Description

The comprehensive course about Animation, by Duduf, the developer of Duik himself. Gold Members have an unlimited access to all our tutorials, including this one, along with other exclusive perks. Character rigging with Duik and After Effects is one thing, but one other thing is animation! It’s time to learn how to make characters move, and even better, to give them a soul and a heart, to animate them!In this very complete video course, I’m sharing my experience as an animator with you. You’ll learn:

• how to think to prepare your animation,
• practical and technical tips and tricks to get nice and precise motion at first,
• then, how to characterize the characters, to give them their soul, intentions, and temperament.

Pardon my French! Please, keep in mind that I’m French and I live in France, so recording this tutorial is not easy 😉 Please pardon my hesitations and my accent! If you understand French, cette formation est entièrement disponible en français aussi !

In this comprehensive animation course

We’re going to focus on animation, on motion. This course is not very technical: I won’t talk about character setup, (you can follow this course about character rigging) and I won’t talk much about how to use After Effects animation tools – I just explain a little bit the important Graph Editor at the beginning of the course. That means you should know at least a little how to use After Effects before following this course!

These are a few prerequesites (this list is not exhaustive) :

• Having some knowledge about keyframes and eases (types and how to use)
• Having (tried to) use the Graph Editor
• Knowing the important keyboard shortcuts (“P”, “U”, “R”, “W”, “V” etc.)
• Knowing what the “shy mode” is and what it does on layers

This being said, this course is made for beginners in animation. As this course already lasts more than 8 hours, I’m talking about “semi realistic” animation only, somewhere between cartoonish and realisitic, but with these basics you can then practice other styles of animations. I would have like to talk about the “animation exposure” too, something originally used in traditionnal animation but which can be very interesting when animating with softwares and rigs too. All these matters may be covered in another tutorial one day… The nice characters used in this course were designed by my talented friend Justine Cunha. Watch her work here or on Instagram! The character rigging has been made by Léa Saint Raymond and myself, using an early version of Duik Bassel. All these files are available with the course. I wish you a nice course, and I can’t wait to see your animations!

A note about Duik

Although this course was recorded a few years ago and thus uses an older version of Duik, you can perfectly follow it with the current, latest version, as everything is just about animation, and not character rigging. All rigged character files are provided with the course so you can start to animate right away!

Table of Contents

01 – Introduction – Basics and theory

Duration: 1h29mn

• The graph editor for animation
• Spline vs Block animation
• Energy!
• Falling brick
• The weight of the crate
• Follow through and Overlap – Sticks and springs
• The ball
• Stretch and squash – Torture the ball

02 – Some exercises

Duration: 41mn 33s

• Appearance and disappearance
• A stick and a ball – The ball in the air
• A stick and a ball – Hit!
• A stick and a ball – Bounces
• A stick and a ball – Squash, Stretch, Distortions
• Bonus – Expression to squash and stretch the stick

03 – Neutral walk cycle

Duration: 1h 39mn

• Introduction
• Presentation and how to use the rig
• Start pose
• First keyframes
• Right foot – Position
• Right foot – Rotation
• Left foot
• Body and knees
• Pelvis and shoulders
• Arms
• Head and details

04 – Angry walk cycle

Duration: 1h 40mn

• Introduction
• Start pose and first keyframes
• Feet
• Hips
• Shoulders and arms
• Neck, head, hair
• Details

05 – Walk and act! Acting basics

Duration: 1h 40mn

• Make them move!
• Introduction
• Locations of the steps
• Feet
• Hips
• Shoulders and arms
• Head
• Eyes
• Reaction
• Reaction – Arm
• Reaction – Look, hair

06 – Acting and lip sync

Duration: 1h 25mn

• Introduction – How to manipulate the rig
• Start pose
• Main poses
• Blocking
• Lip Sync
• Animation curves
• Animation curves – Hair
• Finalization