Hey everyone this is Dave from the Adobe
character animator team and recently I made a short cartoon called Consoles
it's about what if the video game consoles were robots and they're they
share an apartment and they have to pay rent and make fun of each other for the
different specs and all of that and I think it turned out pretty well and they
got a really good reception from you all so thank you for watching and one of the
number-one comments I got though was how the heck did you make this pe
ople want
to make cartoons with multiple characters and a lot of the tutorials
I've shown are one character at a time explainer videos that sort of thing so
in this video we're gonna go really deep into a multi character cartoon workflow
we're gonna start with you know the basics of playing a general overview and
script together order then gonna move into Adobe Audition and mixing all the
audio and exporting for lip-sync and character animator will talk about the
recording process how to do all
those quick hand movements and triggers for
the different hand positions and eyelids and all of that stuff and then finally
we will composite in Adobe After Effects and add motion blur or shadows cameras
title screens credits all of that so hopefully by the time you've watched
this whole thing you will also be ready to make your own multi character
three-minute animated short cartoon to put out there into the world so if that
sounds interesting to you let's get started so before I jump into thin
gs
with a project like this I want to kind of create a Bible for it right I want to
I want to create a guiding sense of where everything's going well so in this
case what's the premise who are the characters what's the world they're
living in who's the intended audience of these videos all of that so I just
started up a Google Doc and just start to write down a few things about that
and then I started to sketch out the characters and you know I just did this
on my iPad on it in Adobe fresco whic
h I'm going to be using quite a lot during
this whole process and just start to you know think of some differences how could
I visually differentiate all the characters there's a lot there's a lot
of different form factors all the mouths are actually different the eyes are
different this is just something that you know the ideas were stuck in my head
and I didn't really realize what was working and what wasn't working until
they got them out there into words or sketches or you know whatever work
s
for you so I just think get those ideas out a good or bad edit them and get them
to where you feel really good about them and you feel like you can move forward I
also started to write out you know character descriptions and who I wanted
to be the voice actors to each one what differentiates each character right so
in a you know a classic comedy like Seinfeld or friends or something like
that all the characters are very different and have different
personalities and that's where a lot of the c
omedy comes from and so I tried to
establish that with these characters so well and it doesn't have to be you know
really long it can just be really short character sketches and then that you
know as you write scripts and build the characters and the voice actors will
bring their own personalities to things you can kind of see how that how that
evolves now part of this playing process was thinking about what the actual scene
and environment is going to look like so again another quick sketch in
Adobe
fresco of where the characters were going to be what's the general layout
you know so in this scene for example switch is gonna walk in from the left
and jump on the couch PC comes in from the right I wanted to just feel like a
normal apartment with you know a fridge and a counter and fruit and a plant and
all these different elements just kind of getting a sense of what this scene is
going to be and if you had multiple scenes you could draw up multiple
environments but for me this is a sh
ort three-minute cartoon it all takes place
in one area and so I just drew that out as a guide as well and then below here I
wrote the script and again trying to stay true to each character and having a
lot of direction here for each of them about to the voice actors about how they
would be saying things I color-coded everything so when I sent this has a
link to the different voice actors they would have this and be able to isolate
their lines a little bit better but yeah there's a lot of stage
direction of you
know when switch she's coming in through the left door just trying to give it as
many kind of hints and and organization and guidance to the process just to make
it easier for everybody easier for me when I'm animating things later on
easier for the voice actors to know what frame of mind they're in and all that
stuff okay so I send the script to the different voice actors they send me back
audio files usually there's you know two or three
takes per line so I've got a few differ
ent choices and then I opened up
here in Adobe Audition and so here I would go through and listen and
basically save an edited version so I would open up the audio file and listen
to you know let's say these are five takes of the same line and say okay
actually this one I'm the press Delete is the best line so I'm just gonna do
this and this move on to the next one and listen to these okay this one sounds
good so I just keep going through this process of listening and deleting until
I've kind of
got a perfect mix of these are these are the best takes of each
line and I'm going to save this as its own document and once you've done that
you can click this little button up here insert into multitrack and that is new
multitrack session and that's going to bring it into a multiple track setup so
you can mix all your different voices and music and sound effects together and
that looks something like this so this is a multitrack setup where every
character's voice is its own track so I've got
PlayStation Xbox switch PC some
background music some sound effects down here but basically all laid out and as
their their separate individual tracks and then I can change you know the
volume of them I can change some settings equalising you can get as
complicated or as simple as you want during this part the basic idea I feel
like is you just want the voices to be as clear as possible have the background
music add to the atmosphere but not be too overpowering add the sound effects
to kind of
punctuate certain moments this is where like he's doing the mario
jump in the cartoon so I had a little bowing and the coin sound they're just
things like that so if I was starting from the beginning I would you know
bring in one of those edited two tracks that I did so let's just drag this in
something like this and then I would use the razor tool up here you want to make
sure it's two selected clips and not razor all Clips tool razor selected
clips and then I would zoom in here by pressing plu
s and I would listen and say
okay here is where I want to cut it and cut it and just make these little cuts
and you know delete the sections that I don't need and then move them around to
get the timing match up with the other tracks so how
I'm spending most of my time here is kind of listening to these different
tracks and making small adjustments so okay this needs to be a little earlier
this needs to be a little later you know just making little little changes so
sometimes I'll break a track
into half if I feel like there's you know too long
of a pause here between you know a moan or a sigh and something else and so I'll
bring them closer together so you just have a lot of options here basically I
want to keep the pace kind of fast and always having a forward momentum and so
I tried to make the lines really line up one right after the other also play
around with volume a lot so for example Andrews track came in a little bit
quieter than some of these other tracks and so I brought yo
u know there's this
master volume control over here so I just bump that up to decibels the sound
effects were definitely need to be quieter in the background so I brought
that brought those down negative ten and you've got some on you know on track
controls here like the music fading in at the beginning if you just click these
little things you can make these little lines and dots that will allow you to
make the volume rise and fall very easily make sure to do it on the volume
and not the pan th
is will make it go from the left ear to the right ear and
that's not what you want to do you want to do it with the volume audition also
has these nice little fader controls that you can drag at the beginning and
end of a clip to kind of fade it in and out so really easy to you know if
there's white space or white noise at the beginning there ends you can kind of
fade in and out each clip to make sure I'm you're not going to have that so
next I need to take each audio track and export it out by
itself to help drive
the lip-sync of each animated character that I'm using so let's start with Play
Station at the top for example so what I would do is mute all these other tracks
so I only want to be hearing the top PlayStation track and then I would
export this out I also want to make sure that any processing I've done to it
I would take off temporarily so I added in the essential sound panel over here I
always add podcast voice or balance male voice or something like that to make it
sound a
little bit cleaner and more professional but when you're driving
lip-sync and character animator I find it works best with just raw audio files
so for temporarily I'm going to clear the audio type to get rid of that so I
just have the raw audio signal and then I would go to file export multitrack mix
down entire session and save that as a a if' file or wav file or whatever
somewhere by the way a shortcut to do this at the same time to mute multiple
tracks is over the m if you hold down command
shift on Mac or ctrl shift on
Windows and click the M that's going to make them all mute or unmute at the same
time so I would then do the exact same process for each track exporting each
individually and then I want to also export out a final mix with everything
unmuted everything with whatever processing or EQ you've done to it
all of that stuff and just export this out this is going to be your final audio
track mixing the music and the sound effects and the vocals together next
let's move on
to art productions so I've kind of divided into four different
sections when I'm thinking of all the art that I need to create for a given
cartoon so first I've got my characters in this case we've got four different
individual characters that I got to you know create and have all their eye
expressions and hand positions and all of that stuff the title and credit
screens usually this is what's gonna start and end the whole cartoon and you
know give credit to everyone who helps you make this part
icular production and
kind of draw the viewer in background mid-ground and foreground elements so
not just the background the world they're living in but different things
like foreground elements and plate things you can hide characters behind to
give it kind of a sense of depth and we'll talk a little bit more about that
in the future and props and special effects so little things that the
characters interact with or little smoke bursts or motion lines or things like
that that help add a little
bit of a dynamic quality to the scene so I've
recorded hours and hours of tutorial about the character side of things but
for this tutorial I want to shine a spotlight on the other elements of
production and what all these other elements that really help bring a full
package to life so let's start with the title and credit screens Here I am in
Photoshop and I've got my title screen and really basic I just drew this you
know very simple building structure down here
kind of setting the scene for
where these you know consoles live
you kind of want to set up an establishing shot of what world you know
your going into so there's like all these you know lights and it's pretty
rough but you get the general idea and then I did a few other things but I've
got these clouds as individual layers that move back and forth I've added a
texture over top of everything so this was without the texture it's a very flat
basic look but then when I add this texture if you've seen other tutorials
you will no
tice and recognize this same watercolor texture that I used for so
many different things and I just did a blend mode over top of it over top of
everything to give it this nice watercolor kind of handcrafted look that
I think makes it feel a little bit more alive and then I basically redrew the
title in an okay samurai cartoon byline um three times a piece all in the same
spot so here's number one and then read through it again and number three and
then it just cycled through those later on wheth
er in character animate or
after-effects are same like that to give it this kind of live kinetic look and I
want to use this an opportunity point out with your different video elements
you always want something in motion so I'm not just gonna export this as a
still image and put this at the first three seconds of my video instead I want
