Hey, this is Dave from Adobe Character Animator team and recently I created an explainer style
video about why I thought video game subscription services were the future. it's a 5-minute
animated piece that includes a narrator character that I created in Photoshop, and then animated
using performance capture in Character Animator, and then composited everything together in
Adobe After Effects. These type of explainer videos are really popular, you see them all
the time, and a lot of you were asking in the comments how I put everything together.
So this video is going to be a full workflow, a walkthrough of everything from the initial
script to recording that, animating and editing a performance in character animator, and finally
linking everything together and compositing it in After Effects. There's a lot here
so we're dividing it into eight different parts so you can look in the video description below
to skip ahead if you want to. But I hope it's helpful for making your own explainer style
videos, so let's get started. So not surprisingly everything kind of starts with a script so I wrote my
script in Google Docs on my train commute in and out of work. And, you know, it's about
12-13 paragraphs, something like that, I just continually edited it. I would cut whole sections
that didn't feel like they were adding to the argument, I would move things around constantly,
saying oh, you know, I think this feels a little stronger down here, but basically I'm just
trying to tell the story and it helps when it's something you're passionate about. So I love
video games. I felt like this was really easy and fun to write, and I think those are the
type of projects that you'll get the most mileage out of, when you're really invested
in the subject matter. And you can speak in kind of a conversational tone, so I'm not writing
this like a, you know, a term paper or essay or something like that. I tried to add language
that felt like I was just being conversational and I think that helps with the pacing and
the flow and making it all feel a little bit more natural. And then when I was ready to
record I just made this way larger so it was easy to read and basically be a teleprompter for
me to record a voice over. So the next step is to record your audio I'm using an Audio
Technica USB mic and I've got a pop filter hooked on that to help with the the harsher
sounds like S's and popping sounds and that sort of thing. But I've got that hooked up
to my computer so I'm going to click I here in audition Record, that looks good, click okay,
and just going to start recording. So you can see as I'm talking right now it's showing
the waveform. Now this is looking a little too hot right now, I'm getting in the red zone
a little bit. Down here you can see with your little levels monitor. Typically I never really
want to see red, and I particularly don't want to see this, when the two red things stick
here. That means it's peaked and you can see if I pause right here, that moment where it peaked
right here, that means the signal, the input signal is so loud that it's going to basically
the limits of the microphone input and you don't want to do that, that leads to a harsh
popping sound and you want to avoid that as much as possible. Your audio preferences and
everything are going to be in your computer's settings so here, let's say I was using my internal
microphone built-in, this is looking a little bit on the higher side so I'm going to move
it down a little bit so the signal is not going to be as loud. That looks good, and then
let's try this again, click record, and now that's looking like a much better signal. You
can see I'm not really in the red anymore. I'm seeing some yellow, that's okay, I'm alright
with that, but I don't want to get those high peaks, and later on I can make this sound a
little bit louder. So this is what I'm going for in terms of a nice clear signal. Now one
more thing you want to do is make sure you have a section that has a little bit of dead
air. So I want to make sure I'm quiet for at least a few seconds so something like this...
and that gives me something that I will be able to identify as background noise in
the next step. So don't just click record and just immediately start talking, give yourself
a few seconds make sure you're quiet, you're not shuffling around in your chair or anything
like that or clicking things with the mouse. Just be quiet for a few seconds and then get
started with your talking. And so when I press record I just go for it and read through the entire
script and if I mess up what you do quite often I'll just go back to the beginning of
the paragraph and try to reread it again so I'm doing everything in one recording session
instead of breaking it up into multiple parts that's just easier for me to have it as one
single file of all my audio that I can later go back to you and edit when you're done you
can get something that looks like this a bunch of different very clear talking points and
a bunch of parts where you are paused and not talking so remember I told you about the
part I'm just pressing plus by the way here to zoom in where you want to get that background
the very first thing I'll do is find a section with white noise and I'm just going to Marquis
elected here like that and then I'm going to go to effects enrestoration capture noise
print what that does is analyze this and basically copy that as background noise and so now what
I can do is I'm going to press the minus key up here to zoom out and see everything I'm
impressed command a on Mac that's control a on Windows and I may go back to effects
and go to noise reduction restoration noise reduction process super need the default has
always been fine you don't need to do anything additional here just click apply it goes through
this process is going to take a few seconds but once it does that it's going to remove
that sound and this will this is a small step it helps your audio seemed a little bit clearer
then I'm going to go through everything and start editing it so I'll listen to a section
I'll say it again with the plus button okay here's my intro. Sounded good you know I'll
listen through this I will in a Morkie select and delete this part make sure I have a little
gap for showing the different sections and then moves to the next one and then I messed
up in these next to take and this third take is the one I want and I'll delete it so I'll
keep repeating this process listening and deleting the unused parts and a tighten things
up until I've got everything working an edited with the pacing and flow that I want to before
moving on I'm going to want to save this as a copy so I'm just going to go to file save
as I don't want to overwrite my original raw audio file just in case I need to go back
to it to grab you know some sentence or saying like that that I just deleted so I'm just
going to call this you know BO2 and hit okay and it's going to save that now as a copy
so with VO2 selected over here I'm just going to click the new multitrack session button
up here and that's going to bring it in yet that's okay to a new multitrack session what's
nice about this is now we can start to mix in different audio parts including the background
music on any sound effects nothing like that has multiple tracks and I can see everything
in one place speaking to music I would highly recommend checking out audio library on YouTube
they have tons of Creative Commons copyright free music that you can use in the background
of your videos as long as you copy and paste a little bit of copyright text in your video
description they have a ton of different styles are constantly adding things to it I would
say all my videos from the past year or so I'm having using this and it is a great resource
I took you to look at the mix that I did for this video voice over track up here I've got
my audio track over here and actually switched tracks in the middle of it so all I did was
you know add another track then I kind of use these little sliders to Crossfade one
Audio One background music track in and out and if you seen the video there's that one
part of the beginning where I say call me crazy and someone says you're crazy I wanted
that to sound a little bit different from the this way so I made that its own section
here and I actually adjusted the pan here so it's going to appear in your right ear
a little bit more and that also helps just differentiate a second voice from your main
narrative track so just a small trick there I've been using the essential sound panel
a lot in audition I think it helps you get a nice clear up broadcast quality voice so
what I'll do is Select my audio track go over here to get central sound panel or a might
show up in different sections depend on what your workspace layout is like, but you can
always find it here under window essential sound and then because this is dialogue I'm
going to go to dialogue and I'm going to set the preset 2 balanced male voice that's going
to automatically kind of do some EQ and compression and stuff on my voice to make it sound as
loud and clear and a balanced as possible particularly for my male voice if I were a
female I would do the balance female voice and there's a few different effects here if
you want you know sound like you're on it phone or radio or stuff like that this is
great this is a nice automatic step that leads to a professional sounding audio within a
matter of seconds the same thing for the background music so I selected it I go to music and I'm
going to select balance background music that's going to make it a little bit quieter and
balanced and not compete with the voice as much I'm actually brought this down even more
probably -3 or something like that just to make sure the voice was the strongest force
in this piece in the music is just kind of complimenting that the Finishing Touch I'm
going to go to the wait till I start talking I'm probably going to in a bring this in a
little bit I might make the volume come up a little bit at the end of just add these
little dots here to bring it up because as I finish talking I didn't want the audio to
be a little bit louder when it comes to the credits and then I'll do a little fade here
by selecting the Little Theater Square here and move it over so it fades out that was
pretty good so now if I press - I will see my whole piece on everything sounds and looks
great I'll always listen to it through it at least once to make sure you know there's
no parts were like the chorus in this music is really overpowering and competing with
the audio or there's a sound of frequency that I didn't hear that I need to edit out
but overall this looks great so I didn't do is go to file export multitrack mixdown entire
session I'll call that you know whatever I want to and hit okay and that is going to
save my file as all these things mixed together with the music the audio the person yelling
you're crazy all of that into one single file my next step was to take a Sketchbook and
just start sketching out ideas of how I was going to visualize some of these different
parts so you can see you know this is beginning part where I talk about insta sock as a you
know a joke Subscription Service the guy senior crazy a video game Icon everything that's
in the video you can see where it started here so I'm just going through the script
and asking what's the best of visual representation of the point I'm trying to make him so you
know just try different things sketching things out really rough this is something that only
I understand right like I know you know what that the Penguin game thing video game idea
that happens a half way through the video which kind of sketch an idea I want to show
a man game premium game you know an indie game fortnite and actually was going to just
show fortnite and then I decided it'd be funny if it was penguin Battle Royale so there's
different things that you know you just scheduled a rough ideas and then will evolve as you
start to put them together later in Photoshop but for now it's just kind of coming up with
these these basic ideas I'm that will serve as the framework for the entire piece has
done you have a great inventory of all the acids are going to have to create so I know
I need these icons for a bed and a toilet and all the other places you can play Nintendo
switch I know that I need these different icons for music and movies and books you know
I need to make up these fake logos for Video subscription services this basically becomes
my Bible this is what I'm going to have to use as my guide in creating all of these assets
for the final piece and now you're ready to move on into creating your narrator character
so in this case I wanted to be a you know kind of flat cartoon version of myself and
I did it in Photoshop you can use illustrator as well as their AI are PST files work just
as well I always say just go with whatever feels comfortable to you this character has
a lot of complexity to him but I'm going to try to break them down into the most simple
components of how I started to build him as I was a kratom in Photoshop the first in the
notice is that he doesn't have a body right she kind of has the top part of his torso
and I knew that I didn't need to show him walking in her head in his legs or anything
like that so I just kind of cut him off right here but I left myself enough room to have
the arms coming down so it most of the time when you see him right he's off of the screen
like this so you're never really going to see the rest of his body you just use arms
kind of rise up and that's it so that's why I built him like this and knowing how much
of your character you're going to see if your character is walking in from the side or whatever
you will have to. The rest of them fight for this for kind of more of a just talking head
Style video all I really needed was the upper part of the Torso and that was enough okay
let's start with the basics here I have a new file that is a size of a 2500 by 2500
pixels it's 72 that is big enough for a what I was going for a 1920 x 1080 video typically
you don't want to go to high line size pump relay for a Photoshop raster file because
the bigger it is too big a file size but slower processing the character animator will have
but this looks pretty good to me so I said okay have one basically no background layer
I am going to just click the group icon 3 * called the first group plus whatever my
character's name is I'm going to call the second group head and me to call the third
group body and then I will select both ahead and body and drag them into my main group
so that is the basic character animator structure 99% characters I create this is the structure
that I'm going to start with and then I'll just continually add parts and elements to
