A post on re-purposing comics and illustration into animation
I have been busy on some projects, but I took a break to try a new script for Adobe After Effects … RigIt. I am always looking for tools that can help an artist animate their artwork whether the artwork is from their comic/illustration or created specifically for a protect. RigIt is a script that can take a bunch of parts that build up a character and use coding to rig them together to allow you to animate it with inverse kinematic. The script is in a Beta Tdest right now so there still might be some bugs, but all-in-all it worked very well. Here is a sample I created in about 2 hours last night (including some trial and error on setting up the figure).
Download the script HERE
RigIt After Effects script test from Brian Kolm on Vimeo.
The script features a window to set the art layers and buttons to set each step of the process. For the final product the script will actually set null objects to control the limbs, but will hide the clutter with the ‘shy’ function which makes the animation space really pleasant to use.
The main hurdle I had was figuring out that you have to place a null object for any parts you don’t want to have as a segment of your figure (for me that was the finger on the hands). Another element that is a bit weird was that you only set the arm and leg on the Left side and then it flips the images and code in the ‘Build’ phase to create the right side. So if your figure has different art for limbs on both sides of the body this could be a problem, but I am guessing you can simply replace/adjust those layers with different artwork before the last step.
In the future I would love to see support for layers that use the Puppet Tool as well as being able to switch which direction the bones work in the middle of an animation.
All in all this has been the easiest character rigging script I have used so far, and it’s only in Beta so it’s not even official done yet. There is a good chance I will be using it on some future projects and I look forward to seeing where it goes from here.
Here is the official video…
