• Adobe After Effects

  2 Pass character animation (rig+puppet)

  Posted by John Hammond on April 15, 2009 at 4:55 pm

  Hi guys.

  I have been doing some simple character animation.

  I have always found that setting up a cut-out style character for animation can be tedious and fiddly. I can rig it ok, setting up pivot points for limbs and creating a parent heirachy from torso through to upper arm, forearm, hands and fingers. What I have struggled with is creating the actual character illustrations, so that limbs join up ok and don’t have visible seams, and making sure the seams/joins look ok at both rotation extremes.

  Also, I am not too keen on the ‘cut-out’ style look. I look at the old classic animation and love the flex in the bodies – something that is often missed out in new digital animation.

  So, what I have started to do is do my animation is use a ‘2 pass’ method.

  For the project I am working on now the animation is simple. A woman, shot from the waist up, whacks a volley ball with her arms. The arms were drawn in photoshop as separate layers, and I combined the body and arms in after-effects, setting pivots and parenting the arms to the body.

  OK, so there’s my first pass. I animate the arms as needed.

  Now, I Precomp the character. Then, to the precomp I add the puppet tool, setting up just 3 puppet points, and a starch point at the hips. I used to always get stuck here as things behaved oddly once the puppet was animated (limbs disappearing behind invisible non-existent limbs..?). I then realised that by turning up mesh expansion I could fix this.

  Now, I animate the character’s waist to bend. This acts as a second layer of animation, retaining my original rigged limb animation.

  So, I get the best of both worlds. The ease and speed of rigged limbs, and the nice flexible motion of the waist. All with just one original .PSD (which the illustrators I work with appreciate 🙂 ).

  So – the point of this post is to ask if other people use this ‘2 pass’ method. I am also wondering how far it could be taken. Full character rigs, walk cycles..? what are the limitations of this technique? are there in-depth tutorials? Am I only scratching the surface of it’s potential?

  Thanks,

  John

  John Hammond replied 17 years, 1 month ago 1 Member · 0 Replies
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