my character so at this stage I'm not really worried about naming things correctly for
character animator we know the character animator looks for certain things like left pupil right
eyeball left eyebrow Mouse shape all that stuff but at this early stage I don't really
care about that on we doing is making sure I have as many parts and layers as possible
so I don't want the ears and that background of the head to all be one layer together because
if I want this year I need him to be their own parts so basic idea is no matter how you
draw or what style you're using you just want to build your character out with as many parts
as possible so building character I used to two main methods of Phi illustration number
one I was using the shape tool which is just a full circle or rectangle thing down here
that she's like the ellipse tool here and it just would drag it out to create a circle
or an oval or different shapes like that and then it would select the fill whatever color
I wanted it to be and move that into position a lot of this character is just simple circles
and triangles and shapes and stuff like that for anything with a non you know standard
shape what I would do is make a new layer go to the pin tool make sure it was set to
shape and not pass and then I would try to be like for the nose I would you know do this
click click and click like that nobody fault mine has a stroke I'm going to remove that
change that to zero and instead change the fill color to something else so this is what
I did for you know the eyebrows for the hair all of that stuff all I did was against like
the pin tool and then for the eyebrow I might you know click here mini click and drag to
give it a little bit of a curve and then click again to stop it like that and then you can
always selected I right click in selected but if you have Auto Select you it'll just
automatically happen when you select the layer here and then if you click show transform
controls that's going to show these little things on the edges which you can drag to
resize things as need be and then you can move them and place them I'll wear if you
want later order is important rights the right now this is showing up behind the head and
I don't want that I would want this to show up in front so make sure your order is as
you would want it I said this before another videos but having a great mouth set is an
essential part of a character and this is not something you want to create from scratch
for every character have a standard mouth said that I've been using for a lot of my
characters and so it's you know here this is its own Photoshop file I've got all my
name out here and then I've got these different in a single expression mouse that I didn't
end up using for this particular one and then my alternative my sad mouth so you'll notice
in the piece that the character will sometimes instead of being happy and talking with an
upward turned mouth they will instead start to get sad and or you know concerned and show
a different style of mouth upside down and this is just a trigger and all you want to
do and setting the shop is to have you know your Mane mouth group and then some Alternatives
mouth group as well so good to separate PSD file or you could take this from any other
example puppet that you liked their unit their mouth shut your mouth groups from going to
make sure over here at the bottom of my toolbar if I click this I'm going to go to standard
screen mode that's going to allow me to see these different tabs any other documents that
I have open I want to do is drag this group this group is called Talk contents it's kind
of just a main container for all my different mouth groups and I was going to drag this
all the way over here into my day before. PSD file and let go and it's going to show
up now it's behind the skin but I'm going to bring it and it's going to show up right
there and that's way too big so again I'm going to do show transform controls and just
kind of resize it here so it looks a little bit better and went that looks good I'm going
to move it back in place and there we go so upset that you feel happy with that's what
you should stick with and just keep that as a file that's around so in case you need it
for multiple characters it's there and ready for you to use the basic look of your character
now you can start organizing and naming things the correct way so for example I started to
put all of his hair groups together so his right side hair is actually you know what
six different layers seven different layers of hair and because I wanted these all to
work with one physics Behavior I wanted to put them all in one group and if you're not
using physics don't worry about it you don't have to organize it like this but if you want
to hear to kind of flop and move around I would keep things in distinct groups and parts
so you will be able to manipulate them as a whole I did the same thing with the left
side of the hair over here as well so inside character animator we have all these great
template example of puppets and you really should use these as a guideline of how to
name an organized think so when I'm dealing with the head if I need a reference the best
one to go to is blank face over here on because I'm in Photoshop and just going to click the
image for Photoshop both of them will open up the puppet and character animator and to
photoshop file so I can see here exactly how everything is structured right + left eyebrow
is his you know left eye brown again that's left side of the character not the left side
of the screen plus right eyebrow I can we add to play we want them to move on their
own basically be independent and a move without warping or pulling on anything else then I'll
make the Eye Group and inside the eye you want you know your blank state which is going
to show up when your character is a blank when you are blinking your eyes in the webcam
that's what you want to show up and that will also make anything else in this group disappear
which is your plus left pupil and your left eyeball so these components make up the eye
we see a lot of issues with people not doing the ice correctly this is the really basic
structure you want a group called Left Eye or right I do you want Les blank + left pupil
plus that's eyeball in anyone do the exact same thing for your right eye if you follow
the structure you will not run into any problems this is exactly how it should be in fact if
you like these eyes you can just you know Dragon select them and drag them into your
composition and have them show up instead of whatever eyes you've created or you can
use that as a guide and then deleted once you're you're done this character is a little
bit different because instead of the blank he's got a group called lids and Lids includes
a bunch of different things it includes a group called blank which is actually a multi
frame sequence of him blinking his eye and completely closing it will get to that in
a little bit and then different ice States so he's got kind of disc half a tank in impressed
I and then a happy I and these are basically going to be triggered by Expressions so later
on when I want my character to feel like he said you know he's happy I'm going to trigger
the happy eyes or when I feel like he's kind of impressed or knows what he's talking about
I'm going to do the other things he knows what he's talking about that is I'm going
to trigger the impressed eyes I think having a bunch of these different lid Expressions
is a great way or lid triggers I should say is a great way to add some extra expressiveness
to your character so for any character I make I will have at least something like this where
they're kind of in their own group and I kind of fruit am with the blanks in this case because
I don't want the I want them all happening over top of my people and I ball I still want
to see in the case of the half eyeball are the half eyelid I still want to be able to
see my pupil moving behind it I don't want it to completely take over it and so that's
why I have it as its own separate group up here but you can try and experiment with a
few different structure of things and see what works best for your character I see the
only other thing I want to worry about right now is making certain parts independent so
for example I know with this character I want to have a certain sense of Parallax to him
so I want a lot of these elements to move on their own for example the ear when the
ear moves I don't know it's just a circle this kind of hidden behind his head but I
don't want that pulling on the rest of his skin so I'm going to call that plus left ear
or same thing with his nose I'm going to call that plus nose and you can take this too far
and go independent overload where is everything is moving independent you're going to lose
some character you're going to lose some of fluidity or Dynamics to the character because
everything is moving on its own and there's there's nothing kind of influencing each other's
animation so I would say you know used with caution experiment but for me when I'm thinking
about this I'm thinking which parts do I want to move on their own independently without
influencing or pulling or pushing a warping any other artwork particularly for the hair
I knew that each of these strands I want to add some Physics to so physics only works
when you have these independent parts so I want to make sure every single strand of hair
is a plus so I did plus one two three four five six seven eight nine 10 11 all the way
down here to make sure each of those were their own independence trance guess the bottom
line that I would say for the head is you know you can have as many things inside your
head group as you want but the basic parts you need really are the my groups and your
mouth group yeah eyebrows are nice to have as well but everything else is kind of extra
you know stuff on top of that foundation so my feeling is if you got the eyes and the
mouth working great everything else is just built on top of that end with stress protect
me if this is one of your first characters you're creating start simple don't feel like
you have to do a full head turn animation don't feel like you have to have all this
physics enabled hair strands you know keep it simple and you'll learn as you go I mean
it's really building off of this guy in mouth foundation and everything else once you've
got that down you'll continue to learn and grow as you create more more puppet where
you can continue to evolve one puppet so you know I can make this puppet and then add a
hat to him right glasses or add you know special new trigger mouth sore eyelid Expressions
you can keep growing and building a single puppet to continually make it more complex
Christine the biggest takeaway is don't go over the complex keep things simple keep things
easy cute things how you know them in Photoshop or illustrator don't feel like you have to
learn a hundred new things just to get a carrot or working this is a simple stuff is a circle
that has a triangle this is you know really basic pin tool 101 type stuff I'm not doing
crazy you know complicated illustration stuff here it's it's really simple basic shapes
with the head let me up and let's move on into the body all it is is a torso layer that
is sandwiched between two arms and really it's the same alarm that I just duplicated
and put on the other side now I'm the only difference here is that if this left arm for
this character his left arm they're no different hand positions it's always going to be single
four-fingered I hand that shows up before the right arm I do want to switch between
a point and an open hand and so if you want to swap between those two you'll need a swap
set trigger and the way that I did that was just make inside the arms group I've got my
basic arm here if I remove the Torso for a second you be able to see it a little bit
better serve got this basic arm shape and inside that I got the hand group that has
a the open and the point as it's two alternating hands and thumbs up peace sign you know whatever
to this but at least in this case from this character I only had two separate positions
so when I'm happy with my character I'm going to save it and then move over to character
animator to start a rigging an animated that we finally made it into Adobe character animator
so let's go over to new project we want to start fresh and let's call this something
like video games and will quick save and now that's going to create a new blank project
and right now all days is me talking to the webcam not very interesting so it will start
to add our character to the project panel over here going to a double click in the blank
space which is going to bring up my file browser you can also do this by going to file import
is going to do the exact same thing so here in my beautifully organized files I'm going
to find that file that I was working on which is Dave for PSD very easy to find and I'm
going to click in Port that is going to bring in the artwork and turn it into a puppet and
you see we get it over here with a nice little puppet icon if I double click on this over
here I'm going to see my character show up in rig mode this is kind of X-ray view of
the character this is where I'm putting everything together to teach character animator how I
want things to animate and there's some extra steps will do here in the future but for now
what's added to a scene and see without doing anything extra what he's going to look like
so with my puppet selected I'm going to go down here in the bottom left corner of the
project panel and click add to new seen the little clapboard icon and what that does is
bring my character into a scene like this double click to my face or you can click set
Rest Post that's going to add the tracking. To your face like that and I can meet Lee
see that this character is too big for my current seen sized to the very first thing
I'm going to do is Click once on the scene and that's going to bring up the scene properties
over here on the right until I remember that my character was about 2,500 by 2500 pixels
so I'm going to change the width and height to exactly that when you're dealing with the
character that you're going to eventually Dynamic link into after effects or Premiere
or other places you want to give it enough but her room so things won't get cut off if
my with Alyssa my height was instead like 18 or something like that the head is going
to get cut off if I Dynamic links this into After Effects right now it would show him
with his head half of his head missing so you want to make sure that you got enough
space around the character so when you do link it eventually none of your artwork is
going to get cut off so by default tell he's looking pretty good I mean his pupils are
