Making Animated Characters with AI Art (Adobe Character Animator Tutorial)

Hey everyone this is Dave from the Adobe character  animator team and Firefly is adobe's AI tool that is allowing creative people all around the world  to just make some incredible new stuff and open up all sorts of new creative possibilities and  one of those creative possibilities is creating artwork for a character and then trying to figure  out a way to turn it into an animated character well there's no one button process to do that just  yet you could take a character that you've made in Ad

obe Firefly and then animate it using some basic  parameters so what we're going to do today in this tutorial is show you how to do exactly that we'll  start with a text prompt and then we will move into showing you how to make the eyes move the  mouth move the body and head move the arms move and even add little things like a sway tail uh for  the back for this Tiger character that we're going to make um hopefully it's helpful and we'll let  you bring your own AI Creations to life if that sound

s good to you let's get started all right  so let's start with the Adobe Firefly website and we're going to use text to image here so I  went to firefly.com and I'm going to click Text to image and I came up with this prompt earlier  that I'm just going to paste in here a cartoon tiger wearing a red shirt and blue pants isolated  on a green background let's go ahead and generate that and see what happens okay so we got some  pretty good results here I've got a couple that have a a few Tails here

or feet um in the back  that they didn't quite get it but overall I'm happy with the quality of how things are looking  and of course I could add more prompts um they have this new suggestions thing down here which  is great for or you know if you start typing it will give you suggestions of different ideas um  that might make things a little bit easier but for right now um I'm kind of liking this guy right  here down here so I'm going to click on to him and uh I'm going to go ahead and click s

hare and I'm  going to download him all right so I've opened up my character here in Photoshop and the problem  is this is a static flat image it's just one layer and in character animator we really want our  character separated into parts right so I want the pupils to be able to move I want the mouth to be  able to move I want uh you know not a background and all these different things and so I'm going  to have to do a little bit of Photoshop surgery to get this character even just doing some b

asic  movements and then moving on to some other stuff as well so let's first get rid of this background  so I could either do remove background or select subject I'm going to go to select subject down  here and this is going to give me a little more control see right here I noticed that the tail  wasn't completely selected as I wanted so I'm just going to use this um polygonal glasso Tool uh I'm  going to hold down shift as I click just to make sure I add this part in as well and now the tail 

is part of that and so now with all of this uh selected I could uh either press delete and that's  going to get rid of my character but probably what I want to do is do the inverse instead so  I'm going to do this uh inverse selection here this little icon here and press delete and now  everything else has been deleted except for my character which is looking pretty good there's  a little artifact here I noticed so sometimes it's not going to be perfect so I'm just going  to use the erase tool t

o get rid of it but right now this character is looking pretty great like  now I've got an isolated character that's ready to go all right so the very first thing I want to  do is I want to separate the head from the body because I want the head to be its own separate  piece so what I'm going to do is again use my polygonal lasso tool over here and I'm going to  jump in here uh zoom in a little bit and I'm just going to get really close and try to do the best  job I can clicking and isolating in

g the head um there's a bunch of different methods you could  use to do this I mean Photoshop has right like a 100 different ways to do the exact same thing but  for me I've always liked the Precision that I get from this particular tool and uh I just kind of  want to get the head as a separate element that I can then put in my head group to be able to do  some more advanced stuff with so okay I'm going to click around now I've got kind of the the hardest  part was where it connects to the Head

uh connects to the body I should say now that that hit is  selected I'm going to press command x uh to uh get rid of it and then command shift V to paste it  in place and now what you'll see is over here I've got my head and my body as two isolated parts so  this is great so now my head is a piece that you know I could do rotations or other things with if  I wanted to and now for the body I probably want this to not be just a gap here I want to have a  little bit more to it so have something tha