to have a lot of movement so that's why I have the type moving you kind of feel
like you're zooming in to the city the clouds are moving all these different
thin
gs that keep momentum in the video you always want a sense of momentum you
always want motion and to move the the viewer forward because if this is just
static in the world of video that gets boring really really quickly so you
always want at least something moving something catching the users eye and for
you know it can be subtle in the case of this all the movement is very slow very
methodical but that's okay it's kind of setting the pace and setting the tone
and drawing the viewer in for the
credits I took the exact same scene and
just move the clouds over to the side for YouTube this is where I'm putting
you know suggested videos and a subscription you know call to action and
all that stuff so I wanted to make room for that you could also you know people
add little videos of themselves talking hey thanks for watching my video like
and subscribe you know whatever you want you could put in this element this area
over here but I do think it kind of adds a nice
professional quality to
add some credits at the at the end give credit for the
music give credit for the people who helped you with voice acting and all of
that stuff it just kind of feels like it ties everything together next up let's
move on to environmental art so this is the world that the characters live in so
I drew this in Adobe fresco and I tried to give it a lot of nice little details
so if you know your way around videogames you'll recognize a lot of
these little pictures that they have on the wall at the Tri
force Atari logo
pac-man Mario Master Chief waving and Kratos there and then there's you know
some some different little small things here their Cheerios and rice grains and
they've even got a grocery list on here and you know a sketch of them on the
refrigerator so just small little details like that that help give the
environment a little bit of life and character now two main things I want to
point out here number one the whole background has kind of a muted quality
to it so I brought down th
e opacity on the stroke on the lineart that's around
everything I added an overlay that kind of D saturated the colors a little bit
and the reason for doing this is you don't want the background to compete
with your characters too much you really want the characters to stand out so take
a look at a scene like this from Netflix's Bojack horseman you notice the
characters very strong you know line art and the drink even also in this bag
they're all in the foreground the phone the chair all these h
ave a great level
of detail but the background all of the you know you can see a few little
details there but you notice it feels much more muted and this really helps
bring the characters out to the forefront
a little bit better so it's a bit of a balancing act it's a bit of a trial and
error you can try different techniques with the colors with overlays with
transparency and see what works best for you a lot of times what I'll do is bring
in these placeholder characters something like this so
I can have a
general idea of the sizing and relationship between the characters and
then I can also see how how strong you know pronounce the characters versus the
background are and make adjustments based off of that the next thing I
wanted to point out is that the background is not just a flat piece of
artwork that the characters are just slapped on top of when you're thinking
of your background in the world the characters are living in you want to
create a sense depth and that's why you know
I've got
this counter for example was a separate element that I drew and it's something
that I was able to put the playstation character behind so you know when his
arm and his body and all that stuff moved behind here you see he doesn't
even have any legs I didn't need to draw them because he was going to be hidden
behind this the whole time it just creates this nice sense of depth and the
same is true of these other elements so I've got these foreground elements this
plant over here in this li
ttle table with flowers on top of it and I used
these a few different times in the project too for the initial establishing
shot that zooming in to the whole thing and then when switch walks in the plant
kind of moves to the side to again it's a very subtle thing but it creates a
sense of depth and makes the room feel like it has a certain amount a certain
size to it a certain quality to it and it's not just this flat piece of artwork
and finally for props and special effects and things like tha
t you can you
know these can come from a variety of sources either your hand drawing them
find them online you know buying resources from different
stock sites that sort of thing you might notice there are a few instances where
there are these little subtle effects like this smoke poof wind switch jumps
up to hit the block and when PC comes in and out there's a little smoke poof as
well so for example here's the tin frame sequence of smoke that I found of the
smoke kind of rising in the air and
then slowly dissipating and it's just a nice
little effect that you could overlay on top of your animations to make it feel
slightly nicer so when you're searching for this stuff online look for you know
ping sequence or sprite sheet or terms like that of these animated sequences
that you should be able to bring into your project and they'll come in a
variety of formats but for me I find it best to put them into a Photoshop file
kind of line them up layer by layer so you can integrate them later
either
cycle layers animations and character animator or just compositing them frame
by frame in after-effects and we'll talk a little bit more about that later so
this is my workflow I did my artwork in fresco and Photoshop primarily but of
course you can use illustrator any combination of these tools or just one
of these tools is totally fine I did my mixing in Adobe Audition and all my
exported all my individual vocal tracks and the final
mix then character animator is specifically for indiv
idual character
animations so not worrying about backgrounds or title screens or anything
like that just worrying about each character as its own individual scene so
with each of these I you know switch got his own scene xbox has his own scene and
then after effects is the final step where I bring everything together and I
put the characters into a background switch between different camera systems
add shadows and motion blur and title sequences and all of that stuff now I
did want to mention th
ere is a way to completely skip that After Effects step
so if After Effects just scares you to no end and you want to kind of see what
you can do all inside character animator it's totally possible you could
composite everything into a scene and character animator all your characters
and background elements and foreground elements or whatnot and then use
character animators built-in camera system to keyframe different hold shots
and close-ups and pans and zooms and all of that and you know what
I would say
for simple projects this is totally fine if you don't want to go overboard and
you just maybe have you know two characters in a single static scene
talking to each other I think this is a perfectly fine route to take but at the
end of the day character animator is not really a compositing tool yet right it
is not the almost 30-year behemoth that an industry standard that After Effects
is so I feel like you just get a lot more bells and whistles and professional
quality stuff if you a
dd in the After Effects step I also think it simplifies
the workflow so you can really focus on just your character animation in
character animator which is what it's really been streamlined and optimized to
do and then focus on the compositing and motion graphics and bringing everything
together in After Effects which is what that's been optimized to do so that's
the way I do things other people will bring in a Premiere Pro into the mix
which dynamic links with character animator and After Effe
cts as well so
that's just another thing you could do if you want to add some editing
components to it but for me and the way that I did this
this three-minute piece this was my workflow all right so let's
go jump into character animator now and I just want to preface this with
not gonna dig into the rigging process that deep in this particular tutorial
because I've covered that really extensively in a lot of other tutorials
specifically about each of the possible tools that you can use to bring
characters to life so if you have no idea what you're doing with rigging and
you want to start getting an instruction on creating your own characters I would
highly recommend checking out one of these videos either the Adobe fresco
Adobe Photoshop or Adobe Illustrator videos each one of those is going to go
into excruciating detail about how to put a basic character model together but
if you're interested how I put my characters together guess what they're
all free so all of these characters al
l the robots I'll forward the robots as
well as the background and the title and credit screen images are all available
for a free download at the okay samurai puppets page so at the time of this
recording there in the very first slot up here just click download and you can
use them however you want no credit necessary feel free to take them apart
make your own you know fanfiction unauthorized episodes I don't care just
have fun with them and learn from them so let's say you've created you know
three or four puppets and you bring them into character animator and you start
putting them into individual scenes so each character is gonna be a little bit
different you know the way that they work this guy has some physics on his
antennas up there his mouth is a nutcracker jaw he's got a bunch of
different triggers I can add to him but it really doesn't matter
you know how simple or complicated your puppet is it could just be published
from the example screen right you could just make a carto
on with any of these
characters and that's totally fine it's all up to you and your comfort level and
you know what what you've created but for each character this is what I'm
going to do I'm gonna add it into its own scene so I had my Xbox character
here and with it selected I would click Add to new scene to make sure it's in
its own scene by itself now because I know I'm gonna bring this to After
Effects later I want this to be as high resolution as possible I don't want this
to be scaled down
at all so while I was going through the rigging process and
just testing things out I've scaled this guy down to 50% I don't want that I want
him to always be a hundred percent now he's way too big for the scene now but
that's okay I'm going to select my scene and it just make the height
a bit bigger so nothing is getting cut off
you want to give yourself a little bit of extra buffer room here so you know
the head and the arms and the antennas nothing's gonna get cut off the edges I
have a full
resolution character now that I can do a performance with and
know that when I bring it to after-effects later there won't be any
distortion or pixelation or anything like that now sometimes you may have a
character that has multiple states I think there's a desire sometimes to just
cram everything into one puppet file add the blocking add the sitting standing
all these different variations into one puppet and personally I think that just
makes your character exponentially more complicated and
sometimes behaviors
compete with each other so for example in the walk behavior with a walking
character you know the arms are moving with walking but then you may also want
to drag them and move them with a standing or sitting character so to me
it makes more sense to split your character into multiple puppets for
different instances and that's exactly what I did with the switch character for
him he has a he has three different states he has a standing a sitting and a
walking state now the stan
ding and sitting are pretty similar it's just
really that what the legs are doing so I just made a leg trigger swap set to
change that so notice he's in a sitting position where he is for most of the
cartoon but when I pressed the z key he's in his standing position so all I
did was change leg artwork put that into a swap set and so I can very easily
switch between those two states now for the walking scene I really want that to
have enough space in the scene so he can walk all the way across fr
om one side of
the apartment to around the couch area and just give him a little bit of a
runway to do that on so for this scene I've got I think it's 7500 pixels wide
something like that depend on how much your character's walking you may have to
make it even bigger but this type of thing works well for the walking
character so I would highly recommend to resist the urge to throw everything into
one puppet if your puppet you know has a frontal view a side view a standing
sitting walking all the
se different things consider making life a little bit
easier on yourself and it's separating into
