Hey, this is Dave from Adobe Character Animator
team and recently I created an explainer style video about why I thought video game subscription
services were the future. it's a 5-minute animated piece that includes a narrator character that
I created in Photoshop, and then animated using performance capture in Character Animator,
and then composited everything together in Adobe After Effects. These type of explainer
videos are really popular, you see them all the time, and a lot of you were as
king in
the comments how I put everything together. So this video is going to be a full workflow,
a walkthrough of everything from the initial script to recording that, animating and editing
a performance in character animator, and finally linking everything together and compositing it in After Effects. There's a lot here so we're dividing it into eight different parts
so you can look in the video description below to skip ahead if you want to. But I hope it's
helpful for making your own explain
er style videos, so let's get started. So not surprisingly everything
kind of starts with a script so I wrote my script in Google Docs on my train commute
in and out of work. And, you know, it's about 12-13 paragraphs, something like that, I just
continually edited it. I would cut whole sections that didn't feel like they were adding to the
argument, I would move things around constantly, saying oh, you know, I think this feels a little
stronger down here, but basically I'm just trying to tell t
he story and it helps when
it's something you're passionate about. So I love video games. I felt like this was really easy
and fun to write, and I think those are the type of projects that you'll get the most
mileage out of, when you're really invested in the subject matter. And you can speak in
kind of a conversational tone, so I'm not writing this like a, you know, a term paper or essay
or something like that. I tried to add language that felt like I was just being conversational
and I think t
hat helps with the pacing and the flow and making it all feel a little bit
more natural. And then when I was ready to record I just made this way larger so it was easy
to read and basically be a teleprompter for me to record a voice over. So the next step
is to record your audio I'm using an Audio Technica USB mic and I've got a pop filter
hooked on that to help with the the harsher sounds like S's and popping sounds and that
sort of thing. But I've got that hooked up to my computer so I'm going
to click I here
in audition Record, that looks good, click okay, and just going to start recording. So you can
see as I'm talking right now it's showing the waveform. Now this is looking a little
too hot right now, I'm getting in the red zone a little bit. Down here you can see with your
little levels monitor. Typically I never really want to see red, and I particularly don't want
to see this, when the two red things stick here. That means it's peaked and you can see
if I pause right here, that
moment where it peaked right here, that means the signal, the input
signal is so loud that it's going to basically the limits of the microphone input and
you don't want to do that, that leads to a harsh popping sound and you want to avoid that as
much as possible. Your audio preferences and everything are going to be in your computer's
settings so here, let's say I was using my internal microphone built-in, this is looking a little
bit on the higher side so I'm going to move it down a little bi
t so the signal is not
going to be as loud. That looks good, and then let's try this again, click record, and now
that's looking like a much better signal. You can see I'm not really in the red anymore.
I'm seeing some yellow, that's okay, I'm alright with that, but I don't want to get those high
peaks, and later on I can make this sound a little bit louder. So this is what I'm going
for in terms of a nice clear signal. Now one more thing you want to do is make sure you
have a section that has a
little bit of dead air. So I want to make sure I'm quiet for at
least a few seconds so something like this... and that gives me something that I will be
able to identify as background noise in the next step. So don't just click record and
just immediately start talking, give yourself a few seconds make sure you're quiet, you're
not shuffling around in your chair or anything like that or clicking things with the mouse.
Just be quiet for a few seconds and then get started with your talking. And s
o when I press record
I just go for it and read through the entire script and if I mess up what you do quite
often I'll just go back to the beginning of the paragraph and try to reread it again so
I'm doing everything in one recording session instead of breaking it up into multiple parts
that's just easier for me to have it as one single file of all my audio that I can later
go back to you and edit when you're done you can get something that looks like this a bunch
of different very clear talkin
g points and a bunch of parts where you are paused and
not talking so remember I told you about the part I'm just pressing plus by the way here
to zoom in where you want to get that background the very first thing I'll do is find a section
with white noise and I'm just going to Marquis elected here like that and then I'm going
to go to effects enrestoration capture noise print what that does is analyze this and basically
copy that as background noise and so now what I can do is I'm going to pres
s the minus key
up here to zoom out and see everything I'm impressed command a on Mac that's control
a on Windows and I may go back to effects and go to noise reduction restoration noise
reduction process super need the default has always been fine you don't need to do anything
additional here just click apply it goes through this process is going to take a few seconds
but once it does that it's going to remove that sound and this will this is a small step
it helps your audio seemed a little bit
clearer then I'm going to go through everything and
start editing it so I'll listen to a section I'll say it again with the plus button okay
here's my intro. Sounded good you know I'll listen through this I will in a Morkie select
and delete this part make sure I have a little gap for showing the different sections and
then moves to the next one and then I messed up in these next to take and this third take
is the one I want and I'll delete it so I'll keep repeating this process listening and
d
eleting the unused parts and a tighten things up until I've got everything working an edited
with the pacing and flow that I want to before moving on I'm going to want to save this as
a copy so I'm just going to go to file save as I don't want to overwrite my original raw
audio file just in case I need to go back to it to grab you know some sentence or saying
like that that I just deleted so I'm just going to call this you know BO2 and hit okay
and it's going to save that now as a copy so with V
O2 selected over here I'm just going
to click the new multitrack session button up here and that's going to bring it in yet
that's okay to a new multitrack session what's nice about this is now we can start to mix
in different audio parts including the background music on any sound effects nothing like that
has multiple tracks and I can see everything in one place speaking to music I would highly
recommend checking out audio library on YouTube they have tons of Creative Commons copyright
free mu
sic that you can use in the background of your videos as long as you copy and paste
a little bit of copyright text in your video description they have a ton of different styles
are constantly adding things to it I would say all my videos from the past year or so
I'm having using this and it is a great resource I took you to look at the mix that I did for
this video voice over track up here I've got my audio track over here and actually switched
tracks in the middle of it so all I did was you kno
w add another track then I kind of
use these little sliders to Crossfade one Audio One background music track in and out
and if you seen the video there's that one part of the beginning where I say call me
crazy and someone says you're crazy I wanted that to sound a little bit different from
the this way so I made that its own section here and I actually adjusted the pan here
so it's going to appear in your right ear a little bit more and that also helps just
differentiate a second voice from yo
ur main narrative track so just a small trick there
I've been using the essential sound panel a lot in audition I think it helps you get
a nice clear up broadcast quality voice so what I'll do is Select my audio track go over
here to get central sound panel or a might show up in different sections depend on what
your workspace layout is like, but you can always find it here under window essential
sound and then because this is dialogue I'm going to go to dialogue and I'm going to set
the preset
2 balanced male voice that's going to automatically kind of do some EQ and compression
and stuff on my voice to make it sound as loud and clear and a balanced as possible
particularly for my male voice if I were a female I would do the balance female voice
and there's a few different effects here if you want you know sound like you're on it
phone or radio or stuff like that this is great this is a nice automatic step that leads
to a professional sounding audio within a matter of seconds the same
thing for the background
music so I selected it I go to music and I'm going to select balance background music that's
going to make it a little bit quieter and balanced and not compete with the voice as
much I'm actually brought this down even more probably -3 or something like that just to
make sure the voice was the strongest force in this piece in the music is just kind of
complimenting that the Finishing Touch I'm going to go to the wait till I start talking
I'm probably going to in a bring
this in a little bit I might make the volume come up
a little bit at the end of just add these little dots here to bring it up because as
I finish talking I didn't want the audio to be a little bit louder when it comes to the
credits and then I'll do a little fade here by selecting the Little Theater Square here
and move it over so it fades out that was pretty good so now if I press - I will see
my whole piece on everything sounds and looks great I'll always listen to it through it
at least onc
e to make sure you know there's no parts were like the chorus in this music
is really overpowering and competing with the audio or there's a sound of frequency
that I didn't hear that I need to edit out but overall this looks great so I didn't do
is go to file export multitrack mixdown entire session I'll call that you know whatever I
want to and hit okay and that is going to save my file as all these things mixed together
with the music the audio the person yelling you're crazy all of that into
one single file
my next step was to take a Sketchbook and just start sketching out ideas of how I was
going to visualize some of these different parts so you can see you know this is beginning
part where I talk about insta sock as a you know a joke Subscription Service the guy senior
crazy a video game Icon everything that's in the video you can see where it started
here so I'm just going through the script and asking what's the best of visual representation
of the point I'm trying to make him
so you know just try different things sketching things
out really rough this is something that only I understand right like I know you know what
that the Penguin game thing video game idea that happens a half way through the video
which kind of sketch an idea I want to show a man game premium game you know an indie
game fortnite and actually was going to just show fortnite and then I decided it'd be funny
if it was penguin Battle Royale so there's different things that you know you just schedule
d
a rough ideas and then will evolve as you start to put them together later in Photoshop
but for now it's just kind of coming up with these these basic ideas I'm that will serve
as the framework for the entire piece has done you have a great inventory of all the
assets are going to have to create so I know I need these icons for a bed and a toilet
and all the other places you can play Nintendo switch I know that I need these different
icons for music and movies and books you know I need to make
up these fake logos for Video
subscription services this basically becomes my Bible this is what I'm going to have to
use as my guide in creating all of these assets for the final piece and now you're ready to
move on into creating your narrator character so in this case I wanted to be a you know
kind of flat cartoon version of myself and I did it in Photoshop you can use illustrator
as well as their AI are PST files work just as well I always say just go with whatever
feels comfortable to you
this character has a lot of complexity to him but I'm going to
try to break them down into the most simple components of how I started to build him as
I was a kratom in Photoshop the first in the notice is that he doesn't have a body right
she kind of has the top part of his torso and I knew that I didn't need to show him
walking in her head in his legs or anything like that so I just kind of cut him off right
here but I left myself enough room to have the arms coming down so it most of the time
when you see him right he's off of the screen like this so you're never really going to
see the rest of his body you just use arms kind of rise up and that's it so that's why
I built him like this and knowing how much of your character you're going to see if your
character is walking in from the side or whatever you will have to. The rest of them fight for
this for kind of more of a just talking head Style video all I really needed was the upper
part of the Torso and that was enough okay let's
start with the basics here I have a
new file that is a size of a 2500 by 2500 pixels it's 72 that is big enough for a what
I was going for a 1920 x 1080 video typically you don't want to go to high line size pump
relay for a Photoshop raster file because the bigger it is too big a file size but slower
processing the character animator will have but this looks pretty good to me so I said
okay have one basically no background layer I am going to just click the group icon 3
* called the first group
plus whatever my character's name is I'm going to call the
second group head and me to call the third group body and then I will select both ahead
and body and drag them into my main group so that is the basic character animator structure
99% characters I create this is the structure that I'm going to start with and then I'll
just continually add parts and elements to my character so at this stage I'm not really
worried about naming things correctly for character animator we know the character
animator
looks for certain things like left pupil right eyeball left eyebrow Mouse shape all that
stuff but at this early stage I don't really care about that on we doing is making sure
I have as many parts and layers as possible so I don't want the ears and that background
of the head to all be one layer together because if I want this year I need him to be their
own parts so basic idea is no matter how you draw or what style you're using you just want
to build your character out with as many p
arts as possible so building character I used to
two main methods of Phi illustration number one I was using the shape tool which is just
a full circle or rectangle thing down here that she's like the ellipse tool here and
it just would drag it out to create a circle or an oval or different shapes like that and
then it would select the fill whatever color I wanted it to be and move that into position
a lot of this character is just simple circles and triangles and shapes and stuff like that
for
anything with a non you know standard shape what I would do is make a new layer
go to the pin tool make sure it was set to shape and not pass and then I would try to
be like for the nose I would you know do this click click and click like that nobody fault
mine has a stroke I'm going to remove that change that to zero and instead change the
fill color to something else so this is what I did for you know the eyebrows for the hair
all of that stuff all I did was against like the pin tool and then
for the eyebrow I might
you know click here mini click and drag to give it a little bit of a curve and then click
again to stop it like that and then you can always selected I right click in selected
but if you have Auto Select you it'll just automatically happen when you select the layer
here and then if you click show transform controls that's going to show these little
things on the edges which you can drag to resize things as need be and then you can
move them and place them I'll wear if you
want later order is important rights the right
now this is showing up behind the head and I don't want that I would want this to show
up in front so make sure your order is as you would want it I said this before another
videos but having a great mouth set is an essential part of a character and this is
not something you want to create from scratch for every character have a standard mouth
said that I've been using for a lot of my characters and so it's you know here this
is its own Photoshop f
ile I've got all my name out here and then I've got these different
in a single expression mouse that I didn't end up using for this particular one and then
my alternative my sad mouth so you'll notice in the piece that the character will sometimes
instead of being happy and talking with an upward turned mouth they will instead start
to get sad and or you know concerned and show a different style of mouth upside down and
this is just a trigger and all you want to do and setting the shop is to ha
ve you know
your Mane mouth group and then some Alternatives mouth group as well so good to separate PSD
file or you could take this from any other example puppet that you liked their unit their
mouth shut your mouth groups from going to make sure over here at the bottom of my toolbar
if I click this I'm going to go to standard screen mode that's going to allow me to see
these different tabs any other documents that I have open I want to do is drag this group
this group is called Talk contents i
t's kind of just a main container for all my different
mouth groups and I was going to drag this all the way over here into my day before.
