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Animate a character in After Effects

After Effects provides a variety of tools to animate characters, including Painting, Puppeting, and Parenting. Fortunately, there’s an equally wide variety of tutorials available online on using these tools. Here’s a survey of some of those tutorials from Ryan Boyle, Daniel Gies, Angie Taylor, Todd Kopriva, Stuart Preece, Rex Crowle, Pete McEvoy, Marcin Zeglinkski, and Dave Scotland, plus additional tips, expressions and scripts from other After Effects and animation luminaries going all the way back to Walt Disney himself.

Ryan Boyle of Sketchy Pictures posted How to make a cartoon in After Effects, a series of video tutorials that explore character design and setup, creating a walk cycle using the Puppet tool, expressions, lip sync, camera animation, and lighting in After Effects. Here’s the first episode:

Two other substantial resources also appeared not long ago: a free series on character animation in AE offered free by Daniel Gies, and Video2brain training sets by Angie Taylor, Animated Character Design in Adobe Illustrator, 2D character animation in After Effects, and Hand drawn animation with After Effects paint tools.

Rig A Realistic Puppet, a newer 17-part series by Daniel Gies, started in October 2011. Mettle’s Freeform Pro  is used to add impressive depth to character in After Effects, and numerous tips are shared including IK (inverse kinematics) with the free Duik Tools (IK scripts for After Effects). Here’s a sample from the earlier series by Daniel Gies and one from Duik Tools:

Todd Kopriva has been tracking and outlining character animation tutorials (including uses of the Puppet Tool), so check out his important summaries: making of “Something Left, Something Taken”, tutorials for After Effects and 3D by Dave Scotland, and character animation tutorials (and more) from Robert Powers. Here’s a sample from the series by Robert Powers:

In Animate a character in After Effects at Computer Arts magazine, Stuart Preece explained how to breathe life into your character designs using After Effects’ built-in tools. They also have a 2007 Animate a character in After Effects tutorial from Rex Crowle. Pete McEvoy’s Rigging a character for After Effects beforehand in Illustrator also appeared that year in Digital Arts, which later added Design and Animate a Stylish 50s Cartoon Character by Ben Mounsey. See also more recent tutorials at AEtuts+ like Learn How to Rig and Animate a Character and Create your Own Odyssey Day 1 and Day 2 by Marcin Zeglinski.

Resources in Lip Sync in After Effects, an AE Portal roundup, may also be useful.

Tools for character animation in AE include Duik Tools AE script panels and the beta of a new script by Marcus Loeper, RigitScript, for character rigging in After Effects. In addition, see Animating a Walk-Cycle Using Loop Expressions by Dan Ebberts as well as his in-depth explanations of expressions in Inverse Kinematics (riffing off Brian Maffitt) and refinements in Inverse Kinematics Redux. See also these AE Help pages, especially the extra resources: Animation, keyframes, and expressions, Parent and child layers, and Puppet tools overview and resources.

Additional resources include basic grounding found in The 12 basic principles of animation for After Effects. John Lasseter’s 1987 SIGGRAPH paper based on The Illusion of Life is especially useful, even for those who find inspiration more in nature and photography. Shaun Freeman’s website also provides tips and links on character animation.

Beyond the character, there’s also the world. Pan & scan techniques are useful; see Chris and Trish Meyer’s article on pan & scan at Artbeats and More Motion, Less Control (on adding a human touch) at PVC for good results. For examples of taking the effect to the next level with camera mapping & multiplane animation, see another article by Trish & Chris at Artbeats, Bob Donlon’s example in Son of Ken Burns, a Richard Harrington video in ‘Motion Control’ with After Effects. There’s much more in AE Portal archive posts tagged multiplane animation, camera mapping, and the AE camera.

Multiplane film cameras were explained well by Walt Disney in this video from 1957:

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