t the head actually connects to so what I'm going to  do is just again using the pogon lasso tool do something like this and let's just use generative  fill to and without put prompt and just click generate and this is going to just add something  here in the background for me hopefully looking similar to this blue and red shirt now this is  normally going to be behind the head and so it's really not that super important like that this has  like skin colors here um because the head is going to b

e you know blocking most of that but just in  case it um you know this were to move around and rotate at least I've got something beneath it and  I can of course you know change the coloring to be orange or you know fit the character a little bit  better if I wanted to I'm going to go ahead and select my two layers here and I'm going to merge  layers rightclick them and put them together just so it's all together as one I don't need them as  separate layers usually in character diameter the more

we can simplify things the better okay so  let's get some basic structure happening over here now so I'm going to select the new uh group  uh and press it three times down here and we're going to call this plus tiger at the top remember  plus is kind of our uh secret code for making same independent and then I'm going to call this head  and body I'm going to put my head and body groups inside my main tiger group so now I've got a tiger  uh group that has head and body inside and now I'm just go

ing to put each of these pieces where they  belong so now the head group has the head and the body has the body and this is exactly what we  want for character animator to have these two separate pieces okay so with only doing this so  far without doing any other details I'm going to go ahead and save this and import into character  animator to see how it looks all right so I'm in a new character animator project I'm going to go  over here to file import I'm going to find that tiger PSD file and

import it in and then let's  go ahead with my tiger selected click this add to new scene button to bring it in okay so now  already I've got some head motion because the head group was called head and it's moving everything  but it's bringing the body along for the ride um I'm probably going to scale this character down a  little bit to fit a little bit better here using the scale in the transform area and uh now I kind  of want to just pin the feet to the ground and do some basic rigging stuff

so I'm going to go  ahead and double click on my tiger uh character over here so it brings me into rig mode and then  let select the head group and bring the uh origin down here just dragging it down to the neck where  it would connect and then for my body group I'm going to add the fixed handles down here the pin  tool and may me add just a couple of fixed handles over there let's try that going back to record  mode and now okay I have my character kind of moving back and forth and keeping the

feet pinned  to the ground now there's obviously things I want to do I don't like the tail just kind of staying  there I wish it had a little bit more movement I want the arms to be able to move I want the  eyes to move I want the mouth to move but hey as a start and if I just had like a background  character for example like I have a zoo scene and there's characters in the background this  might be enough to have you know just some basic movement for a character so uh you know within  5 10 min

utes something like that you can have a pretty easy moving static character for the  background but okay starting off with this this is a good start but let's head back to photoshop  to do a little more fine-tune uh surgery to get some other parts moving all right so let's start  with the head uh that's the most expressive part of a character so I really want this to to work  well and I'm going to focus on the eyes and the mouth as my main things I could do eyebrows and  you know other things as

well but for now those are kind of the two things I want to focus on  so let's start with the eyes um right now the eyes are part of the character and I kind of want  them to be their own uh thing so what I'm going to do is make sure this character is selected  here and I'm going to isolate out the eyes so let's go in here and again I'm just going to kind  of Select things and take this part of the bluish eyes or bluish green part of the eyes and I'm  going to select it here and I'm going to pr

ess command X on Mac control X on Windows and uh then  command shift V to paste it into place and so now I've got this basic eyeball um that's showing  showing up here now you probably noticed that there's like an outline that you can see around  this that doesn't look that great so what I'm going to do is Select this car this eye and press  uh command t on that control t on Windows to give it this free transform uh thing and then I'm just  going to make it a little bit bigger I'm holding down a

n option to make it move from the center  uh to make it a little bit better like that and let's go like that so now it's a little bit uh um  bigger than things but if I dragged it behind the eye it's going to look okay it's going to look  you know like it is its own individual piece all right let's take an isolated look at this eye and  I really the pupil is kind of looking weird right like I don't think this is the thing that I want  to actually have moving around so what I'm going to do is go