PSD file and let go and it's going to show up now it's behind the skin but I'm going
to bring it and it's going to show up right there and that's way too big so again I'm
going to do show transform controls and just kind of resize it here so it looks a little
bit better and went that looks good I'm going to move it back in place and there we go so
upset that
you feel happy with that's what you should stick with and just keep that as
a file that's around so in case you need it for multiple characters it's there and ready
for you to use the basic look of your character now you can start organizing and naming things
the correct way so for example I started to put all of his hair groups together so his
right side hair is actually you know what six different layers seven different layers
of hair and because I wanted these all to work with one physics Beh
avior I wanted to
put them all in one group and if you're not using physics don't worry about it you don't
have to organize it like this but if you want to hear to kind of flop and move around I
would keep things in distinct groups and parts so you will be able to manipulate them as
a whole I did the same thing with the left side of the hair over here as well so inside
character animator we have all these great template example of puppets and you really
should use these as a guideline of how to
name an organized think so when I'm dealing
with the head if I need a reference the best one to go to is blank face over here on because
I'm in Photoshop and just going to click the image for Photoshop both of them will open
up the puppet and character animator and to photoshop file so I can see here exactly how
everything is structured right + left eyebrow is his you know left eye brown again that's
left side of the character not the left side of the screen plus right eyebrow I can we
add to pl
ay we want them to move on their own basically be independent and a move without
warping or pulling on anything else then I'll make the Eye Group and inside the eye you
want you know your blank state which is going to show up when your character is a blank
when you are blinking your eyes in the webcam that's what you want to show up and that will
also make anything else in this group disappear which is your plus left pupil and your left
eyeball so these components make up the eye we see a lot of
issues with people not doing
the ice correctly this is the really basic structure you want a group called Left Eye
or right I do you want Les blank + left pupil plus that's eyeball in anyone do the exact
same thing for your right eye if you follow the structure you will not run into any problems
this is exactly how it should be in fact if you like these eyes you can just you know
Dragon select them and drag them into your composition and have them show up instead
of whatever eyes you've created
or you can use that as a guide and then deleted once
you're you're done this character is a little bit different because instead of the blank
he's got a group called lids and Lids includes a bunch of different things it includes a
group called blank which is actually a multi frame sequence of him blinking his eye and
completely closing it will get to that in a little bit and then different ice States
so he's got kind of disc half a tank in impressed I and then a happy I and these are basically
going to be triggered by Expressions so later on when I want my character to feel like he
said you know he's happy I'm going to trigger the happy eyes or when I feel like he's kind
of impressed or knows what he's talking about I'm going to do the other things he knows
what he's talking about that is I'm going to trigger the impressed eyes I think having
a bunch of these different lid Expressions is a great way or lid triggers I should say
is a great way to add some extra expressiveness to your c
haracter so for any character I make
I will have at least something like this where they're kind of in their own group and I kind
of fruit am with the blanks in this case because I don't want the I want them all happening
over top of my people and I ball I still want to see in the case of the half eyeball are
the half eyelid I still want to be able to see my pupil moving behind it I don't want
it to completely take over it and so that's why I have it as its own separate group up
here but you can
try and experiment with a few different structure of things and see
what works best for your character I see the only other thing I want to worry about right
now is making certain parts independent so for example I know with this character I want
to have a certain sense of Parallax to him so I want a lot of these elements to move
on their own for example the ear when the ear moves I don't know it's just a circle
this kind of hidden behind his head but I don't want that pulling on the rest of hi
s
skin so I'm going to call that plus left ear or same thing with his nose I'm going to call
that plus nose and you can take this too far and go independent overload where is everything
is moving independent you're going to lose some character you're going to lose some of
fluidity or Dynamics to the character because everything is moving on its own and there's
there's nothing kind of influencing each other's animation so I would say you know used with
caution experiment but for me when I'm think
ing about this I'm thinking which parts do I want
to move on their own independently without influencing or pulling or pushing a warping
any other artwork particularly for the hair I knew that each of these strands I want to
add some Physics to so physics only works when you have these independent parts so I
want to make sure every single strand of hair is a plus so I did plus one two three four
five six seven eight nine 10 11 all the way down here to make sure each of those were
their own indep
endence trance guess the bottom line that I would say for the head is you
know you can have as many things inside your head group as you want but the basic parts
you need really are the my groups and your mouth group yeah eyebrows are nice to have
as well but everything else is kind of extra you know stuff on top of that foundation so
my feeling is if you got the eyes and the mouth working great everything else is just
built on top of that end with stress protect me if this is one of your first
characters
you're creating start simple don't feel like you have to do a full head turn animation
don't feel like you have to have all this physics enabled hair strands you know keep
it simple and you'll learn as you go I mean it's really building off of this guy in mouth
foundation and everything else once you've got that down you'll continue to learn and
grow as you create more more puppet where you can continue to evolve one puppet so you
know I can make this puppet and then add a hat to him
right glasses or add you know special
new trigger mouth sore eyelid Expressions you can keep growing and building a single
puppet to continually make it more complex Christine the biggest takeaway is don't go
over the complex keep things simple keep things easy cute things how you know them in Photoshop
or illustrator don't feel like you have to learn a hundred new things just to get a carrot
or working this is a simple stuff is a circle that has a triangle this is you know really
basic pin tool
101 type stuff I'm not doing crazy you know complicated illustration stuff
here it's it's really simple basic shapes with the head let me up and let's move on
into the body all it is is a torso layer that is sandwiched between two arms and really
it's the same alarm that I just duplicated and put on the other side now I'm the only
difference here is that if this left arm for this character his left arm they're no different
hand positions it's always going to be single four-fingered I hand that
shows up before
the right arm I do want to switch between a point and an open hand and so if you want
to swap between those two you'll need a swap set trigger and the way that I did that was
just make inside the arms group I've got my basic arm here if I remove the Torso for a
second you be able to see it a little bit better serve got this basic arm shape and
inside that I got the hand group that has a the open and the point as it's two alternating
hands and thumbs up peace sign you know whateve
r to this but at least in this case from this
character I only had two separate positions so when I'm happy with my character I'm going
to save it and then move over to character animator to start a rigging an animated that
we finally made it into Adobe character animator so let's go over to new project we want to
start fresh and let's call this something like video games and will quick save and now
that's going to create a new blank project and right now all days is me talking to the
webcam not
very interesting so it will start to add our character to the project panel
over here going to a double click in the blank space which is going to bring up my file browser
you can also do this by going to file import is going to do the exact same thing so here
in my beautifully organized files I'm going to find that file that I was working on which
is Dave for PSD very easy to find and I'm going to click in Port that is going to bring
in the artwork and turn it into a puppet and you see we get
it over here with a nice little
puppet icon if I double click on this over here I'm going to see my character show up
in rig mode this is kind of X-ray view of the character this is where I'm putting everything
together to teach character animator how I want things to animate and there's some extra
steps will do here in the future but for now what's added to a scene and see without doing
anything extra what he's going to look like so with my puppet selected I'm going to go
down here in the botto
m left corner of the project panel and click add to new seen the
little clapboard icon and what that does is bring my character into a scene like this
double click to my face or you can click set Rest Post that's going to add the tracking.
