TnT Tuts - #9 - Animating Illustrated Text in After Effects Using Shape Layers

In this tutorial I show you how you can create a text in Illustrator and then animate it in After Effects using shape layers. I created a text for my 2018 reel using simple shapes in Illustrator. The idea was to overlap the shaped and use different blend modes to create various kinds of color combinations. I used the plugin Overlord to import my Illustrator assets straight into After Effects and create shape layers. From there I animated the paths in various ways to create a slick animation. No real tricks in this one, just good ol' fashion keyframing.

TnT Tuts - #6,7 & 8 - Illustrating, Rigging & Animating a Cat in After Effects

In this tutorial series I tackle illustrating, rigging and animating a cat in After Effects.

The first thing people should know about rigging a cat versus rigging a human is that it's double the work (because it is double the legs). Also animal walk cycles are all just slightly different. Dogs vary from cats, cats vary from horses, and so on. So each animal rig is it's own unique beast so to speak. This is why it's always good to have lots of references. I have several books that reference various animal run cycles with photos and information. These are vital to understanding just how different animals walk, because if you don't understand the basics then there is no way you'll be able to deviate and add your own creative spin on things.

Another thing to note is that most animals require an extra bone by the shoulder or foot, so this adds to the complexity of your rig.

Finally, the other difficulty with animal rigs is that they often require extreme flexibility, especially in cats.  If you've ever seen a cat run you'll notice that their torso often stretches very wide on the jump and compresses very small on the landing.  This doesn't seem like a big deal but in terms of looking realistic, getting this to work is what will set your rig apart from others.  This flexibility can often be hard to pull off without breaking the rig as well.

In the following videos you'll see how I tackle these various challenges through the creative process.  I found this to be one of the most flexible cat rigs I've ever created and I had a lot of fun animating with it.

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. 

Tnt Tuts - #4 - Bouncing Balls

So many exciting things to talk about for this one. Finally got a new microphone for the podcast, so now everything is looking and sounding professional. Everything except me that is. Now that I have all of the streaming logistics figured out, I'm happy I have the time to plan out my tutorials more. I want them to be off the cuff, but I also want them to be prepared enough so that people can actually learn something. In this tutorial it was more or less me just trying to work through something rather than explaining it very well. I will have to work on that for the future. Regardless, here is my tutorial on ball bouncing.

Tnt Tuts - #3 - Character Rigging with RubberHose and Joysticks ‘n Sliders

In this tutorial I use RubberHose, Joysticks 'n Sliders, and Duik all together to create a powerful character rig.

Tnt Tuts - #2 - Character Animation in After Effects with Duik: Run Cycles

My second tutorial stream touches on making run cycles with Duik. You see a lot of walk cycles out there on the internet and I wanted to represent run cycles a little bit more. In a lot of ways they are more flexible and fun that run cycles. To catch my steams live just follow me on Twitch.

The Year of Plug-ins

I have to start out by saying that I was never a huge fan of plug-ins when I was first learning After Effects and animation. I mainly didn't like plug-ins because they cost money, and any animator starting out knows that that is something hard to come by. It also frustrated me to watch a tutorial on something cool, only to have the person in the video tell me to go and buy a plug-in to achieve the effect. It always seemed like such a copout. I wanted to learn how to make these things with the program itself, so that is what I did. The downside to that path is that it takes much more time and work to get the effect; however, the upside is that you gain a better understanding in how the effects are achieved. In the long run I would suggest that anyone starting out in After Effects at least try to make an effect yourself before going and buying a plug-in. Plug-ins are great, but they can really become a crutch if you don't know how to make them yourself.

Regardless, over the past year I have found myself buying more plug-ins and I have to say I've found some really great ones.

Duik

Duik has been the one plug-in that I've always had for character rigging. The reason for that is because it was free! Not only is it free, but it's actually an extremely robust interface for creating character rigs. This is what I learned on and would truly recommend it for anyone out there trying to get into character animation. I don't think there is anything as customizable or robust when you know how to use it. That being said, Duik can be quite intimidating to start out with.

RubberHose

This is where RubberHose comes in. I had been hearing a lot about RubberHose over the past few years but was always hesitant to try it. For one, I already had Duik, so I felt I really didn't need something that did essentially the same thing. The other reason was that unlike Duik, RubberHose cost money. Regardless, I finally took the plunge this year and I have to say that I am finding uses for RubberHose. When it comes to rigging legs, RubberHose just seems to have a smoother look to the animation, where Duik can sometimes have issues with leg locking. That being said, RubberHose is still a more basic program. It's definitely what I would recommend for someone just starting out with character animation because the interface and set-up are a little more user friendly than Duik. But, as I said Duik can be more customizable in the end.

Joysticks 'n Sliders

Ok. This is my favorite plug-in this year. Joysticks 'n Sliders is an awesome tool that allows you to do what the name implies - make joysticks and sliders. That being said, it's an extremely powerful tool for tweening character animations and making an overall more robust and professional rig. This is especially evident when it comes to face rigs. Duik and RubberHose work great for rigging bodies, but any good animator knows that the face can hold so much expression and emotion. Thus the need to easily animate things like eyebrows, blinks, and mouths. Up until recently, I would always animate these layers individually, which was honestly a time consuming chore. With Joysticks 'n Sliders I can now animate all the facial assets easily in one simple location. The possibilities are endless with this one.

