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expressions: creating a “flexibel” leg
hello
I try to find a way to animate a caveman. because I need to do about 2 minutes a week I ws going to use shapes with drawings in a 3d programm and connect them with a line (as a leg) so I would only need to animate feet and hands and the arms and legs stay in between like a rubber band.
for look reasons I went to after effects and have this problem:
approach 1: the caveman is a subcomposition. I use a stroked path as a leg and parent is to the foot – but can I parent the top point to the body? so my leg remains the connection to the body when I move the foot?
or
approach 2 (favourite one): can I somehow create an expression that keeps a layer (with a drawn leg) connecting foot and body?any advice appreciated – thank you for your attention.
lars -
7 Replies
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Have you seen Dan Ebbert’s “Animating a Walk Cycle”?:
https://www.creativecow.net/show.php?page=/articles/ebberts_dan/layer_looping/index.html
There’s the steps on parenting and such.
I just did a dancing Bigfoot using Dan’s methods, maybe it will be up on the web if it’s a finalist.
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Brush up on your trigonometry.
I’m trying to picture what you’re talking about. Is the leg just staying straight and stretching and squishing to fit the distance? Because that doesn’t sound too realistic, but you didn’t say anything about bending at the knee.
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Can you post a still of how you want the end-result to look ?
Specifically: is the leg a straight line, a rubber-hose curve, or do you need knee-bending ?
Three quite different situations, each with it’s own solution…
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hey – yes – I had email contact with dan and he could realy help me out a lot. currently we are still testing the animation possible. He helped me to a solution to do inverse kinematic – leading to a to a leg I can pull by the foot and a correctly bending knee.
the only thing that doesn’t yet work would be stretching the aniamtion further (the originbal plan went more towards rubber I guess) to get a more catroony look.
but since we are in the middle of the production for a 2 minutes pilot due to the end of this week, we will go with a 3 point stroked path to connect foot and arm (with a knee) that we will preobably have to animate by hand. unless:
would somebody know how to adress (or parent) a speciffic point of a 3 points stroke?
the IK thing invluding a stretch will be tested and finalized between christmas and new years…
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hey
the thing is that the whole look is pretty sureal. with the bending and stretching method there would have been some kind of knee – but not a realistic one (please see the other reply to get a closer idea of the current stage)
thank you and cheers from berlin!
lars -
hey – it tends more towards the rubber hose. (please see reply above)…
and thank you! -
Hi Lars,
there’s not really a direct way to draw a spline through 3 points that you can animate.
a broken line would be no problem: that can be made with two “beam” effects that you combine.You could try with bending, but then the bend will always be in the middle…
I’m thinking in the lines of this:make the leg in photoshop as one layer, rigid:
Open, then precomp it after effects so it has lots and lots of transparancy around it:
make the precomp three times as wide as the leg is high.
and 1.5 times as high as the leg is high:
Set the Anchorpoint of the precomped leg to the pivotpoint of the hip:
add a “Distort->CC Bend It” filter
give the Start-point “parameter” this expression:"anchorPoint"
Now move the End-point to the bottom of the foot, it’s best to make sure its X-value is the same as the Start-X value, so the two points are directly underneath eachother:
Give the layer’s rotation this expression:
value - effect("CC Bend It")("Bend")*(0.9)
This will subtract a value from the current rotation, if you bend 100% it will rotate -90
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