moving around his eyebrows are going up and down the mouth is disappearing every once
in a while and that's because I think I know why there's some cycle layers mouse that I
have an additive heater to so they're showing up as invisible but we'll get to that in the
second but as I move my head around he's moving his whole body and torso is moving again will
fix that but overall he's looking pretty good there looking pretty nice so I think we're
off to a good start but let's go back to bridge mode and start to fix some of the issues that
we're seeing here to give me a little bit different this is a troubleshooting a trial-and-error
part of things right so your puppet head might be falling off the pupils might be coming
out of the eye eyeballs your eyebrows my becoming completely off your head you're going to have
every puppet and body types can be slightly different and you may run into different issues
depending on how your mouth looks how your eyes look how all your different parts are
together but I'm going to focus on just a basic building blocks that I almost always
do for any character this is the Anchor Point for the head and I don't want the head
(30 MINUTES)
Eyes look how are you different parts are together but I'm going to focus on just a
basic building blocks that I almost always do for any character that I've got here to
the first thing I'm going to do is this is the Anchor Point for the head and I don't
want the head to rotate from the middle of it I actually wanted to rotate by the neck
something to make sure my selection tool is active here down at the bottom in my tool
tray and he's going to drag the origin from whatever wherever it is down to the bottom
this is going to make your head pivot a little bit better and nicer and it's just a first
step that are almost always take next with body in this case he's just a half of a torso
if I had to choose it would be a different story but I want this part to be stuck in
fixed to the ground the way I do this normally is through the stick tool antagonist fixed
so they go over this little bracket thing down here call the stick tool how to make
sure my body group is selected as everything in here with the arms in the Torso and everything
and I'm going to just draw and draw stick across the bottom here and then I'm going
to go over to the tax panel and tag that as fixed now you can also do this with a little
fixed pin tool which is going to add a bunch of different pins but I find that can sometimes
leave gaps and have things Bend between that so I find it's a little bit safer if you do
be at the stick and keep that fix that that tends to work a little bit better so let's
move on to the arms remember I did a plus in front of each of the arms and when you
add two plus in the photo shop in the file the layer name it's going to add this little
Crown icon in the front so all these Crown icons all that means is that I added a plus
in the front of the name in in Photoshop or illustrator and it will automatically add
this as a sign of Independence and I can take this away if I wanted to but for these particular
Parts I do want him to remain independent so let's arms the left arm here and I see
that it's got a nice little origin it's dotted line origin here but it also has this green
line attached torso why is it doing that well there's several reasons number one when you
have it selected and you go to attach to it's going to say what is it attached to what is
this independent arm attaching to in this case it's Auto in nine times out of 10 that
is exact actually 99 times out of a hundred that is what you want if it's something else
here or you're not seeing the green line that probably means that you know updated old artwork
or something like that and it character animator hasn't quite synced up yet so just switch
this to Auto you got to make sure that it's an independent group over here and select
that as Auto you also want to make sure that this tool is highlight down here show mesh
outline and A Auto handles and that will allow you to see the the green line but I'm going
to do is drag the origin of the arm cuz I don't want it to rotate for the elbow is actually
wanted to rotate for the shoulder is and you'll notice as soon as I roll over a dependent
artwork that's artwork that is not independent I can attach it to that particular think so
now the arm is going to rotate from the shoulder as opposed to the Elbow let's do that the
other arm as well it's already green I know that it's set to attach to as Auto so I'm
going to drag this and make it at the origin as a as well so now to be able to drag the
arms I'm going to go down here to the Drager tool I'm going to select that a little Compass
looking thing and I'm going to make a new driver handle on top of the arm on top of
the hand actually leave The Other Extreme basically you always want your origin on one
side and your draggable on the other side unless you have for the left arm as well and
then just to get things a little bit more structure I'm going to draw some sticks so
I'm going to do this for where the bicep is leave a little bit of room for the elbow and
drag some more over the forearm is let's do the same thing for the right arm Drive where
the bicep is leave some room for the elbow and track again one more thing before I check
out my progress and that's I noticed that the mouth was disa turn every once in a while
and I've got a lot of different mouth things that all figure out later but for this mouse
set several the mouse or actually multi-frame sequences so I actually a to frame sequence
of the mouth kind of opening this helps give your mouth a little bit more of a fluid lip
sync quality so I'm going to do is select all three of these that are multi-frame sequences
in this case it off and woo and I'm just holding down the command key on Mac or control on
Windows to be able to select them all and then I'm going to go down here to behaviors
click the plus and go to cycle layers and this just means it's going to win these things
are triggered when it hears when Carriage a mere here's an odd shape or an odd shape
or wolf shape it's going to play through these various sequences that are here these to frame
or three frame sequences these are just so you know sequential layers so yes I wanted
to start when triggered I wanted to move top to bottom of one frame I want to cycle once
I do want The Last lyrics to If I hold a woo sound or Nah sound I wanted to hold on that
last frame instead of going back to another visiting and then I don't want cycle finished
I wanted to stop immediately that's going to make a lip sync feel a little bit more
synced up if you if you have it bled cycle finished there's a chance that you're already
on to another sound while the animation is still playing so you want to make sure that
said to stop immediately. I think I've solved a lot of the basic problems that my character
has a list go back to record mode and let's see how things are looking so already I can
tell his torso is stuck, it's not moving and flopping all over the place which is great
the mouth is not disappearing anymore so it looks like I fix that problem and the arms
I can drag and move around and make some gestures with so it looks like there's a basic problems
got salted ahead is rotating from that origin point that origin handle as well to The Next
Step I'm going to tackle is trigger triggers are one of those critical parts of any character
it's going to add a lot of additional expressiveness to him so I'm going to change the the hands
to be able to do that point and the Open Hand change the ballast to be able to do the sad
mouth set and the change the eyelid to be able to trigger to the happy and impressed
and 1/2 eyelid open eyes and remote let's start with something simple that start with
the the hand swap set so I've got my two hands in here point and open my group over into
my triggers panel over here and I see Creed Trigger or Creed swap said I want this to
be a swap said and what I mean by swaps that is only want one of these to show up at a
time so he's going to let go and that's going to create my swap set and it's all there is
to it I'm going to change a few things I want the open hand to be the default somebody click
the little icon next to that and whatever icon is filled in is basically the first one
that's going to show up so in this case my open hand is the one I want to show up first
appoint hand let's say I wanted to show up when I press the one key so I'm going to press
one there I'm going to enter a 1 in the text field there and so now when I press one I
know point is going to show up I instead of opening open is going to hide and when I let
go of one than open is going to show instead because that's the default I usually like
to do a latch on a quick latch down here and that just means I have to click one once instead
of holding it down for the trigger to work I find last triggers are a little bit easier
to kind of remember and not do finger gymnastics when you're trying to hold down three or four
different triggers it feels just a little bit more user-friendly to me that same concept
with a mouth so I've got my main mouth group here I've got a singles mouth Group which
is like a smile or frown and surprised look and then my alternative this is my sad mouth
group or the melter upside down and looking a little bit more sad I just noticed I probably
have to add cycle layers to these three so I'll do the exact same thing I just did before
Ormond is Select them all at players holding last layer stop immediately and that should
work now I want this alternate mouth group to also read as a mouth so what I need to
do is go over here and tag it as a mouse in the Emmaus panel that's going to allow it
to read as a lip sync mouth but I don't do that step it's not going to understand that
it's going to be used for lip sync the lip sync behavior is specifically looking for
your mouth and by the way when I talk about lip sync behavior all your main behaviors
for your character or up here at the top you might not know that you can select this but
you can see this has a little visit than a mere puppet and a little late is next to it
and that ate means this character has eight behaviors that are pre added to it over here
so whenever whenever you import a Photoshop or illustrator file is going to automatically
add these behaviors to the character and we add these because these are basic behaviors
that almost every characters going to want you want your eyes to move around you want
to be able drive to hint you want the face to move all of these different things are
automatically added but if you don't want something you can always selected here with
the little menu icon remove the behavior and it will take it away the Cradle swap set with
table contents but I'm going to do it a little bit differently on the click the plus icon
down here crate swap set and I'm going to press enter and renamed this to Mel's now
I want to do is first bring in my default mouth and drag that in and I want that to
be my default some of the click the little default icon to make sure that's the one that
selected then I've got my three single mile smile smile smile surprised than frown I'm
just going to drag all three of those into the mouse swap set and they will all show
up as separate things the reason I'm doing this is because if I'm smiling I don't also
want my lip sync mouth to show up behind it or you know in place of it I want the smile
to kind of be take take over so let's set a few different keys for this let's do two
for the smile 3 and for frown and I'm as select all of these and slide them is latched as
my preferred it triggering methods but your mileage may vary and it finally let's take
that alternative Mouse group on a drag that in here again to my mouth swab said I will
set that to a five key and also latch and Alicia's rename that by hitting enter and
calling that sad for no. Let's see if everything is working as expected so the first one was
added to hand Swap and then they seen one hand right now if I press one is going to
change to the point and if I press it again it's going to go back to dance to that seems
to be working let's try the different nail shapes I did too for a frowny mouth and that's
working and you'll notice my lip sync is not overriding that says working just as I want
to buy / 3 is going to do this surprised mouth for is a smile and 5 is going to do my sad
Mouse set so now he's talking and he's sad about something and I was happy again and
always and always happy so I can you know do a bunch of these and try different expressions
and my character is starting to come to life little bit more he's got a little bit of additional
emotion next couple move on to the eyes of these different eyelid positions and up links
and what not to do remember our a multi frame sequence someone to do the same thing with
a select these go over to my behaviors and add the cycle layers behave and be pretty
similar to the mouth except I do want them to forward and reverse I do want the eyes
to be able to close and then open back again and then hold on last layer in case I hold
a blank I'm on my way ice to remain closed and looks like we'll finish this corrected
it stopped immediately it would stop mid blank and that could look kind of weird so these
feel like the correct settings for the blank State's right so normally I would drag and
mileage group over crate swap set and you know he was happy let's do that with seven
and let's do impressed is 8 and 1/2 as I noticed that I only tried in the right eyes groups
but I can actually do is combine these and do the left eye as well so the happy layer
for have for the left eye I'm going to drag that over top of the happy trigger I've got
here in a notice as soon as they do that I've got my two layers showing up down here my
left eye lids happy and my right eyelid happy so both of these layers actually as many layers
as you want I could select all of these and dragged him over top of here and my players
list is going to be really really long and he's all those things are going to be disappearing
by default when I press this trigger they'll all appear that is not what I want and do
that but you get the basic idea triggers can have as many layers groups whatever added
to them but do the same thing for impressed I'm going to drag the impressed layer over
here and with half I'm going to do half and finally for the blank I'm going to do the
left blank as well now here's a problem the blanks because of the default if I just triggered
them at just like this look what's going to happen if I go to record mode my character's
eyes are constantly close there in this default triggered state right where their concert