to my clone stamp tool over here and  I'm going to pick a nice size brush probably with a little bit of a blur to it on the edges and  let's bring this in and when I want to sample something if you've never used the Clone stamp  tool before I'm going to hold down option on Mac I believe it's alt on Windows and click a sample are  area and then move it and click in another area to kind of paste and I'm going to hold option again  and then do it a few times and I just kind of keep sampling with op

tion or alt and kind of breaking  out um you know in and painting over things until I feel like I have something that looks pretty  solid pretty good okay so this is looking like you know in the same style but he has kind of a  basic blank eye now and now I'm going to make a separate layer that's appear p and I'm going to  make this a little more cartoony I'm going to go ahead and make a new layer over here I'm going to  just make an ellipse tool let's make this uh black actually I'm going to go

by this black that's over  here so it fits the color scheme of the character a little bit better and let's just make kind of  an oval shape like this for this character's eye okay so something like that's looking pretty good  to me and I can of course make it bigger smaller add a highlight whatever I want to if I needed to  but that's looking good okay so now we've got uh the eyeball and the pupil so I'm going to call  this plus uh what side is this right pupil and then the right eyeball over h

ere and I'm going  to put both of these into a group called right I and probably want to be that a plus I um to  give it its own independence okay so now I've got one eye over here that is isolated and should  be working as expected now I probably want blink state for this as well right when the character  blinks um an easy way for me to do this might be to duplicate my eyeball layer I'm going to press  command J on Mac or contrl J on Windows I'm going to call this right blink I'm going to put i

t  above everything and then I'm going to double click on this and go to color overlay and instead  of this let's make it uh the white that we have here and hardlight looks okay I could try some  different ones and see if there's something that looks better but let's just stick with hard light  for now um you could try and see what works best for your character and now this will kind of be  the blink State and I probably also want like a line going through this or something like that so  I might

just pick a brush and you know do a really basic brush um that goes across to be like where  the eyes meet so something like that to make it look like the lids are closing and I might make  it a little ragged because that's what the rest of the character looks like and that's going to be  the blink state for this character obviously you could spend as much time or as little time as you  want on this but let's merge these two together I'm going to select them both and again uh merge  the layers

where is that merge layers here we go and it looks like it went over my naming so  I'm going to call it right blank here okay so that's the basic idea that I would do for the  eye I'm going to go ahead and speed through this for the second eye and uh move forward all right  so speeding through the process I now in my head group have a left plus left eye and plus Right  Eye Group each of these has three things inside of it a blink State a pupil and plus left pupil  or plus right pupil and an eyeb

all and so all of these are kind of looking through these cutouts  that I've made in the uh in the head and then these eyes are showing up behind it all right so  with that done let's save this and go to character animator and now I can immediately see that my  pupils are moving around as I look around with this character so this is looking pretty good and  I have my blink States as well uh showing up now I can fine-tune this if I feel like they're going  a little bit too far to the side I can g

o into my uh eye gaze over here and Camera strength is set  to 100 maybe I changed that to 75 or something like that and now they're not going all the way  to the edge they're going a little bit um in to the side of it and that's going to look a little  bit better so of course you can always fine-tune these different parameters but now my character  is really starting to come to life a little bit more right with the blinks and the pupil movements  I've got a little bit more expressiveness now th

e mouth this can potentially depending on the type  of character you have be a kind of tricky part right because um you know for a typical character  animator mouth you might go for one of our free resources uh so I'm just on the character Mater  examples page I click resources I can download this mouth pack that I could overlay over top of  my character but if I'm being honest I don't think that mouth is going to look really good just you  know superimposed on top of this character um I'm think

ing that the Nutcracker jaw might be a better  use for this particular character to have this jaw kind of move up and down now depending on your  character it might be different you might have a beak or you know a fish with a side view uh you  know I could do 20 tutorials and over 20 different types of mouth shapes but for this particular  character that has an open expression like this I think the Nutcracker jaw is going to be the best  way to go so again I'm going to do a little bit of Photosh

