A step-by-step course to character animation with After Effects
Made for Animators
We’ve designed this course to be tailored specifically for aspiring animators and motion graphics artists, or professional animators transitioning from a different program. After Effects is simple to learn, but hard to master. I’ve been using After Effects almost daily for the past decade. I’ve done everything from animated logos, animated web series, to compositing and visual effects. This course is a great place to start your path to a career in animation.
What will you learn?
Interface
We’ll start by going over the After Effects interface and understand how to work with different layouts, compositions and how to select and manipulate layers.
Basic Tools
We’ll go over different animation tools and methods. We’ll cover keyframing, interpolation types, using the graph editor, working with different layer types, precomps, mattes, and shape layers.
Logo Animation
After covering the basics, we’ll jump into logo animation, and go over animating 3 different logos in After Effects, as well as one 3D logo using Cinema4D Lite.
Rig a Character
We’ll create and rig an entire character using DUIK Bassel – a free easy-to-use plugin. We’ll cover body and facial riggings, as well as lip syncing techniques.
Animating a Shot
After the character is ready for animation we’ll create a scene, learn how to manipulate cameras and create depth with 3D layers. We’ll then insert our rigged character to the scene and animate a shot from start to finish, including lip syncing to audio. We’ll then learn how to render and export our animation.
Project Pipeline
We’ll go over how to approach a larger scale project, both for clients and for your own work, including planning and delivering the final assets.
