animate a character

[Steve Roberts]

You just need to:
1. make sure that each limb layer’s anchor point sits where the limb would pivot, e.g. an arm would pivot at the shoulder. Either use the pan behind tool, or move the anchor point in the layer window.
2. parent the limbs to the body, so when the body moves, the limbs go with it.

Then you animate the rotation of the limbs and position of the body.
Pretty much.
If your limbs move when you don’t want them to, consider using “hold” keyframes occasionally.

These terms are mentioned in the AE Help.

Good luck!

[Rich Rubasch]

How about more organic movement, like where you have an eagle and his wing becomes a hand and you want him to do a thumbs up? Would Flash or Toon Boom Studio be a better approach if it is much more than just swingin on a pivot point? It would be more like tweening than just pivoting.

Just curious because I might have one coming up and I didn’t even consider AE to do it….I immediately thought of Toon Boom first, then Flash.

Rich Rubasch
Tilt Media

[Mike Clasby]

For a tut on Steve’s suggestions see Dan Ebberts “Animating A Walk Cycle” (click on his head at the top of the page and scroll down).

Also AE CS3 is coming with the new puppet tool that looks promising.

[Steve Roberts]

For that sort of thing an onionskinning feature would be nice, and currently AE only offers it when using Vector Paint. Which I like, actually. If you want to draw individual frames and tween by hand, I’d say Vector Paint would be the way to go. But it’s not as efficient as other apps for that sort of thing, and I’d imagine that after a few hundred frames, you’d want to work efficiently. 🙂
Maybe you could shoot a sequence of hand-drawn stills, and import that sequence, but I can’t see the inking going very well. Flash might be better if you can “trace bitmap” the sequence then bucket fill for the inking.

No, AE’s method is to set keys for animatable properties and let the computer interpolate. If keys can’t be set for it, AE can’t interpolate it. This leaves us with position, scale, rotation, anchor point, effects, distortion and the new puppet effect. I think the closest AE can get to wing-to-hand animation would be morphing with Re:Flex, but morphing looks like morphing, ya know?

Then again, I could be wrong — you could give AE a shot, coming up with a method that avoids AE’s limitations and leverages its strengths.

[David Bogie]

Doing character animation in After Effects is a stylistic decision. You must think paper dolls, puppets and “South Park.”

If you need to simulate cel animation, you need a real animation system.

bogiesan

This is my standard sigfile so do not take it personally: “For crying out loud, read the freakin’ manual.”