op surgery here I've got my main head part  here here I'm just going to take out the body for a second so I can see this a little bit better and  I'm going to take the bottom jaw and I'm going to cut it out again using the polygonal lasso tool  um to be its own jaw layer so let's go ahead and cut this out going around the edges trying to  get as best I can and then closing it at the end and that's looking pretty good so I'm going to  press command X on macrol x on Windows and then um press comma

nd shift V or uh control shift V on  Windows to paste it into place so now what I've done is isolated this jaw now this by itself looks  terrible this is not looking that great right so what I want to do is put it behind first the um in  my layers group I want my head in front of it I'm going to call this plus jaw um and that's going to  automatically tag it as a jaw when it comes back into character animator and now what I want to do  is kind of extend this a little bit more and uh so when it c

omes down it's going to be uh you know  not as uh not as isolated not have a gap showing up behind it so what I can do with this is again  with the edge here I'm just going to kind of go up and around something like this and let's go  around the edge like this and I could just like paint this black if I really wanted to but I'm  just going to use our friend generative Phil here and try this as a starting point to see if it gets  me kind of close Okay so that looks pretty good um I'm going to pla

y around with my variations over  here and see if one looks a little bit better oh I like this one a lot better because it's darker and  I think as I move these you know in the character talking I probably want um this to be uh looking  darker in the background so I might play around with some uh clone stamping to make this look  darker uh and more consistent but for now and our purposes I think this is looking pretty good  um and so what I'm going to do is combine these these two again merge th

em by selecting them both  and going to merge layers and we're going to again call this plus jaw okay now you'll notice as it's  moving if I get to a certain threshold I might see some gaps over here and I don't want that so  to isolate that I'm just going to make an extra layer over here that's just plain black so I'm  just going to go here and around and we're just going to fill that in with a paint bucket tool and  make that black and now when my jaw moves up and down and it you know kind of

goes a little bit too  far it's going to be okay um it's going to look all right so let's start it in a decent position  something like this maybe like that as it starting position is looking pretty good to me uh let's  bring the body back in let's save and let's go into character animator so something is happening  by default as I'm talking the mouth is moving up and down um based on lip sync jaw movement and  this is set by by selecting my character going into the lip sync parameter over here

and changing  jaw movement so right now it said to 100% if I change this to 50 it's going to be a little bit  more subtle so this is actually looking pretty good like this is looking better than I thought I  kind of forgot that this was going to happen when I brought it in um so this is actually looking  pretty nice however it is a little bit more stilted right it's kind of as I say a word the  thing the the jaw is kind of just warping from place to place and uh maybe not looking as as  fluid as

I might want so I could do uh go into let's change this jaw movement to uh to zero  actually not negative 397 what am I doing here and let's go back into rig mode for my character  and at the top level here I'm going to add a new Nutcracker jaw behavior and so coming back in this  is already looking a lot smoother so as it's it's moving up and down as I'm talking and right now  I have both camera input and audio input uh as as um methods of bringing it in as inputs I could  turn this off and ma

ke it you know just audio for example so now just the audio movement is  happening and it doesn't care about my camera jaw movement at all and then I can change the audio  flappiness parameter by the way great property name audio flappiness I mean what other product  has an audio flappiness it it's I love it okay so let's change this and I can make this really high  but then the jaw might look a little too detached and again if I make it too small then it's going  to be or negative even it's goi

ng to be too subtle so I like starting with 100% that's looking pretty  good and depending on my mic setup and what I'm doing I might want to move that a little bit more  or less to make my character come to life a little bit more or less all right now that I'm pretty  happy with how the head is looking I'm going to move on to the body and uh the two things I want  to deal with here are the arms number one and then this tail giv a little bit of Dynamic movement  to it so again depending on what