clothes and that's because the default is seen as the first thing that place until in
this case that blink is the first thing that gets triggered so there's a few ways I could
fix this I could go back into Photoshop instead of calling this right blank call this container
or something like that and then put the right blinker group inside of it that way it wouldn't
trigger I'm exactly as we're seeing right here but you know what for this character
I want to keep things easy and it's not a big deal it is blank is showing up at the
same time as these other things because for the most part these are kind of covering the
rest of his eyes so I'm going to do is just delete this from the swap set and this WAP
said I'm not going to add a default to sew the default is just can't be the open eyes
without anything and then if I press 7 for 9 which I'm in the latch hear those will show
up instead so I hold my eyes closed his eyes closed at least I think he is I can't see
the screen I hopefully he has and then if I press I was at 7 I'll do the happy eyes
and 8 he'll do the empress dies and 9l do the half eyes. Because the way I set it up
I can blink in this state and so you will see to have eyes with a blank at the same
time but I think that looks okay and that's an easy problem to fix later on if I needed
to edit out a blank or something like that next let's start to tackle that hair so if
you remember correctly I had my right side and all my little individual Independence
strands of hair here and my left side as well so what I want to do for each of these strands
is drag the origin of the Harrah's where would basically attach the head and then come down
here and get the angle tool automatically create a dingo tags handle and put it on the
end the tip of the hair somewhere around there like that and it's going to go through this
process for single strand of hair I might add some variety to because I don't want each
hair piece to move exactly the same so I might move to dangle like you no more on the tip
for this one and then a little bit further back for another strand of hair just to add
a little bit more variety so the hair is incompletely moving in the exact same direction okay so
I finished that I've got all my different hair strands let's go and see how this is
working by default well he's looking a little emo there gravity is going straight down at
as it normally does and that is affecting these long strands of hair they are attaching
at the root and then they're coming down now that's a pretty cool look like now you say
I could go for that but I think I want to hear to be a little bit stiffer and so I could
play around with gravity direction right I could change this to make the hair go up a
little bit more and that works pretty well but then that's all going to affect the hair
on the other side so instead of one physics Behavior that's kind of a global setting I
think I might want more control over my hair I want that longer strands on the one side
to move slightly differently than the smaller strands on the other side so I'm going to
go back to rig mode and see if I can fix this so when I go up to my Global behaviors here
I'm actually going to remove physics by clicking a little menu icon here and seeing remove
behavior and that's going to remove my Global behavior for physics and instead I'm going
to add it by selecting right side and left side simultaneously go down in add physics
there this is going to add a physics paper to each of these days look like brick icon
with little gear incited that means that a behavior has been added to my cycle layers
for the blank and in a few other places this doesn't really matter you can click through
this and it's a bunch of different things this is an alpha alpha layers transparent
it really doesn't matter it's not going to show up in your final piece it's just for
your own a clarification so okay so I've got my here still kind of flopping around here
to do is go into the characters right side and the right side of the screen but his right
side is the longer a hair so I'm going to do is try and I'm just going to change the
gravity Direction so it's up a little bit more now that's still looking a little too
floppy so I'm heading to your enemy to change the stiffness of little bit so let's try like
125% and that looks a little bit better to me that doesn't have too much weight I can
go super crazy right I could do one or zero and that's going to be you know zero gravity
crazy here I don't want that or I can do super hairspray and make it you know 200% and then
it's really stiff it's not going to move but you know play around with this and see what
works best for your style 125 is looking good for what I want in the little movements that
my character does that's going to give it a nice amount of bounce let's do the same
thing for the left side I'm in general that's looking pretty good I'm going to maybe move
it over a little bit kind of in the direction that the hair is going and I'll probably do
the same thing as stiffness of about 125 and now that I've set those parameters this is
not something I have to worry about anymore it's just what we call a secondary animation
so it's just automatically adding that physics at aspect to the hair as I move my head around
and I don't have to do any additional details or parameter changes a recording or anything
like that it just automatically happened and that's great being able to add these little
Dynamic elements your character can really help bring them to life and make the movement
feel a little less stiff and More Alive particular for something like the hair if you've been
making puppets for a while and want to add a little bit of extra Dimension and control
to your characters I would 222 additional videos to check out I'm not going to just
reiterate what is send another video is here because never won this is already running
pretty long but never to these are more advanced concepts that I think are better served through
a more dedicated video to the first video I would want you to is the arm ik tutorial
you noticed in this character now I've tagged the shoulders and in each of the arms I've
got elbows and wrists tagged as well and padding are my case just going to give me more control
over how the arms Bend so if you find your elbows or bending the wrong way or your arms
are looking wonky I would definitely check out that tutorial secondly you probably noticed
that the character has some really nice Parallax going on some shadows and some texturing is
hidden right now but if I turn those on you'll start to see it's nice watercolor texture
that's happening here beside their texture in his body views are just adding some extra
elements to help bring him a little bit more to life so if you're interested in learning
more about this text effects as a moving to head in the shadow is moving in the eyes and
the ears and all that stuff are moving simultaneously as well as check out the advanced rigging
tutorial for the sample character lead at the exact same principles apply to this character
you want him or her to we can move on to the recording process character animators little
different in how to record so if you've used Adobe animate or after effects or other programs
before you may be used to more of a keyframe cell recording where you set one post and
then you keyframe and he's into another Poe's character animator instead is all about acting
and Performing so it's more about think of it as like if you were recording a band you've
got your drums you've got your face you've got the vocals all that stuff you've got the
lip sync the eyes that had moved is the triggers all these different things are essentially
a multiple components that when you put them all together they create a compelling animator
performance and everything starts with the script and the words and the voice over so
the first thing that I want to do with any animated performance is bring in my initial
voice over so an important thing about bringing in voiceover for character animator recordings
character animator lip sync works best with raw microphone recorded audio not stuff that
you've mastered or processed or a mixture or anything like that you're going to get
the best results from just raw microphone audio so because of the way we set up our
file in audition if you can remember that I think it was like 5 hours ago when we talked
about you know a setting up your file and then you bring it into a multi-track master
session and then we're adding the effects over top of that another reason we did that
is because we still have that raw audio file that we can use it for the boy lip sync equality
project panel and a double click in the blank area and it can I can always go to file import
instead but I'm going to find that voice over I have done a horrible job of naming a things
over here master final lip sync all this stuff but I believe lip sync final is the one I
want so let's just don't follow my leave their organizer files a little bit better click
import and now we have this audio file that is also showing up and our project panel so
I'm going to do is drag this into my scene over here just into the campus over here and
you'll see the audio shows up down here at the bottom one small thing I always do is
drag my audio over just slightly so it's not it gives me a little extra time in the beginning
in case I'm getting my charger ready or you know as the physics simulation is starting
are the arms are getting in place you want to get yourself a little buffer room so you
don't have to start exactly at 0 0 0 you have a few seconds to kind of get started so now
that we've had this voice over file we are going to create the lip sync from it I'm going
to select my character down here and I'm going to disarm all of the behaviors except for
lip sync the shortcuts do that while you could just click you know all these red dots and
take forever but you can also hold down command on Mac or control on Windows and click any
red. And that's going to turn them all on or all off simultaneously so as I was saying
I only want to do lip sync so let's arm lip sync and you notice right now it's not doing
my eyes it's not doing my head it's not doing drag or anything like that it's only focused
on lip sync and that's because that is the only thing that's armed whenever you see a
red. It means it's ready for record think of red as ready it's ready to record in the
case of a pre-recorded audio track on a do is go to a timeline compute lip sync from
seeing audio and that's going to go through the process of analyzing that audio track
giving me all of the individual Mouse shaped as if I were a recording that live so this
is the process I am constantly using when I record an audio track in audition I bring
that audio in I added to my scene and I do timeline compute lipsing from seeing audio
so you can see that added a new track in my timeline called lip sync audio input and visit
use the visual Mouse shapes that your character has those things they were in your mouth mouth
group in the Photoshop file so I can actually own off I don't need to add anything else
my lip sync is good I don't need to polluted with any other information and lets you man
I'm just going to press the plus key here to look a little closer and you'll see as
I'm kind of dragging through here every shape every Mouse shape is showing up down here
down below and so this is great I can see exactly you know when I say particular word
to know later step we're going some further editing of the lip sync track and make sure
everything is looking exactly right and all the mouse shapes are lining up as you would
want but for now this is what I want because now I can base all my next steps of Animation
off of this audio track because now I can tell when the character is happy when they're
sad what they're saying at any moment when did Jesters like this with their pants so
the talk track is the perfect starting point for your animation and that's why you want
to do that as your first step lip syncs done I can now move on to whatever other aspect
I want an activity you know Dragon the arms around that could be the eye gaze that could
be face movements that can be triggers person the different buttons to make different things
happen but you could do all these at the same time right I had these alarms I press the
record button and I can record my performance from me I find it I can't keep track of multiple
things in my head at the same time I feel like I get better results 20 focus on one
element at a Time start with i gaze so just focus on eye gaze I'm going to disarm the
other elements and now you'll notice the only thing that's moving around are the characters
pupils default i gaze is set to camera input and that's the reason why it's showing my
webcam of people movement is dictating where the pupils are going for the character but
first recorded pieces that's great for Life stuff but for me personally for recorded pieces
I want an extra degree of control and so I will usually disarm camera input and do keyboard
input instead and now when I press the arrow keys is going to allow me more precise control
over where those pupils are going now I like coming out of your eyeball or they feel too
subtle you do have control any strength parameters down here so since I have keyboards strength
I'm using the keyboard I can bring this down movies are going to be really subtle you can't
even really tell they're moving or I could bring it really far up and now the people
are going to go completely out of the eyeball so you don't want that for me I I change I
went with 75% which is not quite to the edge of the eyeballs but it gives it enough movement
that it feels like it's going to add add some life to him know what I'm thinking of performance
I'm mixing a few elements number one there's a certain degree of Randomness right as we're
talkin we're not just staring blankly at the end of the viewer we want to kind of tartar
eyes to the side and then maybe down and up and do a few things like this so just adding
this I am a little variety making it feel making the eyes not feel lifeless and staring
blankly the second thing that I'll mix with it is certain phrases so I might say something
that the character feels a little introspective about right so he's kind of looking up into
the corner and thinking about something or maybe he's making a hand motion and he wants
to look down at his house as you're listening to your talk track are there certain phrases
where your character might want to be looking in a specific Direction and that includes
as your thing about your composition later on after effects okay I know that have this
big chart in the corner over here or I know none of these things floating around my character's