To your face like that and I can meet Lee see that this character is too big for my
current seen sized to the very first thing I'm going to do is Click once on the scene
and that's going to bring up the scene properties over here on the right until I remember
that
my character was about 2,500 by 2500 pixels so I'm going to change the width and height
to exactly that when you're dealing with the character that you're going to eventually
Dynamic link into after effects or Premiere or other places you want to give it enough
but her room so things won't get cut off if my with Alyssa my height was instead like
18 or something like that the head is going to get cut off if I Dynamic links this into
After Effects right now it would show him with his head hal
f of his head missing so
you want to make sure that you got enough space around the character so when you do
link it eventually none of your artwork is going to get cut off so by default tell he's
looking pretty good I mean his pupils are moving around his eyebrows are going up and
down the mouth is disappearing every once in a while and that's because I think I know
why there's some cycle layers mouse that I have an additive heater to so they're showing
up as invisible but we'll get to that in
the second but as I move my head around he's moving
his whole body and torso is moving again will fix that but overall he's looking pretty good
there looking pretty nice so I think we're off to a good start but let's go back to bridge
mode and start to fix some of the issues that we're seeing here to give me a little bit
different this is a troubleshooting a trial-and-error part of things right so your puppet head might
be falling off the pupils might be coming out of the eye eyeballs your eyebr
ows my becoming
completely off your head you're going to have every puppet and body types can be slightly
different and you may run into different issues depending on how your mouth looks how your
eyes look how all your different parts are together but I'm going to focus on just a
basic building blocks that I almost always do for any character this is the Anchor Point
for the head and I don't want the head (30 MINUTES) Eyes look how are you different parts are
together but I'm going to focus on
just a basic building blocks that I almost always
do for any character that I've got here to the first thing I'm going to do is this is
the Anchor Point for the head and I don't want the head to rotate from the middle of
it I actually wanted to rotate by the neck something to make sure my selection tool is
active here down at the bottom in my tool tray and he's going to drag the origin from
whatever wherever it is down to the bottom this is going to make your head pivot a little
bit better and n
icer and it's just a first step that are almost always take next with
body in this case he's just a half of a torso if I had to choose it would be a different
story but I want this part to be stuck in fixed to the ground the way I do this normally
is through the stick tool antagonist fixed so they go over this little bracket thing
down here call the stick tool how to make sure my body group is selected as everything
in here with the arms in the Torso and everything and I'm going to just draw and
draw stick
across the bottom here and then I'm going to go over to the tax panel and tag that as
fixed now you can also do this with a little fixed pin tool which is going to add a bunch
of different pins but I find that can sometimes leave gaps and have things Bend between that
so I find it's a little bit safer if you do be at the stick and keep that fix that that
tends to work a little bit better so let's move on to the arms remember I did a plus
in front of each of the arms and when you add
two plus in the photo shop in the file
the layer name it's going to add this little Crown icon in the front so all these Crown
icons all that means is that I added a plus in the front of the name in in Photoshop or
illustrator and it will automatically add this as a sign of Independence and I can take
this away if I wanted to but for these particular Parts I do want him to remain independent
so let's arms the left arm here and I see that it's got a nice little origin it's dotted
line origin here
but it also has this green line attached torso why is it doing that well
there's several reasons number one when you have it selected and you go to attach to it's
going to say what is it attached to what is this independent arm attaching to in this
case it's Auto in nine times out of 10 that is exact actually 99 times out of a hundred
that is what you want if it's something else here or you're not seeing the green line that
probably means that you know updated old artwork or something like that
and it character animator
hasn't quite synced up yet so just switch this to Auto you got to make sure that it's
an independent group over here and select that as Auto you also want to make sure that
this tool is highlight down here show mesh outline and A Auto handles and that will allow
you to see the the green line but I'm going to do is drag the origin of the arm cuz I
don't want it to rotate for the elbow is actually wanted to rotate for the shoulder is and you'll
notice as soon as I roll o
ver a dependent artwork that's artwork that is not independent
I can attach it to that particular think so now the arm is going to rotate from the shoulder
as opposed to the Elbow let's do that the other arm as well it's already green I know
that it's set to attach to as Auto so I'm going to drag this and make it at the origin
as a as well so now to be able to drag the arms I'm going to go down here to the Drager
tool I'm going to select that a little Compass looking thing and I'm going to make
a new
driver handle on top of the arm on top of the hand actually leave The Other Extreme
basically you always want your origin on one side and your draggable on the other side
unless you have for the left arm as well and then just to get things a little bit more
structure I'm going to draw some sticks so I'm going to do this for where the bicep is
leave a little bit of room for the elbow and drag some more over the forearm is let's do
the same thing for the right arm Drive where the bicep is le
ave some room for the elbow
and track again one more thing before I check out my progress and that's I noticed that
the mouth was disa turn every once in a while and I've got a lot of different mouth things
that all figure out later but for this mouse set several the mouse or actually multi-frame
sequences so I actually a to frame sequence of the mouth kind of opening this helps give
your mouth a little bit more of a fluid lip sync quality so I'm going to do is select
all three of these that are
multi-frame sequences in this case it off and woo and I'm just holding
down the command key on Mac or control on Windows to be able to select them all and
then I'm going to go down here to behaviors click the plus and go to cycle layers and
this just means it's going to win these things are triggered when it hears when Carriage
a mere here's an odd shape or an odd shape or wolf shape it's going to play through these
various sequences that are here these to frame or three frame sequences these a
re just so
you know sequential layers so yes I wanted to start when triggered I wanted to move top
to bottom of one frame I want to cycle once I do want The Last lyrics to If I hold a woo
sound or Nah sound I wanted to hold on that last frame instead of going back to another
visiting and then I don't want cycle finished I wanted to stop immediately that's going
to make a lip sync feel a little bit more synced up if you if you have it bled cycle
finished there's a chance that you're already on to
another sound while the animation is
still playing so you want to make sure that said to stop immediately. I think I've solved
a lot of the basic problems that my character has a list go back to record mode and let's
see how things are looking so already I can tell his torso is stuck, it's not moving and
flopping all over the place which is great the mouth is not disappearing anymore so it
looks like I fix that problem and the arms I can drag and move around and make some gestures
with so it lo
oks like there's a basic problems got salted ahead is rotating from that origin
point that origin handle as well to The Next Step I'm going to tackle is trigger triggers
are one of those critical parts of any character it's going to add a lot of additional expressiveness
to him so I'm going to change the the hands to be able to do that point and the Open Hand
change the ballast to be able to do the sad mouth set and the change the eyelid to be
able to trigger to the happy and impressed and 1/2 e
yelid open eyes and remote let's
start with something simple that start with the the hand swap set so I've got my two hands
in here point and open my group over into my triggers panel over here and I see Creed
Trigger or Creed swap said I want this to be a swap said and what I mean by swaps that
is only want one of these to show up at a time so he's going to let go and that's going
to create my swap set and it's all there is to it I'm going to change a few things I want
the open hand to be the d
efault somebody click the little icon next to that and whatever
icon is filled in is basically the first one that's going to show up so in this case my
open hand is the one I want to show up first appoint hand let's say I wanted to show up
when I press the one key so I'm going to press one there I'm going to enter a 1 in the text
field there and so now when I press one I know point is going to show up I instead of
opening open is going to hide and when I let go of one than open is going to show
instead
because that's the default I usually like to do a latch on a quick latch down here and
that just means I have to click one once instead of holding it down for the trigger to work
I find last triggers are a little bit easier to kind of remember and not do finger gymnastics
when you're trying to hold down three or four different triggers it feels just a little
bit more user-friendly to me that same concept with a mouth so I've got my main mouth group
here I've got a singles mouth Group whi
ch is like a smile or frown and surprised look
and then my alternative this is my sad mouth group or the melter upside down and looking
a little bit more sad I just noticed I probably have to add cycle layers to these three so
I'll do the exact same thing I just did before Ormond is Select them all at players holding
last layer stop immediately and that should work now I want this alternate mouth group
to also read as a mouth so what I need to do is go over here and tag it as a mouse in
the Emma
us panel that's going to allow it to read as a lip sync mouth but I don't do
that step it's not going to understand that it's going to be used for lip sync the lip
sync behavior is specifically looking for your mouth and by the way when I talk about
lip sync behavior all your main behaviors for your character or up here at the top you
might not know that you can select this but you can see this has a little visit than a
mere puppet and a little late is next to it and that ate means this characte
r has eight
behaviors that are pre added to it over here so whenever whenever you import a Photoshop
or illustrator file is going to automatically add these behaviors to the character and we
add these because these are basic behaviors that almost every characters going to want
you want your eyes to move around you want to be able drive to hint you want the face
to move all of these different things are automatically added but if you don't want
something you can always selected here with the litt
le menu icon remove the behavior and
it will take it away the Cradle swap set with table contents but I'm going to do it a little
bit differently on the click the plus icon down here crate swap set and I'm going to
press enter and renamed this to Mel's now I want to do is first bring in my default
mouth and drag that in and I want that to be my default some of the click the little
default icon to make sure that's the one that selected then I've got my three single mile
smile smile smile surprise
d than frown I'm just going to drag all three of those into
the mouse swap set and they will all show up as separate things the reason I'm doing
this is because if I'm smiling I don't also want my lip sync mouth to show up behind it
or you know in place of it I want the smile to kind of be take take over so let's set
a few different keys for this let's do two for the smile 3 and for frown and I'm as select
all of these and slide them is latched as my preferred it triggering methods but your
mile
age may vary and it finally let's take that alternative Mouse group on a drag that
in here again to my mouth swab said I will set that to a five key and also latch and
Alicia's rename that by hitting enter and calling that sad for no. Let's see if everything
is working as expected so the first one was added to hand Swap and then they seen one
hand right now if I press one is going to change to the point and if I press it again
it's going to go back to dance to that seems to be working let's try
the different nail
shapes I did too for a frowny mouth and that's working and you'll notice my lip sync is not
overriding that says working just as I want to buy / 3 is going to do this surprised mouth
for is a smile and 5 is going to do my sad Mouse set so now he's talking and he's sad
about something and I was happy again and always and always happy so I can you know
do a bunch of these and try different expressions and my character is starting to come to life
little bit more he's got a little
bit of additional emotion next couple move on to the eyes of
these different eyelid positions and up links and what not to do remember our a multi frame
sequence someone to do the same thing with a select these go over to my behaviors and
add the cycle layers behave and be pretty similar to the mouth except I do want them
to forward and reverse I do want the eyes to be able to close and then open back again
and then hold on last layer in case I hold a blank I'm on my way ice to remain closed
an
d looks like we'll finish this corrected it stopped immediately it would stop mid blank
and that could look kind of weird so these feel like the correct settings for the blank
State's right so normally I would drag and mileage group over crate swap set and you
know he was happy let's do that with seven and let's do impressed is 8 and 1/2 as I noticed
