Character Rigging in Adobe After Effects
Puppet Pin is one of After Effects’ most powerful tools. With just a few clicks and keyframes, you can transform a static image into a lively animation! The tool has its own idiosyncrasies and methods, but with this tutorial, we’ll help you learn the ins and outs of this great tool. The anchor point in After Effects is the point in which all transformations are manipulated from. In a practical sense the anchor point is the point in which your layer will scale and rotate around. While it may seem silly to have an anchor point and a position transform property both of these parameters do very different things.
Originally, Adobe After Effects was not designed for animating characters. Usually those tools are found in programs like Adobe Flash, or 3D packages such as Cinema 4D, 3Ds Max, Maya, etc. But thankfully, the genius Duduf created an amazing and free script which he posted on his website, allowing us to now use After Effects for character rigging.
I used this technique in a video created for Zion & Zion client, Century 21 Northwest. You can view the video here, or download the full rig.
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Duik After Effects Pin Tool
If you’re reading this article, I’m going to hope that you have a fairly good knowledge of After Effects, as I will be jumping into somewhat advanced how-tos in order to explain how to rig characters in After Effects. If you are not familiar with this program, I would recommend visiting the Adobe Classroom to learn some of the basics first.
Download and Install the Tools
First, you are going to want to download and install Duduf’s IK Tools. To install, simply download, unzip the file, and then copy and paste over the three files. I work on a Mac so it might look a little different for you if you work on a pc, but it’s still the same process. Once you have your three files, you will want to place them into your scripts UI folder within your After Effects application folder. My path looks like this: Application/Adobe After Effects CC/ Scripts/ ScriptsUI Panels. Again, yours might look a little bit different.
Test the Tools
Dock Of Auto-Rig Icons
Cool, so now you have the tools installed. Let’s just make sure everything is working as it should be, before jumping too far into things. Go to your window tab and look for “duik.jsx.” If you have that, boom! Go ahead and click it. Next, it will most likely ask you to enable “Allow Scripts to Write files and Access Network.” Enable it, and you’re ready to go. You should get a dock of icons that look like the image to the right. If you do, then you are good to go.
Rigging a Character
So once we have all of that taken care of, we are ready to go and rig. I will be working with a very simple character that I created in AE (After Effects), but this technique works just as well with characters created in Illustrator; you just have to make sure you have broken that character up, and make sure that it is AE ready. If you’re not totally sure how to go about breaking your character up further, it’s basically breaking apart your character, and then placing its individual components into their own separate layer so that when you import that AI (Adobe Illustrator) file, you have several different layers, instead of just one. The scope of this article won’t go into this in any more detail, but there are several tutorials and blogs on how to do this. Here are two of my favorites:
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Precomp the Limbs of Your Character
This is the simple character I created in AE; you will notice the left side of his body is red. That’s just to help me to differentiate what body part is what. If you want to do something similar, you could simply throw a fill effect on top of your limb, and then disable it when you’re ready to render. You can find the fill effect in “effect/generate/fill.” In this rig, I’ll be using the puppet tool, as well as the Duik script. Together, they will create the rig. On each of your limbs, you will want to precomp them into their own comps to allow the puppet tool to work correctly.
Precomp Groups for the Puppet
Add Deformation Points
Now that you have each limb precomped, you will need to add deformation points—let’s start on the right leg.
This is what my leg looks like with puppet pin points. Select the puppet tool, and add three points in the leg, starting at the bottom and working your way up. Next, add the deformation points in the following order: foot, knee, hip.
Animation Timeline for Puppet Leg
Crt ss 9900 service manual. Now that you have three points, let’s bone it and add the IK chain. After doing this, you want to twirl down the puppet effect in the timeline, and click on each puppet pin, and add a bone using Duik. First, select pin one, add bone, pin two, and then add a bone, and finally pin three, add a bone.
Next, we have to change the names of our bones. If we don’t, it won’t work properly in the later stages. Change the bone names to “right foot,” “right knee,” and “right hip.” Now you have all of the bones you need. You can now add a controller to the bones, selecting the bottom foot bone and clicking the controller button on the Duik panel. Your comp should look something like this. Finally, all you have to do is parent two bones together to allow the IK chain to work. Start with the right foot, grab the pick whip icon, and parent that to right knee. Then parent the right knee to the right hip.
Create IK Chain for Animation
d’IK Options Panel
This is it! Now we are ready to do the final step in creating our IK chain for animation. Select the right foot bone, right knee bone, right hip bone, and finally your controller, in that order. Click the IK button on the Duik panel. You will then see this new panel. It will ask you what orientation of the knee joint you will want. Think of the point on the > as what direction you want it to go, and click “ok.” If you want to change it for whatever reason, you can easily do so in your effects panel. Under IK orientation, there is a check box you can check to flip the direction. Boom! Your controller should be working, and you now have a complete IK chain. This is what a complete IK chain should look like in the timeline.