head so you can address those and connect the character to those Elements by making
him stare at where you think they will go now this is always send you can go back and
fix later on so as if he's looking the wrong way or whatever don't worry too much about
your church is going to be and where does graphical elements are going to be connecting
them with the pupils is a really strong technique a really handy tool that helps you make really
precise recordings is slow motion recording so this is something I'm using all the time
so next year is next to the red record icon here I've got playback speed if I cook this
whole number here I see playback speed and recording speed 1/4 3/4 recording speed .75
X that is what I normally do this allows me to see think hear things when I'm recording
slightly slower playing at 3/4 speed and that means I have a little bit more time to react
and do things and move around as opposed to doing it at full speed when everything if
I'm doing it I'm reacting to things it might feel a little bit late and all my deliveries
so when I hear someone say he's happy and then a second later I'm like oh yeah I need
to be happy hour or something like that when things are moving slower and if you go too
slow and you can't understand anything they're saying so I prefer The Sweet Spot is that
is that .75 X because that's going to get it a little bit slower than normal but not
too slow that you can't understand what's going on so let's just give this a try so
I've got ideas I'm ready I'm at the beginning of my and I will hit record a little countdown
will happen and we will start to record with this sort of thing is I just keep on recording
until I mess up right so I'm looking around and maybe sometimes I might do you know kind
of igetter and it doesn't you know book exactly like I want so in that case I'll stop all
either press the record button or press the spacebar as a shortcut and I will just kind
of dragged back a couple of seconds and then press report again and start the process all
over again now this is not recording you know it's not overriding your previous performance
all this doing is creating a second take so you are just kind of you know hat here's my
second performance here's my second try at things and there's going to be some overlap
there right so let's just stop this for now and show you exactly where that transition
happened so if I scroll back here I can see here is my initial take this take one down
here but then here right around 12 seconds is where I started my second take normally
when you are transitioning between one take in the next you want to blend performances
together so here's my bottom one and you see where it's kind of dark in here that means
something over top of it is taking over so whatever is up here is kind of overpowering
what's down there but if I drag this little blind handle over here you can see that changes
its kind of mixing anywhere where there's a curve here that means it's taking part of
performance 1 and blending and performance too and so it's a much more natural way to
blend all your performances together and make it look like you got everything right the
first time when in fact it might be multiple performances strung out together for me and
my Blends are usually pretty short and honestly with this case it looks like with the eye
gaze not much is happening the eyes aren't moving at that particular part so I don't
even really need to blend in this case but a lot of times with head movements with arms
with some other things we will see a blending having a dramatic effect okay so now let's
say I've gone through that whole 5-minute performance and I've done my eye gaze it's
good to go it looks great I'm going to disarm that I'm done with eye gaze and then move
on to another element so let's try Dragon moving the arms around the way I set up tracker
is I will first record a short pass of the arms being in a rest pose and then I will
add and blend other small gestures on top of that I'll show you what I mean so I might
go back to the beginning here and make sure his arms and I'm going to put my arms and
kind of a neutral rest position always starting from and going back and forth from at during.
You know the whole piece so that was pretty good they're kind of off screen right here
but there's a little bit of been to them so I know they're going to be easy to move up
and make certain gestures with soap that looks good I'm just going to press record for you
know a couple of seconds keep them in place and stop and you know what that's going to
do two different tracks here now I didn't name my Handles in the original of rig emotes
you see as his handle parentheses handle parentheses if I wanted to change that I can actually
just double-click on a Dave here in asking to bring me into range mode and then let's
find those those Dragon Ball handles right so here this handle is currently just tagged
as drag ball and left wrist but if I press enter I can actually name that handle into
something different so this character that's his left hand so I'm just going to type in
left hand quick OK and now in very tiny text down there it says left hand let's do the
same thing for the right arm on the selected the Dragon Ball because if that's what's the
drag her behavior is controlling it select at it's also Texas right wrist because I've
got our Mighty on this character and I'm going to hit click enter and we're going to call
this I tan so now we have those two things so if I go back to record know now things
are a little bit clearer I can see that this track is my right hand and this track is my
left hand just makes things a little easier as you're trying to manipulate in blame things
in and out so because I want this These Arm positions to remain stationary and fixed I'm
going to do is a slight both of these on the price of minus a few times so I'm doomed out
a little bit and then I'm just going to hover over the edge of them until I get this little
arrow icon and just going to drag all the way through the entire length of the peace
and that means my characters are going to be stuck in that rest position for the entire
duration of the of the timeline now I can start to play things back listen to them and
think about how my character might be just rain based off of what's being said so I do
a few techniques I will do you know the arm up I will do a gesture when I'm talking like
this on certain words I know with this hand I have a little point on that I'm going to
do for a trigger it later on so sometimes you know raise their hand up and say you know
I know I'm I'm all worried about that later though I'm in it sometimes I also do where
he's like you know kind of scratching his head or putting it like this as you thinking
about same reason barest about something so few things like that normally I am a alternating
between the arms so if you watch the video you'll notice a lot of times he's moving with
his right hand and then he will switch over to his left hand for another gesture and then
to the right and this is just to add a little bit of diversity would do my Drager overdubs
are the little gestures that the characters doing so let's go back to the front of the
timeline that characters armed Draeger's armed slow motion recording speed everything's looking
good so let's press record you said everything is becoming a subscription nowadays so for
that I'm going to just everything is becoming a subscription nowadays bring that down and
stop just like that so I'm only recording for a few seconds but I had this nice little
gesture that my character is doing a based off the audio that I'm hearing and then what
am I to do is add the blending so if I did not add the blending here's what is going
to look like let's go back Place pack stalking does his gesture and watch the hand so it
just stops right there and it kind of clicked into place if there's his jumpiness there
that's not no that's going to be off screen with this character kit because it's below
the torsos that's okay but with his other arm you would definitely see that happening
and just as a general rule I try to blend all performances together so instead want
to do is do a very very small blind here at the beginning and end usually it doesn't have
to be very long it can beat you know just that you know one tenth of a second or something
like that it can be very very short to allow it to blend and look a little smoother so
watch it this time we'll see how this looks and so there was a little jump there you can
tell where it went back in place but one thing I could do is re-time this so I can see I'm
scrubbing here and I say okay that's when it goes down then drag the edge here backwards
so my blind is happening at the exact same time when my arm is going down and this is
going to look even better so watch this I think okay so there's still a little bit of
a jump there but it looks a little bit nicer I might adjust the blend I might need to try
a few things see what looks best that look the best of all so it's a constant play back
and forth thing and then I will move on to the next step so I'll say OK mini you know
I just did his his right arm there so let's move on to the left arm instead she lets you
record and it's the same thing I'm going to take this I had blending into the other opposed
and then let's move on and so this is my process I just keep recording in these very short
spurts trying you know different gestures if it doesn't work I just undo try again and
keep blending these small gestures over top of that General foundational arrest post so
how's this going to look when you're all done well this is the final project that that I
eventually brought into After Effects this is the final look of the timeline and let
me just click the tilde key here to make this full screen and this is what my dragon looks
like for just one of the hands and in my other hand this is what that one looks like so you
get this kind of staircase basically of very short performances so I'm doing exactly what
I was saying I just blend in these very short gestures and I do it for each of the hand
editing this can be very unwieldy right so it can be you know just really difficult to
say okay so at this time what is happening here and you're scrolling between you know
a hundred fifty or so takes a G6 takes it can be kind of crazy right so wait I prefer
to deal with things is actually twirling this up so these little icons here will twirl things
up and then let's go back to under the main timeline you can see let's zoom in a little
bit that I've got my different takes and I can actually select them here and do on my
blending or moving around directly at this at this level so this is a much more in condensed
view on the role of you on as we like to call it and I think it's just easier to use you
can kind of see everything at one glance sometimes when you see something like this that means
I have selected the underlying a background track so that's the rest pose at the hands
and anytime it's just one of these with a blind handle that means it's the track that
I did and blue the performance over top of rice is done so I'm going to disarm that and
I'm going to instead arm face now most of the time that's all you have to do this character
is a little more complicated because he's got a bunch of extra fees behaviors for The
Parallax on some just going to make sure I have all those selected but generally with
simple characters all you have to worry best performance a common thing that I see in beginner
character animator performances is they want to move around all the time they want to you
know I have this constant live 121 jumpiness of your character in in traditional animation
we do we see more of what is called a pose to pose on style of Animation so I character
will start a 1 pose and then we'll kind of move to the next MMA slide adjustment and
that's what I think so when I'm performing my face performance I'm not really moving
all the time and being very jumpy I'm trying to be very deliberate in my poses and sometimes
pretty subtle it does not take a lot to have the character you know gesture back and forth
the rolled up into the face behavior is also control of your eyebrows so I'm as you're
moving your head you might also want to think about if your eyebrows are raised or lowered
or a few other things I'm if I go into my face Behavior here I can see you know I can
change the tilt of how much they are when they're in their race position or down I'm
up I got eyebrow strength how one-to-one are my eyebrow movements going to translate into
movement of his own eyebrows and then something I did for this particular character was move
eyebrows together is checked by default that's going to move him at the same time but there
were a few instances where I wanted you to know I brought a raise a little bit or look
a little puzzled or that sort of thing so for this character I unchecked them and it
can lead to a little bit of Jitter every once in awhile but overall I'd like to the expressiveness
that it was giving me more so with all of this stuff play around these parameters see
what looks good for the quality of Animation that you're going for and and then go for
it with a face performance I'm not stopping and starting as much as I was with the dragon
performances I'm doing longer takes I think in the final video I may need only three or
four takes for the whole head performance because all you're really doing is you know
motion and posing between different things it's a pretty simple straightforward process
so and again I'm reacting to what he said it's a lot of times I will move my head at
the different changes so I'm looking at the waveform when he's talking and now I moved
for the next thing and I'm going to move here and so I'm just kind of watching the waveform
and listening to what he's saying and changing my poses on based off of that and because
this guy also is The Parallax II don't always have to move my head I can just kind of Twisted
a little bit to get some of that as well so play around with it again this I would much
rather do this than try to keyframe all of these into place I think it's a much more
natural easier faster way to do this type of character performance you know if this
takes even with slow motion recording does it going to take you know no more than what's
7 and 1/2 minutes I can't do math is that is that right I don't know anyway something
like that once I'm happy with how the face is looking I can disarm that and move on to
the last step at least for this character which is his triggers now with triggers I
will not try to address everything at the same time so I'm not thinking about doing
his eyes and his mouth is hand triggers I'm going to focus on one trigger area at a time.