multiple puppets I think it will talk about how I do it here and I just think
it'll make your life a lot easier so let's get into recording and editing now
I'm gonna take every character you know one step at a time and kind of walk
through them until I've got all my performances all set up and ready to
bring in and composite and after-effects so I always start with the audio that's
the first step ev
erything else in the animation is driven from what the
character is saying I don't know what emotions or how the character will be
acting if I don't know what they're going to be saying at any given time so
you want to import those isolated audio tracks that we did before and I would
just you know file import to bring them in here and I would find my xbox
lip-sync and I'm just gonna click and drag it over top of my scene to add it
to this character in this scene now this robot character is a lit
tle bit
different right his mouth is not the traditional swapping lip-sync mouth it's
the Nutcracker jaw behavior and that's a different way to do a mouth it's totally
fine but the lip-sync and analysis will work the exact same as if you were doing
traditional lip-sync so if I have him selected I'm just going to go to
timeline compute and up Nutcracker jaw take from scene audio and that's going
to go through the analysis process and really analyze the amplitude the volume
of the audio and determ
ine when the jaw is moving up and down based off of that
data and so once that's complete you'll see now I have a nutcracker jaw audio
input take down here and if I play back you'll notice the mouth is moving now if
it's moving a little bit too much I can always change the audio flap enos
parameter one of my favorite parameters down to something like 75% and see how
that goes because you don't want it to go too far because you can see if the
jaw goes beyond a certain threshold it's gonna go you
know off the face so you
don't want to do that so three out of the four robots actually do have this
Nutcracker jaw style setup but the more traditional route to go is what switch
has which is a mouth with a lot of different shapes that it's going to swap
between automatically as I'm talking and so if I did that exact same process of
selecting my character going to timeline compute lip-sync tape from scene audio
it's going to give me all these little mouth shapes down here
these are called vis E
ames and so if I play this back I can see each of little
mouth shapes appear down here and if I wanted to edit them I can disarm my
puppet so I'm not seeing any new life data coming in in fact at this point I
should probably turn off my microphone because I don't need it anymore there's
no reason to bring in any new audio it's all pre-recorded so I've been at fair
price plus a few times I can really dig in here and say oh you know that M
doesn't need to be in here that's kind of leading the whol
e thing or this e
sound if I right-click this I need this to be an uh sound instead or you know I
can drag the different parameters back and forth so or I want this s to show up
a little bit later so let's drag that around see a full control over how the
lip-sync is looking so if you're doing this type of lip-sync which I would say
95% of projects usually do you would want to now go through the lip-sync and
just do a pass and make sure the mouth shapes are more or less looking correct
so I would
just play it back and then stop it and make small edits here and
there so let's just try this little scene for example so I noticed when he
said PlayStation did you see that his mouth really didn't move that much it
just kind of it was stuck in one position so that really stands out as a
problem right I'm I'm by no means a lip-sync expert on there are people who
are much more skilled in this than I am what I'm looking for at this stage are
the big mistakes things where a mouth is being held whe
n there are multiple
syllables multiple thousand said and I want to make sure that at least there's
a little bit of a you know rise and fall of the mouth to at least give the
illusion that the mouth is moving during those parts I might not always a hundred
percent the time line up the you know the exact right mouth at the exact right
time but at least I have the option of making it look a little bit more in line
with what's being said as certain words and syllables are going so if I play
kind of
scrub through this so station so what I would do here is select this area
go to edit split and that's gonna give me a new
place to make a new vism so I no station so that's probably an a sound and a
sound let's try that at least place top station place stage tion so over here so
I'm probably gonna do more of a you sound again I'm really trying to just
hit the main valves the main syllables and by the way I just short cutted the
edit split it's a shift command D on Mac or shift ctrl D on Windows
it's just I'm
you know you'll if you're doing this a lot you know it'll help a lot to learn
that shortcut and then I'll right-click it and let's say that's the UH for play
station and then maybe I wanted to stop right here so let's split it there and
then I don't need these extra visions that look like they got picked up
so let's actually right click and go to silence which is going to leave a gap
here for these ones and finish this a little bit more so let's see if this
looks any better so tha
t looks a little bit better I could of course finesse and
and move the the lip-sync around but I just wanted to give the general idea of
that's the type of thing that I'm looking for extra visi UM's that you
don't want delete them or change them just silence and where there are you
know when there's a long vision that's being held and you want to split it up
into multiple parts and make sure that you're hitting each of those different
sounds that the character is saying so now that we've got the
lip-sync out of
the way and we've got kind of an audio track to work against let's start
focusing on other individual elements what we're gonna do is kind of record
one piece at a time and slowly build up a performance by combining all these
different elements together so I'm just gonna start today with the arm motions
so I'm going to disarm everything else and the way I do that is hold down
command on Mac or ctrl on Windows and click one of these red dots and now
everything is turned off every
thing is disarmed so no new live data is coming
in now I want to only arm dragger and then that means the only thing
that's going to be active right now or not the eyes or the eyebrows in the
mouth or anything it is just going to be dragging the arms around so we're going
to start by setting a default position for our character we probably don't want
our character to look in this traditional a-frame position with their
arms out like this we want them to have them to their side or hands
hips or s
ame like that what do you think is going to be the rest position so go
all the way back to the beginning of your project and then drag the arms
wherever you want them to be let's say something like this I think I want his
arms down on this side maybe a little bit bent something like that and that's
looking pretty good and when that's done I'm going to go to
timeline record to frame take now I could also press the record button and
just wait a couple of seconds but record to frame take is just an
easier process
there's no countdown although you can't turn the countdown off before recording
it's just a quicker method to allow you to quickly get something recorded when
you know there's not going to be a lot of changes like if this character was
waving or saying like that yes I would want to want to press the record button
but if they're just holding a single pose the record to frame taken
particularly this shortcut command to on Mac or control 2 on Windows is going to
be a lot quicker so
let's go ahead and do that record to frame take and if i
zoom in really closely by pressing plus here I will see that I've record
recorded two frames of animation where the hands are by the sides of the
character now right now I'm not seeing it because the characters still armed
live for recording so when I turn a disarm that character I'm going to only
see what's in the timeline so if you only want to see what's in the timeline
not be looking for new live data just turn the red dot off of the c
haracter in
the timeline and you will only see recorded stuff so now I just need to
drag this all the way across the the whole timeline this is kind of my
foundational layer this is the you know my safe default view that I know I can
always go back to if the character is is not doing anything else with his hands
and now I'm just gonna listen to the audio track and make gestures based off
of what the character is saying right now I'm only worried about the arm
movements I'm not really worried abo
ut the hand positions and things like that
I only want to focus on where the arms are going and I want my arm movements in
general to be pretty quick one of the telltale cases of kind of amateur
animation is when things happen really slowly and you know hi I'm this
character and then the arm goes back down slowly in more traditional
animation a 2d animation you see quicker gestures the arms move a
lot faster and that is also gonna allow you to hide things like hand swaps and
other things and jus
t make the character feel a little bit more alive so I'm
gonna arm my character one more time dragger is the only thing that's armed
here and then let's listen to this part and see what this character says at this
scene okay so look guys there's no reason for us to argue in that case I
feel like my arms would be out like this maybe they would then drop down a little
bit so something like that so what I'm gonna do is instead of pressing record
and you know trying to drag in time with all this stu
ff I'm going to just set
certain poses and record them like that so let's say you know look guys I'm
going to start back drag back to the beginning and then he says look guys
something like that and then I'll do my two frame take command two on Mac or
ctrl two on Windows and now I've got that nice little two frame take so I
mean I'll drag it out to the end here and then I can use the little blend
handles on the edge I just do you know two or three frames really quickly to
have those arm transiti
ons to move pretty pretty quickly let's see how this
looks so we think no reason for us to our look guys there's no reason for us
to argue I think about the arms to then move down so I can actually record a
second take of the arms down like this and I do have to drag them even a little
bit even if I want them to look like this it's not gonna record if I don't
touch them so I need to drag them just a little bit so I know that they're gonna
get recorded so let's press record actually command two t
o do the two frame
take and I will drag these out something like that okay and then I'll do the same
thing blend to the beginning and the end in fact I think I wanted to end here so
I'm going to take this bottom take that I did previously and make that end a
little bit earlier so if we just look really closely here what's happening is
it's started with my foundational take of let me disarm the character see this
easier my foundation take of the arms on the side then it's going to
blend and trans
ition into the arms being in their Upstate and then it's gonna
blend and transition into the downstate and then it's gonna blend back to the
rest position like that so I have three different takes here and I'm just
blending from one take to the next between these different poses and when
it's all put together it should look okay let's try it out now this next part
he's talking to xbox so he probably wants to point to xbox I'm going to do a
pose where let's me arm him again and he's pointing so I
might bring the arm
up like this do a two frame take drag it out and then maybe it goes down again so
let's uh you know have the arm outstretched like this command two again
it may be it then it'll drop down to the side so I'll blend there it's just
something like this forgot to do the blend here you could see it looks choppy
it looks very clearly choppy when you don't have the blends in there and of
course you can finesse it with you know how short or long you want the plains
whatever works fo
r you if you want to be a little bit longer go for it so this is
exactly what I'm doing I'm just patching in these little arm motions and gestures
for the character to do and actually if I like a certain gesture like if I want
to reuse these two over and over again I can just you know copy them and then
down here press command-v to paste them maybe if we're here paste them and you
can just keep using the same ones over and over again or retime them so this
happens a little bit you know this star
ts a little bit later this happens a
little bit earlier you know if you get those few motions over and over again a
point arm arms out that sort of stuff you can just keep adding them over and
over again and it's a nice way to save some time now as you keep doing this
you'll probably see your timeline start to look like a staircase right with a
bunch of different parts each track each state gets its own line in the timeline
