• Adobe After Effects

  A folding paper effect

  Posted by Adam Hengstberger on February 11, 2008 at 5:36 am

  Hey out there!

  I have a job I’m doing where I have to have paper cut out dolls (you know the ones that are all attached and then you pull them apart and they’re holding hands) I need to Animate them pulling apart.

  Does anyone out there know of a way to animate such an object?

  -Adam

  Kevin Camp replied 18 years, 3 months ago 2 Members · 1 Reply
• 1 Reply

• 

  Kevin Camp

  February 11, 2008 at 11:11 pm

  you can do it, but it will involve moving the anchor points, parenting nulls and layers and creating a universal control for the angle (unfolding of the dolls).

  you can start by just creating a doll in illustrator or photoshop. if you create it in photoshop have the doll fill the width of the frame (or crop the image so it does). you could create it in ae making sure the doll fills the comp width (set a custom comp size).

  bring the paper doll into a new comp and move the anchor point to the right edge. duplicate it and position the anchor point of that doll to the left edge. set the positions for each layer to be the same (the center of the comp would be fine). now the 2 dolls should appear to be linked by the hand.

  make both those doll layers 3d layers. add a null layer, name it ‘control’, then apply an angle control effect. select the doll layers and hit ‘r’ to show the rotation controls and enable expressions for the y rotation. use the pick whip to link the y rotation values to the angle control on the ‘control’ null. for one doll (it won’t matter which) add ‘* -1’ to the expression (that would read ‘times negative one’). what you want is to rotate one doll opposite the other, multiplying that value by -1 will do that.

  now you can modify your angle control value and the dolls will rotate accordingly (0-90 degrees). if you want to continue, set the angle control back to 0.

  it gets trickier now because you can’t move the anchor points to get the next dolls to link the available hands. to do this you will need to use nulls, positioning them on the available hands, parenting them to the doll that they correspond to and linking the rotation to the angle control. then you can duplicate one of the previous dolls and position it (and it’s anchor point) to match the null, parent it to the null and link the y rotation to the angle control.

  then just keep repeating the process until you have a chain of dolls. it’s tedious, but possible.

  Kevin Camp
  Senior Designer
  KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW

Reply to this Discussion! Login or Sign Up