- [Evan] Hello everyone, this is Evan Abrams
and in this After Effects tutorial,
we're gonna animate a character's arms and legs
using one path in a shape layer.
It's a pretty good way to compress stuff
just the way this character here is compressing his spine.
Here in After Effects, what we're gonna do
is first dive into what is this thing you saw in the intro
and then we'll get into how the arms and legs actually work
and then we'll make a thing for ourselves
and then we'll be done, so that's the order of things today.
So if we crack open this thing,
we can see that we've got shoulders, back, gut.
These are all just shape layers and all they're doing
is changing their position and sometimes their scale.
There's not much to them.
Really for this whole thing, there's only 15 layers,
it's a small number of layers for all the
wonder things, wonderful finger motion, oh it's great stuff,
but we're interested in the arms and legs.
So if we look at the leg here,
you can see, we'll just isolate it and, oh,
those legs are actually two legs because they're
using a repeater to repeat those legs.
You can see that, oh yeah, pretty sweet,
but within the legs there's a lot of stuff,
but there's only one set of key frames
that control the whole thing,
so we're gonna go through how we would make
arms and legs with this, how much detail we can put on them,
and now it's time to move on to phase two like I promised,
actually making something.
So we're gonna crack open a new composition
and, you know, I've been working with square things,
but we can use regular framing of things,
so that'll be great and what I would like
to do in here is activate a grid.
So if I'm drawing in After Effects,
I usually turn on a grid, and everything I'm gonna do,
you can draw it right in After Effects,
very simple, very fast.
Make sure we are also snapping to that grid.
It's great to look at, it's better to snap to it.
So now we need to actually draw something.
So I'm gonna go over here, I'm gonna grab the old
rectangle tool and I'm gonna choose a fill color.
Let's make that kinda torso t-shirt looking thing out here.
So I'm just gonna draw a lovely rectangle.
That's a square because I was hold down shift,
and I'm concerned that I didn't draw it in the middle
of the frame so what we can do is hit uu on any layer
you've ever drawn to call up everything that's ever
changed about it and I'm just gonna adjust its position
to be dead center, just for my own ease of use on this thing
and I think we're ready to go.
Its size is 160, maybe let's size that up
to be an even 200, that'll work for me for brain math
I think, so yeah, we got this thing out here.
This is gonna be our torso, so I'm gonna hit return
and write torso out there, awesome,
we made it a shape layer, it's a square, we're so good.
The next thing I want to do is maybe draw the hips
of this person, we're doing this super simple,
real low end stuff here and just gonna draw a circle,
move that layer up to right here,
put it below the torso, call this hips,
and give it a fill color that is like a dark red here.
That should do it, sweet, good to go.
Nice, very harmful to my eyes.
What we need now are the arms,
and these arms we will make using the pen tool.
You just hit G to call that up,
we're gonna use a nice orangey stroke, that's great,
and 40 pixels is perfectly good.
I'm just gonna click out here and then click over here
and look at that, you have made an arm.
Now that doesn't look very arm-like to you,
well who do you think you are?
Anyway, we're gonna rename this layer arms,
that's a good first step, twirl down inside
and have a look at its contents.
So in here, we have a shape layer 1.
Inside the shape layer 1 we have a path, a stroke, a fill.
This is a group containing stuff,
and I'm gonna rename it skin because this is
the group that's dealing with the person's skin,
and inside that group, I'll go into the stroke
and not butt caps, but round caps please.
That's what I'm looking for, perfect,
and I'm gonna twirl open the path.
We're not gonna touch it for now.
Just set a key frame for now and we'll come back to it later
but I'm gonna duplicate that group and I'm gonna call this
sleeve because now we're gonna define the sleeve part
of this person, which I will do by going into its stroke,
choosing a totally different color,
and then adding a trim paths so I can trim off
a percentage of the path I'm not interested in seeing,
which is 25% maybe, and I'm gonna change the stroke
to have butt caps (chuckles) butt, and we'll change the
width to be, not eight, 8-0, 80.