So start with the simplest thing which would be the hands right there's only one hand that
is changing sometimes to a point so I know like 30 seconds and I know that he raises
his hand on his right hand and I want to do a point right there to remind me to do this
is I want a time to hand transition normally a well in this case is he really doesn't matter
but a lot of times I want you time to transition when the thing when the hand is in motion
so I really want to trigger it right around there when it's moving to help blind make
it not as clear cuz it's really obvious right now it's really clear that his hand is changing
and I want it to be more of a fluid kind of hit in the quality to it so let's try this
if I get the timing right and I'll do it back out wasn't perfect but it was a it was pretty
close so what I can do now is go back and edit a little bit more lips look at when this
point comes in if I look at my track right here I can see that hands as shown up and
that the name of my trigger which in this case was point is showing up as well so if
I wanted to make that point happen a little bit later I'm just going to drag that and
trim it in a little bit and then if I wanted it to happen a little bit earlier here I'm
going to track it like that now here's a nice thing is that I don't have to continue recording
triggers and keep on pressing one at the right time what I actually could do is extend my
take here just by dragging the edges I could find another part where the characters arm
was raised the same distance apart and I can actually just right click in this blank space
and I've got a choice between my different options now open as the default I don't really
care about that but point I just click that and you'll see it's going to make this very
shortly how far did I can then move around and manipulate so a lot of times I'm not even
pressing one I'm not trying to record I never actually press the record button I'm just
dragging around finding the appropriate place right clicking doing point and just adjusting
based off of that I feel like it saves a lot of time in the long run done to do it this
way it's just a little bit quicker not always have a new record weight make sure you get
the timing right go back and edit it it's kind of all-in-one a condensed up here the
same principle is going to apply to the mouth or the eyes so for example the eyes now so
I see that three will do his Happy Eyes for will do is impress dies and a two will do
the half eyelids so instead of doing the time for right now or you know the character also
has control panel here if I click the controls to have and that's it nicer visual way to
see things if you'd like to do it that way but I think things are going to add method
soap to do is let's go back to the beginning I'm a hit record for a second I will let it
record I will press two to do a half eyelid trigger press it again to on trigger it and
stop and what that's going to give me is my Lids take and in this one part where half
is showing up right so to play things back in in what we call edit mode as opposed to
live rehearsal mode to right now the reason when I'm over top of half and I'm not seeing
half triggered over there his eyes aren't at halfway down his legs are in a halfway
down like they should be it's because I still have this triggered it's ready to record and
it's ready for any new data to come in and that means it doesn't understand it's not
even care what's in the timeline it's looking for live data should I press 2 3 4 whatever
it's going to have that show up if I want to see specifically what's in my timeline
what I do for that is disarmed the character here and that just means my character is not
ready to record right now all I care about is just attending what's in the timeline so
anytime you want to switch between the live rehearsal mode and the recorded mode just
click on that disarmed it and now you'll be able to see things
for the entire length of the of the timeline so now that's extended I have a full tank
and I can start to right click and add new I positions and Celeste person plus a few
times to get back here and I can going to drag you know over here maybe at this point
he's feeling a little happy some of the right click and you'll see I've got my three options
that are in the swap sit here so happy and maybe that extends to hear and I'll drag down
a little bit and say okay here he's going to be a little bit impressed and notice when
you're dealing with this the reason I did the eyelid triggers after the pupils is because
what would happen if this was at a halfway instead do you see what happens here the pupils
are in some instances not going to work with your eyelid triggers and so you may that's
why I always do the pupil performance first cuz I want to make sure that the eyelids are
going to work well with them so listen to happy instead that's going to look a little
bit better and so I will just go through again the entire timeline listening and thinking
about when I want to add some variety I'm a lot of times I just some swapping back and
forth between his wide-eyed look and it's half I'd look and then sometimes I will occasionally
throw in these more extreme emotions of feeling impressed or happy and again or manipulate
them and a lot of times I will change them a based off of the waveform up here so I want
to start looking impressed when he starts talking about you know this one particular
fact that he's sane speaking from personal experience for me one of the most difficult
parts of editing is lip sync editing so honestly nine times out of ten the automatic lip sync
is going to do a great job and it's going to look like you know the right thing we're
using Adobe Sensei technology to say okay this is when you say in an hour ew all these
different sounds and if I dragged through my timeline here I can see exactly those shapes
showing up in my lip sync track but there's going to be times where you want to edit thanks
and something doesn't look right and so you have a lot of choice of your disposal here
so if I want this e shape instead to be an o i just right click it and I go to that oh
and then it's automatically going to switch to that if I wanted to happen a little later
or earlier or whatever I can manipulate that and move it around if I feel like there's
a visiting that's missing here right so if I feel like at this point you know there's
one syllable that I'm not quite hitting I can select this and I usually use the shortcut
but it's split and that's going to split it into basically right where this current time
indicator is it going to split it into an extra visiting and then I can right click
and add the appropriate sound that I want but I feel like for me I will do multiple
passes of lip sync editing and a lot of times I will lip sync editing until after I've rendered
a recording from After Effects when I can see everything running at is full frame rate
and resolution and against everything else and making sure that everything feels like
it's lining up correctly so the biggest thing that I look for are very clear mistakes right
so blips that are happening after the character stops you no talking her before they stop
start talking different things like that that are very clear issues then I'll start to look
for where there are long sounds that there should be more changes for and that's what
I'll do that split command to add a bunch of additional syllables and I'll look for
just things that don't that feel like mistakes where you know it's has no sound and it really
should be an S sound it doesn't feel like it's lining up a lot of times in general if
the mouth is more open Sound and the mouth is open is probably going to look okay or
closed its you know when it's more clothes sound like or something like again it's going
to look okay some regards to lip-sync adenine the biggest takeaway I would say here is do
what feels appropriate to your skill level if you feel like you can hit every syllable
exactly right your professional go for it would you do at the tools to allow you to
do that if you're more like me and you're more of an amateur in the sort of thing you
want to focus on those big glaring mistakes fix those and don't sweat the small details
I'm in general the automatic lip sync is going to work really really well better than if
you tried to do it manually yourself so don't lose sleep over it it's it's it's going to
be okay unless I'm going to take before I bring things into After Effects is to take
out the lip sync only audio track and instead bring in my full audio mix that has the background
music the guy yelling your crazy the processing where I made it the balanced meal voice so
it sounds a little louder a nicer so what I'm going to do is import final file I already
did that here but again you can go to file import or double click on a blank area and
here I think it was Master II was the one I wanted and so I'm going to drag that into
my scene and it's going to give me two audio tracks here but it should be the same length
if you are set everything up correctly and so they just dragged is over I should see
that the waveforms are lining up pretty much except this one looks a little bit taller
on because it's louder or process one has music in the background all of that and so
I can just delete this other track and I'm sad I do this because you know you could line
things up in After Effects later on but personally I feel like this is the better way to go because
now your lip sync and audio are always going to be connected 121 n o matter what you do
or manipulate in After Effects you can be ensured that the audio track and the characters
lip sing or going to be in sync with that you're done with character animator if you
recording process you've added all these different components together the eyebrows to face the
mouth the arm gestures the triggers all of this stuff it finally comes together when
you know play this back and you see the character has a real sense of emotion and Life to them
it's always really gratifying to see when it all comes together and you get this really
nice performance all right so what the heck am I looking at here so this is a Photoshop
file did I have added a bunch of layers in that I know I'm going to manipulate later
on in After Effects this is my supplemental artwork so remember earlier in the tutorial
when we drew out all the different things we wanted our character to react with you
know the different graphs and charts and icons and all of that stuff that's what I'm starting
to create here so this is not you know I'm building it up one time I normally am not
looking at it like this until I'm ready to export it out but what I normally do is okay
I've got my background layer here and then I'm going to start trying one asset in this
case this was this you know penguin Quest video game that I created I actually made
that in its own group that some multiple layers that are put together and did that and then
I went on to the ultimate version start working on this and then I knew that I wanted the
different prices to fly out of the bottom of the the boxes and so I did those and so
all I'm doing is going through that Sketchbook and showing all these things that I know I'm
going to manipulate I want to make them all at a decent size in reality they show up a
lot smaller in the final piece but I want to make sure they're big enough that they're
not going to get pixelated if I do have to scale them up or down or anything like that
except for this case because this is supposed to be a pixelated indie game you know what
you're doing all these pieces together and I'll just turn them all on before I bring
them into a After Effects because if you want to make sure I can access them all and then
I can move them individually as layers and position rotate scale all the stuff that we're
about later on but I made like you know three main files for this in this so here is games
number one on this the first section here's games number 2 and games number three and
basically I just split it up so the file you know one file wouldn't be have everything
in it in there that actually got corrupted or I mess something up that it wouldn't mess
up the the whole video some things are just easier for me to do in illustrator so I also
had an illustrator document where I just drew a few things I'm using their pin tool and
they're more vector-based tools just because it felt more comfortable to me for certain
styles of drawing so you noticed a lot of these elements ended up showing up and I would
you know copy and paste them into the final Photoshop file but in terms of ease of drawing
it's okay to jump between different programs if you need to don't feel like you have to
do everything in Photoshop if you feel like going to be a little bit better in illustrator
or something on the iPad Pro or you know additional things like that another fantastic resource
that I used for this piece is the noun project. Calm and if you're doing an explainer in informational
Style video this is an excellent resource so let's say I wanted to do something about
newspapers so let's type newspaper click that in and all the sudden I get all these different