Honorable Mentions

Butt Capper - Easily add caps to strokes in After Effects. Seems simple, but it's seriously so helpful.
Dojo Shifter - Easily sequence layers in After Effects. Another simple but effective one.
Motion - A robust plug-in for adding different motion to your elements using only a simple interface. Good for making complex motions easily.
Pixellate It - Simple for giving a pixel look in After Effects
Boil It - Simple for giving a wiggle look in After Effects

Day 225: Space Knight

I haven't done an in depth process video in quite a while, so I thought it would be fun to do a little timelapse of Day 225: Space Knight.

As usual, this one started with a simple sketch.  I had like 6 different ideas going into this sketch and was struggling bringing them all together. Basically I wanted to take the idea of a knight and bring it into the future.  I feel like knight armor and space suits share some similar attributes. That and I'm a sucker for both space and knights.

After the sketch was scanned in I brought the art into illustrator and just went at it.  Not a whole lot to say about it.  I am enjoying getting back into illustrator lately. I've been playing in Photoshop so much that it's a nice break to just play with vector shapes.  That and I'm much quicker in Illustrator so it's a little less stressful for me.

I was pleasently surprised with how it turned out given that I was struggling so much with the initial design. Just shows that sometimes you have to keep working at something even if you're unsure how it will turn out.

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!

Blacksmith Andre Illustration and Rigging

I recently played through Dark Souls 3 and loved it. I enjoyed it so much I had to create my own animation of one of my favorite NPCs, Blacksmith Andre. I created the illustration in Photoshop and did the animation and rigging in After Effects using Duik.

Sun Maker

A little late to the show, but I'm finally getting around to sharing the film I created with my friends for Sylvania's 2016 Tree City Film Festival. This film was a part of the 50-hour challenge during the festival. This basically means we had 50 hours to write, shoot, and edit a film (not a lot of time for those of you who don't know!) Before the teams break out and begin they are each given a genre (ours was western), a prop (lightbulb), a character name (Robin Chandler), and a line of dialogue ("it's in the trunk."). All of these elements must be incorporated somehow into your film for you to be accepted. So, we got our elements on Friday night and set off into the weekend of work and filming. We honestly used EVERY bit of time we had to make this film come to life, but I've honestly never been more proud of something that I filmed. We shot the whole thing on just my iPhone using the Filmic Pro app and a Moondog Anamorphic lens. After all was said and done I'm happy to say that this year, our 3rd time entering the festival, we won best picture! Ok, enough suspense, please enjoy both the film and the behind-the-scenes below.

Into the Orange - A portrait for Nicole

Every time a new person is hired at the place I work they get a unique portrait based on their personality created by one of the artists here.  I tend to throw my hat in the ring every so often, but this time was special.  Normally I don't know the person very well but Nicole has worked on the video team as an intern for about a year and now she is full time. Needless to say we are pretty close.  She's a huge film buff and a lover of the color orange, so she told me to get my inspiration from old horror movie posters.  I had a lot of fun with this one and really liked how it came out in the end.

This is Nicole.

I started with a simple sketch.

And ended up here.

Closer shot for detail.

Dog Walk Cycle

This is my first real stab at a dog walk cycle.  I've been practicing more using Duik as an animation tool as well.

Creating and Rigging Spike Timelapse

With Monkey Man: Origins only a week behind me I'm already beginning to think of what new and exciting short films I can make for Bun House Films. The more I thought about it the more it seemed obvious that our brand of humor, gore, and horror would be great for animation. So one of the projects I want to start next year is a short animated horror flick involving all the Bun House crew up to their usual antics. If you've seen my Mean Mug & Slim series then you already know I have an animated character for myself; however, that still left Spike, Dusty, Danny, and Kevin from Bun House to be created before I could start animating anything.  To make it a little more fun I thought I would create each new character one by one, and then release them in a series with each new character killing off the last.  For the first installment I created Spike, and naturally he killed my character.  You can see the making of Spike's character below, and make sure to keep an eye out for the next kill...

Geometric Portrait Timelapse

Every time someone new is hired at the place I work they get a unique portrait created by one of our artists.  Once in a while I will volunteer my creative services to this cause because not only is it fun, but it's a great way to flex your skills.  Usually the person I'm creating a portrait for doesn't have much of an opinion on what I create, but this time they came with a specific style in mind.  I really liked the geometric vector style they had in mind, but because girls tend to have softer, rounder faces I found it challenging to replicate.  In the end I think the result came out great and it only took me about 2.5 hours to create. You can check out the making of below.

San Diego Studies

Cy Kuckenbaker has made some really interesting videos he calls "time collapses". Not to be confused with time lapses. His first two time collapses were merely documenting the amount of airplane departures and arrivals in San Diego over one day. The result is both beautiful and interesting; however, his recent video on the color of cars in San Diego is taking this technique to a whole new level. It's easier to watch the video than have me explain it, but if you'd like to read a little bit more about Cy's process, check out this article here.

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.

The Art of Editing in The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

A very interesting analysis of the editing in The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly from Max Tohline. It's always intriguing to me when people are capable of breaking down scenes to their core components. Normally I'm just enjoying the film, but it's always fun to see exactly why I'm enjoying one film more than another. That and Clint Eastwood is just a badass.

EXERCISE

A lovely little exercise from Chloe Nicolay. I love getting to see the many different stages of the process and then at the end to see it all come together. I think I need to start working out my animation muscles too.