Major Project - My Character Rigging Setup
Little kids still don’t have that much control over their movements sometimes. This is, why I wanted to keep the animation very loose and fluid.
I constructed the characters with very round limb shapes and aimed for puppet pins in After Effects to work as joints, instead of setting up fixed circle overlaps. I only needed side and front views for my animation as I wanted to keep it simple and also the characters looked nicest from these perspectives. Therefore, I recided to rig them seperately and not attempt to set up a 180°turnable character rig.
In After Effects I worked with the DuIK.Tool version 15, which by now can also connect puppet pins to Inverse kinematic controllers.
Generally, in After Effects it is possible to connect an object (layer) to another to make it follow its ‘parent’. This already allowed to tie the arms legs, neck and head to the body of a character. However, arms, legs and body were still just one solid form each.
I had to set puppet pins for every joint that was still missing. Important is here, to define the areas which are not to be altered by the puppet tool when moving the pins later.
To use the DuIK tool, I then had to create a so-called ‘bone’ from each puppet pin, which is essentially a null object (reference layer), that can (in contrast to puppet pins!) be parented to another object.
Here, already, it’s foreseeable that one ends up with a lot of layers. Fortunately, in After Effects, they can be both turned invisible and hidden from the layer list. It is still a challenge to keep the overview. It is therefore ESSENTIAL to label all the layers logically and distinctively. To later create the IK connections, the DuIK tool needs unambiguous layer names.
The bone layers have to be parented to each other in the correct order. (The foot depends on the calf, the calf on the thigh, the thigh on the pelvis, …)
If the naming of the layers goes in line with the DuIK suggestions, it is possible to use the auto-rigging functions, which allows to just select the respective layers for each joint position from a list and have the DuIK connections created automatically.
Because I did not always stick to their nomenclature (for my own sanity and because of my slightly different character construction), I only used the ‘partly auto-rig’, which allows to rig arms, legs and body separately.
This generally worked well for the limbs, the body was a bit tricky sometimes and I even had the characters set up differently in terms of the body structure (in how many parts body + neck were divided). Here, I probably just also struggled with the way it worked, when I used the tool two years ago, when far less controllers were created for the body. But I worked it out and in the end, so the character had controllers to their wrists and ankles which allowed to move the arms and legs and have the ellbows and knees bend accordingly and the hands and feet turn. They also had two controllers for their pelvis, one global controller, that had the rest of the upper body follow and one local, that could turn the pelvis without moving the shoulders. Moreover, there were controllers for the shoulders to move and turn, again both global and local and a controller for the neck and head to turn.
When moving the body, the feet would stay on the ground and the knees would bend – that makes walk cycles far easier!
Apart from the general body structure, I also worked on the facial rigging. Yet, I haven’t fully reached the amount of functionality that is possible here. I would have liked to have the time to engage further here.
Using ‘replacement shapes’ in After Effects works by creating pre-compositions of the interchangeable parts. In this composition, each of the images has to last for one frame (which can easily be done by a scattering effect). Then a time-remapping effect has to be enabled for the whole composition. When deleting the end keyframe of the effect, the composition rests on the frame which is connected to the number value of the effect. By changing the value, the different replacement shapes can be chosen. It is even possible to just slide through the images. However, it is not as visual as in e. g. Celaction, because you can only see the respective shape when it’s chosen.
This set-up, however, works with head shapes, mouths, hands, eye lids and blinks.
For the blinks, I initially just had created a tick-box effect (open / closed) until it was pointed out to me that I definitely needed a half-blink… I only had the time to replace this for the main character, though.
Something I spend quite a lot of time on, just because it was exciting to puzzle over it, is the rain capes and boots. I wanted to find a solution how to avoid having to rig two completely different characters with either outdoor or indoor clothing. So I set pin points on the parts of the rain capes as well and parented them to the pin points of the underlying body parts. So I could still move the arm controller and the sleeve would follow.
But as the capes were much bigger I also added a few more pins to later make it nice and flowy.
It sounds very simple, but it took me quite a while to get all the connections right and working. For the Peter side view character, I ended up with ~ 150 layers in After Effects, most of which I could gladly hide as I didn’t need them for the animation.
This is also a reason why I chose the DuIK Tool in the first place: you only need to animate one controller for e. g. the arm instead of three for upper arm, lower arm and hand.
Once I had figured out the structure, I gained some kind of routine for rigging 10 different characters… it still took a lot of time.