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DUIK Copy/Paste for Animation
Thank you Duik for IK capabilities in After Effects & CCow for this great forum. I’m trying to build several characters dancing together in After Effects. I need to copy a bracket of keyframes for a character to another time position in the characters’ timeline. DUIK says its Animation Copy/Paste utility can do it but I can’t get it to work nor is there any web info about it. When I select the keyframes I want copied, then press “Copy Anim” in the DUIK Animation section I get a message “Animation Copied – Number of Layer copied 45”. Press OK, Good. I move the time cursor to a position further along and press “Paste Anim” and message says “Pasted animation on 45 Layers.” and nothing happens, no keyframes. I try again and again without success but sometimes, YES! the keyframes do appear not on the position of the time cursor but almost on top of the existing keyframes. What am I doing wrong ? Can somebody please help as I consider this an extremely important labour saving device. Thanks.
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2 Replies
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After many trials I found the process of how DUIK Copy/Paste works in After Effects. (Google DUIK for free download – but consider making a donation). Here is the solution.
PROBLEM: I have a character built in Photoshop, and imported as a composition of layers (images) into After Effects. In AE the character blinks, rolls his eyes, sings (moving mouth) and dances, waving arms and legs. These actions are semi-automated using slider, point and DUIK IK Controllers. This generates 45 layers (for each part of his body components -eg Thigh-Leg-Foot = 3 layers) and some 500 plus keyframes to set up a dance routine over 0-15 seconds. The character needs to repeat his dance routine several times during his song and dance act. AE can only copy keyframes horizontally, i.e. across one layer at a time. How do I repeat all these keyframes in bulk (i.e. make multiple brackets of 15 seconds of multi-layer keyframes along the timeline) with DUIK Copy/Paste?
SOLUTION:
Lasso and select all the keyframes. DUIK does Copy and it does paste BUT as it copies the positions of what you selected, it pastes directly over the existing keyframes thus overwriting them and it appears to you nothing has happened. So First drag the original bracket of 500 keyframes say, from position 0-15 seconds, to where you want the repetition to start, say 20-35 seconds. DUIK COPY to snapshot the keyframes at 20-35 seconds. Drag these original keyframes back to their 0-15 second position. Now you can DUIK PASTE to see a cascade of copied keyframes populating the layers at the 20-35 second position in the Timeline. To do this in a different pre-comp first use AE copy/paste to set up the layers in the new pre-comp, then DUIK PASTE to populate the Pre-comp with the 500 keyframes. -
A massive thank to you Bill
This is the largest time saver for character animation since I installed duIK. Thank you for explaining this, it’s crazy how simple it is:) My hats off to you.
Andy
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