and that can make your timeline get vertical and really big and hard
to
figure out and kind of parse really quickly so what I tend to do is twirl
open a twirl up I should say my drag drag er behavior so everything is in one
line and then I can still select individual parts and move them around as
if I was in the you know the the more extended view but this is just a nice
more compact view and way to see things and then if I'm not sure about something
I can always troll this back open and go into it and and understand kind of the
relationship between the takes a litt
le bit better so now that we're done with
all our arm movements let's move on to triggers specifically two hand triggers
but while I'm at it I'm just gonna do all the triggers at once so I'm going to
disarm my dragger behavior and move on to triggers and make sure I'm at the
beginning of my timeline here so this character if I look in the triggers
panel and you can kind of expand this panel a little bit if you want to see it
a little bit more if your character has a lot of triggers um he's got q
uite a
few triggers and they're all set up as swap sets meaning only one of them is
going to show up at a time in that given set so this makes sense for Sam like the
hands for example this right hand over here I either want this hand or when it
press five it does a point or six it does the hand flipped around with the
thumb facing the other way so I only want one of those to show up
at a time so that's how I'm setting up all my triggers and if you need a
refresher on that go check out the trigge
rs tutorial the very first lesson
talks about swap sets and how they're set up and how you can do something like
this all right so to record a trigger triggers are actually going to work in a
swap set very similar to the mouth shapes the vidiians
so remember how I could like move those around and then right-click them and
swap them in and out you can do the exact same thing with triggers so what
I'm going to do is go through all of my triggers that I want to record with and
I'm going to activate
one of them in each swap set if I just pressed record
right now nothing would show up in the timeline because all the defaults are
just active by you know by default there's nothing no new data being
recorded so I have to actually activate a different trigger for them to be
activated so let's go to my lids so this guy just to show you what he's capable
of he's got a two for a squint one for a kind of a half
look three four more of a worried look for for a blink animation and there you
go and th
en open this the default state there for the hand the right hand I've
got five and six for a point and a flip for the left hand I've got seven and
eight for point and a flip a default nine is gonna do a sad mouth set change
the mouth to being upside down this guy actually has a bunch of different
eyebrow triggers this is same different I tried usually the eyebrows you tagged
them and they'll move with your own your own eyebrows and the webcam for this one
though I added a new transform behavior
to each eyebrow and keyframed and
created replays out of each one to do a few things so T was the default queue is
gonna move them up W II in our so I have a lot of different eyebrows states that
I can move between don't have to do that that's a more advanced thing if you know
what you're doing with keyframes replays try it out it's pretty fun and then
finally I've got a two different leg states for this character so I don't
know if you remember at a certain point the switch character is standin
g on the
ground and then he jumps up on the couch and he's in this more seated position so
I actually have a trigger for his legs to go from a standing to a seated
position so again what I'm gonna do is just make sure at least one of these in
each group is active so let's do squint I'm going to press two for that let's do
the point for this arm let's do the point for the other one the nine for the
mouth to be upside down and Z to get that down and Q for the worried eyes
okay so now every trigger
is doing something a little bit different there's
some new trigger that's not the default that's been activated
and so I'm just going to go to timeline record to frame take so there we go so
now if I look at my timeline in my triggers area I've got each of the names
of my swap set showing up here and the active trigger within each swap set
showing up down at the bottom so let's select all of these and expand it for
the rest of the timeline I'll press minus a few times to zoom out and just
make
it so it goes all the way across so great so now I've set up all my triggers
I have a foundation and the nice thing about this is now it's going to be
really easy to add swap between these different
triggers in the timeline so let's disarm my character down here and let's drag to
that scene I was working on previously with the arms where he was saying
talking to the other characters alright so remember here he's raising his hands
and they're gonna be in a certain position so let's see so right n
ow
they're still doing the default of the the points right that's that's kind of
what I had set this up what I want to do is hide the swaps the art swaps between
transitions of the arms moving so if I select you know I've got my two dragger
areas twirled up here but if I select these I can see where that blend is
happening where I blended it take to go from the default position to the raised
position and when I go right in the middle here
right between this take you know right somewhere in the m
iddle here that's
where I want to do a transition for the arms for the hand swaps so I'm going to
go down to my right hand and click on the dark blue that's the bottom version
where the trigger actually lives and at the left hand I'm gonna hold down
command and select those both at the same time and then I'm going to go to
edit split just like I was doing with the the VIS Eames and now you'll see I
have a new area where I can change the trigger to whatever I want so in this
case let's change the
right hand to default actually that looks like flip
would be better so you can just try this out really easily and then the other one
I do think I want to be default so that looks better that looks like the thumbs
are you know facing the correct way they're they're in the right orientation
there and then he moves his hands down in a second here I'm just kind of
scrubbing through making sure I get it right and then they're eventually gonna
go back down to his hips and when that happens let's see
this looks like the
transition where that happened so again I'm going to go to around the
middle of that frame I'm going to find the right in the left hand edit split
and I'm going to now right-click and change these back to where they make
more sense where the thumbs are faced a little more inward so then the second
you starts pointing I wanted them to point to Xbox so let's check out where
that transition is this is with only one hand with his left hand
so let's do the transition here and I w
ill press command shift D as the
shortcut to split and that's a control shift D on PC right click point so now
he's going to go into a point and then if I scroll down a little bit more he's
gonna be more of an out reached and I think in a second when it drops there
so let's find where that one is and again at the exact same thing take the
left hand split shortcut right and let's do I think it's yep it's default it's
always the one that you don't think so I can go and play this back but then chec
k
out all the other hands are kind of in their default positions before this so
I'm gonna change like the right hand that should probably be default the left
hand before here should be flip I think the lids I want to probably have that
open so let's change that to open and the mouth I do think I want him to be
sad at this point so I'm just going to make sure that's split and then make his
mouth happy before this the regular mouth not the Ault mouth and finally the
feet I do want those too for th
e most part be
the sitting position so I'm gonna change that so you can see how easy it is to
really quickly change a character's expression with all of these different
triggers now I tend to do one at a time so I'm just focused on the hands for
right now then I'll move on to the eyelids then I'll move on to the mouth
then I'll move on to you know feed our eyebrows or you know whatever other
things I want to do but it's a pretty easy process to kind of pinpoint exactly
when these triggers are ha
ppening so let's take a look at how this turned out so the nice thing is those are hand
positions those transitions they happen when the arms are moving and so you
really don't see that transition between the arm going from one state to the next
the hand I should say going from one state to the next because the motion of
the arm is kind of hiding at that transition so that is always how I do
things with these hands I just find where the blend is happening somewhere
in the middle that's where I'm
doing my transition
it usually works really well so let's say I go through the whole piece and get
all my hands looking the way I want then I would move on to other triggers so for
this character you know the mouth for example he start kind of starts out kind
of unhappy look guys we all make mistakes and then maybe he's a little
bit happier about it so I'm going to add a split there command split our command
shift D and then I'll right-click and do the happy mouth
so he'll transition going from
a sad to a happy mouth set really adds a ton of
emotion to a character I've shown this in several tutorials before I can't
recommend it enough I really think it's important to have that two mouth set
thing if you have a lip sync mouth like this and then same thing with the lids
so you know I think he would probably be squinting when you first say hey look
guys there's no time you know why are we all getting upset at each other so I'm
going to change this to squint and then maybe he opens his ey
es a little bit
more and then another one here and he goes to half I just try things out I
don't know what I'm doing most of the time I just think of listen to what's
happening and hear the emotion of the scene and what's what like what I think
I would be doing with my eyes and just try to change it for the character and
you notice it's a lot of changes right like the character changes his
expression whether it's the eyes or the mouth of the hands or something like
every second or two right ther
e's a lot of different emotion happening here and
that helps the character feel a little bit more alive we see a lot of beginner
character animator projects where the character is just one happy emotion in
their face their wide eyes the entire time and that's the whole thing and I
think it just brings your character to life a lot more if you're able to keep
throwing in these little things these little surprises these little details
these little emotions and when you add you know the eyebrows and
the eyes and
the eyelids and the mouth and the hands and the gestures and all of that it
really comes together and makes for a compelling performance
now there's one trigger in this character that I'm only going to do once
and that is the feet changing position so I know after he jumps up and hits the
question mark block that somewhere in here I'm going to change it to the to
the standing set from standing over on this side so that's the
first version to the sitting version and I'm gonna have t
hem jump up and do that
now I don't know the exact timing yet I'm gonna do the actual movement using
keyframes in After Effects a little bit later on of him jumping up and then
jumping on the couch so for right now I'm just kind of setting my best
expectation for when I think this is going to happen but that's the beauty of
dynamic link if I see same in After Effects that doesn't feel like it's
working correctly I can come back here in a character animator make a few
changes as soon as I go back
to After Effects it automatically gets updated
and I can make sure everything is lining up correctly all right so we're getting
there slowly let's disarm triggers over here and move to I gaze so from my
character's eye gaze I almost always use keyboard input instead of the default
camera input this just gives me a little more control over where my eyes are
going so when I press the right I know my characters gonna look right left up
you know two at a time to look diagonally and you have full co
ntrol
over how strong this is and under keyboard strength if I turn this really
far up they're gonna go outside of the eyeballs but I can turn this down as
well sometimes a lot of times I'll do like 75% like that so they're not going
right up to the edge of the the eyeballs so this is one of those where I will
press record and just come up with my best performance think about where the
character is looking you know look left right up down usually if they're
thinking about say my but look up into
the left or up into the right to kind of
feel like they're more thoughtful about sine more when they're ashamed they
might be looking down so I'm just trying my best to you know come up with where
