now let's animate. So what I like to do when I create my character is to duplicate this composition. Just so I have another draft of it. If I ever want to go back, refresh, restart, I can do that. So I'm going to take the hero to layer, duplicate it and I'll just name this one hero to draft. Okay. And I'll just put that in the compositions folder if you want to look at it too. Okay, so for a hero to No, we still have our hero too. I'm actually just going to close out all of these other tabs and I'm closing those out by pressing command. W that's the shortcut for that let's animate. So in our other one actually let me open that back up, we animated the legs. So he sort of kneels down, he gets ready with his arms and then he springs up and there's also a little subtle like deeper little push and then he jumps up. We're going to do something similar, but he's just gonna sort of do a squat and then lift up. So what we need to do is animate both the legs and the arms right now. So starting ...

with the legs which seems to be the most obvious thing to animate first. Let's open up our leg well right and leg left. Go into contents and we're going to be animating the path. So I want to open the path of both of these so we have it easily accessible. Okay, zooming in. Okay, so to get that squat action first, we want to set a key frame here at the beginning. So he's going to be standing there for just a moment to set a key frame for path for both legs left and right, then go forward. Maybe a 2nd or so. And now in the path we want to creates sort of a bend. So we're going to take this point. We're going to bring it up a little bit so it's a little bit shorter. But then take the extension and drag up. So we get that sort of bend. Now for the leg left. Let me just show you something so that you understand what's going on. If I just click left leg and then I try clicking on this. Whoa. That's not exactly what I wanna do. You gotta click into the path. Okay. And so we're going to bring it up to about the same point. And then bandit just like so kind of match the bend. Something like so we can even bend inside too if we want. But I'm not going to do that. So that looks kind of close but you'll notice something funny happening. He's bending his legs but he's not squatting down. What the heck? So what we need to do is animate the torso as well. But how do we know exactly where we want him to squat down to? That's where we use rulers. Now. You might have noticed that I have these rulers open. If you don't have those open, go to view show rulers or press command. R. See you now what I can do and if you've used adobe illustrator or Photoshop this is similar. We can click within the ruler on either the top or the left and dragged into our composition. And this creates sort of an invisible just for our reference. A line that we can use. And I'm gonna put that right there at the bottom. That's where his feet are. Right. Okay so now what I can do with the torso press P. To bring up position. I can set a key frame right there where our first position key frame is for the path the first path key frame is I'll go to the second key frame just by pressing K. On my keyboard and I'll drag down. Okay so now it looks like he's actually squatting down now. We might want to make this a little bit more extreme actually. So what I can do is bring him down further closer to the ground and then that gives us a better reference for how much we need to bend our path. So let me go again into our path one not just the path because if I take the path and I take my selection tool it moves the whole path Click Path one. I know it's confusing and I keep repeating myself but I know this is confusing for a lot of people. Let's take our leg up like so and then make even more of a bend now with our other one take our path like left, just like that. Okay, let's take this one. We can even take this one in for the other one too. That might actually look good. So let's rotate this like, so okay, so now if we zoom out, we get more of a squat. Okay, the one thing is that the legs kind of blend in with the arms, so actually for the leg, I'm going to change the color so I'm gonna select both legs right and left. Take the not in the film but the stroke and make it a little bit darker. So we just have a little bit of a difference in color from the legs and the hands in case they cover each other up. Like so awesome. So that looks pretty good. We actually, one thing I realized is that I don't want the feet to move apart, you know, this is just playing around with it. So I'm gonna move this point in just a little bit at this point in, okay, that looks better and we'll play around with the speed of this stuff too, which will make it look better. Okay, so the legs go down and maybe when the lights go down, the arms kind of go up and the elbows like point up. So let's close our legs. Okay, now go into our right arm and left arm going to contents shapes, path, shape path, go to the first key frame set a key frame for path, so we'll start there and then if we go into here, let's zoom in, click on our path, we can bring this up like so Okay, bring the elbows in something like that. I think that looks pretty good. Take our other path, bring it up, rotate our arm around. Okay, something like that. Okay, that looks pretty good. Crouches down, That's pretty good. Okay, let's play through this. Crouches down and then he needs to spring up so we'll send another key frame for around here a second later. So let's just copy all of our key frames. Press you on our keyboard and then you again to see all of our key frames and let's just copy them copy paste, copy paste. Or just click this little key frame button on the far left, which creates a key frame based off of the other key frame that was previously set, so now it sticks down there and then we'll have a shorter sort of jump up. So what we can do is just actually copy these first key frames but we might want to I don't know if our I think our arms, I guess our arms when we jump, we probably putting them down, but a superhero is going to put his arms up, right? So instead of these key frames for the arms, let's make our arms go up. So again we have to go into our arm path layers itself, move them up. I'm sure the rotation is right, just like so okay, maybe one arm is up, One arm is down. You can do whatever you know kind of motion you want? Okay, so now let's zoom out and see how this looks. Yeah, that looks pretty good. Arms go up. No like so so let's play through this. Crouches down, springs up. Cool. Okay so now let's play run with the motion or the speed. So again press you you again select all of these key frames F nine on my keyboard or right click key frame, assistant easy ease. Now when he crouches into this key frame we want to slow it down. So let's go into our crafting graph editor. Select this point which is now selected for all those key frames I've selected. So it's going to slow into that Crouch and then it's gonna be like a pop. So let's take both of these key frames in at the end. Yeah, that's good. That's good. Looks like he's popping off the ground. So now this looks like good motion, he's jumping up but we need to add some context to it and that's what we're going to be doing with adding a background