icons for newspapers this is a fantastic resource so I can say okay I'm really going with this
kind of shaded in your dark and style stoves click on this they can either choose to do
a pro download where you are a pain the Creator themselves are usually a pretty small amount
like three bucks here and then you don't need to do any attribution real thing like that
I did the basic download why I've got the Creative Commons license in there you've got
it include that as part of it and it's going to show up in the file itself but that was
pretty good you say okay I'm doing this for your art project or whatever and then you
can choose to do it in a ping or SVG file as a download finally I've made it into After
Effects this is where everything starts to come together the audio the character performance
all that supplemental artwork everything is going to start to hopefully make sense when
we bring it all in so let's begin by creating a new composition and I know that I want mine
to be 1920 x 1080 for this particular piece on the do 24 frames per second on because
that's what I did in my character animator peace and I'm going to click okay as a container
for all your different elements coming together so I'm going to double click in this area
over here and I could do that by file import as well and let's find my character animator
project to begin with so in this case it was called the aptly-named character animator
project 57 I don't know how to keep track of all the stuff but okay let's head open
and that's going to bring up my Dynamic link a dialogue now I have a few different things
that are recorded here under the few scenes were like animated character animator as well
read monster shows up as a cameo a few different things like that again I can only make sense
in my own file naming conventions I know that Dave to was the correct one so I'm going to
select that scene and click okay and what that does is bring in my character animator
project as its own timeline as its own asset and so I'm if I scrubbed around here it's
going to take a while after effects you have to render things they don't immediately show
up you can change your settings over here in the preview of panel so a lot of times
what I will do is when I'm trying to move things around and get things moving as quickly
as possible I'm going to set my resolution to quarter and I'm going to skip every two
frames that just makes it run a little bit smoother and allows you to see things a little
bit quicker they might be a little more pixelated they're not going to be perfect Final in a
broadcast-quality but they're going to be able to let you move run a little bit faster
okay so what's double click on the comp to go back to that and then going to select once
my crotch file my character animator project file I'm just going to drag that into my composition
so I had my composition open and then I dragged this asset this new character animator project
file in here and then I can manipulate I can just drag and move this character around and
put him wherever I want I think in the beginning the video he starts down here you got a few
options for manipulation and the way I do this is normally with just these keyboard
shortcuts and you just have to learn these this is just the way it goes if this your
first time learning After Effects I'm sorry it gets a little crazy at times but this is
how it works so if I want to reposition the character normally I'm just going to drag
over them like this but sometimes when you got a lot of stuff on your canvas up here
is going to be a little bit crazy so I'm going to press select it down here in my timeline
and press pee and that gives me position slow and so here's my Exposition and here's my
wife position I can't rag or I could type something in whatever and it's going to allow
me to do that the next one that I use quite a lot is SS is going to change scale of the
character and by default X and Y position are locked together but if you click the soul
link icon that's going to stop it and then you can make him stretch and do some goofy
things like that but for the most part that is not what I want so I'm going to undo all
those steps and make sure that's on the time that I had that link on and then since we're
going through some of these basic controls are is going to do rotation and that allows
you to rotate the character a little bit if you wanted to and then T4 opacity I'm sometimes
if I want the character to fade in and out these are just basic building blocks right
these are very simple steps positioning a scale rotation just really simple controls
but this is something I am constantly doing and scaling my characters around in one of
those a background file so let's just a double click here again to bring it in let's go to
my games folder and let's find one of those igames thing was just bringing Games 3 right
now so this isn't footage this is actually a composition and I'm going to do retain layer
sizes I want to keep the size of my layers as they are this is not a Photoshop sequence
so if that is checked I'm going to uncheck that and I'm going to click open it's going
to see this thing about Styles I emerged is fine with me but you can try it out depending
on what your ass hats look like all right so what did that do well that made this new
comp called Games 3 that shows up a base of my games free PSD and then all the layers
are showing up here in my file as well so if I double click on Games 3 S going to open
up that comp here and you can see any country have open or going to show up as tabs in your
timeline so if I want to go back to comp one I just click here right now and looking at
Games 3 you can see that is my whole layer order exactly as I had the Photoshop file
the only difference is not going to timeline attached to everything so every layer now
exists as something that exists overtime now there's a bunch of different ways to do this
some people love to Dupree calms some people like to bring in layers one of the time I'm
going to actually just select all of these by selecting one layer pressing command a
on Mac or control a on Windows and I'm done I'm going to press a command C to copy on
Mac and has control C on Windows and then I'm going to close that comp down and then
inside my nuke my original composition comp one I'm going to press command V and now all
of those elements are going to show up here now those about covered my main narrator guy
and normally I want him to be at the top so I'm just going to take him from the bottom
up here and now he's showing I had every sense of all of this you know basic illustrate it
looks like an illustrator just threw up on the screen right there's no limit to be able
to make sense of all this so what I'm going to do is Select these layers I'm just going
to hold down shift and select multiple layers I'm just going to drag all of these kind of
out of the way maybe three minutes in or something like that so I've only now got my character
the paper background is showing up here and then all these other elements I'm going to
sandwich in between so let's say I'm starting this section with you know this penguin Quest
3 box that's coming in and this show up as a computer because this was a group inside
a Photoshop second one to manipulate any of the individual elements here I can just double-click
p q and that's going to show up as its own composition I want that to be a little bit
more transparent I can select that presti photo shops original pasty there was 50% but
if I wanted to change it to 25 do that here so you can do a little bit of manipulation
here most times I'm going to go back to the original Photoshop file if I manipulating
the artwork but there's a nice tricks you can do here so it's X out of that go back
to remain calm and now it's time to start thinking about how things are animate in and
out so let's press plus few times or a little bit closer in and now I'm a two-second 3-second
and I know I'm kind of working at 24 frames-per-second let's start to manipulate this I'm going to
select a p q penguin Quest layer on a PS4 scale and I'm just going to scale it down
a little bit that looks pretty good and then I'm going to use my selection Arrow appear
selection tool and let's see this is basically where I wanted to end up going to change for
the origin is I don't want this to be this little cross everything that's going to like
the origin to Anchor Point of where things will rotate or scale around if I go up to
this hand behind anchor tool and just drag the anchor over to the middle of the box that's
going to work slightly better so anytime it looks like things are scaling or moving a
rotating weird it's probably because the Anchor Point is somewhere completely different I'm
depending on your competition okay so if I know this is where I want this particular
piece to end up I'm going to press key for position and I'm going to click the little
stopwatch icon it's right here that is going to create what we call a keyframe so that
scene at this moment this is the these values right here this is the position that I want
you to have okay so that looks pretty good but let's say many half a second before I
wanted to be off of the screen so I'm just going to drag the CTI to where I you know
where I wanted to start from and then I'm just going to drag it off the screen like
this or a lot of times what I'll do is just manipulate the values down here until I can
get it off the screen and you'll notice that automatically created this new keyframe down
here so what's going to happen is as I scrubbed through you can see it's going to kind of
do the in-between it's going to say okay at this time at 1 and 1/2 seconds you're off
the screen at 2 seconds your this part of the screen so I'm going to fill in the middle
the in-between part and get it from point A to point B and I press the spacebar key
it's going to take a second to render but it's going to go kind of slow and choppy but
you can see what's happening here it's slides in from the left to the right and we start
seeing things here that means it's rendering it's got rendered frames for your video and
so the next time you go and play it back it's going to move a little bit smoother so a lot
of times when you're injuring things you will you let it render let it kind of chug along
and then go back to the beginning and watch everything at a slightly smoother rate so
that's pretty good I think I also wanted to rotate though at the same time so I want to
be able to still see these keyframe still while I'm bringing it in as rotation so I'm
going to do is still with my penguin Quest comp selected is pressed shift and are and
that's also going to bring up rotation now to make sure I'm on the exact point same point
that this keyframe was I'm going to use these little keyframe a controls over here some
to press the right arrow and when this lets me move between my different keyframes left
and right when this is blue that means it's on a current keyframe and now because I know
that's where it's going to be off the screen that's in a kind of position a for it, click
rotation as well and that's going to create a rotation keyframe and then if I click right
here it's going to move to that other extreme position and I create another keyframe there
and I wanted to kind of Romaine up like that but as it's coming in actually when it's off
screen I think I wanted to rotate a little bit more so I'm going to press the hold down
the space bar and I'm just going to click and drag it so I can still see my mean even
though it's off the main screen and in this case I think I want to rotate a little bit
I'm so it has this nice slide and it kind of rotates into place as it's coming in now
now I'm noticing that you know the box is not looking that you peeking over the edge
and that's not what I want to do something calculate the position just a little bit so
it starts off of a screen so it looks a little nicer if I wanted to I could press shift an
S and that's also going to let me see scale at the same time and in so I can click here
gets scale maybe I wanted to actually was make my I want to make my chuki friends first
cuz I always want to have my rest position I want to have my you know final position
where it ends up and then when it starts let's say I wanted to be a little bit more scaled-down
so let's bring that down and then spacebar and I can see that all come together if I'm
being honest what I just showed you is 90% of all I did in this video I am just manipulating
objects coming in and out of the screen and moving around and scaling and rotating and
fading and position and all of that stuff while the character talks over on the side
of the character is you can manipulate him or her in exactly the same way that you are
manipulating your other stuff so if I wanted this character for example to scale up and
go to the middle of the screen I could do to make sure that P is preposition I mean
press shift in S4 scale and I'm going to keyframe both of those and then let's say have a second
later I wanted to show up here and all I'm going to do is Click these little diamonds