that I only tried in the right eyes groups but I can actually do is combine these and
do the left eye as well so the happy layer for have for the l
eft eye I'm going to drag
that over top of the happy trigger I've got here in a notice as soon as they do that I've
got my two layers showing up down here my left eye lids happy and my right eyelid happy
so both of these layers actually as many layers as you want I could select all of these and
dragged him over top of here and my players list is going to be really really long and
he's all those things are going to be disappearing by default when I press this trigger they'll
all appear that is no
t what I want and do that but you get the basic idea triggers can
have as many layers groups whatever added to them but do the same thing for impressed
I'm going to drag the impressed layer over here and with half I'm going to do half and
finally for the blank I'm going to do the left blank as well now here's a problem the
blanks because of the default if I just triggered them at just like this look what's going to
happen if I go to record mode my character's eyes are constantly close there in t
his default
triggered state right where their concert clothes and that's because the default is
seen as the first thing that place until in this case that blink is the first thing that
gets triggered so there's a few ways I could fix this I could go back into Photoshop instead
of calling this right blank call this container or something like that and then put the right
blinker group inside of it that way it wouldn't trigger I'm exactly as we're seeing right
here but you know what for this charac
ter I want to keep things easy and it's not a
big deal it is blank is showing up at the same time as these other things because for
the most part these are kind of covering the rest of his eyes so I'm going to do is just
delete this from the swap set and this WAP said I'm not going to add a default to sew
the default is just can't be the open eyes without anything and then if I press 7 for
9 which I'm in the latch hear those will show up instead so I hold my eyes closed his eyes
closed at least
I think he is I can't see the screen I hopefully he has and then if
I press I was at 7 I'll do the happy eyes and 8 he'll do the empress dies and 9l do
the half eyes. Because the way I set it up I can blink in this state and so you will
see to have eyes with a blank at the same time but I think that looks okay and that's
an easy problem to fix later on if I needed to edit out a blank or something like that
next let's start to tackle that hair so if you remember correctly I had my right side
and
all my little individual Independence strands of hair here and my left side as well
so what I want to do for each of these strands is drag the origin of the Harrah's where would
basically attach the head and then come down here and get the angle tool automatically
create a dingo tags handle and put it on the end the tip of the hair somewhere around there
like that and it's going to go through this process for single strand of hair I might
add some variety to because I don't want each hair piece
to move exactly the same so I might
move to dangle like you no more on the tip for this one and then a little bit further
back for another strand of hair just to add a little bit more variety so the hair is incompletely
moving in the exact same direction okay so I finished that I've got all my different
hair strands let's go and see how this is working by default well he's looking a little
emo there gravity is going straight down at as it normally does and that is affecting
these long strands of
hair they are attaching at the root and then they're coming down now
that's a pretty cool look like now you say I could go for that but I think I want to
hear to be a little bit stiffer and so I could play around with gravity direction right I
could change this to make the hair go up a little bit more and that works pretty well
but then that's all going to affect the hair on the other side so instead of one physics
Behavior that's kind of a global setting I think I might want more control over
my hair
I want that longer strands on the one side to move slightly differently than the smaller
strands on the other side so I'm going to go back to rig mode and see if I can fix this
so when I go up to my Global behaviors here I'm actually going to remove physics by clicking
a little menu icon here and seeing remove behavior and that's going to remove my Global
behavior for physics and instead I'm going to add it by selecting right side and left
side simultaneously go down in add physics there
this is going to add a physics paper
to each of these days look like brick icon with little gear incited that means that a
behavior has been added to my cycle layers for the blank and in a few other places
this doesn't really matter you can click through this and it's a bunch of different things
this is an alpha alpha layers transparent it really doesn't matter it's not going to
show up in your final piece it's just for your own a clarification so okay so I've got
my here still kind of floppin
g around here to do is go into the characters right side
and the right side of the screen but his right side is the longer a hair so I'm going to
do is try and I'm just going to change the gravity Direction so it's up a little bit
more now that's still looking a little too floppy so I'm heading to your enemy to change
the stiffness of little bit so let's try like 125% and that looks a little bit better to
me that doesn't have too much weight I can go super crazy right I could do one or zero
and
that's going to be you know zero gravity crazy here I don't want that or I can do super
hairspray and make it you know 200% and then it's really stiff it's not going to move but
you know play around with this and see what works best for your style 125 is looking good
for what I want in the little movements that my character does that's going to give it
a nice amount of bounce let's do the same thing for the left side I'm in general that's
looking pretty good I'm going to maybe move it over a lit
tle bit kind of in the direction
that the hair is going and I'll probably do the same thing as stiffness of about 125 and
now that I've set those parameters this is not something I have to worry about anymore
it's just what we call a secondary animation so it's just automatically adding that physics
at aspect to the hair as I move my head around and I don't have to do any additional details
or parameter changes a recording or anything like that it just automatically happened and
that's great bei
ng able to add these little Dynamic elements your character can really
help bring them to life and make the movement feel a little less stiff and More Alive particular
for something like the hair if you've been making puppets for a while and want to add
a little bit of extra Dimension and control to your characters I would 222 additional
videos to check out I'm not going to just reiterate what is send another video is here
because never won this is already running pretty long but never to these
are more advanced
concepts that I think are better served through a more dedicated video to the first video
I would want you to is the arm ik tutorial you noticed in this character now I've tagged
the shoulders and in each of the arms I've got elbows and wrists tagged as well and padding
are my case just going to give me more control over how the arms Bend so if you find your
elbows or bending the wrong way or your arms are looking wonky I would definitely check
out that tutorial secondly you pr
obably noticed that the character has some really nice Parallax
going on some shadows and some texturing is hidden right now but if I turn those on you'll
start to see it's nice watercolor texture that's happening here beside their texture
in his body views are just adding some extra elements to help bring him a little bit more
to life so if you're interested in learning more about this text effects as a moving to
head in the shadow is moving in the eyes and the ears and all that stuff are movin
g simultaneously
as well as check out the advanced rigging tutorial for the sample character lead at
the exact same principles apply to this character you want him or her to we can move on to the
recording process character animators little different in how to record so if you've used
Adobe animate or after effects or other programs before you may be used to more of a keyframe
cell recording where you set one post and then you keyframe and he's into another Poe's
character animator instead is al
l about acting and Performing so it's more about think of
it as like if you were recording a band you've got your drums you've got your face you've
got the vocals all that stuff you've got the lip sync the eyes that had moved is the triggers
all these different things are essentially a multiple components that when you put them
all together they create a compelling animator performance and everything starts with the
script and the words and the voice over so the first thing that I want to do wit
h any
animated performance is bring in my initial voice over so an important thing about bringing
in voiceover for character animator recordings character animator lip sync works best with
raw microphone recorded audio not stuff that you've mastered or processed or a mixture
or anything like that you're going to get the best results from just raw microphone
audio so because of the way we set up our file in audition if you can remember that
I think it was like 5 hours ago when we talked about you
know a setting up your file and
then you bring it into a multi-track master session and then we're adding the effects
over top of that another reason we did that is because we still have that raw audio file
that we can use it for the boy lip sync equality project panel and a double click in the blank
area and it can I can always go to file import instead but I'm going to find that voice over
I have done a horrible job of naming a things over here master final lip sync all this stuff
but I belie
ve lip sync final is the one I want so let's just don't follow my leave their
organizer files a little bit better click import and now we have this audio file that
is also showing up and our project panel so I'm going to do is drag this into my scene
over here just into the campus over here and you'll see the audio shows up down here at
the bottom one small thing I always do is drag my audio over just slightly so it's not
it gives me a little extra time in the beginning in case I'm getting my ch
arger ready or you
know as the physics simulation is starting are the arms are getting in place you want
to get yourself a little buffer room so you don't have to start exactly at 0 0 0 you have
a few seconds to kind of get started so now that we've had this voice over file we are
going to create the lip sync from it I'm going to select my character down here and I'm going
to disarm all of the behaviors except for lip sync the shortcuts do that while you could
just click you know all these red d
ots and take forever but you can also hold down command
on Mac or control on Windows and click any red. And that's going to turn them all on
or all off simultaneously so as I was saying I only want to do lip sync so let's arm lip
sync and you notice right now it's not doing my eyes it's not doing my head it's not doing
drag or anything like that it's only focused on lip sync and that's because that is the
only thing that's armed whenever you see a red. It means it's ready for record think
of red
as ready it's ready to record in the case of a pre-recorded audio track on a do
is go to a timeline compute lip sync from seeing audio and that's going to go through
the process of analyzing that audio track giving me all of the individual Mouse shaped
as if I were a recording that live so this is the process I am constantly using when
I record an audio track in audition I bring that audio in I added to my scene and I do
timeline compute lipsing from seeing audio so you can see that added a new
track in my
timeline called lip sync audio input and visit use the visual Mouse shapes that your character
has those things they were in your mouth mouth group in the Photoshop file so I can actually
own off I don't need to add anything else my lip sync is good I don't need to polluted
with any other information and lets you man I'm just going to press the plus key here
to look a little closer and you'll see as I'm kind of dragging through here every shape
every Mouse shape is showing up down h
ere down below and so this is great I can see
exactly you know when I say particular word to know later step we're going some further
editing of the lip sync track and make sure everything is looking exactly right and all
the mouse shapes are lining up as you would want but for now this is what I want because
now I can base all my next steps of Animation off of this audio track because now I can
tell when the character is happy when they're sad what they're saying at any moment when
did Jesters
like this with their pants so the talk track is the perfect starting point
for your animation and that's why you want to do that as your first step lip syncs done
I can now move on to whatever other aspect I want an activity you know Dragon the arms
around that could be the eye gaze that could be face movements that can be triggers person
the different buttons to make different things happen but you could do all these at the same
time right I had these alarms I press the record button and I can
record my performance
from me I find it I can't keep track of multiple things in my head at the same time I feel
like I get better results 20 focus on one element at a Time start with i gaze so just
focus on eye gaze I'm going to disarm the other elements and now you'll notice the only
thing that's moving around are the characters pupils default i gaze is set to camera input
and that's the reason why it's showing my webcam of people movement is dictating where
the pupils are going for the charac
ter but first recorded pieces that's great for Life
stuff but for me personally for recorded pieces I want an extra degree of control and so I
will usually disarm camera input and do keyboard input instead and now when I press the arrow
keys is going to allow me more precise control over where those pupils are going now I like
coming out of your eyeball or they feel too subtle you do have control any strength parameters
down here so since I have keyboards strength I'm using the keyboard I can br
ing this down