the eyes are going but I don't want them to feel dead right I don't want when we
talk our pupils are not just staring blankly into the abyss they're kind of
always darting all over the place and looking around and to make our character
feel alive that's something that we want to do as well so let's ju
st try this I'm
gonna press record so something like that where every few seconds or whatever
I'm darting the eyes around I'm trying something have him to look around in
different directions you can do it with the camera input you can do with mouse
and touch input whatever works best for you and your workflow
and then I can you know make changes if I want to patch in here he shouldn't be
looking in the upper you know the upper side he should be looking straight on or
something like that I can us
e you just press record I'm gonna hold down right
instead something like that and now I've got a new take that's gonna appear above
and just like I was doing with the arm motions I can blend that in to the next
one so the OP pupil will move smoothly from one position to the next all right
now we're ready to move on to the last step which is the face so I'm gonna
disarm I gaze and move into face face basically means the head movements um if
you do have your eyebrows tagged they would do eyebrow m
ovements as well it's
going to incorporate blinks if you have that as a non manual process this
characters blinks and eyebrows were both done through triggers and so that's a
separate process for him but you know all of that is considered part of the
face behavior now this character is a little weird because he's basically one
big face right so his face and body are kind of the same so the way that he's
rigged his whole body is kind of moving back and forth and pivoting that's kind
of different
from a character like xbox over here whose head has more pronounced
neck and it's gonna pivot basically though all the body movements and
everything it's all reliant on your head movements everything is kind of moving
together with the head so in the case of switch it's a little weirder because his
head and body are combined but with other characters their whole body is
going to kind of lean back and forth based on your head movements so with my
face movements what I'm gonna do is do a basic tak
e where I go through the whole
three-minute piece and I just move my head slightly you know so it's not just
stayin still give it a little bit of back and forth sway maybe if I hear
something the dialogue that makes me want to lean forward a little bit or
lean back recoil in horror sound like that I can do that but in general I'm
just trying to give this character a little bit of life and switching from
one pose to the next I don't want to be moving all over the place all the time
that looks pre
tty amateurish you want to move more from pose to pose to pose
every few seconds so I would go back to the beginning of my piece I tradish I
typically will do slow-motion recording I'll do at least 3/4 recording speed if
if not half speed now that means for a three-minute piece
is gonna take me six minutes to record the whole thing but I find the animation
is a little bit smoother in the long run so personally I usually
we'll do three quarters or half speed I'm gonna do half speed for now and wi
th
switch I know he actually doesn't come in until later so I can actually start a
little bit later on in the timeline and do my performance from there and of
course before any phase performance you need to calibrate your camera so I'm
going to get really nice and close to the camera click set rest pose make sure
the tracking dots are on my face and press record so you can see it's a lot of subtle
movements is just moving your head slightly from one side to the next
giving the character a little
bit of lean forward and backward to bring them
to life and if you've done it correctly then you should get this whole face take
that shows up down here and just like we were doing with the eyes and with the
arms and all that if you see places you want to patch other things in just go to
where that section is pressed record and do a new face take this or something
like that and to make it blend in with the previous performance I'm just gonna
move those blend handles to make it look nice in trans
ition from that first state
to that state so you're gonna go ahead and apply that exact same process to
each of your characters you're gonna do the lip-sync you're going to do the the
arm movements the triggers the eye gaze the face all these different elements in
any order you want usually you lay down that foundational
layer that foundational track and take and then you patch in other little
things overtop of it where you feel like it's appropriate now I don't want to
scare you but this is wha
t the PlayStation character looks like this
was his final version so let's make my timeline a little bit bigger here and a
twirl opens some of this stuff so I've got you know all these different drag or
takes where he is moving his hands around that's just one one hand one arm
the other one over here he doesn't move that one as much we've got some
different I gaze takes here so I'll told I'd say this character probably has you
know 150 200 tracks something like that here in the timeline if it's
world
everything open but don't let that scare you honestly it's a as I just showed
it's a pretty easy process and you put the level of effort that you want to
show up in your final piece so if you just want to press record and just do
one take for everything and get through it
you can totally do that if you want to kind of fine-tune and patching a lot of
stuff like I've shown here you can do that as well there's no right or wrong
way to do things we all have our different styles of animation an
d you
know time constraints and all of that so so I could spend five minutes on this or
five hours on this and that's kind of the beauty of character animator is it
lets you work really rapidly when you want to and at less you
really get in and have a lot of control and find detail when you want to as well
so yeah I mean if I'm being honest I would say each character probably took
me I don't know well the PlayStation and Xbox characters
probably took me 45 minutes apiece to put everything togeth
er which you know
for a three-minute piece to do all of that character animation within 45
minutes that's pretty awesome there's shorter characters like switch
and PC who aren't for the whole thing those took even quicker so all told it
was a round-trip you know character animation of maybe two and a half hours
three hours at most something like that and that's pretty awesome to say and now
that I have these characters rigged and and ready to go I can use them in
multiple episodes so when I'm re
ady for episode two three four I've already got
the rigging and the triggers and all that setup I just need to go through
this process and record new stuff for them and it's gonna be it's gonna be
pretty easy moving forward after walking character remember switch at the
beginning of the cartoon he comes in from the left hand side of the screen he
walks over to the couch and stops and so I know what that timing is going to be
so I'm gonna do position based walking in my walking version my walking
scene
of switch not the sitting version but the walking scene to have him come in so
I've already recorded all the details here the different I gaze lip sync all
of that stuff and I'm just going to do a position based walk so I'm gonna start a
little bit before he starts talking and under walk I'm gonna change this instead
to position based that looks pretty good and we are going to now keyframe this by
clicking the stopwatch next to position that's going to change a starting
position and so I
can drag this to wherever I want let's say he's all the
way on the left hand side and something like that and then he'll say his line
and I want him to instead at the end of the line move over to the other side of
the screen so maybe something like this I think is about I'm kind of eyeballing
it right now I don't know exactly where the background is I could bring in my
background as a temporary kind of placeholder to see where he lines up but
overall I just wanted to walk a short distance I can
check it out and
after-effects see how it's looking and when I come back I can make some
adjustments if I need to but this is looking pretty good something like that
so let's see how this looks all overall so he's really working these we're
moving way too fast there so I'm think I'm gonna slow him down a little bit so
let's have this start a little bit later and then let's not have him move as much
so I'm going to bring the position back a little bit something like this I'm not
gonna have a move
this much let's see if this looks better so that feels like a
good pace to me so I think I'm going to stick with that and again I can always
come back here if I need to fix it later on so that's it for character animator
we're done here we have all of our characters in each of their scenes with
their own individual audio tracks now it's time to bring everything together
and we're gonna do that all in after-effects all right here we are in
After Effects and I'm going to do a new project and let'
s get started by
bringing in our apartment background that's kind of the big main background
that I'm going to be putting everything else inside so remember I made that a
Photoshop file so I'm going to double click in this area over here you can
also go to file import file to do this and I'm just gonna bring in the
apartment PSD now I don't want this to be footage I actually want this to be a
composition a footage is just gonna be like a video clip basically and know
this is actually a scene tha
t has a bunch of different parts so I want to be
a composition retain layer sizes create composition and let's click open yeah
yeah click OK whatever ok so now I've got a composition this little thing with
the circle square and triangle and if I double click on that this is a full
composition and the composition is basically just a container to put
everything else inside so I'm gonna make sure I'm selected to fit here so I can
see my whole scene and if I go into my composition settings up here c
omposition
composition settings I can see how big this is
so my scene 6000 by 2500 I'm feeling pretty good about that that's a good
size seen for what Italy be in 1920 by 1080 thing I'll zoom in and out and kind
of do some camera movements but that's looking good you start to check your
duration here I know mine my piece was about 3 minutes I'm just gonna give
myself a little extra buffer room at 4 minutes right here but it's gonna
remember the last by default the last timing of whatever the las
t composition
you did was so you may want to check this and make sure you
know you give yourself enough time otherwise assets are gonna get cut off
after this time and you'll have to just stretch them out later on all right so
now I'm ready to bring in my characters into this scene so let's double click on
the project panel over here and I'm going to find my chip raj file my
character animator project file that has all my information in it I don't need to
create a composition for this one that's
that's ok I just want these to come in
as individual assets and I'm gonna click open this brings up the dynamic link
window and this is going to show me all my available scenes that I can bring in
to my composition so let's start with the Xbox he's kind of a central
stationary character so I'm going to select that scene unfortunately you can
only do one at a time but let's start with him click OK and there we go now I
have this new little thing that has a timeline icon next to it that shows me
that's kind of this piece of footage that I've brought in so I'm gonna drag
this over into my scene and it should line up with everything else so all
these are starting at the zero zero point I want to make sure that my
character doesn't like start later on because that's gonna mess up all the
timing so you want to make sure it starts at zero zero and then I'm gonna
place him into the scene so to do that I can kind of drag him around with with
the mouse with the selection tool up here and then I
can also resize him so I
can either do that by holding down shift while I drag over here or I can just
press s while the layer is selected to change the scale here I can also press P
if I want to change the position with these values down here but let's do
something like maybe 70% looks pretty good drag him onto the couch down a
little bit something like that alright next up is PlayStation so let's double
click same process I'm going to bring him in find the character that's the
scene I want ok
ay and the same method here drag him into the scene and let's
resize him now remember he's gonna show up behind the counter so I need to worry
about my layer order here a little bit so luckily because this was a Photoshop
file my initial apartment I can see all my different elements the flour table
the plant and the counter showing up down here so I'm going to select all of
those and drag them in of my characters to kind of sandwich
them in between and now you see the counter is in front of my c
haracter so
