License Support Sign in Register. Fashion After Effects Templates. Follow us:. These free animation tools for After Effects are essential for becoming a killer animator. Top image via Jenny LeClue While I would never recommend that working character animators use After Effects exclusively, there are a few tools that make animating in After Effects much easier.
DuIK Price: free, but donations are helpful. Place a pin at both ends to ensure that each limb or body part is rooted. Once you are sure that your character is rigged, use the tool to click and drag one of your pins. Due to the outer ring that each Pin has, you can rotate the Pin if you keep the Puppet Warp tool cursor within that ring, but not on the central Pin. This helps create all kinds of warping effects with the shapes.
At this point, you will notice that the Puppet Warp tool works perfectly for small, subtle movements. However, you will know that you cannot make a character run at this stage if it is in a standing position. If you want a more loose and cartoony warping effect, start over and make your character into one single shape. Once again, rig your character by placing the Puppet Warp pins at all the main joints. You will see that the entire character starts to bend and adjust more if you click and drag the pins.
This creates some dynamic, fluid poses, that is great for cartoon squash and stretch effects. Placing a few warps help reveal different a lot about the personality. As you can see here, a few simple warps can add a lot of personality and interest to such a simple character.
Make sure to play with each part of the character to be able to tell the story that you want to tell. In this example below, Puppet tool is used to give subtle movement to the bird, which otherwise seems lifeless.
Once you start adding pins, move and warp the image based on where you move the pins. You are adding a pin each time you click on the image. Place the Pin on the tips, middle joint, and beginning of its wings, the tips and beginning of his tail, and the middle of the neck as well as head.
If you want to make it seem like the bird is spreading its wings and tail as it goes up, manipulate it by bringing down the tip of its wings and the mid-point of its wings a little towards the center of its body. Now, take the three bottom points on the tail and move them all together towards the top tail joint.
Next, you must take the Pin on the head and drag it up just a little, thereby giving the impression that the bird is bending its head as it spreads its wings. Follow these guidelines: Your Puppet Pin character must all be one piece on a single layer. Even though you can choose any image you want, you must make sure that the picture has an alpha channel that outlines its shape.
This will help define the character's edges when you rig it with the Puppet Pin Tool. Next step is to click with it in the larger white area of the picture image to select all the white pixels. The head of the alpha channel must be connected to the body, or else the Puppet Pin Tool will view them as two separate objects.
So, it will not connect them into a single character. In Photoshop, click the Channels tab to show the channels, turn off the visibility for the RGB channels, turn on the visibility for the Alpha channel, and select it for editing. Next, set your background color to white and use the Rectangular Marquee tool to select between the head and neck, then delete the selection to white.
Sine we select black in the RGB channels, the head will appear to be detached when composited against black, but the alpha channel connects the two sections together for the Puppet Pin. You can now save the picture as a Photoshop file to preserve the alpha channel. It can now be used to work on After Effects. For the Puppet Pin to work, one must set an initial Pin Point. This divides the entire character depending on its alpha channel, into a fine mesh of triangles.
You can then add additional Pin points to define joints and deformation centers. Once that is done, you can drag those Pins anywhere you want, and that includes keyframing them.
The pixels underneath the mesh will then warp and bend with the mesh, almost as if your image has been printed onto a sheet of rubber, and you're stretching and pulling the sheet.
This cool effect can be achieved only by rigging the character. Hit on the Puppet Pin Tool and leave the settings at their defaults. Once you click with it on the foot region, the image will be covered with the mesh Step 3 Adding A Lot More Control Points You will now need to add more Pin Points that serve as animation control points and set limits for the influence of other points on the mesh. However, you don't need very many points for a simple animation.
As you keep experimenting, you will learn how each Pin affects the other. Next, you will have to place your cursor accordingly on one of the points and drag it around.
You will slowly notice that the mesh, and the character, distort to follow the point. You can make the character dance by keyframing the character over time in the usual way.
This is one of the striking features of the Puppet Pin. Add a soundtrack to the character's comp and position it at the time when you want it to start. Keep the Puppet Pin Tool selected and hold down the Command key. Position the tool over one of your Pin points. A tiny clock icon will appear. Recording will begin as soon as you click with the Record cursor on the Pin. Talking Tom Cat. Clash of Clans. Subway Surfers. TubeMate 3. Google Play. Navient student loan settlement.
GameStop in-store PS5 restock. N95, KN95, KF94 masks. Windows Windows. Most Popular. New Releases. Desktop Enhancements. Networking Software. Trending from CNET. Developer's Description By Nonlinear Educating. The rubbery, stretchy, squashy characters seen in the popular Warner Brothers or Hanna-Barbera cartoons of the s through the s required intensive hand labor to animate. But with Adobe After Effects' Puppet Pin tool, that kind of organic animation is easy and even fun to achieve.
In this new tutorial series by After Effects expert Richard Lainhart, you'll learn all the secrets of the Puppet Pin tool and how to create your own organic animated characters. Richard starts out by showing you how to import Adobe Illustrator vector artwork to begin your animation project. The result is that a movement in one part of the image causes natural, life-like movement in other parts of the image.
