hey what's up ladies and gentlemen I'm Ignace Aleya and today it's another Tip Trick Tuesday
Tuesday and today's tip trick Tuesday I'll be showing you a simple tip on how
to animate characters inside of Adobe After Effects
I've already been making some Victoria 'ls on this kind of technique but I find
it's so much fun and it's actually a part of a bigger tutorial that I'm still
working on and it's kind of Halloween related that's why I talk of redoing
this tutorial because I find it's so much fun you can do so many things with
it and yeah basically in this tutorial we're going to be animating a flying bat
and when you want to try and animate something try to look up how the
movement actually works try to actually imitate that movement like if you would
be flying you would go up if you push down you go low so the body actually
moves you you find that the wings kind of roll off so yeah you would be looking
funny if you would do this in an office but actual animation companies also do
that before they go for a walk cycle they would actually try and do that walk
cycle so it's really important that you look up how the actual movement goes and
try to imitate it yourself so without further ado let's jump into Adobe After
Effects and see how we're gonna animate this alright so here we are in Dobby off
your effects and as you can see I have this image here of a bat and it's a
frontal image and we just want to animate it flying so if you have an
image of a bird or any of these kinds it's actually super easy to animate them
if you're going to use them in like long distance shots so of course you don't
want any kind of close-ups of this bat and did this bat doesn't look realistic
enough for that but oftentimes you see in a shot like birds flying in the sky
bats flying at night and you kind of can fake all these animations simply and
after effects with a simple tool without being an actual animator so first of all
once you want to animate something really think of how that animation is
going to look like I said in the intro and we are going to drag this into a new
composition here at first so what I'll do is click on my layer and then right
over here you see this option for the puppet tool in the puppet pen tool if we
click on that we can actually click on our
image right here to make kind of joints so we want a joint over here maybe over
here and here actually also here and then we want maybe a few joints over
here on the on the bed itself just to make sure it's not really animating over
here then another one here here and then again over here at the end okay so now
we have made some joints for our bat and instantly if we're going to press you on
the keyboard you're going to see that we have a bunch of keyframes right here for
all these joints so let's move ten frames forward so hold shift and press
the page down key now we can animate it so well before we start animating
actually we're going to set this like it's a slap down like the way the bat is
kind of trying to go upwards so how we'll do that is actually click on this
one and this one first I'm going to drag this down and then also bring this one
down okay there we go I really think of these dots like real
actual joints so we can actually move these there we go looks pretty good in
my opinion maybe a little bit closer to the body so we can do something like
that and the body actually we want to move it up so we're going to click on
one of these joints hold shift and select the other ones and then move this
up there we go maybe also play a little bit with these joints so everything
looks kind of right okay there we go so now we have a nice flap upwards and now
we're going to move forward so hold shift and press page down and in this
case we want to make this go again we're going to like all of these holding shift
and now we want to bring this down and this up
kind of try to make it somewhat right as you can see it's not perfect but um gets
job done pretty pretty well in my opinion okay we can drag this out a
little bit more and there we go so now we have this animation and already it
looks kind of good so what we're going to do is now select all our first
keyframes and copy these and then go to the second keyframes again go ten frames
forward and then paste these keyframes so now we have a kind of loop then go
one frame backwards with a page up key and then we're going to press n on the
keyboard and let's preview this okay so basically that's that's already very
nice and what you can do is and go over here again and maybe and I made it a
little bit better to go a little bit higher maybe it's uh like you want and
another thing I want to do is select all of these keyframes and hold alt and drag
them in and that's going to speed up the process and right over here and then go
one frame forward always go one frame from the end and press n because that
way you don't have any double keyframes for example if I would make this one
frame longer this would have the exact same value as this one but if we make it
one frame shorter it's going to stop at one frame before the exact value of the
beginning and that's going to make that a seamless perfect loop and there we
have it so that looks pretty nice and if we're going to enable motion blur here
for this layer actually the layer and then motion blur for the composition
we're going to see that now we have some motion blur in the wings and look how
cool that already looks so okay so this is getting there in my opinion maybe we
want to make it I go down a little bit more as the body itself so we can go
again here and bring it a little bit more down so we have a little bit more
of a harsh animation and maybe over here we want to make it go up a little bit
better and just make sure that you select all these keyframes
and go at the end here and paste them over here okay so let's see yes okay
there we have it super nice we have our animations if we're going to go to
effects curves and like bring this down a little bit make it dark and let's
bring in the sky just quickly and if we're going to click on the bat we can
go for layer pre-compose and move all the attributes in here if we go into
that layer you'll see here we have this entire range of our animation we want to
right click on that and trim the comp to work area and now if we go back to our
first composition and we can go and right-click and go for time and enable
time remapping and I'll hold alt and click on the stopwatch for the time
remapping and go into this arrow here and simply go to property and loop out
and like right here loop out and if you select that it's going to make a loop as
long as your timeline lists and there we have a loop of our bat and we can now
simply just make it smaller put it over here and then kind of keyframe the
position to move off screen and maybe also go and animate the scale duplicate
this one move it over and maybe also go for an offset here and now we have like
a few of these and it's completely up to you what you're going to do with them so
maybe bring this down like this
and of course if you have a particle generator like particular you can and
just drop this in as a texture and use it that way but that's going to be for a
different tutorial but see how cool that already looks just using it that way
alright so that's it for this tutorial I hope you enjoyed it if you did give this
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would be awesome and apart from that I hope to see you
guys in the next one goodbye