2D animation in Adobe After Effects

a post on re-purposing comic art and illustrations for animation.

I love Adobe’s After Effects program. It’s complex, but open ended in it’s possibilities for doing animation, motion graphics, and special effects. After Effects is also the most popular program that animators use to create Motion Comics too. It seems that artist are just starting to delve into the program as a character animation tool and there seem to be more and more video tutorials on how to do different techniques showing up on the internet all the time. Of course these techniques can be used for Motion Comics and Motion Illustrations as well as to allow artist who normally don’t do animation to add new life to their art.

Bellow are a collection of helpful video tutorials by some talented folks on the web who explain techniques to do character animation in After Effects.

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In this episode, the team at Tiny Inventions shares their unique work flow for mixing real-world models with computer animation. They’ve used these techniques for music videos, advertising, and their new short film: ‘Something Left, Something Taken.

At about  5:24 they talk about how they rig the characters to animation with a cool interface.

— Visit SlipperyRockNY where they have tutorials at using the Puppet Tool in After Effects for character animation.

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DuIK Tools is a revolutionary Inverse Kinematics script for After Effects developed by Nicolas Dufresne a.k.a DuDuf (vimeo.com/?duduf) which brings the principles behind 3D rigging to After Effects, giving greater precision and faster, more lifelike animations!

– Animator Daniel Gies (via After Effects Portal) has posted some very cool tutorials for animating 2D art. Very cool looking stuff.

Here is the first part of a tutorial on doing a walking characters: (see more tutorials HERE)