it just feels like he's integrated into the environment a little bit more so I'm
going to continue going through this process bringing in each of these
characters individually and that includes switch in his two different
formats the standing and sitting version I'm gonna have them both on the screen
currently at the same time and oh that feels a little bit weird but we'll take
care of the transition in the next step all right so there we go I've got my
whole scene and all my charact
ers in their various states and positions
showing up down here now I don't need to hear their individual audio tracks
anymore so I'm gonna actually mute all of these by turning toggling off the
volume icon and then I'm going to double click and import that final mixed
version of the the audio where I had the music and the sound effects and all of
that stuff together bring that in drag it into my scene and because
everything's starting at the same 0-0 starting point everything should line up
exac
tly as I would expect now word about performance when you have
so many of these characters these assets on-screen you know this is a huge six
thousand by 2500 pixel scene I've got five characters here and it's only gonna
get worse as I add things like motion blur and drop shadows and things like
that things are gonna go move pretty slow so for example if I go you know
here you see it's taking a second for it to render out the frame and realize
exactly where I'm at and that's gonna get really ann
oying really quickly if
you know I have to wait ten seconds every time I move things around so
there's a few ways around this what I normally do is bring the resolution down
a little bit all over the place so here is kind of your static screen resolution
so I might change this to quarter or something like that that's going to move
and render a little bit quicker and you'll see that you know the characters
close up don't look great but from a further away distance it's actually
looking alright so
this is enough for me to make these basic choices from maybe
later on in the process I might want to be full fidelity so I can see everything
as clear as possible but at this early stage I think this is totally fine same
thing with the preview panel up here so this is how you know when I press
spacebar what's happening I can change every couple frames change the
resolution to quarter and that's gonna move a lot quicker now that's not gonna
entirely get rid of the slowdown but it's gonna move th
ings a lot faster and
you can even make it you know skip every five frames or set a custom resolution
you know where it's only every 15 pixels vertically you really make this low revs
whatever works for your system and allows you to be speedy with the number
of assets you've got I'd say do whatever works for you in this case so now that I
have all my characters into the scene I can start blocking them out and doing
any additional animations or key frames than I need to do luckily a PlayStation
X
box they're mostly in the same place PC he moves in and out a little bit but
switch is where I really have to focus on because he's changing between a
walking animation to a stand to a jump and then hops on the couch so let's try
to get through this together so I'm gonna press play and see what this looks
like right now so then he's walking in the scene and a certain point he's going
to transition into a standing position so I'm gonna figure out exactly where
that transition is by clicking the p
revious frame button here in my preview
window and it looks like right there is when he's going to change to finish his
walk cycle I can see this a little bit better if i zoom in and take a closer
look so he's still in this walk and now he's moved out of his walk so I'm gonna
use that as my transition point to move between the two states
so with that character with that you know character diameter character
selected I'm going to hold down option and right bracket and that and on a PC
that's gonn
a be Alton right bracket and now she's gonna trim everything and
basically bring the out point so this character's out point is now this is the
last frame where it's going to show up at the same time I'm going to do the
same thing for his new state showing up and so I'm going to press option left
bracket and that's going to bring the end point in so if i zoom in really
closely you can see there's one frame here where both of these are showing up
at the same time and if I go one frame before it's
only going to be the lock
and if I go one frame after it's only going to be the standing animation so
standing character so let's bring standing character down and try to line
him up as best as I can I might need to change the resolution at this stage just
to make sure everything lines up correctly but something like that I want
to get it in the general area and now with both of them here at the same time
I can get rid of the overlap and just trim it back this walk cycle so it's
going to go dir
ectly into that standing state so let's try looking at this a
little bit closer and see how this is looking all right so we pretty
successfully hid the transition there I mean there's a little bit of finesse I
could bump him around a little bit and add a little bit of you know forward
momentum but overall this is looking pretty good now in my final piece
actually hid this change behind a camera change right so later on we're gonna
switch between some cameras and stuff and I focus on Playstation
talking and
saying Sam to switch and hide this transition happening off-camera so
that's the easiest quickest and dirtiest way to kind of do it but in case you do
want to do it in scene this is how I would go about that all right so next up
switch is going to jump up and hit an invisible block so let's zoom out a
little bit and let's get to that part of the scene and as soon as he does that
he's going to start doing a little jump he says here's mine and he jumps up it
hits an invisible block so
let's take our switch character here and I'm going
to press P to do his position so I'm going to click the stopwatch icon I'm
gonna say Mamie here he's going to jump up so something like this I'm just gonna
click and drag him straight up and then maybe something like this he's gonna
come and go back to his original position actually even to keep it more
consistent I can copy this keyframe command C command V to paste it and
that's ctrl C + V on windows and let's take a look at how this looks
oka
y sounds looking pretty good um typically with the jump though I want to
add a little bit of easing to it so I'm going to select all of these right click
let's go to keyframe assistant easy ease I use this all the time for keyframes
and this will make it look a little bit better let's try this out it gives it a
little bit of easing at the beginning and end of each keyframe just to kind of
smooth out the motion a little bit more and it looks like it's lining up with
the audio pretty well but of c
ourse I could move these earlier or later if I
wanted to to have it line up and you know make the jump a little bit quicker
or move the keyframes in next to each other it's really a trial and error
process see what works best for you now when a second switch is going to jump up
on to the couch and enter his sitting state where he remains for the rest of
the cartoon so let's see where that makes sense to happen so he starts I can
see around 53 seconds or 52 and a half he starts to transition and
the
character I made her filed to his seated state so let's get a jump happening here
by again with position I can go to click this little diamond icon here to set a
new keyframe and let's have him jump up on the couch so let's move him up like
this and now he's on the couch let's see how this looks all right so he's just
kind of floating on the couch and that's not gonna work too well so what I'm
gonna do is give them a little bit more of a bounce to them and the way I'm
going to do that is see
this little circle right here this is a handle for
the motion this is going to basically determine the quality of the line if
you've ever used like the pin tool in Photoshop or after illustrator you know
about this but basically something like this where I'm dragging it so there's a
little bit more of a rise and I'll do the same at the beginning so I'm just
creating a basic jump curve right here so let's see how this looks now all
right so that's looking a little bit better I need to probably f
inesse it a
little bit more I'm gonna bring this in a little bit make it a little smoother
okay so after playing around with it a little bit just kind of dragging these
little handles I've got what I feel is a pretty nice arc so let's see how this is
looking looks like a pretty good jump something
like that now I noticed even though he should be in this stationary state as
you play around with these curves sometimes you're gonna run into things
where the character is gonna kind of bob and weave
based on your because of what
you've done in other areas so to remedy that I'm just going to click the in
keyframe here where you're supposed to be standing still and say toggle hold
keyframe and let's see if this fixes the problem and now he's standing still for
that entire duration so anytime you see your character accidentally moving
around like that you can just do a toggle hold keyframe and that should
keep them stuck in one place and if you want one nice little finishing touch you
could ad
d a little bit about when he lands here on the couch
so I could go a few frames later and just add this you know kind of keyframe
that makes him move up slightly and I might need to play with the you know of
little handles for that but something like this might give him a nice little
bounce up that might feel like he's impacting the couch a little bit more so
it's a really subtle thing I mean you're probably most people are not even going
to notice this but it just helps him feel connected to th
e environment a
little bit more and so little things like that little bounces anticipations
reactions to things I think can really help sell an effect well so I actually
did this technique a few more times at the beginning of the piece PlayStation
feels like he's walking in all I did was just do some quick position up and down
keyframes to you sell that effect so something like that just a little rise
and fall to make it feel like he's actually entering the scene when in fact
it's just him kind
of hiding bouncing up and down behind this counter and I did
the same thing with the PC coming in at the end here he just kind of swings in
and out using very simple position keyframes now I notice in this
in-between state that he's kind of in a blurry motion and then when he
eventually settles down he's looking a little bit more crisp so when we do
things in motion in After Effects a lot of times I add motion blur to the
characters to make them feel a little bit more like there's a little bit m
ore
motion to them it just feels a little bit more realistic the way you do that
is make sure there's a little blue enable motion blur thing
is on up here so you can toggle that on and off to turn it on and off and then
any layers that you want motion blur to be used on just toggle this little
bouncing ball icon on it so a lot of times I will just click and drag down
the entire list and make everything motion blur just in case it starts to
move I think generally it tends to make things look a li
ttle bit nicer Dada
motion blur but you know it's an aesthetic choice you can decide if you
want it or not I tend to go overboard with it and I think it looks alright now
something else you could do to these characters is add shadows to them it's a
nice little touch that again is going to add a little bit of extra depth to your
scene definitely not necessary if you don't want to do it but it's actually
really really easy so let's take a character like Xbox here and I'm just
gonna duplicate him b
y pressing command D on mac or control-d
on Windows and that's going to give me two layers and then with the lower
layers selected here I'm just gonna kind of press the left and down arrow keys to
kind of nudge it so it's a little bit away from the character something like
that is looking pretty good and then what I can do is go into effect color
correction there's actually five hundred ways to do this in After Effects but I'm
just gonna bring the saturation all the way down to negative one hund
red and the
master lightness down to negative one hundred and that should more or less
turn it black then I'm gonna press T with it selected that's gonna bring up
my opacity controls and let's bring it down to something like I don't know 15%
something like that and I can see you know this really nice little subtle
shadow back there I probably also want to add a little bit of blur to it so
let's go to effect blur and sharpen fast box blur and I think for this I did a
radius of five if I remember
correctly and that's just gonna blur the edges and
make it a little bit softer a little more integrated into the scene so it's
as easy as that to add shadows I can do that to all of my characters add these
little shadow effects and I think it's just a nice little finishing touch now
