.
I know what a key frame is obviously but I wasn’t sure about the “hold” part. Perhaps it was just different terminology and I already know what it means.Thanks for the suggestion on the tutorials. I will check it out.
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