there's a couple more details I can add to make this a little bit more realistic one has to do with the cape movement. So I would imagine that after he jumped the cape sort of would go directly behind him and flutter in the wind a little bit. So let's go into our animation. Close everything down and then with the cape, what I'm going to do is let's bring up the key frames for just the arm left so I can see what's going on where those key frames are. So I'm going to set a key frame for rotation of the cape here. Then let's go down to the squat and the cape is going to rotate just a little bit up like so but what happens is now it's going over his shoulder like this which I don't like but that's okay, we'll adjust that in a second. I'll copy this key frame right here and then at three seconds we will rotate back down. Maybe even just like oh yeah, that looks pretty good actually. So now cool. Now let's easy ease these so F nine on your keyboard and it would probably be good to match the ...

speed of the other key frames but it doesn't necessarily have to match. And that's one thing with character animations, changing the speed just a little bit, making subtle differences so that this graph editor doesn't look exactly the same. Can make things look a little bit more organic. But what I don't like is how this sort of pops up over that corner and that's what the path of this cape. So let's go down. Open up our contents, open up, shape layer three path and set a key frame right here. Now let's zoom in here, go to our next key frame, click on path and I'll take this down like so and maybe we want might even, you know, move this up just a little bit, move it around just to get some sort of organic movement, then go here, copy and paste this key frame. Go to our next one and here we might want to change our path a little bit too. Click on path, bring this down. You know, you would imagine that the cape would change just a little bit. Something like that. That looks pretty good. So let's zoom out and see what this looks like. Awesome. So that's looking pretty cool. Let's add some easy ease. Looks like it's blowing a little bit in the wind while he's you know, stomping down on the ground while he's crouching. But we want to add a little bit more fluttering effect while he's going up and down and we can just do that with the path animation. So let's go up. You know, just half a second. Let's change the path just a little bit. So let's take all these key frames so what I can do is just click and drive over them. So again what I did was click path down here with my selection tool, click and drag over all of these and drag to the right. So those are just dragging those ones on the bottom, not the path one path points up here. So now if I go back to four seconds I can drag these to the left, Go to 4.5 seconds, drag these to the right, so now that gives a little fluttering effect. And so if I play through this at the end, okay, it's a little bit too slow so I can just make these faster. I don't, I like making a little organic so I can copy and paste some of them. Just repeat. Yeah, that's looking pretty good. Okay, it'll look better in our other composition with the background to give us more context. So now we have the cape. Oh yeah, that looks good. Okay, cool, so now we're getting that more flying effect. Nice. One other detail. I'm going to go in and add a little bit of a head rotation. So here let's again bring up our rotation for the arm or are key rooms for the arm for rotation for the head. So press r, click the stopwatch to set a key frame. Then when he goes down to his crouch, I'm gonna rotate just slightly back. It's like, so then copy this key frame there, Go here and copy this 1st and add easy ease. My favorite. Easy ease. Now if we play through he has just a subtle head tilt back, which I think works good, adds a little bit more detail. Nice. I am really enjoying how this looks. I'm going to do one more little detail and that's with the mouth. So if I go in, what I'm going to try to do with the mouth and I'll have to go into my head. I have to go into my content and find the mouth, which I think is. So the shape four. Yes, it's shaped four so I can turn that on and off. I want them out to kind of widen and then purse up while he flies. And so you make that sort of more of a grimace when you crouch down or when you're working hard. So that's what it's going to look like here when he's crouching down and the way I'm going to do it is add a trim paths animation. So I can click this add button here, go to trim paths, make sure that it's in our shape for if it happened outside of trim shape for it. Just make sure you drag it into shape four. Now I'm going to set a key frame for the start and end here, go to the top where he's standing up And then I'm going to drag the start into like 20 And the end into 80%. So the mouth gets smaller, it gets a little wider, copy these key frames here and then when he jumps up, copy these first key frames. His mouth is going to get a little bit bigger. See that early, subtle not necessary but just makes it a little bit more dynamic. Cool. And let's add easy ease, select all of them. Easy ease. Now we've added all these little details and I'm actually going to wait until next lesson to add the texture because I think that's a completely different type of lesson. But we really have our basic character animation and you can see that it's all about these little details, animating stroke, animating rotation using what we did right here, trim paths to animate a line that is the mouth of our character and of course adding the background to which gives more context to our motion. I hope you're enjoying it. And I'll see you in the next lesson for adding that texture.

Class Materials

Bonus Materials with Purchase

Practice Files

buy this class

$00

Buy Class

Sale Ends Soon!

starting under

$13/month*

Unlock this classplus 2000+ more >

79.7K Students

99% Recommend this Class

00 Student Work

0 Video lessons in HD
00h 00m of class content
Exclusive bonus content
Lifetime access, anywhere, anytime
Streaming access on desktop and mobile browsers
Download and offline access with class purchase
Offline sync with our iPhone & iPad apps
100% satisfaction guarantee

Philip Ebiner

Professional video & course creator, photographer & teacher to 1mil+ students; 10+ years experience with 1000+ videos.

2,000+ classes ranging from fundamentals to advanced techniques.

Adding Details to Character Movement

Adding Details to Character Movement

Lesson Info

89. Adding Details to Character Movement

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