once you're doing this things might get really slowed down right as I'm full in
our own shadows you know I'm basically duplicating
everything so I'm gonna have like you know ten different puppets on the scene
at any
given time so if it helps you from a performance perspective if you
are just constantly running into little loading bars and stuff like that
just turn all the puppets you don't need off at any time I guess I should keep
the counter on but any puppets that you're not working with currently so you
can just focus on one element at a time and that's gonna help save a little bit
of processing power now there are other little details that we want to add in so
for example the jump here when he jumps in
and in hits the invisible block
that's it's easy as just importing a PSD file or whatever images you have so I
made this mario block PSD that has a few different things let's just create this
as a composition retain layer sizes and I'm just gonna do everything directly in
here so I'm just going to double click on my composition I'm going to select
all my pieces copy them bring them out and paste them directly here into this
scene I'm just so I have them all as a frame of reference and I'll just
drag
this over here looks a little bit small so let's drag everything I'm holding
down shift to constrain it and make it bigger and then I can just do all my
animation right here so let's say you know the exact moment that I wanted to
hit this is right around here I believe so let's have this show up for just a
second I'm gonna use my same things I did before option left and left bracket
or alt and left bracket on PC to bring that up and bring all the end points
like that and I only want the qu
estion mark to appear for like one frame so
let's do a question for one frame and then option right bracket to end that
and trim that in and then the hip state should show up after that and then I
want the coin popping up so I'll press P on that position and just have it slide
up over a few frames something along those lines let's see if that's looking
okay so something like that right and then I can make it disappear I actually
hide when it goes off when I do a camera change so I could just get
rid of these
by holding down or bring out the out point so I should say by pressing option
and right bracket or Alt + right bracket on PC and then they will disappear so
any little elements like that are really easy to bring in and out just import
them put them in here trim them keyframe them whatever you need to do
I probably do a little bit of an ease there I'm just pressing f9 as a shortcut
when you select to add that easy ease to make that slide look a little nicer and
that's really it that
's all that I'm doing with these different elements so I
was also talking about those little smoke things that you can add little you
know special effects and things so I have this smoke jump a PSD right here
let's change this to a composition say okay that looks great and if I double
double click and go into this composition I see that my smoke jump is
all my frames together but what I can do is I'm just going to trim this so it's
happening one frame at a time so I'm going to select everything
hold down
option and right bracket or alt and right bracket and I'm just gonna drag
these so with a frame-by-frame sequence and there's some other ways to do this
you can import in your sequences and other things and after-effects but this
is such a short thing that I wanted to show how easy it is to do something like
this so now I've got this jump smoke animation that's appearing over the
course of you know ten frames and so I can place this wherever I want in my
composition so I want to do it
as soon as he leaves the ground I want to have
this kind of jumping feeling the smoke that's leaving so I'm gonna drag this
onto not the scene here because that's gonna bring it that's gonna start it
right at the beginning the composition instead I want to drag it into the
timeline and that's gonna do it right at the moment where the the current time
indicator is so let's move this over here I'm gonna scale it up a little bit
something like that so it doesn't look too pixelated and let's drag it
under
the switch because I don't want it to be overpowering him and let's watch and see
how this looks so it's a really subtle effect right you blink and you miss it
and I'm already skipping frames here so you're missing some of it but you get
the idea it's just little things like this little poof's of smoke little
motion lines little effects like that that can really help sell an effect of a
jump or a swipe or a leap or whatever sort of things
you have in your animation so just think about are
there's moments like that that
I can add these little effects to my to my scene to help you know cement these
these characters doing specific things so at this point I should feel like I
have a fin seen everything is lining up correctly
I've added on that little effects and props the characters are in the right
places it's as if I had a you know really far wide shot and I'm watching
the whole scene unfold in front of me but don't worry about stuff like the
prop movement and stuff the foreground
elements we can deal with that a little
bit later but in general the main action that's happening on this stage is
looking correct so if you've reached that point now we can move on to cameras
now After Effects does have the ability to do cameras you can go in to layer new
and create a camera but honestly this gets a little bit too complicated for
what we're trying to do we just need to kind of change the scale and position of
our composition and that's gonna be more than enough we don't need z
oom and angle
of view and depth of field and all this stuff if you want to do that in your
more advanced user you can certainly do that but I find it's a little bit easier
to do it this way so I'm gonna take my appartement
composition my huge composition and I'm going to just click and drag it into and
create a new comp into this composition icon that's already down here and that's
going to create something called apartment 2 so with apartment 2 selected
I'm going to press Enter and let's call t
his final comp of something like that
and I double click on this and it's going to be now what I'm seeing in my
scene and a tab down here now I can go back to apartment and right now these
are looking very much the same but in a second we're gonna change final cop now
final comp what I upload to YouTube or Facebook or broadcast TV or whatever is
probably not going to be 6,000 by 2500 right it's going to be a more
traditional aspect ratio so with this selected I'm going to go to composition
compo
sition settings and let's change this to something like 1920 by 1080 and
I want to make sure my framerate and resolution all that looks good great
okay so now I have a rectangle window into my world that's the apartment and
if I press P I can you know to move this around and reframe this into a different
way I can also drag on the screen if I have the select tool up here selected
and if I press s I can scale it and zoom in and out so with these key you know
with these tools it's really easy to j
ust reposition and do a bunch of
different shots really easily so let's set some key frames to set up an initial
shot here so I'm going to press P and then
hold down shift and press s so I see position and scale at the same time and
I want to hold with this kind of wide shot to begin with
so I'll click the stopwatch icons for each that's making a keyframe here and
it's just like I was showing with switch staying in that same position if I want
to hold a keyframe I can just select them right clic
k and say toggle hold
keyframe that's gonna change the icon to this little symbol down here and that
means that I cut that that scene is going to hold until a new keyframe comes
into view so let's play and see when we want to change our camera so right
around here is where play station is going to start talking so I think I want
to zoom in on him so with this selected I can now change
and change the zoom drag the position something like this frame it like that
so that's looking pretty good and y
ou'll notice you get this little square
meaning that is a held shot so now here's how the transitions going to look
something like this now I might want to switch to Xbox so I can just drag over
here maybe change the scale a little bit something like that and now that's gonna
be the new held position so it's gonna look like this and then I might want to
go back to a wide shot so now that I've got these kind of different shots
established I can just copy and paste existing keyframes so let's sele
ct these
command C to copy them command V to paste and I can go back to a wide shot
and it's as simple as that so all I'm doing is alternating between a bunch of
different shot types I want to keep the viewer interested in as long as I don't
just hold on one shot at any given time it's going to look okay and it's gonna
keep the viewer engaged so you know if you really wanted to cheap and easy way
to do this you could just keep copying pasting the same shots over and over
again but really what ma
kes the most sense is to watch the cartoon stop it
when a character is talking when you think okay this
this scene is right for a close-up shot or this scene is better for a wide shot
and make your camera choices they're all through just these really simple hold
key frames so if you ever want to edit a keyframe value the easiest way to go
through them is with these little arrows here so you'll make sure you're on that
exact keyframe this just lets you move between the previous and next keyframes
so if I say you know this shot I want it to be actually a little bit wider
I'm gonna do something like this and that just helps you because sometimes
it's really easy if you try to just pinpoint it here you might accidentally
create a new keyframe and then it's gonna feel very jumpy so you always want
to make sure you're using these buttons to move back and forth between your
different positions now sometimes you want might want a moving shot so for
example in the final piece here I do a pan fr
om Xbox and talking to Playstation
so let's see something like this so right there seems like a good spot to
start the pan so I'm going to turn both of these on I'm just gonna click both of
these to create a new keyframe I'm gonna change this now to ease easy ease by
right-clicking and selecting that and then I want to pretty quickly get over
to to the PlayStation so let's do something like this where I just drag
and you'll see it's created a new keyframe for me I might as well keep a
scale keyf
rame just I might want to scale them a little bit to scale out so
let's see how this looks so something like that looks pretty good
I probably I want to add motion blur to this to make sure that I you know am
getting that nice blur effect as the cameras moving but you can do this as
much as you want and then go right back to you know your different key frames
held shots if you want to and I did this in a few other places for the beginning
of this piece for example I kind of did a su Ming you kin
d of want to set an
establishing shot get the mood of the place and so I did something like this
where it kind of slowly pans in as the character comes in and they talk and
then it's going to switch to that other close-up shot so you can do little
things like that now to help sell this effect even more I brought some of those
foreground objects in so let's go back to apartment here and I'm going to take
my plants and my flower table I'm gonna actually cut them out of this scene I
pressed command
X on Mac or can Rolex on Windows and I'm going to bring
them into this scene instead command-v something like this and I'm just going
to kind of fake where these things might be so I'm going to you know scale this
down over here and the flowers were over here bring them in something like this
scale them down and then I'm just gonna have them move out of the way kind of at
a faster rate as if they were right next to the camera to just again give the
feeling of depth a little bit more so what I c
an do is let's go around here to
where this zoom in starts to begin now this first part can be hidden from the
credits so it really doesn't matter what's happening here there's give me a
credit screen over top but in general I'm starting my zoom a little bit before
the scene is actually revealed to the viewer so let's take both of these here
I want to make sure that they have motion blur on and actually I'm gonna
add some additional blur to them facts fast box blur unless you sign like maybe
thr
ee or four or something like that to make them feel like they're in the
foreground a little bit they're a little bit more out of focus our main
characters are in focus and these aren't and so then I'm just gonna press P for
position and s hold down shift and press s for scale and I'm you're gonna set
some initial keyframes at the beginning of this let's change those into easy
ease right click keyframe assistant easy ease or f9 is the shortcut for that and
then have them end something like this I
'm just going to click over top of the
the diamonds over here to add some more keyframes to them but really I think I