If a single animated Deform pin is selected, its Position keyframes are visible in the Composition panel and Layer panel as a motion path. You can work with these motion paths as you work with other motion paths, including setting keyframes to rove across time.
See Smooth motion with roving keyframes. You can have multiple meshes on one layer. Having multiple meshes on one layer is useful for deforming several parts of an image individually—such as text characters—as well as for deforming multiple instances of the same part of an image, each with a different deformation. The original, undistorted mesh is calculated at the current frame at the time at which you apply the effect.
The render order for continuously rasterized layers—such as shape layers and text layers—is different from the render order for raster layers. You can precompose the shape layer and use the Puppet tools on the precomposition layer, or you can use the Puppet tools to transform the shapes within the layer. See Render order and collapsing transformations and Continuously rasterize a layer containing vector graphics.
The motion created by the Puppet tools is sampled by motion blur if motion blur is enabled for the layer and the composition, though the number of samples used is half of the value specified by the Samples Per Frame value. See Motion blur. You can use expressions to link the positions of Deform pins to motion tracking data, audio amplitude keyframes, or any other properties. Aharon Rabinowitz provides a tutorial on the Creative COW website that shows a creative way to use the Puppet tools with a particle generator to simulate airflow over a car.
Robert Powers provides a video tutorial on the Slippery Rock NYC website that demonstrates the use of parenting and the Puppet tools to animate a character. Dave Scotland provides a video tutorial on the CG Swot website that demonstrates how to create a looping character animation using the Puppet tools. Daniel Gies provides a detailed series of video tutorials in which he demonstrates the use of inverse kinematics and the Puppet tools to rig and animate a character.
The stopwatch switch is automatically set for the Position property of a Deform pin as soon as the pin is created. Therefore, a keyframe is set or modified each time that you change the position of a Deform pin. This auto-keyframing is unlike most properties in After Effects, for which you must explicitly set the stopwatch switch by adding a keyframe or an expression to animate each property. The auto-animation of Deform pins makes it convenient to add them and animate them in the Composition panel or Layer panel, without manipulating the properties in the Timeline panel.
Click any nontransparent pixel of a raster layer to apply the Puppet effect and create a mesh for the outline created by auto-tracing the alpha channel of a layer. Click within a closed path on a vector layer to apply the Puppet effect and create a mesh for the outline defined by that path.
Click within a closed, unlocked mask to apply the Puppet effect and create a mesh for the outline defined by the mask path. Click outside all closed paths on a vector layer to apply the Puppet effect without creating a mesh.
Outlines are created for paths on the layer, though an outline is only visible when a Puppet tool pointer is over the area that the outline defines. Place the pointer over the area enclosed by a path to see the outline in which a mesh will be created if you click that point. Click within an outline to create a mesh. Increase the Triangle value in the Tools panel and try again. Use as few pins as possible to achieve your desired result. The natural deformation provided by the Puppet effect can be lost if you over-constrain the image.
Just add pins to the parts of the figure that you know that you want to control. For example, when animating a person waving, add a pin to each foot to hold them to the ground, and add a pin to the waving hand.
You can modify the motion paths of the Deform pins using the same techniques that you use to modify any other motion paths.
After Effects no longer draws the tinted fill for the original layer region when hovering using the Puppet Pin tool. You can sketch the motion path of one or more Deform pins in real time—or at a speed that you specify—much as you can sketch the motion path of a layer using Motion Sketch. Before you begin recording motion, you may want to configure settings for recording. The ratio of the speed of the recorded motion to speed of playback. Creating fewer keyframes makes motion smoother. Use Draft Deformation.
The distorted outline that is shown during recording does not take Starch pins into account. This option can improve performance for a complex mesh. This procedure assumes that you have already placed Deform pins in the object to animate.
For information on placing Deform pins, see Manually animate an image with the Puppet tools. Recording of motion begins when you click to begin the drag. Recording ends when you release the mouse button. The color of the outline for the mesh for which motion is being sketched is the same as the color of the pin yellow. Reference outlines, for other meshes on the same layer, match the label color of the layer.
The current-time indicator returns to the time at which recording began, so that you can repeat the recording operation with more Deform pins or redo the recording operation with the same pins. The motion path for a pin is shown only if it is the only pin selected. Try creating several duplicate meshes and sketching motion for each mesh. When you have multiple meshes in the same instance of the Puppet effect, you can sketch motion for one mesh while seeing the reference outlines of the others, allowing you to follow their movements, either roughly or precisely.
When a Puppet mesh is created, its boundaries are determined by an outline, which can be defined by any of the following types of closed paths:. If a layer has no unlocked masks, shapes, or text characters on it when you apply the Puppet effect, it uses Auto-trace to create paths from the alpha channel. These paths are only used by the Puppet effect in the determination of outlines and do not appear as masks on the layer.
If the layer is a raster layer with no alpha channel, the result is a single rectangular path around the bounds of the layer. For a complex image, or to configure Auto-trace settings, use Auto-trace before using the Puppet tools.
See Create a mask from channel values with Auto-trace.
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