I downloaded after effects to be able to animate my own stuff, however... Now I'm afraid to play with it. :( I've been used to frame-by-frame animation that I've done by hand and played with the framerate in windows movie maker before now. I've looked at the tutorials and while it make sense it... doesn't? I can't find a tutorial that explains how I have to cut up the character in order to animate it well enough so that it sticks. Do I actually need photoshop for this or can I do it in a different program? (Say that one that came with my drawing tablet.) I just need a little help here. Oy. :( -G.R.B.
Animation : After Effects Newbie by G.R. Barnett
After Effects Newbie
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Hi G.R.B. I'm not 100% sure what you're wanting to do. Are you doing stop motion, 2D animation or 3D CGI? After Effects is really only useful for 2D. Stop motion is best done using a standard DSLR and a frame capture program and 3D should be created in one of the many 3D programs out there. What After Effects is good at is comping everything together. It's also got a new puppet feature that uses your webcam so you can move and have your 2D characters move on screen. I haven't tried this yet but that might be ideal for you? If it is 2D you're creating then you either need to have separate layers for the different parts of the body. Or more crudely you can use the puppet mesh plugin that basically pins parts of the image and you can then move those pins using keyframes. It's worth noting that this is a different feature to the one I mentioned earlier. If you can show me an example of what you're trying to achieve I can hopefully point you in the right direction. All the best, Peter
I want it to be 2D, no worries of any 3D or live-action. The separate parts is what confuses me the most I think. how on earth do you go about cutting it up in a way that makes any sense? I was going to use character animator for the mouth movements since I have all the voice recordings done, but I was going to use the puppet mesh for the live action since there's a few scenes in there that wouldn't work with the webcam technology. Is that even doable? -G.R.B.
It sounds like you should just go with character animator. Theres a few tutorials on the Adobe site on how to separate the parts into layers using photoshop. As long as you names them correctly then Puppet Master will pick up what goes where.