movies are going to be really subtle you can't even really tell they're moving or I could
bring it really far up and now the people are going to go completely out of the eyeball
so you don't want that for me I I change I went with 75% which is not quite to the edge
of the eyeballs but it gives it enough movement that it feels like it's going to add add some
life to him know what I'm thinking of performance I'm mixing a few elements number one there's
a certain degree of Randomness
right as we're talkin we're not just staring blankly at the
end of the viewer we want to kind of tartar eyes to the side and then maybe down and up
and do a few things like this so just adding this I am a little variety making it feel
making the eyes not feel lifeless and staring blankly the second thing that I'll mix with
it is certain phrases so I might say something that the character feels a little introspective
about right so he's kind of looking up into the corner and thinking about someth
ing or
maybe he's making a hand motion and he wants to look down at his house as you're listening
to your talk track are there certain phrases where your character might want to be looking
in a specific Direction and that includes as your thing about your composition later
on after effects okay I know that have this big chart in the corner over here or I know
none of these things floating around my character's head so you can address those and connect
the character to those Elements by making hi
m stare at where you think they will go
now this is always send you can go back and fix later on so as if he's looking the wrong
way or whatever don't worry too much about your church is going to be and where does
graphical elements are going to be connecting them with the pupils is a really strong technique
a really handy tool that helps you make really precise recordings is slow motion recording
so this is something I'm using all the time so next year is next to the red record icon
here I've g
ot playback speed if I cook this whole number here I see playback speed and
recording speed 1/4 3/4 recording speed .75 X that is what I normally do this allows me
to see think hear things when I'm recording slightly slower playing at 3/4 speed and that
means I have a little bit more time to react and do things and move around as opposed to
doing it at full speed when everything if I'm doing it I'm reacting to things it might
feel a little bit late and all my deliveries so when I hear someone sa
y he's happy and
then a second later I'm like oh yeah I need to be happy hour or something like that when
things are moving slower and if you go too slow and you can't understand anything they're
saying so I prefer The Sweet Spot is that is that .75 X because that's going to get
it a little bit slower than normal but not too slow that you can't understand what's
going on so let's just give this a try so I've got ideas I'm ready I'm at the beginning
of my and I will hit record a little countdown
will happen and we will start to record with
this sort of thing is I just keep on recording until I mess up right so I'm looking around
and maybe sometimes I might do you know kind of igetter and it doesn't you know book exactly
like I want so in that case I'll stop all either press the record button or press the
spacebar as a shortcut and I will just kind of dragged back a couple of seconds and then
press report again and start the process all over again now this is not recording you know
it's
not overriding your previous performance all this doing is creating a second take so
you are just kind of you know hat here's my second performance here's my second try at
things and there's going to be some overlap there right so let's just stop this for now
and show you exactly where that transition happened so if I scroll back here I can see
here is my initial take this take one down here but then here right around 12 seconds
is where I started my second take normally when you are transitioni
ng between one take
in the next you want to blend performances together so here's my bottom one and you see
where it's kind of dark in here that means something over top of it is taking over so
whatever is up here is kind of overpowering what's down there but if I drag this little
blind handle over here you can see that changes its kind of mixing anywhere where there's
a curve here that means it's taking part of performance 1 and blending and performance
too and so it's a much more natural way t
o blend all your performances together and make
it look like you got everything right the first time when in fact it might be multiple
performances strung out together for me and my Blends are usually pretty short and honestly
with this case it looks like with the eye gaze not much is happening the eyes aren't
moving at that particular part so I don't even really need to blend in this case but
a lot of times with head movements with arms with some other things we will see a blending
having a dra
matic effect okay so now let's say I've gone through that whole 5-minute
performance and I've done my eye gaze it's good to go it looks great I'm going to disarm
that I'm done with eye gaze and then move on to another element so let's try Dragon
moving the arms around the way I set up tracker is I will first record a short pass of the
arms being in a rest pose and then I will add and blend other small gestures on top
of that I'll show you what I mean so I might go back to the beginning here and
make sure
his arms and I'm going to put my arms and kind of a neutral rest position always starting
from and going back and forth from at during. You know the whole piece so that was pretty
good they're kind of off screen right here but there's a little bit of been to them so
I know they're going to be easy to move up and make certain gestures with soap that looks
good I'm just going to press record for you know a couple of seconds keep them in place
and stop and you know what that's going to do
two different tracks here now I didn't
name my Handles in the original of rig emotes you see as his handle parentheses handle parentheses
if I wanted to change that I can actually just double-click on a Dave here in asking
to bring me into range mode and then let's find those those Dragon Ball handles right
so here this handle is currently just tagged as drag ball and left wrist but if I press
enter I can actually name that handle into something different so this character that's
his left hand
so I'm just going to type in left hand quick OK and now in very tiny text
down there it says left hand let's do the same thing for the right arm on the selected
the Dragon Ball because if that's what's the drag her behavior is controlling it select
at it's also Texas right wrist because I've got our Mighty on this character and I'm going
to hit click enter and we're going to call this I tan so now we have those two things
so if I go back to record know now things are a little bit clearer I can s
ee that this
track is my right hand and this track is my left hand just makes things a little easier
as you're trying to manipulate in blame things in and out so because I want this These Arm
positions to remain stationary and fixed I'm going to do is a slight both of these on the
price of minus a few times so I'm doomed out a little bit and then I'm just going to hover
over the edge of them until I get this little arrow icon and just going to drag all the
way through the entire length of the pe
ace and that means my characters are going to
be stuck in that rest position for the entire duration of the of the timeline now I can
start to play things back listen to them and think about how my character might be just
rain based off of what's being said so I do a few techniques I will do you know the arm
up I will do a gesture when I'm talking like this on certain words I know with this hand
I have a little point on that I'm going to do for a trigger it later on so sometimes
you know raise t
heir hand up and say you know I know I'm I'm all worried about that later
though I'm in it sometimes I also do where he's like you know kind of scratching his
head or putting it like this as you thinking about same reason barest about something so
few things like that normally I am a alternating between the arms so if you watch the video
you'll notice a lot of times he's moving with his right hand and then he will switch over
to his left hand for another gesture and then to the right and this is
just to add a little
bit of diversity would do my Drager overdubs are the little gestures that the characters
doing so let's go back to the front of the timeline that characters armed Draeger's armed
slow motion recording speed everything's looking good so let's press record you said everything
is becoming a subscription nowadays so for that I'm going to just everything is becoming
a subscription nowadays bring that down and stop just like that so I'm only recording
for a few seconds but I had
this nice little gesture that my character is doing a based
off the audio that I'm hearing and then what am I to do is add the blending so if I did
not add the blending here's what is going to look like let's go back Place pack stalking
does his gesture and watch the hand so it just stops right there and it kind of clicked
into place if there's his jumpiness there that's not no that's going to be off screen
with this character kit because it's below the torsos that's okay but with his other
arm
you would definitely see that happening and just as a general rule I try to blend
all performances together so instead want to do is do a very very small blind here at
the beginning and end usually it doesn't have to be very long it can beat you know just
that you know one tenth of a second or something like that it can be very very short to allow
it to blend and look a little smoother so watch it this time we'll see how this looks
and so there was a little jump there you can tell where it went
back in place but one thing
I could do is re-time this so I can see I'm scrubbing here and I say okay that's when
it goes down then drag the edge here backwards so my blind is happening at the exact same
time when my arm is going down and this is going to look even better so watch this I
think okay so there's still a little bit of a jump there but it looks a little bit nicer
I might adjust the blend I might need to try a few things see what looks best that look
the best of all so it's a constant
play back and forth thing and then I will move on to
the next step so I'll say OK mini you know I just did his his right arm there so let's
move on to the left arm instead she lets you record and it's the same thing I'm going to
take this I had blending into the other opposed and then let's move on and so this is my process
I just keep recording in these very short spurts trying you know different gestures
if it doesn't work I just undo try again and keep blending these small gestures over top
of that General foundational arrest post so how's this going to look when you're all done
well this is the final project that that I eventually brought into After Effects this
is the final look of the timeline and let me just click the tilde key here to make this
full screen and this is what my dragon looks like for just one of the hands and in my other
hand this is what that one looks like so you get this kind of staircase basically of very
short performances so I'm doing exactly what I was say
ing I just blend in these very short
gestures and I do it for each of the hand editing this can be very unwieldy right so
it can be you know just really difficult to say okay so at this time what is happening
here and you're scrolling between you know a hundred fifty or so takes a G6 takes it
can be kind of crazy right so wait I prefer to deal with things is actually twirling this
up so these little icons here will twirl things up and then let's go back to under the main
timeline you can see let
's zoom in a little bit that I've got my different takes and I
can actually select them here and do on my blending or moving around directly at this
at this level so this is a much more in condensed view on the role of you on as we like to call
it and I think it's just easier to use you can kind of see everything at one glance sometimes
when you see something like this that means I have selected the underlying a background
track so that's the rest pose at the hands and anytime it's just one of t
hese with a
blind handle that means it's the track that I did and blue the performance over top of
rice is done so I'm going to disarm that and I'm going to instead arm face now most of
the time that's all you have to do this character is a little more complicated because he's
got a bunch of extra fees behaviors for The Parallax on some just going to make sure I
have all those selected but generally with simple characters all you have to worry best
performance a common thing that I see in beginn
er character animator performances is they want
to move around all the time they want to you know I have this constant live 121 jumpiness
of your character in in traditional animation we do we see more of what is called a pose
to pose on style of Animation so I character will start a 1 pose and then we'll kind of
move to the next MMA slide adjustment and that's what I think so when I'm performing
my face performance I'm not really moving all the time and being very jumpy I'm trying
to be very de
liberate in my poses and sometimes pretty subtle it does not take a lot to have
the character you know gesture back and forth the rolled up into the face behavior is also
control of your eyebrows so I'm as you're moving your head you might also want to think
about if your eyebrows are raised or lowered or a few other things I'm if I go into my
face Behavior here I can see you know I can change the tilt of how much they are when
they're in their race position or down I'm up I got eyebrow strength
how one-to-one are
my eyebrow movements going to translate into movement of his own eyebrows and then something
I did for this particular character was move eyebrows together is checked by default that's
going to move him at the same time but there were a few instances where I wanted you to
know I brought a raise a little bit or look a little puzzled or that sort of thing so
for this character I unchecked them and it can lead to a little bit of Jitter every once
in awhile but overall I'd like t
o the expressiveness that it was giving me more so with all of
this stuff play around these parameters see what looks good for the quality of Animation