So now that's looking more sleeve-like, I think,
very sleeve-like, and the path, we need to change that too.
Certainly it has the same path,
but I don't wanna be setting key frames individually
for this thing, so I'm gonna hold down alt,
click on that path, which will let me enter an expression.
The expression I will enter is not gonna involve typing.
I'm gonna grab this thing here, which is a pick whip,
which inserts a reference to a target.
So I'm gonna say your target is this other path.
So I can take this path here, I can go ahead to one second,
I could use the old convert vertex and make this thing,
you know, like a curvy line, I can do that.
I can do whatever I want, I'm the king of this castle.
I can do all sorts of things out here,
you wouldn't even believe, would melt your mind,
the things we could do out here.
Now you see that other path has to follow this one,
because it is referencing it, that's just how that goes,
but one thing you'll notice is that this shoulder zone
looks abysmal, so I'm gonna duplicate that sleeve
to make sleeve two and the stroke on this one is not
butt caps but round caps, and I'm gonna set the trim path
to be like 1%, that's gonna fill in that shoulder zone,
so if I call up the key frames of this arm,
by hitting U, you can see that it goes from straight
to floopy, it just floops down, I think it would
make more sense if this point actually came in closer,
like this, how's that?
Like that, that's cool I guess.
I might be mindful, though, of the points,
have these handles here, and these handles
are being animated as well, so you can see the difference
in if you extend the handles at the beginning,
what that does to the rest of the animation.
So it's coming in, maybe he's punching someone,
punch, punch, but at two seconds I'm going to
copy and paste and put the same key frame there,
so he's going from here to there to here.
You can take those, I'm gonna hit F9 to ease them,
which is wonderful, so now they are nice and easy, la la,
and arms are great but this person also needs legs.
They need a head, too, but that's a thing for another time.
So I'm gonna duplicate those arms,
and instead of arms two, let's call it legs,
and I'm gonna twirl into legs, twirl into the contents
of those legs, twirl into the skin of those legs,
twirl into the path, grab that path,
remove these key frames because we don't need them,
and I'm just gonna move that path down here
and sort of attach it to where I think it should go
on this creature, I hesitate to call him a person
because they look very strange, and I'm just gonna
set it like this and maybe we'll start him off
with a nice curved leg, kinda like this.
So what I might do is, since this is a leg and not an arm,
I might alter this significantly.
So these sleeves, I'm just selecting them both
and then I go up to the stroke up here
and I go like this, I make them red,
now he's got shorts, sweet shorts,
and maybe I should have done this before,
but I'm gonna duplicate these and rather than
call them sleeves, I'm gonna call them socks,
so this is gonna be socks1 and socks2,
and you know, the big thing that we're gonna
change about those is their paths are gonna be inverted,
so we just reverse the direction of the path,
so they're down there, select both of those,
and I should have duplicated something before I did
something else, but whatever, don't hold that against me.
And I'm just gonna click the body there, sweet,
and we're gonna bring the stroke size down, maybe like a 45
or something so it's still kinda noticeable,
and yeah, that's great, so while he's punch punching,
his legs are gonna do something, haven't decided yet,
but we've got legs, those legs have socks and shorts.
It's pretty adorable, I'm gonna duplicate the socks
one more time, though, just gotta find which of the socks
is my, there we go, duplicate that and I'm gonna call
this one stripe, so if you want to put stripes on your socks
as we did in the original example,
I would go to the stroke here, I would select that color,
and then I would go into its trim paths, give it
kind of a thin trim and then off-set it to be higher
up on the ankle, like right there, boom, just like that.
And the same principle applies that if this thing
goes from a straight leg to a bent leg,
all we have to go is go into the skin, twirl down,
go to the path, set a key frame here,
and I think, how do squats go, I guess?