to add a new key frame and then let's do something where he skills up like that I probably don't
want to go to High over 100% or he's going to look pixelated and then I'm going to drag
him over here to reposition him and now you can see that over time he's going to move
and scale up slightly actually does make him a little bit smaller to begin with so it's
a more of a dramatic effect so it's go down there something like that and then I was just
using the arrow keys by the way to move around and let's see how this looks now any scales
up like that when I've decided I'm done with penguin Quest I wanted to leave I will just
basically click and drag over top of these to set one more keyframe and then let's press
plus to see a little bit closer where we are half a second later I'm going to click all
these again and then I'm going to start manipulating the values and bring it back out so let's
rotated back like this but scale it down and let's bring it out of the frame like that
so the whole thing would look something like this for this manipulation he comes in and
stays there and then it's going to slide out there for me I'm currently done with this
right I don't want it kind of sticking around here in the background of me that's not hurting
anybody over there but for the cleanliness of the timeline I'm going to actually cut
this off here in the way I'm going to do that is press option and bracket on a right bracket
on the Mac and I think that's all and ride bracket on a PC and that's just going to make
it basically disappear so now you know 10 seconds in that is not there anymore that
layer is not visible to that just helps make your timeline a little bit easier once you
have done that step I'm going to add some easing to the keyframes this is just a nice
Finishing Touch that's going to make it feel a little bit not as robotic not as you know
it's in one position and then crudely it moves in the next position it's just going to feel
nicer it's just going to look professional just trust me on this one so Marquis select
all of these and I'm just going to click function f 9 and that's the shortcut for that function
of the Mack I have to press down the FN key and an S9 you also have the ability to right
click and go to keyframe assistant I usually use Eazy-E's you have a ton of different options
though I'm to be able to make this and as fast or as slow as you want but from me a
lot of the time I'm fine with just using EZ 8 now kind of cheese is in a little bit nicer
and eases out it's a little bit subtle it would look better in the final piece but you
get the idea so once I'm done with that I'm ready to move on to the next thing so let's
say you know the Nexus is Starbucks coming in so few times I'll drag this piece over
I will press plus to move in a little bit closer and I will start to manipulate the
same way positioning scale rotation all of that stuff exactly like we just saw so this
is where the final project looks like at least one third of it I ended up splitting into
three parts to this is games and then here is games and game seat so I know this can
look really overwhelming if this is your first time in After Effects I certainly felt that
way when I pick this up you know over 15 years ago when I was first learning After Effects
it's something that's going to take time and something that there's no way I'm going to
be able to cover everything and you know this tutorial but it just want to show you kind
of the end result of picking up these basic position scale rotation changes that solve
it's really happening here so it was such a look at some of the stuff step by step so
the character skills down you'll see that rotating behind the insta sock all I'm doing
is you know position rotation scale stuff very simple I had the second character that
came in rotation you can start to see scale all it is you know when you really break it
down it's just really simple transform things that are happening to a couple of tips that
might help along in your animation process if this is your first time using After Effects
number one she was calling right here with a little ball icon that is motion blur if
you're not seeing it click this little toggle switches modes down here and that's going
to switch between your you know your blending modes and some other stuff I'm in instead
show you is this column you want to click this to toggle I make sure it's on for everything
if you see something like this that as a little line that means it's a an inside the camp
you would want to make sure that all those things are a have motion blur on as well and
into enable motion blur you want to make sure if this is set to Blue that this icon is toggled
blue which means as things move around motion blur is going to happen so even in this state
I should be able to see things a little bit blurry as they transition and move yeah you
can kind of see that in between it's just as a nice professional touch everything looks
a little bit nicer when you add a little bit of motion blur the second thing sometimes
you want multiple elements to move together at the same time so for example $60 down here
and penguin Quest 3 these are two separate elements but I do want the $60 to kind of
always move with penguin Quest 3 two players here I can see that $60 this year and penguin
Quest is here to connect $60 so it's going to follow wherever penguin Quest goes I cook
this little a swirly icon here click and drag and we call this the pic Whip and so I'm going
to pick whip $60 to penguin Quest and now it's going to show up as this is connected
this is linked to penguin Quest so now when I moved it around what was happening $60 is
moving around at the same time so this is something I'm doing consistently I am always
moving multiple things together in fact at any given time in this composition there's
almost always something moving even if it's just an icon on the screen there's probably
some subtle scaling going on or there's multiple elements that are moving at the same time
so I use this a lot and you can see that here parents and Link you see that a lot of stuff
is linked to other things I want multiple things moving at the same time and that includes
something called a no layer so sometimes you want multiple things to move at the same time
but you don't want just one layer to control them all you kind of want an invisible force
to to move them all and that's where an ulcer so I do this a lot as well I'm going to go
to layer new No Object that's going to create basically this invisible little handle that
I'm going to be able to connect things to so if I want the credits for example to move
with no 47 I'm just going to pick with the credits to know 47 and now let's go back to
where the credits are which is at the very end here I can move the credits on their own
sure you know I can I can manipulate them like that but because they're connected to
know 47 I can also manipulate no 47 and I can keep frame it and I can do whatever I
want and I can connect as many things as I want to a single know and that gives me a
great level of control so if I have multiple elements icons or objects that I want to move
and scale at the same time I'm just going all to annul layer and then manipulate that
no layer instead of a physical artwork layer General take away hear my general advice is
used After Effects at the level that you feel comfortable with if you are a beginner just
do this basic position skill rotation transformed as a motion blur do if you know objects it's
going to look pretty great still and as you advance in as you use after effects or do
other tutorials online and continue to learn the program you can continue to add new stuff
and layers on top of everything all right so once you're done with all of that I've
got this one Mega compa games Megamix we're actually put three different cops that broke
up things in three different sections and then combine them all together by the black
solid feet out at the end over top of the credits but that's how I set mine up just
make sure whatever you have is selected over here and then go to file export add to Adobe
Media encoder queue up Adobe Media encoder and this allows you to render out your final
piece in the best possible quality so you might see different defaults hear a different
mov file or something like that I'm just going to click on whatever is here am I format and
then I'm going to see my full export settings know you have a lot of different options here
of the type of format you want there's some presets in terms of in a professional studies
that are going to look as good as possible and you can scrub through and see you know
different frames at full quality to see kind of get an idea of what they're going to look
like this is helpful to because if you're like you know size penis different or same
like that you're going to see black bars or pixelation problems or things like that so
it's helpful to see this as a little preview for me these are great h.264 and match Source
high bitrate those are for what I'm trying to go for output name was call is something
different of me to click on this and they save change the destination folder to somewhere
where I could actually find it would you be on the desktop and let's just call this game's
draft a draft trust me you were going to see mistakes you're going to want it added stuff
we're going to do this your first version is always going to be a trap so just trust
me on this one everything else is looking good size 2 framerate something to click okay
and what's ready to go click the little green play icon and now you can go grab a snack
wrap a coffee whatever you want because the rendering process has started and this little
sliver of blue over here in about what an hour and 15 minutes that's going to be finish
rendering so yeah rendering at full quality is going to take some time to Addle the motion
blur to add everything together looking as good and sounding as good as it does it's
not something that happens instantaneous so is it going to take a while just let your
computer said once your video file is finished rendering open it up and grab a notebook and
pen and watch it and when you know this mistake when it looks like you know the lip sync isn't
lining up correctly or a character isn't moving as quickly as you would want or anything that
you see stop it make a note of what time it's at and make a little note about it so I will
do this several times several iterations with every video I think I did this three or four
times with this video where I watch the whole thing multiple times I took a big laundry
list of notes of things that I wanted to fix both in you know all the way in the original
Photoshop artwork either for the character or the supplemental assets to the character
animation if it felt like the lip sync wasn't looking right at a particular part or his
you know emotions or stuff didn't fit with what was happening in the scene finally all
the things in After Effects and a lot of times that's you know things lingering on the side
of the screen that you thought were gone or oops I forgot to add motion blur to this particular
logo wear that sort of thing watch it several times go through the steps of rendering out
a new video watch it again and keep doing that until you only see like two or three
mistakes that no one else is going to see in your like okay that's alright so that's
it that is the whole process so we went all the way from just basic words on a page some
scribbles in a notebook all the way to this final rendered piece that looks pretty good
so this whole project from beginning to end probably took me about five or six days I
would say and that includes the script writing the carriage creation the recording the editing
all the composite in all the art asset Generation all of that stuff so yeah this is going to
take some time if you're going to want to let you know if you want to make a 5-minute
explain Her Style video like this if not something that you're going to just snap your fingers
in can I get done it does take time and effort to put together but for me character animator
really is the missing link in all of this allows me to have a narrator a character that
goes through the entire process and is relatively fun and easy to animate instead of fiddling
around with little keyframes are trying to make things you know look like they're natural
I just talk and Act Naturally and it translates into a cool animated performance so I hope
this was a helpful look at my process this is just one way of doing things this is the
way that I do things there's all sorts of different ways and Avenues in and out of creating
a cool animated video but I'm for me this worked well let me tell my story in a fun
animated way and I hope it I helps you as well. I using the techniques that we learned
in today's tutorial I want to see what you create so please share it on social media
with hashtag character animator and if none of this is making sense or you got stuck at
a certain part or anything like that the best place for help is the official Adobe character
animator forums where people from the team or the community can help answer your questions
thank you very much for watching and have fun.