that you're going for and and then go for it with a face performance I'm not stopping
and starting as much as I was with the dragon performances I'm doing longer takes I think
in the final video I may need only three or four takes for the whole head performance
because all you're really doing is you know motion and posing between different things
it's a pretty simple straightforward process so and again I'm reacting to what he said
it's a lot of times I will move my head at the different changes so I'm looking at the
waveform when he's talking and now I moved for the next thing and I'm going to move here
and so I'm just kind of watching the waveform and listening to what he's saying and changing
my poses on based off of that and because this guy also is The Parallax II don't always
have to move my head I can just kind of Twisted a littl
e bit to get some of that as well so
play around with it again this I would much rather do this than try to keyframe all of
these into place I think it's a much more natural easier faster way to do this type
of character performance you know if this takes even with slow motion recording does
it going to take you know no more than what's 7 and 1/2 minutes I can't do math is that
is that right I don't know anyway something like that once I'm happy with how the face
is looking I can disarm that and
move on to the last step at least for this character
which is his triggers now with triggers I will not try to address everything at the
same time so I'm not thinking about doing his eyes and his mouth is hand triggers I'm
going to focus on one trigger area at a time. So start with the simplest thing which would
be the hands right there's only one hand that is changing sometimes to a point so I know
like 30 seconds and I know that he raises his hand on his right hand and I want to do
a point ri
ght there to remind me to do this is I want a time to hand transition normally
a well in this case is he really doesn't matter but a lot of times I want you time to transition
when the thing when the hand is in motion so I really want to trigger it right around
there when it's moving to help blind make it not as clear cuz it's really obvious right
now it's really clear that his hand is changing and I want it to be more of a fluid kind of
hit in the quality to it so let's try this if I get the ti
ming right and I'll do it back
out wasn't perfect but it was a it was pretty close so what I can do now is go back and
edit a little bit more lips look at when this point comes in if I look at my track right
here I can see that hands as shown up and that the name of my trigger which in this
case was point is showing up as well so if I wanted to make that point happen a little
bit later I'm just going to drag that and trim it in a little bit and then if I wanted
it to happen a little bit earlier
here I'm going to track it like that now here's a nice
thing is that I don't have to continue recording triggers and keep on pressing one at the right
time what I actually could do is extend my take here just by dragging the edges I could
find another part where the characters arm was raised the same distance apart and I can
actually just right click in this blank space and I've got a choice between my different
options now open as the default I don't really care about that but point I just clic
k that
and you'll see it's going to make this very shortly how far did I can then move around
and manipulate so a lot of times I'm not even pressing one I'm not trying to record I never
actually press the record button I'm just dragging around finding the appropriate place
right clicking doing point and just adjusting based off of that I feel like it saves a lot
of time in the long run done to do it this way it's just a little bit quicker not always
have a new record weight make sure you get the
timing right go back and edit it it's
kind of all-in-one a condensed up here the same principle is going to apply to the mouth
or the eyes so for example the eyes now so I see that three will do his Happy Eyes for
will do is impress dies and a two will do the half eyelids so instead of doing the time
for right now or you know the character also has control panel here if I click the controls
to have and that's it nicer visual way to see things if you'd like to do it that way
but I think things a
re going to add method soap to do is let's go back to the beginning
I'm a hit record for a second I will let it record I will press two to do a half eyelid
trigger press it again to on trigger it and stop and what that's going to give me is my
Lids take and in this one part where half is showing up right so to play things back
in in what we call edit mode as opposed to live rehearsal mode to right now the reason
when I'm over top of half and I'm not seeing half triggered over there his eyes aren
't
at halfway down his legs are in a halfway down like they should be it's because I still
have this triggered it's ready to record and it's ready for any new data to come in and
that means it doesn't understand it's not even care what's in the timeline it's looking
for live data should I press 2 3 4 whatever it's going to have that show up if I want
to see specifically what's in my timeline what I do for that is disarmed the character
here and that just means my character is not ready to record
right now all I care about
is just attending what's in the timeline so anytime you want to switch between the live
rehearsal mode and the recorded mode just click on that disarmed it and now you'll be
able to see things for the entire length of the of the timeline
so now that's extended I have a full tank and I can start to right click and add new
I positions and Celeste person plus a few times to get back here and I can going to
drag you know over here maybe at this point he's feeling a little
happy some of the right
click and you'll see I've got my three options that are in the swap sit here so happy and
maybe that extends to hear and I'll drag down a little bit and say okay here he's going
to be a little bit impressed and notice when you're dealing with this the reason I did
the eyelid triggers after the pupils is because what would happen if this was at a halfway
instead do you see what happens here the pupils are in some instances not going to work with
your eyelid triggers and s
o you may that's why I always do the pupil performance first
cuz I want to make sure that the eyelids are going to work well with them so listen to
happy instead that's going to look a little bit better and so I will just go through again
the entire timeline listening and thinking about when I want to add some variety I'm
a lot of times I just some swapping back and forth between his wide-eyed look and it's
half I'd look and then sometimes I will occasionally throw in these more extreme emotions
of feeling
impressed or happy and again or manipulate them and a lot of times I will change them
a based off of the waveform up here so I want to start looking impressed when he starts
talking about you know this one particular fact that he's sane speaking from personal
experience for me one of the most difficult parts of editing is lip sync editing so honestly
nine times out of ten the automatic lip sync is going to do a great job and it's going
to look like you know the right thing we're usin
g Adobe Sensei technology to say okay
this is when you say in an hour ew all these different sounds and if I dragged through
my timeline here I can see exactly those shapes showing up in my lip sync track but there's
going to be times where you want to edit thanks and something doesn't look right and so you
have a lot of choice of your disposal here so if I want this e shape instead to be an
o i just right click it and I go to that oh and then it's automatically going to switch
to that if I want
ed to happen a little later or earlier or whatever I can manipulate that
and move it around if I feel like there's a visiting that's missing here right so if
I feel like at this point you know there's one syllable that I'm not quite hitting I
can select this and I usually use the shortcut but it's split and that's going to split it
into basically right where this current time indicator is it going to split it into an
extra visiting and then I can right click and add the appropriate sound that I
want
but I feel like for me I will do multiple passes of lip sync editing and a lot of times
I will lip sync editing until after I've rendered a recording from After Effects when I can
see everything running at is full frame rate and resolution and against everything else
and making sure that everything feels like it's lining up correctly so the biggest thing
that I look for are very clear mistakes right so blips that are happening after the character
stops you no talking her before they stop st
art talking different things like that that
are very clear issues then I'll start to look for where there are long sounds that there
should be more changes for and that's what I'll do that split command to add a bunch
of additional syllables and I'll look for just things that don't that feel like mistakes
where you know it's has no sound and it really should be an S sound it doesn't feel like
it's lining up a lot of times in general if the mouth is more open Sound and the mouth
is open is probab
ly going to look okay or closed its you know when it's more clothes
sound like or something like again it's going to look okay some regards to lip-sync adenine
the biggest takeaway I would say here is do what feels appropriate to your skill level
if you feel like you can hit every syllable exactly right your professional go for it
would you do at the tools to allow you to do that if you're more like me and you're
more of an amateur in the sort of thing you want to focus on those big glaring mist
akes
fix those and don't sweat the small details I'm in general the automatic lip sync is going
to work really really well better than if you tried to do it manually yourself so don't
lose sleep over it it's it's it's going to be okay unless I'm going to take before I
bring things into After Effects is to take out the lip sync only audio track and instead
bring in my full audio mix that has the background music the guy yelling your crazy the processing
where I made it the balanced meal voice so
it sounds a little louder a nicer so what
I'm going to do is import final file I already did that here but again you can go to file
import or double click on a blank area and here I think it was Master II was the one
I wanted and so I'm going to drag that into my scene and it's going to give me two audio
tracks here but it should be the same length if you are set everything up correctly and
so they just dragged is over I should see that the waveforms are lining up pretty much
except this one loo
ks a little bit taller on because it's louder or process one has
music in the background all of that and so I can just delete this other track and I'm
sad I do this because you know you could line things up in After Effects later on but personally
I feel like this is the better way to go because now your lip sync and audio are always going
to be connected 121 n o matter what you do or manipulate in After Effects you can be
ensured that the audio track and the characters lip sing or going to be i
n sync with that
you're done with character animator if you recording process you've added all these different
components together the eyebrows to face the mouth the arm gestures the triggers all of
this stuff it finally comes together when you know play this back and you see the character
has a real sense of emotion and Life to them it's always really gratifying to see when
it all comes together and you get this really nice performance all right so what the heck
am I looking at here so this is
a Photoshop file did I have added a bunch of layers in
that I know I'm going to manipulate later on in After Effects this is my supplemental
artwork so remember earlier in the tutorial when we drew out all the different things
we wanted our character to react with you know the different graphs and charts and icons
and all of that stuff that's what I'm starting to create here so this is not you know I'm
building it up one time I normally am not looking at it like this until I'm ready to
export it
out but what I normally do is okay I've got my background layer here and then
I'm going to start trying one asset in this case this was this you know penguin Quest
video game that I created I actually made that in its own group that some multiple layers
that are put together and did that and then I went on to the ultimate version start working
on this and then I knew that I wanted the different prices to fly out of the bottom
of the the boxes and so I did those and so all I'm doing is going thr
ough that Sketchbook
and showing all these things that I know I'm going to manipulate I want to make them all
at a decent size in reality they show up a lot smaller in the final piece but I want
to make sure they're big enough that they're not going to get pixelated if I do have to
scale them up or down or anything like that except for this case because this is supposed
to be a pixelated indie game you know what you're doing all these pieces together and
I'll just turn them all on before I bring
them into a After Effects because if you want
to make sure I can access them all and then I can move them individually as layers and
position rotate scale all the stuff that we're about later on but I made like you know three
main files for this in this so here is games number one on this the first section here's
games number 2 and games number three and basically I just split it up so the file you
know one file wouldn't be have everything in it in there that actually got corrupted
or I mess so
mething up that it wouldn't mess up the the whole video some things are just
easier for me to do in illustrator so I also had an illustrator document where I just drew
a few things I'm using their pin tool and they're more vector-based tools just because
it felt more comfortable to me for certain styles of drawing so you noticed a lot of
these elements ended up showing up and I would you know copy and paste them into the final
Photoshop file but in terms of ease of drawing it's okay to jump betw
een different programs
if you need to don't feel like you have to do everything in Photoshop if you feel like
going to be a little bit better in illustrator or something on the iPad Pro or you know additional
things like that another fantastic resource that I used for this piece is the noun project.