character you create yours might look totally different but  that's okay I think the same basic principles May apply to different things you want to be able  to drag or move around all right so I'm going to collapse the head group here and I'm just going to  have the body and what I'm going to do is isolate each of the arms typically I want my arms to be  their own separate parts so let's go ahead and select this and what I'm going to do is go to the  arm and kind of make an area like this aroun

d the arm where I think it would basically be connecting  to the shoulder uh area so something like this it's not perfect but it's going to be close enough  okay so let's again cut this out command X on Mac control X on Windows and then command shift V on  Mac or control shift V on Windows to paste it into place now again you see the faint line that shows  up here I'm just going to press right a couple of times to uh move that out of the way and then  because this arm's going to kind of twist an

d move I may want something behind it to be you know the  rest of the shirt so I'm going to do my typical thing where I'm just going to kind of make a space  here around the shirt area and let's connect that let's make sure it's on this layer here and let's  do a generative fill and this should fill in that shirt area behind my arm okay so now we got this  kind of extra area here and then my arm can show over top of that so that's looking pretty good now  this arm's going to give me a little bit

trouble because because it is uh currently in kind of  a weird state where it's on the hip and we know with character animator characters typically you  want them to be more in an ash shaped position so I'm going to have to do a little bit more uh  to make this one work but I think I can do it so let's go ahead and select my character again  uh the body group and I'm going to again select start selecting my character and now I'm going to  go in with more fine detail around where I think this ha

nd would be this claw it kind of looks like  he's almost wearing gloves like he doesn't have claws so maybe I would add claws later on but  okay that's looking pretty good and then let's go around and maybe something like this is how I  would want it to connect okay same sort of story command X to take it out um there's a little bit  of extra stuff here that I can erase I don't need and then command shift V to put it in write a  couple times okay so the first thing is let's fill in these gaps th

at we've got over here so  so I'm going to take uh this area uh where the basically the the pants are and this area here  I'm just going to add a little bit of an extra bump uh around it something like this okay and  that's looking good let's do generative fill for both of these generate okay and I can play around  with different variations but overall this first one is looking great I'm going to go ahead and  merge this with this body and call it BG again I just uh select things and you can do

merge  layers or press command e on Mac or contr E on Windows okay so now we've got our two uh and let's  actually do this as well for the other one so now I've got three layers I've got my background my  one arm and my other arm now to get this arm and that outstretched a position like I want I'm going  to select it and go to edit puppet warp what this is going to do is put kind of this Warp all around  uh my arm and so what I could do is put two points at least I'm going to put three points ac

tually  and then drag this out like this and basically what I'm doing is determining where this thing is  going to bend and how it's going to bend so maybe something like this and you can add more points  if you want to to add more points where you can uh you know add things um but overall I'm feeling  good about how this is looking I'm going to remove that one I held an option over top of something  to click to get rid of it but that didn't look very good so let's try that and something like  t

hat is looking pretty good pretty okay so let's press enter it's never going to be 100% perfect  um but overall this is looking better than what I had before now there is a bit of a uh you know  very clear divide here where the arm is connecting because as I twist things the pixels aren't going  to line up as well so to make that look a little bit better I'm going to go to my erase tool and  just kind of erase a little bit here um on some of these areas just to make it blend in a little  bit bet

ter um and you'll notice like this isn't lining up exactly right either so I might take  my arm and just kind of move it in a little bit until it feels right and you can kind of finesse  this as you want but overall that's looking pretty good to me um how it looks I might this looks a  little bit too bent now actually so I might come in here and like kind of shave off some part  of the arm here uh some something like that to make it look a little bit more um like what I'm  wanting and maybe come

in a little bit here as well so if you're doing this kind of puppet warp  thing you might just need to finesse it a little bit but overall this is looking a lot better for  uh a movable arm that I've got now I'm going to want these arms to be independent so I'm going  to go ahead and name them I'm going to say plus uh right arm and plus left arm to name each of  these as I want and then finally let's de with this tail here so I'm going to again go to my  handy dandy polygonal tool I'm going to