Prepare for Animation
Final Timeline
This is the process you’ll need to follow in order to get the main chunk of what needs to be done, allowing you to prepare for animation. Once you have each limb, let’s focus on the body and the head, and finally, connect them all together. Use the pin tool like before and place three pins, one at the pelvic area, chest area, and shoulder area. Next, add bones for those areas as well.
Now you should have three extra bones on the body. Take your left and right shoulder bones and parent them to the shoulder bone in the body, and take your left and right hip bones and parent them to the pelvic bone. Leave the chest alone. Now you will have to add two null objects (go to layer/New/Null). Name one “Head” control, and one “Main” control. You’ll want to place one somewhere near where the head meets the neck and body. This will be your head control parent, your head graphic to the head control null, and then the main controller null. What I like to do is make it slightly bigger, and place it somewhere around the pelvic area. Now all you have to do is parent all of your controls to this null.
So shoulder, chest, pelvis, left foot controller, right foot right foot controller, right hand controller, left hand controller, and head controller to main controller. Your full rig should look something like this in the timeline, and this in your comp viewer.
Conclusion
There you go—now you have a character rigged and you’re ready to go. If you want help cleaning up your timeline, shy guy (i.e. turn off the visibility of your layers) your layers that don’t need to be directly controlled, and give your controllers different colors in the timeline to help differentiate what is supposed to do what.
Watch Puppet Tool videos and. Karl covers the puppet pin tool and motion sketching in After Effects while Jason. The Puppet tool in After Effects easily. The Puppet Pin Tool Is Not Just for Dummies. At first glance the puppet pin tool in After Effects may seem like a low impact tool that you. Pull, squash, stretch, and.
When you move one or more Deform pins, the mesh changes shape to accommodate this movement, while keeping the overall mesh as rigid as possible. The result is that a movement in one part of the image causes natural, life-like movement in other parts of the image. For example, if you place Deform pins in a person’s feet and hands and then move one of the hands to make it wave, the motion in the attached arm is large, but the motion in the waist is small, just as in the real world. If a single animated Deform pin is selected, its Position keyframes are visible in the Composition panel and Layer panel as a motion path. You can work with these motion paths as you work with other motion paths, including setting keyframes to rove across time. (See.) You can have multiple meshes on one layer.
Having multiple meshes on one layer is useful for deforming several parts of an image individually—such as text characters—as well as for deforming multiple instances of the same part of an image, each with a different deformation. The original, undistorted mesh is calculated at the current frame at the time at which you apply the effect.
The mesh does not change to accommodate motion in a layer based on motion footage, nor does the mesh update if you replace a layer’s source footage item. Robert Powers provides a video tutorial on the that demonstrates the use of parenting and the Puppet tools to animate a character. Dave Scotland provides a video tutorial on the that demonstrates how to create a looping character animation using the Puppet tools. Kert Gartner provides a video tutorial on the that shows how to add organic motion to images using the wiggle expression method on Puppet pins.
Daniel Gies provides in which he demonstrates the use of inverse kinematics and the Puppet tools to rig and animate a character. The stopwatch switch is automatically set for the Position property of a Deform pin as soon as the pin is created. Marvel Vs Capcom 2 Chd Downloads there. Therefore, a keyframe is set or modified each time that you change the position of a Deform pin. This auto-keyframing is unlike most properties in After Effects, for which you must explicitly set the stopwatch switch by adding a keyframe or an expression to animate each property. The auto-animation of Deform pins makes it convenient to add them and animate them in the Composition panel or Layer panel, without manipulating the properties in the Timeline panel.
• Click any nontransparent pixel of a raster layer to apply the Puppet effect and create a mesh for the outline created by auto-tracing the alpha channel of a layer. • Click within a closed path on a vector layer to apply the Puppet effect and create a mesh for the outline defined by that path. • Click within a closed, unlocked mask to apply the Puppet effect and create a mesh for the outline defined by the mask path. • Click outside all closed paths on a vector layer to apply the Puppet effect without creating a mesh. Outlines are created for paths on the layer, though an outline is only visible when a Puppet tool pointer is over the area that the outline defines. Place the pointer over the area enclosed by a path to see the outline in which a mesh will be created if you click that point.
(See.) Click within an outline to create a mesh. If a layer has no unlocked masks, shapes, or text characters on it when you apply the Puppet effect, it uses Auto-trace to create paths from the alpha channel.