Calm and if you're doing an explainer in informational Style video this is an excellent resource
so let's say I wanted to do something about newspapers so let's type newspaper click that
in and all t
he sudden I get all these different icons for newspapers this is a fantastic resource
so I can say okay I'm really going with this kind of shaded in your dark and style stoves
click on this they can either choose to do a pro download where you are a pain the Creator
themselves are usually a pretty small amount like three bucks here and then you don't need
to do any attribution real thing like that I did the basic download why I've got the
Creative Commons license in there you've got it include t
hat as part of it and it's going
to show up in the file itself but that was pretty good you say okay I'm doing this for
your art project or whatever and then you can choose to do it in a ping or SVG file
as a download finally I've made it into After Effects this is where everything starts to
come together the audio the character performance all that supplemental artwork everything is
going to start to hopefully make sense when we bring it all in so let's begin by creating
a new composition and I
know that I want mine to be 1920 x 1080 for this particular piece
on the do 24 frames per second on because that's what I did in my character animator
peace and I'm going to click okay as a container for all your different elements coming together
so I'm going to double click in this area over here and I could do that by file import
as well and let's find my character animator project to begin with so in this case it was
called the aptly-named character animator project 57 I don't know how to k
eep track
of all the stuff but okay let's head open and that's going to bring up my Dynamic link
a dialogue now I have a few different things that are recorded here under the few scenes
were like animated character animator as well read monster shows up as a cameo a few different
things like that again I can only make sense in my own file naming conventions I know that
Dave to was the correct one so I'm going to select that scene and click okay and what
that does is bring in my character animato
r project as its own timeline as its own asset
and so I'm if I scrubbed around here it's going to take a while after effects you have
to render things they don't immediately show up you can change your settings over here
in the preview of panel so a lot of times what I will do is when I'm trying to move
things around and get things moving as quickly as possible I'm going to set my resolution
to quarter and I'm going to skip every two frames that just makes it run a little bit
smoother and allows
you to see things a little bit quicker they might be a little more pixelated
they're not going to be perfect Final in a broadcast-quality but they're going to be
able to let you move run a little bit faster okay so what's double click on the comp to
go back to that and then going to select once my crotch file my character animator project
file I'm just going to drag that into my composition so I had my composition open and then I dragged
this asset this new character animator project file in he
re and then I can manipulate I can
just drag and move this character around and put him wherever I want I think in the beginning
the video he starts down here you got a few options for manipulation and the way I do
this is normally with just these keyboard shortcuts and you just have to learn these
this is just the way it goes if this your first time learning After Effects I'm sorry
it gets a little crazy at times but this is how it works so if I want to reposition the
character normally I'm jus
t going to drag over them like this but sometimes when you
got a lot of stuff on your canvas up here is going to be a little bit crazy so I'm going
to press select it down here in my timeline and press pee and that gives me position slow
and so here's my Exposition and here's my wife position I can't rag or I could type
something in whatever and it's going to allow me to do that the next one that I use quite
a lot is SS is going to change scale of the character and by default X and Y position
ar
e locked together but if you click the soul link icon that's going to stop it and then
you can make him stretch and do some goofy things like that but for the most part that
is not what I want so I'm going to undo all those steps and make sure that's on the time
that I had that link on and then since we're going through some of these basic controls
are is going to do rotation and that allows you to rotate the character a little bit if
you wanted to and then T4 opacity I'm sometimes if I want the
character to fade in and out
these are just basic building blocks right these are very simple steps positioning a
scale rotation just really simple controls but this is something I am constantly doing
and scaling my characters around in one of those a background file so let's just a double
click here again to bring it in let's go to my games folder and let's find one of those
igames thing was just bringing Games 3 right now so this isn't footage this is actually
a composition and I'm going to d
o retain layer sizes I want to keep the size of my layers
as they are this is not a Photoshop sequence so if that is checked I'm going to uncheck
that and I'm going to click open it's going to see this thing about Styles I emerged is
fine with me but you can try it out depending on what your ass hats look like all right
so what did that do well that made this new comp called Games 3 that shows up a base of
my games free PSD and then all the layers are showing up here in my file as well so
if I d
ouble click on Games 3 S going to open up that comp here and you can see any country
have open or going to show up as tabs in your timeline so if I want to go back to comp one
I just click here right now and looking at Games 3 you can see that is my whole layer
order exactly as I had the Photoshop file the only difference is not going to timeline
attached to everything so every layer now exists as something that exists overtime now
there's a bunch of different ways to do this some people love to
Dupree calms some people
like to bring in layers one of the time I'm going to actually just select all of these
by selecting one layer pressing command a on Mac or control a on Windows and I'm done
I'm going to press a command C to copy on Mac and has control C on Windows and then
I'm going to close that comp down and then inside my nuke my original composition comp
one I'm going to press command V and now all of those elements are going to show up here
now those about covered my main narrator
guy and normally I want him to be at the top so
I'm just going to take him from the bottom up here and now he's showing I had every sense
of all of this you know basic illustrate it looks like an illustrator just threw up on
the screen right there's no limit to be able to make sense of all this so what I'm going
to do is Select these layers I'm just going to hold down shift and select multiple layers
I'm just going to drag all of these kind of out of the way maybe three minutes in or something
l
ike that so I've only now got my character the paper background is showing up here and
then all these other elements I'm going to sandwich in between so let's say I'm starting
this section with you know this penguin Quest 3 box that's coming in and this show up as
a computer because this was a group inside a Photoshop second one to manipulate any of
the individual elements here I can just double-click p q and that's going to show up as its own
composition I want that to be a little bit more tran
sparent I can select that presti
photo shops original pasty there was 50% but if I wanted to change it to 25 do that here
so you can do a little bit of manipulation here most times I'm going to go back to the
original Photoshop file if I manipulating the artwork but there's a nice tricks you
can do here so it's X out of that go back to remain calm and now it's time to start
thinking about how things are animate in and out so let's press plus few times or a little
bit closer in and now I'm a two-
second 3-second and I know I'm kind of working at 24 frames-per-second
let's start to manipulate this I'm going to select a p q penguin Quest layer on a PS4
scale and I'm just going to scale it down a little bit that looks pretty good and then
I'm going to use my selection Arrow appear selection tool and let's see this is basically
where I wanted to end up going to change for the origin is I don't want this to be this
little cross everything that's going to like the origin to Anchor Point of whe
re things
will rotate or scale around if I go up to this hand behind anchor tool and just drag
the anchor over to the middle of the box that's going to work slightly better so anytime it
looks like things are scaling or moving a rotating weird it's probably because the Anchor
Point is somewhere completely different I'm depending on your competition okay so if I
know this is where I want this particular piece to end up I'm going to press key for
position and I'm going to click the little stopwatc
h icon it's right here that is going
to create what we call a keyframe so that scene at this moment this is the these values
right here this is the position that I want you to have okay so that looks pretty good
but let's say many half a second before I wanted to be off of the screen so I'm just
going to drag the CTI to where I you know where I wanted to start from and then I'm
just going to drag it off the screen like this or a lot of times what I'll do is just
manipulate the values down here u
ntil I can get it off the screen and you'll notice that
automatically created this new keyframe down here so what's going to happen is as I scrubbed
through you can see it's going to kind of do the in-between it's going to say okay at
this time at 1 and 1/2 seconds you're off the screen at 2 seconds your this part of
the screen so I'm going to fill in the middle the in-between part and get it from point
A to point B and I press the spacebar key it's going to take a second to render but
it's goin
g to go kind of slow and choppy but you can see what's happening here it's slides
in from the left to the right and we start seeing things here that means it's rendering
it's got rendered frames for your video and so the next time you go and play it back it's
going to move a little bit smoother so a lot of times when you're injuring things you will
you let it render let it kind of chug along and then go back to the beginning and watch
everything at a slightly smoother rate so that's pretty good
I think I also wanted to
rotate though at the same time so I want to be able to still see these keyframe still
while I'm bringing it in as rotation so I'm going to do is still with my penguin Quest
comp selected is pressed shift and are and that's also going to bring up rotation now
to make sure I'm on the exact point same point that this keyframe was I'm going to use these
little keyframe a controls over here some to press the right arrow and when this lets
me move between my different keyframe
s left and right when this is blue that means it's
on a current keyframe and now because I know that's where it's going to be off the screen
that's in a kind of position a for it, click rotation as well and that's going to create
a rotation keyframe and then if I click right here it's going to move to that other extreme
position and I create another keyframe there and I wanted to kind of Romaine up like that
but as it's coming in actually when it's off screen I think I wanted to rotate a little
bit more so I'm going to press the hold down the space bar and I'm just going to click
and drag it so I can still see my mean even though it's off the main screen and in this
case I think I want to rotate a little bit I'm so it has this nice slide and it kind
of rotates into place as it's coming in now now I'm noticing that you know the box is
not looking that you peeking over the edge and that's not what I want to do something
calculate the position just a little bit so it starts off of a scree
n so it looks a little
nicer if I wanted to I could press shift an S and that's also going to let me see scale
at the same time and in so I can click here gets scale maybe I wanted to actually was
make my I want to make my chuki friends first cuz I always want to have my rest position
I want to have my you know final position where it ends up and then when it starts let's
say I wanted to be a little bit more scaled-down so let's bring that down and then spacebar
and I can see that all come toget
her if I'm being honest what I just showed you is 90%
of all I did in this video I am just manipulating objects coming in and out of the screen and
moving around and scaling and rotating and fading and position and all of that stuff
while the character talks over on the side of the character is you can manipulate him
or her in exactly the same way that you are manipulating your other stuff so if I wanted
this character for example to scale up and go to the middle of the screen I could do
to make
sure that P is preposition I mean press shift in S4 scale and I'm going to keyframe
both of those and then let's say have a second later I wanted to show up here and all I'm
going to do is Click these little diamonds to add a new key frame and then let's do something
where he skills up like that I probably don't want to go to High over 100% or he's going
to look pixelated and then I'm going to drag him over here to reposition him and now you
can see that over time he's going to move and scale u
p slightly actually does make him
a little bit smaller to begin with so it's a more of a dramatic effect so it's go down
there something like that and then I was just using the arrow keys by the way to move around
and let's see how this looks now any scales up like that when I've decided I'm done with
penguin Quest I wanted to leave I will just basically click and drag over top of these
to set one more keyframe and then let's press plus to see a little bit closer where we are
half a second later
I'm going to click all these again and then I'm going to start manipulating
the values and bring it back out so let's rotated back like this but scale it down and
let's bring it out of the frame like that so the whole thing would look something like
this for this manipulation he comes in and stays there and then it's going to slide out
there for me I'm currently done with this right I don't want it kind of sticking around
here in the background of me that's not hurting anybody over there but fo
r the cleanliness
of the timeline I'm going to actually cut this off here in the way I'm going to do that
is press option and bracket on a right bracket on the Mac and I think that's all and ride
bracket on a PC and that's just going to make it basically disappear so now you know 10
seconds in that is not there anymore that layer is not visible to that just helps make
your timeline a little bit easier once you have done that step I'm going to add some
easing to the keyframes this is just a nice
Finishing Touch that's going to make it feel
