Saturday 23 April 2011

Making things move in After Effects- Uni session

In uni we were shown how to make things move in after effects using 2 different techniques.
One was using the puppet pin tool and putting 'pins' into where there should be movement on your character for example, the joints. We used a skeleton picture for the tutorial as it was easier to see the movement. I found the puppet pin tool didn't work well with the skeleton because it made his bones go bendy. We used the starch tool to 'spray' where we wanted parts of our skeleton to not move such as the bones and that made the movement look better but I still didn't like the effect. I thought learning this technique was useful though as I think it could possibly work well on my characters just for slight movements for instance if one of my characters walk there body will need to move slightly too.
The other technique we were shown I preferred and will be using this technique to make my character move it's arms and legs. It is a bit more difficult though as the characters body parts all need to be on separate layers so there are more things to organise and I found my layers panel started to get a bit clustered.
Once all the body parts have their own layers you have to adjust the points to make sure each centre part is on the joint as this is where the movement will originate from. Then the complicated bit is the parenting bit so you have to make sure the body is the parent of the upper arm and the upper arm is the parent of the lower arm and so on! Once that is complete you can use the rotate button to make the parts move as if they were joined together.
Here are a couple of examples as it is easier to show then explain it!

Skeleton from sarah chester on Vimeo.



Skeleton 2 from sarah chester on Vimeo.

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