Lynda - After Effects Guru: Character Animator

may

Get up and running with Character Animator, the motion capture animation tool in After Effects CC. Character Animator can speed up your character-driven animation projects exponentially—eliminating keyframes and time-consuming dialog matching. AE Guru Ian Robinson starts you off by working with Character Animator templates. Then it's time to build characters with custom controls for animation, such as subpuppet attachment points and layer handles. Ian then shows how to drive animation with your mouse or touchscreen device, and control facial expressions, mouth positions, and body parts like hands, arms, and legs. He even shows you how to map keystrokes to drive animation in real time with body and head rotation or advanced physics simulations. Lastly, he reviews puppet behaviors for smoothing and transforming character motion, and shows how to refine, edit, and export recordings. The final output from Character Animator can be rendered with After Effects, Premiere Pro, or even Adobe Media Encoder.

Topics include:

Using face tracking to drive animation
Mapping keyboard keys to drive poses
Driving poses with a mouse
Adding physics to animation
Creating lip-sync animation
Creating custom characters