Is this a usable animation method?

[David Bogie]

Do not try to re-invent this wheel.
This is a relatively simple application for After Effects. Tens of thousands of character animators have perfected several different methods. How you would find them is anyone’s guess but my favorite involves a simple Expression Control for your phonemes. There are really only 7 or 9 basic mouthshapes for speech and these can be nested inside other moutshapes for emotion or they can be created into a full set of 20-60. Same with eyes.
Each of the individual phoneme items resides on its own layer (built in Photoshop or Illustrator). Each layer has a number in After Effects. You can use an Expression controller to make visible only one layer at a time. You keyframe the Expression Controller, not the mouthshapes themselves.

There are many different ways to accomplish the same control and they’ve all been invented and they’ve all been pretty much perfected for creativity and efficiency. Spend a few evenings on Google looking for character animation tutorials and fan sites. Locate good animators on YouTube and Vimeo and contact them. Many are willing to help out budding animators.

bogiesan

[James Roberts]

I had a feeling that wouldn’t be ideal. The problems usually is, I want specific information up front, but it isn’t. I’ve done a fair amount of searching and tutorial perusing, and still haven’t found a clear set of instructions for the exact processes I’m aiming for.

I’ve got no desire to invent a new way to do it, but it takes time to sort through all the info and learn a new process. While I’m doing that, I want to spend some time getting character assets ready to use.
I like the idea of having all the mouths as well as the head they’re used on all brought in as a layered
Photoshop file, but I don’t want to waste time setting up such files if they all needed to be separate. It sounds as if this will work, though.

It’s obvious it’s going to take time to learn the right process. Not because I’m slow to pick up on it, but because the specific info is hard to search out. I know my way around Flash animation, but there are very big differences between the two.

[Jason Milligan]

I used to use the method you are proposing when I was first learning AE. It will work. I found the time-remapping method you mention from a COW tutorial to be much more manageable in the end. If you find that approach confusing, I would recommend messing around with it a bit more until it makes sense. It isn’t the only solution, but it is a good one.

[James Roberts]

The main thing I didn’t follow from the “Mr Face” tutorial was where in the project the composition of the 8 frames was. Was it just being used as a source, or was it at the beginning of the project? I’m used to having a library to draw from in Flash. I didn’t get if he was moving and duplicating frames from within the timeline or pulling them from a separate composition.

I’m sure when I get the feel for it it will be a better approach than what I noticed with opacity, but I’m concerned about not being able to call up the frames by name. If you work with the same 8 he has in the tutorial it’s probably pretty easy, but I tend to use more mouths for greater expression, and 20 or more might make for a confusing mess. Or add a whole step to the process of printing out a cheat sheet each time a new set of mouths is established.

I’m sure I’ll figure it out soon and feel dopey for even asking, right now I just can’t compare it to what I’m used to in Flash.

[David Bogie]

[James Roberts] “I’m sure I’ll figure it out soon and feel dopey for even asking, right now I just can’t compare it to what I’m used to in Flash.”

Yar, that’s going to be a big problem for you. Flash shares almost nothing with After Effects in terms of how one approaches a seemingly similar challenge. The two people in my department who use Flash approach everything from a weirdly PowerPoint-like point of view. I cannot relate to them at all. Collaborating with them is almost impossible because of how differently the two apps are designed.

Changing the transparency of layers in order to switch mouths in and out is remarkably labor intensive and ignores all of the higher functions Adobe has provided for you in AE.

Character animation in AE is a specialized function with many solutions. We’ve been doing this stuff for more than a decade. Back in the olden days, we used an obscure function of AE called Motion Math that could analyze audio and apply a scaling factor to a “mouth” object. The result was a sadly inadequate lip movement in rough sync with changing levels in the audio track. Several hours of tweaking the individual scaling keyframes usually resulted in something we could pass off as cell-style animation. Add a tooth and a tongue layer behind the mouth and the scene got much more satisfactory.

If you need to move limbs, expressions and parenting will give you the fundamental tools you need to simulate inverse kinetics although I understand CS4 has a more sophisticated IK too. I don’t have CS4 yet. You can control eye movement with a radial expression control, just move the pointer around the circle and your eyes will follow. Blinks and unblinks can be handled with a slider or a radial expression controller.

Learning expressions has been very difficult for me but if you can code in Flash, you can handle the syntax easily.

The Cow’s AE Expressions forum will give you many suggestions if you search carefully. There are many other AE Expressions help sites on the Net that should come up while you are cruising the forum.

bogiesan

[James Roberts]

That’s a good constructive point. Don’t try to compare. Good enough, I’ll start looking into expressions
more. I’ve already gotten a basic understanding of parenting, nulls, and puppet pins. All things that aren’t in Flash but I instantly see a use for, so I’m adaptable to new working methods.

The first thing I did when I got a trial of Flash was to bring in a bunch of 300 dpi Photoshop characters and flew them around the screen. That bogged down quickly, and I learned Flash is not ideal for bitmap and learned the vector symbol approach quickly enough. Now I’ve got the latest Flash, with nice new features like bones to utilize, but being able to go back to the Photoshop images with Ae is the first order of business.

If you mean by “code in Flash” the action scripting level, I never really got into any of that. My goal has always been cartoon animations for video, and I’ve only used it to animate on the stage and export to quicktime. Similar goals with Ae, but I know how the results differ in appearance and that’s the look I’ll be going for. The simplest description would be like a more fluid Aqua Teen Huger Force look.

[James Roberts]

Okay, that’s better. I went through the tutorial here again, this time while playing along. That cleared up the confusion I had just watching it. This does now seem like a good way to do it, I like the way I can just apply lip sync and eye blinks to the head, then take that and further animate it’s position in the final scene setup.

I wonder if having nested compositions adds more complications into the redering process. I noticed a quick test (about 2 seconds of lip sync at the beginning of a 30 second timline) was billed as using 55% of the RAM. Is this number likely to go a lot higher with a more full project? I’m generally thinking of doing only 60 seconds or so per project file, then editing the resulting clips in Final Cut. I’m working on a new Mac Pro with what I though was ample RAM (4 GB), but after seeing what some other users have it seems boderline. I don’t have any major RAID setup for rendering either. I hope I’m not in for a world of headaches trying to run this on the low end of things.