TnT Tuts - #5 - Animating a Bicycle in After Effects

This weeks tutorial features a character riding a bike.  You'll see how I use the same basic principles I've shown rigging characters with Duik, creating the bouncing ball, and using simple expressions to make this rig. 

Day 218: Apple Jacker

This daily is an example of work overlapping with this project. Occasionally I will get a new job that requires some fresh characters. No pun intended. As you can see from the mock up below, this piece has a photoshopped type of style. The apple is a photograph and the rest of the elements are just hand drawn in Photoshop. This piece calls for a lot of apple and pear characters so I made a mockup of what one might look like to test it in After Effects. If project timelines allow it, which they rarely do, it's always good to practice with an animation rig beforehand so you can spot any pain points and redesign later.

Photoshop Animation: A New Journey

It's been quite a while since I've posted on this blog. My Instagram feed on the side is always updating, you can always follow me there for quick hits. Also my Illustration and Photography page auto update when I add to my Flickr, so there is always new work to be seen.  Still, my day to day blogging has been lacking as of late.  Like most blogs it comes in waves. I commend anyone who can blog every day all day. It really becomes like a second job when you do that. Plus, I've been quite busy freelancing as of late, and most of that stuff I'm not aloud to just openly share my process on. However, I have been dabbling more into some personal things and it's time I got off my lazy ass and posted more.

Recently I've been trying to develop a new skill-set in Photoshop animation. I've always thought the Timeline option in Photoshop was really cool, but I've always been weary to dive into it. Doing frame by frame animation takes a lot more patience and time to get to that final product. I've grown pretty quick in my abilities to use Illustrator and After Effects to animate, so that excuse wasn't cutting it anymore. The bottom line is, if I want to make this part of my process, I need to practice to get quick at it. Just like I did with Illustrator. I've approached this in 2 forms so far: Pixel and Hand Drawn. 

Pixel

As an avid gamer this only felt like an obvious first step into the ream of the Photoshop Timeline.  For one, making pixel art in Photoshop is quite easy in principle.  You make a tiny canvas (300x300px), and then you color in each pixel until you make something cool.  The process of making a still image is actually quite fun because there isn't much you can do to totally ruin anything.  I started by making a couple character images. One of a favorite video game character of mine, ICO.  The other was a self portrait of myself with my cat.

This much was fairly easy, but I wanted to take it the next step.  So, I began working with my character to try and make a jump animation.  It seems simple enough to start, but when you have to begin bending pixel legs and making 12 or so copies, it gets a little more daunting.  To save some time, instead of drawing the character from scratch each and every time, I would copy and paste bits that didn't change much.  For instance, the torso remains fairly straight for a majority of the animation. Also the head stays the same almost throughout.  Doing this saved me lots of time while only having to focus on arms and legs and any other secondary motion such as the shirt and hair. 20-so frames later I had the jump that I was happy with.

I forgot to mention that I created the animation in a 30fps timeline.  I tried looking up the standard but couldn't really find one.  I wasn't going for the completely old school look, and I know that most modern games today run somewhere between 30fps and 60fps, so I just went with 30.  I also wanted it to look really smooth so I thought this would be better than a typical low animation frame rate. Below is the result in motion.

8bit Jump

As you can see those 20 frames zip right by, and about 5 of them are just the hair bounce at the end. But that secondary motion of hair, the shirt, the smoke puff, all really add to the effect of the motion.

Hand Drawn

Now that I had my feet wet in the Photoshop Timeline, I felt I was ready to explore some more hand drawn type animations.  Once again, I thought it best to start off with something I was familiar with.  About a year ago I had sketched a character in my notebook.

I had always really loved this guy and planned to do some animation with him, but just never got around to it.  Creating him in Illustrator just felt like I was cheapening his look.  He was meant to have a hand drawn feel to him.  So, with the same principles in mind from the Pixel animation, I began drawing this guy.  However, starting out was much different.  I had to make a stick figure rendition first to make sure the timing was right.

Once I had this locked down I could begin my shortened process as before.  I made a sketch of the character first. Then, instead of drawing him new everytime, I simply copied and pasted him and used the lasso tool to rotate the limbs and such.  This was the result:

As you can see,  there are some breaks in the lines near his arm. This was the result of me using the lasso tool and moving bits around.  However, it worked to speed up the process. Now I could go through and draw over everything very nicely without worrying about timing or placement.  I did that, and added some color to get the final image:

Gay German Run

This process really taught me a lot, and I took it to the next level on my next project. Someone had reached out to me on Instagram asking if I could animate their character removing a sword from a stone, like in Zelda. Being a huge fan of that entire sentence I couldn't possible refuse. So, I began by going through the same set of steps to achieve the animation:

From there I decided to take it a step further. I brought the character and background into After Effects separately so I could do further compositing on the animation as well as give it some slight camera motion. After tweaking the colors, adding some flares and dust, I was pretty pleased with the final result:

Teddy Tortoise Pulls the Sword

I have to say all in all this has been a really fun endeavor and a nice break from business as usual. While I still love making characters in Illustrator, using Duik to rig and animating in After Effects, it's still nice to hone a new skill. That's it for now. I will hopefully be blogging a little more often now. Probably not every day, but at least more than once every 6 months. Also I created a Facebook page specifically for my blog and art. So if you want to support me go over there and like the page. Otherwise check out all my social links on the right side of my blog. You can follow me just about anywhere.