probably want them to end a lot quicker they're gonna get out of the scene a lot
earlier than this so I'm gonna make sure I'm on those frames and I'm just going
to scale them up slightly each of them so they're getting a little bit bigger
as the camera comes and then zooming them off the scene like that and off the
scene like that let's see how this looks okay so they went a litt
le bit too much
to the side I think I want them to go down a little bit more so I'm just gonna
nudge them down here on these last keyframes I'm just holding down shift
while I press the down arrow key let's see if this looks any better yeah something like that it's a really
subtle detail you know like eight out of ten people are probably not even gonna
notice it it just is gonna feel like it's part of the scene but those are the
little details that are going to help you really establish your wor
ld and
characters and keep the yuta the viewers attention throughout the whole piece I
do this a little bit later on as well when the switch character walks in he
kind of comes in behind the plants that's in the foreground so I just have
that kind of key framed to show up he's kind of hiding behind it to begin with
and then that just goes off the screen at a slightly different rate than the
whole scene is moving back and forth again if it's in the foreground it's
just going to move a little bit
faster than everything in the background so you
just have to play around with the keyframes manipulate it and see what
looks good to you but little effects like this can really help the add a
little bit of depth to the scene and then last but not least you can bring in
your title screen and your credits so I'm just gonna double click find both of
those so I've got titles and I'm holding down command on Mac or ctrl on Windows
and again I want these to be compositions let's create composition
for
both of these and hit open okay so now I've got my different titles and
let's make sure this is the correct aspect ratio it should be composition
settings 1920 by 1080 24 frames per second that's looking good
same thing with my credits should be because it's almost the exact same file
okay so now inside here I can do little animations for each of these to make
them look interesting so so for the titles remember I did this little like
kinetic art type treatment where I had the type kind of always
moving so I'm
just gonna zoom in a little bit here I'm going to take my layers and let's do
like three frames option right bracket I'll show you what I'm doing in a second
here and drag these and stagger these different frames so what's gonna happen
is this gonna keep moving between the three drawn states that I have so I did
it once for the consul's and once for as I drew three times for consoles and
three times for an okay samurai cartoon and it's just gonna keep cycling between
those and so
I can just take the you know the sequence and just continued
to duplicate it command D on Mac control D on Windows duplicated and continue
this process select everything command D ring it to the end there and just have
it continuing to cycle of course your title sequence may look entirely
different totally up to you whatever you want
just make sure it all lines up and there's no gaps there and you'll get
something though you know looks pretty nice and cool and then in this I also
want to make cl
ouds moving around let's add some motion blur to them and then
let's keyframe all of these so let's start at the beginning and at a position
keyframe have them start there and then maybe 15 seconds later or something like
that the credits there's only three seconds so it really isn't going to be
this long but I can kind of show the path of where I would want them to end
up and give them all a little bit different speed so they'll move pretty
nicely and then when we watch it it's gonna look somet
hing like this with some
nice little cloud movement I always want to have things moving have a little bit
of sense of everything zooming in so what I'm gonna do is create a new null
layer here layer new null object and I'm just gonna make sure this is yes
centered on everything and then I'm just going to shift select everything else in
the scene and use the pick whip tool to connect it to this null controller this
is just an invisible controller I'm gonna do some really basic key framing
on posi
tion and scale at the beginning and just do a zoom in like that and
maybe bring it up a little bit and if I'd like don't want the title to be
zooming for example I want that to be its own thing I could get rid of that so
let's not make this connected to the null let's make that not connected to
anything and that way the zooming is going to happen but the title is going
to stay in its same general place there's a few other things I did I've
got some lights here that I want blinking off and on so
I can you know
take those and change the durations of when they are appearing just little fun
little details like that they give a little bit of life to the background or
you know little little dynamic elements and then it would do the exact same
thing for the credits so I would find you know make this kinetic type sequence
make the lights go on and off to a very slow zoom have the clouds moving and
there's a little bit longer I think my credits I keep for 20-25 seconds
something like that so I
would just make sure it goes a little bit long
by the way right now my composition is defaulting to like the four-minute mark
that I don't really need for this short sequence so I can always shorten my time
but going to composition composition settings and let's change this to
something like you know 30 seconds and that's gonna be a little bit more
manageable a little bit easier to see my keyframes not be so far zoomed out
alright so when I'm happy with those I can go back to my main final comp
scene
here and just drag them into the timeline where I want them to go and so
let's have the title start something like that it's gonna do the zoom and
then I'm gonna have it really quickly dash away so let's add a motion blur and
a position and just drag it out of the way to reveal what's behind it select
these right-click keyframe assistant easy ease something like that and now I
get a nice little title card that comes in and then gets out of the way and
reveals the action behind it something
like that and same thing with the ending
I've got them saying one last joke at the end don't forget friend codes ugh
and then we bring in that the credits here drag that into the timeline same
thing it shows up right at the beginning the composition so it's gonna start
everything and now I can change the final timing of my piece so let's say I
want the credits to end around you know three twenty two something like that
let's go to composition composition settings and change this to the very
fin
al duration that I want and just to make it look a little bit nicer I could
you know fade out if I wanted to I could bring the transparency down start it
there bring the opacity down to zero I've got the apartment behind it so
let's select that option right bracket to trim that out and then you would get
a nice fade to black at the end maybe I add some ease to that I'm showing a
bunch of different things I know I went pretty fast here at the end but really
you know every composition is gonna be
a little bit different and it's really up
to you to decide how far you want to go with all these different keyframes
elements everything I'm doing is really basic right it's just really simple
position keyframes scaling all of that stuff nothing too complicated as long as
you kind of know your way around position scale opacity all of that stuff
there's just so much you can do and as you learn more and more about After
Effects you'll learn there are other you know
cool effects and things that you
can add into your production and this is an
industry standard tool I mean this is saying that major motion pictures are
using to do some of their motion graphics and special effects and
compositing so you know learning this is a really helpful skill you're using you
know professional grade tools to create a cartoon and so that leads us to our
very last step which is exporting so I'm going to go to file export ad to Adobe
Media encoder cue so Adobe Media encoder is a separate program that basica
lly
allows you to render out your video in whatever format you want the one that I
normally do is gonna take a couple of seconds but then your comp should show
up here I'm just gonna click on the preset here and that's going to bring up
a bunch of different options for me so these are the settings that I use h.264
match the source high bitrate and then I can call it you know whatever I want and
check that make my final destination so let's just put this on the desktop I'm
gonna call it consoles
something that I can easily identify save and everything
else is looking pretty good this will give you a kind of a preview of what
it's looking like so you can move around through here to check it out it might
take a while to render each frame but you can kind of get a sense of what your
final piece is going to look like and once that's good and that's looking
alright hit OK select your composition and hit the play button you're gonna see
a little loading thing appear here for a little bit and
then you will see a
little thumbnail of your your project being rendered out and you'll see an
estimated time remaining most of the time this is either wildly inaccurate or
it starts to move up and down so I wouldn't worry too much about this but
you know rendering a really complicated project can take some time this is not
saying that you're just gonna save and a couple minutes later it's gonna be ready
to go it may take you know half an hour 45 minutes an hour depending on how long
your projec
t is how many complicated assets there are so this is the time to
go grab a coffee go to your lunch break whatever you need to do and by the time
you get back hopefully the be all rendered and you
will love it now if it isn't once you find that finally finish and you look
over it and you see some mistakes it's really easy to fix just go back to
character animator make any changes you need to
the animation go back to After Effects make any changes to the composition the
cameras the effects and al
l of that and render out a new version for consoles I
think I've rendered out probably three or four different versions of it before
I was totally happy with it I just you know watch the video with notepad took
notes of where some of the mistakes that I saw were either maybe a lip sync mouth
didn't look correct or maybe there was a little glitch somewhere where a
character jumped into place or appeared where they shouldn't appear little
things like that and you'll notice new things on every view
ing finally I said
all right four is enough I'm ready to upload it get it out there to the world
and that's it all right that's it somehow you have made it through an hour
and a half long YouTube video you are absolutely insane for doing this I don't
know why anyone in the right mind would do it but apparently you're that crazy
to get through this whole thing so congratulations number one number two
I just wanted to end with this I I think the world needs more animation
I think animation is one
of the best ways to tell a story and up until now
the tools to create animation have been kind of locked up right that you need to
be an expert at animation and you need to take a really long time to do these
things and the tools to become an animator are becoming more and more
democratized and it's not just character animator and After Effects and animate
in the Adobe tools but it's all across the spectrum there is animation tools on
your phone animation tools everywhere that are becoming easie
r to use and so I
would say you know think about the stories that you want to tell and think
about animation being maybe the best way to tell them whether it's making fun of
stuff like video game consoles or the latest you know superhero movies or Star
Wars or whatever talking about current events or issues that matter to you
politics politicians you know whatever sort of things are on your mind and
either we want to entertain people or inform or inspire I really think
animation is one of the be
st ways to do that so that's my spiel whatever I'm
delirious after an hour and a half of YouTube tutorials and then further
editing and putting it all together it's a mess I don't recommend it to anybody
but anyway the usual thing is say at the end if you are making stuff with
character animator we would love to see it so please use hashtag character
animator on social media that's where we will see the work that you do and the
whole team sees that and we'll feature some of those in our communit
y spotlight
videos so we'd love to see that and if you're running into any issues any
problems with what I showed here need further clarification or any other
character animator issues the best place to get help is the official character
animator forums so that's it for today thank you so much for sticking through
and watching this whole thing and have fun
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