Over the last few weeks, we have been introduced to AE animation and learnt how to use Duik for animated skeleton binding.
I was very intrigued by the reference given by the teacher in the class and I was so impressed by the effects of AE animation that I went online to learn more about how some of the AE animators do the skeleton binding of the characters and create the effects.
This animator-Duduf mentioned that she used the plug-in Duik in AE in order to make the flat characters move.
She had to separate each part that had to move in the animation: cut the hands, the toes, the legs in two parts, separate the eyes from the face to be able to move them, etc. That was the first step in this work, a lot of organization and drawing in Photoshop.
And for the expressions, she had to draw a library of expressions, for the eyes, the eyebrows, the mouth…
And she even drew three head shapes, to adapt the shape depending on the mouth displayed.
It’s looking pretty good!
After watching animator Duduf’s work, I decided to practice skeleton binding with Duik on my own.
I started by drawing a puppy in Adobe Illustrator and wanted to simulate a short AE walking animation. Here is what the puppy looks like:
And I split the puppy’s limbs into paws, lower limbs and upper limbs, and the body part was broken down into three layers: top, middle and bottom.
Made a short animal walking and running action.
But I wasn’t very satisfied with the dynamics of the walk, a lot of parts were through the mould which I didn’t expect and I spent a lot of time adjusting it.
I thought it might be because the dog’s joints were too small, so I recreated a new rabbit character using Adobe Illustrator with the same operation to try to adjust it to a better display, but this time I added the eyes and other expressions, and added some of the water animation effects I learned in An class.
The movements feel a little more fluid, but the rhythm is still not quite right. I think I will pay more attention to the rhythm in the next project and improve it.