select this tail and I am going to cut it out command X  and let's put it in command v um and I'm going to move it actually behind the character behind the  body uh is still in the body group though and I'm going to move it like up here something like that  and I'm going to call this plus tail okay so now I have all the basic parts of of my character  in a way that I like that I think is going to work pretty well so let's go ahead and save this  and bring it into character animator all right so

when I first come in uh my character is looking  pretty good but there's no interaction with the arms yet the tail isn't moving um and if I move  too far I'm going to notice that the arms can kind of feel like they get detached a little bit  so there's a little bit of extra rigging that I have to do here so let's go back into rig mode  and let's take this one thing at a time so let's start with the arms I'm going to take the origin  of my arm which is in the middle of my layer here and I'm going

to drag it until it connects with  my base of my character here which in this case is the BG layer that I'm trying to connect to so  here it's connecting like this and then I'm going to go down to this dragger tool down here uh this  little Compass looking thing I'm going to add it to the hand here and then finally I'm going to  go to the stick tool this little bracket looking thing I'm going to add a stick for the forearm add  a little bit of space for the elbow and put the bicep there let's d

o the same thing with the left  arm over here I'm going to go to my selection I'm going to click on this origin and drag it to where  it connects I'm going to add a dragger in the hand and then I'm going to add here uh for the forearm  and the bicep okay so that's looking pretty good and let's go to record mode and see how this is  looking so now I can drag my arms and it's uh you know it's pretty stretchy right now uh but  it does have exactly what I'm wanting I do have the ability to drag the

arms around to give it a  little bit of extra refinement let's add the limb I behavior and this is going to give us a little  bit of better elbow Bend and control over things so I'm going to go ahead and add an extra handle  here in the elbow and let's call this the elbow I'm going to select my dragable handle call this  wrist and then I'm going select the origin and call this shoulder let's do the exact same thing  with the left arm over here let's do uh select this left left arm uh origin over

here call that  the left shoulder uh add a new handle blank handle here and call that the left elbow and then select  our pre-existing dragable and call that left wrist now when I go back I'm going to get a little bit  of extra elbow bend that looks a little bit nicer for my character and it's bending without that  stretchiness that I had before so overall this kind of setup is looking pretty nice now I can  make him wave I can make him put his you know hands on his tummy something like that I'

ve got a  few different options there so little steps that I can take to just refine the arm movement a little  bit more now for the tail I'm going to go ahead and select it it is already independent it has the  crown icon on it which means it can move on its own I'm going to drag the origin where it connects  to the character and then I'm going to click this dangle tool down here this little pendulum looking  thing and add it to the end of the tail when I go into uh record mode now you'll see t

he tail is  starting to move around if I don't like the how it's moving I can go into my physics parameter  here and change things under the dangle category so let's change the stiffness to be kind of a  little bit different well that's too much 59 I can go really low if I wanted to um but let's go back  to a 100 and maybe we can make the uh something like 85 or something like that instead and maybe  that's the amount of bounce that I want I can add more parameters here I could add more sticks 

inside it if I wanted it to move around I could even go in here and the tail selected instead of a  weld mode add a hinge mode instead which is going to make it a little bit more droopy like that now  I can see the edge of it here so I probably don't want it exactly like that but if I played around  with these parameters maybe I can get a stiffness or squashing or something like that that's going  to work pretty well in general though I think weld is probably the best way to go with this and  th

en I can play around with these parameters until they get the quality of Animation that I'm  looking for in this case I might even move this tail reverse it flip it around so it's kind of on  the ground and bouncing around or something like that but for the purposes of this tutorial this  is pretty good all right so within the course of you know half an hour or something like that  I've taken this character that was a completely static flat image and I've now turned it into an  animated characte