a little bit not as robotic not as you know it's in one position and then crudely it moves
in the next position it's just going to feel nicer it's just going to look professional
just trust me on this one so Marquis select all of these and I'm just going to click function
f 9 and that's the shortcut for that function of the Mack I have to press down the FN key
and an S9 you also have the ability to right click and go to keyframe assistant I usually
us
e Eazy-E's you have a ton of different options though I'm to be able to make this and as
fast or as slow as you want but from me a lot of the time I'm fine with just using EZ
8 now kind of cheese is in a little bit nicer and eases out it's a little bit subtle it
would look better in the final piece but you get the idea so once I'm done with that I'm
ready to move on to the next thing so let's say you know the Nexus is Starbucks coming
in so few times I'll drag this piece over I will press plus t
o move in a little bit
closer and I will start to manipulate the same way positioning scale rotation all of
that stuff exactly like we just saw so this is where the final project looks like at least
one third of it I ended up splitting into three parts to this is games and then here
is games and game seat so I know this can look really overwhelming if this is your first
time in After Effects I certainly felt that way when I pick this up you know over 15 years
ago when I was first learning After
Effects it's something that's going to take time and
something that there's no way I'm going to be able to cover everything and you know this
tutorial but it just want to show you kind of the end result of picking up these basic
position scale rotation changes that solve it's really happening here so it was such
a look at some of the stuff step by step so the character skills down you'll see that
rotating behind the insta sock all I'm doing is you know position rotation scale stuff
very simple I
had the second character that came in rotation you can start to see scale
all it is you know when you really break it down it's just really simple transform things
that are happening to a couple of tips that might help along in your animation process
if this is your first time using After Effects number one she was calling right here with
a little ball icon that is motion blur if you're not seeing it click this little toggle
switches modes down here and that's going to switch between your you k
now your blending
modes and some other stuff I'm in instead show you is this column you want to click
this to toggle I make sure it's on for everything if you see something like this that as a little
line that means it's a an inside the camp you would want to make sure that all those
things are a have motion blur on as well and into enable motion blur you want to make sure
if this is set to Blue that this icon is toggled blue which means as things move around motion
blur is going to happen so ev
en in this state I should be able to see things a little bit
blurry as they transition and move yeah you can kind of see that in between it's just
as a nice professional touch everything looks a little bit nicer when you add a little bit
of motion blur the second thing sometimes you want multiple elements to move together
at the same time so for example $60 down here and penguin Quest 3 these are two separate
elements but I do want the $60 to kind of always move with penguin Quest 3 two players
here I can see that $60 this year and penguin Quest is here to connect $60 so it's going
to follow wherever penguin Quest goes I cook this little a swirly icon here click and drag
and we call this the pic Whip and so I'm going to pick whip $60 to penguin Quest and now
it's going to show up as this is connected this is linked to penguin Quest so now when
I moved it around what was happening $60 is moving around at the same time so this is
something I'm doing consistently I am always moving multip
le things together in fact at
any given time in this composition there's almost always something moving even if it's
just an icon on the screen there's probably some subtle scaling going on or there's multiple
elements that are moving at the same time so I use this a lot and you can see that here
parents and Link you see that a lot of stuff is linked to other things I want multiple
things moving at the same time and that includes something called a no layer so sometimes you
want multiple things
to move at the same time but you don't want just one layer to control
them all you kind of want an invisible force to to move them all and that's where an ulcer
so I do this a lot as well I'm going to go to layer new No Object that's going to create
basically this invisible little handle that I'm going to be able to connect things to
so if I want the credits for example to move with no 47 I'm just going to pick with the
credits to know 47 and now let's go back to where the credits are which is a
t the very
end here I can move the credits on their own sure you know I can I can manipulate them
like that but because they're connected to know 47 I can also manipulate no 47 and I
can keep frame it and I can do whatever I want and I can connect as many things as I
want to a single know and that gives me a great level of control so if I have multiple
elements icons or objects that I want to move and scale at the same time I'm just going
all to annul layer and then manipulate that no layer inst
ead of a physical artwork layer
General take away hear my general advice is used After Effects at the level that you feel
comfortable with if you are a beginner just do this basic position skill rotation transformed
as a motion blur do if you know objects it's going to look pretty great still and as you
advance in as you use after effects or do other tutorials online and continue to learn
the program you can continue to add new stuff and layers on top of everything all right
so once you're done
with all of that I've got this one Mega compa games Megamix we're
actually put three different cops that broke up things in three different sections and
then combine them all together by the black solid feet out at the end over top of the
credits but that's how I set mine up just make sure whatever you have is selected over
here and then go to file export add to Adobe Media encoder queue up Adobe Media encoder
and this allows you to render out your final piece in the best possible quality so you
might see different defaults hear a different mov file or something like that I'm just going
to click on whatever is here am I format and then I'm going to see my full export settings
know you have a lot of different options here of the type of format you want there's some
presets in terms of in a professional studies that are going to look as good as possible
and you can scrub through and see you know different frames at full quality to see kind
of get an idea of what they're going to look lik
e this is helpful to because if you're
like you know size penis different or same like that you're going to see black bars or
pixelation problems or things like that so it's helpful to see this as a little preview
for me these are great h.264 and match Source high bitrate those are for what I'm trying
to go for output name was call is something different of me to click on this and they
save change the destination folder to somewhere where I could actually find it would you be
on the desktop and
let's just call this game's draft a draft trust me you were going to see
mistakes you're going to want it added stuff we're going to do this your first version
is always going to be a trap so just trust me on this one everything else is looking
good size 2 framerate something to click okay and what's ready to go click the little green
play icon and now you can go grab a snack wrap a coffee whatever you want because the
rendering process has started and this little sliver of blue over here in abo
ut what an
hour and 15 minutes that's going to be finish rendering so yeah rendering at full quality
is going to take some time to Addle the motion blur to add everything together looking as
good and sounding as good as it does it's not something that happens instantaneous so
is it going to take a while just let your computer said once your video file is finished
rendering open it up and grab a notebook and pen and watch it and when you know this mistake
when it looks like you know the lip sync
isn't lining up correctly or a character isn't moving
as quickly as you would want or anything that you see stop it make a note of what time it's
at and make a little note about it so I will do this several times several iterations with
every video I think I did this three or four times with this video where I watch the whole
thing multiple times I took a big laundry list of notes of things that I wanted to fix
both in you know all the way in the original Photoshop artwork either for the charact
er
or the supplemental assets to the character animation if it felt like the lip sync wasn't
looking right at a particular part or his you know emotions or stuff didn't fit with
what was happening in the scene finally all the things in After Effects and a lot of times
that's you know things lingering on the side of the screen that you thought were gone or
oops I forgot to add motion blur to this particular logo wear that sort of thing watch it several
times go through the steps of rendering out
a new video watch it again and keep doing
that until you only see like two or three mistakes that no one else is going to see
in your like okay that's alright so that's it that is the whole process so we went all
the way from just basic words on a page some scribbles in a notebook all the way to this
final rendered piece that looks pretty good so this whole project from beginning to end
probably took me about five or six days I would say and that includes the script writing
the carriage creation
the recording the editing all the composite in all the art asset Generation
all of that stuff so yeah this is going to take some time if you're going to want to
let you know if you want to make a 5-minute explain Her Style video like this if not something
that you're going to just snap your fingers in can I get done it does take time and effort
to put together but for me character animator really is the missing link in all of this
allows me to have a narrator a character that goes through the e
ntire process and is relatively
fun and easy to animate instead of fiddling around with little keyframes are trying to
make things you know look like they're natural I just talk and Act Naturally and it translates
into a cool animated performance so I hope this was a helpful look at my process this
is just one way of doing things this is the way that I do things there's all sorts of
different ways and Avenues in and out of creating a cool animated video but I'm for me this
worked well let me tel
l my story in a fun animated way and I hope it I helps you as
well. I using the techniques that we learned in today's tutorial I want to see what you
create so please share it on social media with hashtag character animator and if none
of this is making sense or you got stuck at a certain part or anything like that the best
place for help is the official Adobe character animator forums where people from the team
or the community can help answer your questions thank you very much for watching and
have
fun.
Comments
i literally never comment on YouTube videos but the fact that someone taught me the basics of audition that i started learning a few hours ago and a complete in-depth tutorial about Character animator in an organized-well explained 2H video made me appreciate how much dedication and time you've put in this so Thank you mister.
My God, so much work for such simple animation. Imagine the pain Disney goes through to do what they do.
I really like these type of long videos explaining everything, your content and character animator are the things got me into animations and stuff. You're the best teacher for this software.
Hey I tried downloading this character 'Dave' but its not working as I have 1.5 verison, can you please share this puppet file for version 1.5 It will be a great help.. Love from India..Learning a lot by you and seriously this is the video because of which I will be starting my new channel...
I just had to stop the video in the middle and comment that this is one of the clearest videos describing Adobe software that I've ever witnessed. Just amazing. I came here to learn about one application but learned so much about others. Thank you so much!!
Despite the fact that this video is over a year old the creator is still giving hearts to the comments Grateful for your content love from India
I wish all software had a person like you to help the way you do. This is an amazing channel, thanks so much!
This is a whole semester of school work curated into 1 hour of high quality real-world best practice. A graphic designer can become an decent animator after watching this course. Thanks for this and all the amazing content on your channel.
From start to end, clear steps. You're probably the best instructor. Thank you so much.
This video is my Character Animator bible! I'm working on my first character & first animation and I replay this video hundreds of times. Great job and thanks so much for putting it together.
Teacher here. You are an amazing soul for this. I can’t express my gratitude for this tutorial!
Dave - You are amazing!!! I get so much from all of your tutorials, but this one in particular is always something I find myself wondering 'how do others do this, what is best practice' Not only that, but all of your little hints and tips... I learnt more in this in 10 minutes than I have watching hours of after effects and premiere pro tutorials! THANK YOU, THANK YOU, THANK YOU!!!
I am just speechless!! this was freaking amazing, seriously. I have been an architect for 12 years and decided to career shift because I think animating is my passion. This video is out of this world. I can't thank you enough, u're very talented and approachable. U make is look so easy and i hope i come to find it effortless as u do in this video one day.
This is the biggest revolution I have seen in animation. I mean, WHAT ! Thanks Dave, this will really change it all.
Youtube is full of videos and tutorials but the way of teaching only a few ppl know how to deliver the idea ... You are a PRO .. Thank you
Bro, for a very long time, I haven't felt so much love directed into me like in your tutorial, thank you very much. BIG LOVE ! World needs more awesome dudes like you !
I literally only today learned that this software existed, and I feel so much more confident in understanding what it can and cannot do after watching this video. thank you for the work you put into it
There are so many useful tips in here for every stage of the process, it's a goldmine. Thanks so much for taking the time to make it, Dave!
I am about to start creating my first character and I can't thank you enough for your tutorials.. please never stop doing what you do because you are videos are valuable
This is the fastest, detailed, animation, direction, audio, studio, perfect all aound tutorial ever. Thanks