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Philip Ebiner

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Animating Our Character

Animating Our Character

Lesson Info

87. Animating Our Character

Lessons

Class Updates & My Favorite CC 2020 Updates

Understand the After Effects Workspace

Starting a New Composition

CC 2018 Update - Starting a New Composition from Footage

Adding Media to Your Project and the Timeline

Using the Basic After Effects Tools

Create a Perfect Circle, Alignment, and Shape Colors

Working in the Timeline

Layer Properties

Quiz: After Effects Basics

Animating in After Effects

Position, Scale, and Rotation Animations

Tips to Make Your Animations Look More Nautral

Using the Graph Editor

Challenge - Bouncing Ball

Solution - Bouncing Ball

Quiz: Animating with Keyframes

Working with Solid Layers and the Ken Burns Effects

Working with Shape Layers, Strokes, and Paths

Adding Layer Styles like Drop Shadow, Bevel, and Gradients

Shape Effects - Trim Path Animations, Wiggle, and Zig Zag

Quiz: Shapes and Solid Layers

Track Matte Animations - Make Layers Appear and Disappear

Using Pre-Compositions to Group Layers

Easily Reverse Complicated Animations

Playing with Time

Blend Modes

Stabilize Shaky Footage

CC 2018 Update - Previewing and Favoriting Fonts

CC 2019 Update - Responsive Design Time

CC 2019 Content Aware Fill

CC 2019 Create Motion Graphic Templates

Quiz: Important After Effects Skills

Intro to Motion Graphics Projects

Clean Lower Third

Logo Reveal Animation Bumper

Colorful Transition

Text with Mask Path Animation

Text Bubble Animation

Weather App 1

Weather App 2

Weather App 3

Quiz: Motion Graphics Projects

Flat Animation Challenge

Phil Designs his Flat Animation Scene

Animating Fireworks with the Repeater Effect

Removing Green Screen Background

Adding a Background that Matches the Foreground

Adding Motion to a Still Image with the Puppet Tool

Adding Movement with the Ripple Effect

Quiz: Flat Animation Challenge

Intro to 3D

Swinging 3D Text Animation

Build Out Your 3D Composition

Animating Our 3D Scene

Create Stars in After Effects

Quiz: Green Screen (Chromakeying)

Using the Rotoscope Tool

Cleaning Up Your Edges

Finishing Our Rotobrush Animation

Quiz: 3D Animations and the Camera Tool

Easy Screen Replacement with Masks

Replacing a Screen Version 2

Screen Replacement with Mocha

CC 2019 Update - Native Mocha AE Plugin

Quiz: Rotoscoping

Using the Puppet Pin Tool

Animating Your Puppet Pins

Animated Blinking Eyes

Adding Perspective with Animated Clouds

CC 2018 Update - Advanced Puppet Pin Tool

Quiz: Screen Replacements

Applying Text Animation Presets

Create a Page Turn Effect with CC Page Turn