r so now as I talk the mouth is moving as I blink as I look around the eyes are  moving I have control over the arms to be able to do different movements and wave and all sorts  of different things and I've got a little extra bounce with the tail and adding some Physics to  the character this is a great first step and way to get your character alive and now from here  you could add triggers you could add um other behaviors that you want to do add the eyebrows add  physics in the fur and the top

of the hair and all that stuff to get the character as Lively as you  would want it to be but hey for just starting out this is a great first step and right now I've got  a Talking Tiger that was not an animated character um you know 30 minutes ago so it takes a lot of  manual Photoshop work to get it to this stage and I'm hopeful then in the future you will be able to  create layered PSD files um from AI tools and like Firefly and if there is that in the future that  would be awesome because th

at's going to save you a lot of time to be able to say okay now I don't  have to do all that surgery and cut out and clone stamp and all of that stuff you can just have  these layers separately now you could try your luck with this I've tried Firefly searches where  I search just for cartoon eyeball or cartoon mouth or cartoon beak or hand uh you know that sort  of stuff and kind of Frankenstein a character together piece by piece uh my results have not  been that great if I'm being honest I thi

nk it's better to start with one thematic character and  kind of go through it and uh Do Your Own Thing like that piece by piece but that's how I did  it um I think it works pretty well and I hope this is a helpful way for you to start creating  your own characters using Firefly and character animator now if you're an Adobe Illustrator your  life might be a little bit easier because uh you might be able to create a character that does have  some isolated parts that's the nice thing about the new

text to Vector graphic beta feature in  illustrator so I've got a 1920 x 1080 scene that I've made here in Adobe Illustrator 2024 I'm going  to go ahead and make sure that the subject is over here in the properties panel is set to subject and  not icon or pattern um and I'm just going to type in a prompt here so I wrote a cute cartoon frog  wearing a t-shirt and jeans let's go ahead and generate this awesome okay and now I've got this  really cool looking frog character and I've got a few diffe

rent variations that I could play around  with um I like this one cuz the arms are already out that's going to make my life so much easier  and the nice thing is these are all pieces that I can play around with so I can you know select  and delete certain things using the illustrator tools I already know how to use and um things like  for example the head being isolated check this out the head is already luckily for this character  isolated and I've already got a piece that I can you know start

to work with here and the body  same thing with the arms I'm going to have to do a little bit of surgery to get them out because  um they are connected to the uh this shirt here but overall um a lot of these pieces are already  isolated for me so when I'm doing the eyeball for example and the pupils I've already got my pupils  basically isolated here that I can move around and play around with and have ready to go um the  mouth for this character I would probably just do like an open mouth you k

now I would probably make  my own mouth set for this character and make like an open a what that would look like and maybe an  ooh and an e maybe you know four or five different mouths to make this character work pretty well so  with my layers panel out here I would select my character select the parts that I want I'm just  kind of double clicking until I get exactly what I want um here looks like I got most of the head  except for the eyeball so I'm going to hold down shift to also select those

that's looking pretty  good and now I'm going to uh uh press command X to cut this I'm going to make a new group actually  let's go back to my main area here and I'm going to create a new group or new uh layer I should  say called head and command shift V to do it in place and there is my head group group and now  here is my body and now I can make a new layer called plus frog and let's put both my head and  my body inside of there make sure the head is in top of the body and so on and so forth

and  now I can start to dig into my eyes make more groups make more mouths all of that stuff just  like I showed in um in Photoshop and if you're more comfortable in an illustrator you can just  follow the exact same methods that I just showed to create a comp compelling character all right  so I hope this was a helpful first step into the world of taking AI characters and turning them  into 2D animated characters in character animator obviously there is so much more that you could  do with thi

s and I'm really excited to see what you all make with this type of stuff so please  if you make stuff using this method or anything else use # character animator when sharing on  social media so myself and the rest of the team can check it out and if you're running into any  trouble or running any questions or I went too fast through any of the sections or whatever the  best place to get help is the official character animator forums all right that's it for today  thank you so much for watching

and have fun