Testing Animation in AE

Now we’ve gone to After Effects, it’s probably a good time to show some of the reason why.

What you see here is the first animation test of the main things discussed in previous posts. It probably looks very basic, but it represents some very cool things. Luke reports:

So firstly, I rigged the character in After Effects with DuIK using the Auto-Rig function. Damn! This speeds things up so much. Basically you can import the Photoshop file straight into AE, drag all the sprites together in the composition window (the main animating window), set up your anchor points, label your layers, then press Auto-Rig and it’s done. There’s no need to slice up the sprite sheet or any of that nonsense, no need to set up and label a million bones, nothing.

Next up – check out the knees and elbows! Nice and neat and tidy. That’s probably just cause I spent more time getting the anchor points set up in the right spot, but it’s really easy to get that right, and since we’re saving time on the rest of the rigging process, there’s no reason not to take some extra time on that.

Finally, if you notice in the animation, at the bottom of his crouch he has a little bounce, and at the top when we stands up again there’s a bit of a stretch to him. Normally you would have to animate all those little movements that give the animation life. NOT ANYMORE!

Thanks to Motion2 all I had to do to get those secondary movements was drag him down to the bottom position, click a button to add the spring to that keyframe, then tweak some sliders. Boom, done. Copy & paste the keyframes from the first position to the end of the loop, add the bounce there and done.

That could really take our animations to the next level just in terms of smooth movement. It could also allow us to make quick motion guides for any frame x frame animation we want to do on a character, and because we can export the animation as frames straight into Photoshop, it means we can draw directly over the guide frames created in After Effects which will speed up that process dramatically as well.