Let's make when the arm is out, his leg will be bent,
and his, her, I don't know, we don't really know
the gender of this person, otherwise we will make them
kind of straight-legged, I suppose, kinda like this.
Sure, and then they kinda scrunch up like that, neat.
So let's kinda play that back, copy this,
paste it there, how we looking?
Oh, maybe that's something, I don't know,
but the next thing to do, I think,
is to give this person multiple arms and multiple legs.
It is kind of weird that they don't have more of them,
and what I did in the example was, for example with the arms
here I can go in here and I can add a repeater to this.
Go add repeater, and with this repeater,
I can give this thing two copies, because you have two arms,
go down, transform repeater one, and rather than having
each instance or each projection of this stuff,
we'll take a minute here and talk about the repeater a bit.
The repeater is below the skin, the sleeve, and sleeve2.
That means the repeater is gonna be repeating,
creating instances of all the stuff above it,
so skin, sleeve, this.
Because the repeater is below it all, takes it all,
and we're making two copies and putting them below
each other, change that, put them above each other, thanks.
And I could repeat just the sleeves, we can do that,
but if you've got it under everything
and repeat everything above it.
What it then does is it changes something about
each subsequent iteration, so it could be
we want to change the position,
we don't, so put that to zero.
We could change the scale, which I used when I change
one to negative to make it flip,
it kinda flips it on its anchor point,
which you can see is right here,
so all of this is flipped to over there,
and what does that look like?
Whee, pretty cool, I think that's pretty good.
Maybe this person's dancing, I don't totally know what's up,
but I can just copy this repeater, command C,
go down to the legs and ctrl+V, or command,
put it down there and there we go, we got this going on.
You don't need to make the repeater flip stuff, though.
You could make it instead translate it,
so don't do that, but do do that voodoo that you do,
and maybe this looks correct.
Warp, so that they're doing this, sweet.
So the next thing to do is to put some motion
to the arms and the legs and all this.
I think the legs should be parented to the hips,
the arms should be parented to the torso,
the torso should be parented to the hips as well,
and if we go here to the middle time,
this is sort of where the ground is.
Call up my rulers, command R, put a ruler here,
just so I know, and hips position change
with the straight legs, you're in the right position.
With the bent legs, your new position should be down here,
kinda like this, I think so,
and then we can copy paste that key frame like this,
and how does that look?
Whee, perfect, that's good, that's good.
I'm just gonna shorten my work area to be right there,
so if we play this back, who, ha, neat.
We can grab everything, hit U, call up all the key frames,
and then we can go to the graph editor,
all of them are eased, so grab all their handles
and push them like this and then, who, ha, who, ha.
There are a few things that you want to look out for.
Sometimes if you shorten the path too much,
then that little shoulder bubble that we made
will stick out under the sleeve.
Just have to be careful to sort of work around that
by extending the sleeve or by not animating in ranges
that are gonna make that happen.
Sometimes the connections look a little bit funny,
like it is kinda funny to see that this person
doesn't own a butt, what we'll probably want to do
is give them one by simply drawing in a butt,
and we'll just move that butt like this.
Sweet, that's doing it,
looks a little bit more anatomically correct.
They're also missing a head, I can't believe I missed that.
You know, I think it really tells you what I think
is important, and let's go like this, make the head,
sweet, and we'll make that head like that, awesome,
and we put that on the torso layer so it's in a good zone,
and yeah, we've got this person just,
I don't know what this exercise would be called,
but it looks kinda funny, and they don't have shoes
because I find drawing shoes to be incredibly difficult,
but the point of this tutorial was to teach you
how to animate arms and legs using a shape layer
and just one set of key frames,
and I think we have accomplished that.
So if you've had trouble with that,
please let me know in the comments.
Ask questions, I'll try to get you through it
as best I can, and if you really enjoy yourself
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If you have questions about after effects,
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that was used to make this thing you're watching now
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I've been Evan Abrams, and if you subscribe,
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