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How do I animate a 2D character?
I’m really new to adobe after effects so if this is blatantly obvious I apologize. I drew some characters on paper in their individual parts (i.e. seperate head, arms, chest..) and I was trying to animate them. It seemed like it was going to take forever if I had to animate each part individually for every movement. There was another kid in my class who set up a matrix (i think?) that allowed him to set all of the pivot points. He could then just adjust the body using keyframes to make the animation much faster.
If anyone knows how to do this please let me know.
Thanks.
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3 Replies
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HI Matt,
I’m in the middle of something and noticed your post. Here is a good link but the feature in question is only available in After Effects CS3.
Check this out;
https://www.metacafe.com/watch/885847/puppet_tool_in_adobe_after_effects_cs3/
Cheers
Chris (your prof….)
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the puppet tool works well for bending single layers by putting and moving ‘pins’
for multi-layer characters, use the “pan-behind” tool (look it up in the manual), to position the anchorpoint where the rotation should be, then use parenting to create a “tree-structure”
when a parent rotates (or moces, scales), all of it’s children follow.
for example:
R foot is parented to R lower leg
R lower leg is parented to R upper leg
R upper leg is parented to pelvisR Hand is parented to R lower arm
R lower arm is parented to R upper arm
R upper arm is parented to upper body
upper body is parented to pelvis
etc.the pelvis would be the best choice to be the ‘über-parent’
you could combine this with puppet-anims on some layers.
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Hey,
This is about as awesome as it gets… THANKS DAN!!!
https://www.motionscript.com/expressions-lab-ae65/ik.html
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