Glenn Davis - Be Honest - UNOFFICIAL Music Video

I recently had the pleasure to work on one of my first full fledged music videos. The musician in question is Glenn Davis of the band Way Yes.  At the end of this month he will be releasing his very first solo album titled Waves & Webs.  Glenn recently helped me create the music for my 2016 reel and as a fellow Ohio native I felt extremely connected to helping him create a video for his single, Be Honest.  His entire album centers around the turmoil that followed a failed marriage, so all of his songs have a shared meaning in love and loss.  Be Honest is unique in that it has a very driving beat and higher energy than his other singles.  When we discussed ideas for the music video we tossed around all things relating to what honesty is and what it means in different forms.  We landed on the idea of chameleons and their ability to shift their colors.  How this effects their ability to be honest or dishonest with their surroundings and who they are.  We took the idea a step further by having a central character who did not want to conform with the ever changing colors he is being bombarded with on a daily basis. With this in mind I took off to sketching out and developing more ideas, characters, and storyboards.

As you can see my sketchbook is very stream of conscious and rough.  I like to spend the majority of my time actually developing the art and animation.  I use my sketches as a quick way to just put my ideas on paper.  I did everything from research about chameleons to looking at all shapes and sizes of the species. Once I had these things locked down I went into creating my characters and assets.  I knew I wanted the look to be vibrant and alive to match the emotion of the song, so instead of using a clean vector look in Illustrator, I decided to use hand drawn elements in Photoshop to give everything a much more textural feeling.

Now that my assets were created, I was free to bring everything into After Effects and just get down to the nitty gritty of rigging and animating.  When rigging characters I use a program called Duik.  This is a free program that works great with setting up character rigs within After Effects.  All you have to do is label and parent your elements properly and you have a working character rig within minutes.

It's a little challenging showing all the layers in one shot, but this is what the set up looks like after the rigging is done and Duik has performed it's magic.  Basically I get a set of about 8 controls that let me easily manipulate the character in a way that makes sense.  Once this is complete with all the various characters I do all my animating.  After many hours and hundreds of keyframes you end up with the music video you see below.  I hope you enjoy it as much as I did making it!

Metal Gear Solid V: Snake's Worst Day

This animation was inspired by a series of doodles I was making while playing through Metal Gear Solid V. I enjoyed a lot of the games gadgets and mechanics and thought it would be fun to explore those in an animated short. I also got to test out and play with the most updated version of Duik, which was pretty educational. It is far more robust that the older versions and rigging is now much more powerful.

Moment of Truth

This is an animation I put together for my sister for one of her midwife classes. They were tasked with making a video on the moment they realized that they wanted to be a midwife. I said, "That's cool, but let's make it an animation." So she did the writing and provided the VO while I did the animating. In the end it was really fun to take a story like this and bring it to life in a way only animation could. Getting free creative reign is something you don't find often in client work so it was fun to just let my hair down on this one and not worry if I was hitting the mark or not.



Storyboard Images

Animation Samples

Micah 8 Year Portrait

Recently had the privilege of doing a portrait for another coworker.  When someone at my company has their 8 year anniversary they are rewarded with a much larger and more robust portrait.  This was the first 8 year portrait I've been able to do so I was particularly excited.  This was also my first time attempting pixel art seriously. It was a little bit of a risk combining two firsts like that, but I think it paid off. I really enjoy the 8bit result.

How To Animate a Photo | The 2.5D Effect

Have you ever had a photograph you wanted to animate? Or maybe your client only had archival photos and no footage. There are a ton of situations in which this tutorial from The Creators Project could come in handy for you.

Cowboy Painting Timelapse

Trevor Conrad has taken the time to make this wonderful timelapse of a cowboy character he created from scratch in Photoshop. While the timelapse is long, it gives you the time to really inspect his process and learn a thing or two. I always love watching other people work, and you should too.

Creating Pixel Art in Photoshop

Nice little tutorial on creating pixel art in Photoshop by Ryan Boyle.

Pavel Maria Smejkal - Fatescapes

Some truly thought provoking work from Pavel Maria Smejkal. In his series Fatescapes he takes iconic photoraphs throughout history and through digital manipulation he removes the central theme or focus. What we are left with is usually an eerie and empty image. It plays with your emotions and makes you question, what if this event never happened in the first place? I took the liberty of hunting down samples of the originals because when I was looking through his work I found myself obsessed with finding the original photograph.

Photoshop Friday

Had a little fun today 'shopping my colleague fighting a fierce dragon. The background art I found online. I simply took out the original wizard and replaced him with my friend.