After Effects Lesson 4: puppet tools

During this lesson I was taught how to use the puppet tools in Adobe After Effects CS6. This short animation consists of a man walking through a city and slips over a banana skin. To give our character life we used the puppet pin tool first which helped After Effects define what the body parts are, so we used a very basic five pin puppet which covered his arms, legs and head. however if you were working for Pixar animation you would use a ton more than five pins as they would cover all parts of the body that would be moving including very finger thumb and joints. once i had placed the pins in the appropriate spots i next used another tool in the puppet tab which is called the puppet starch tool which effectively tells After Effects where the shadow parts are so the arms and legs look natural and don't flow in front of the body.

after that we could make a walking cycle motion for the character by using key-frames to animate the character. key-frames are a fundamental part of creating animation on After Effects as they are what starts and ends an animation, when you add an effect or animation preset After Effects automatically displays the keyframes that are within the transition which you can then further edit to either slow, speed up or reverse the effect. when you use the puppet starch tool you will see triangles on certain parts of the character which will define where the body parts can overlap over the torso to make a fluid and life like motion. we then used the key-frames in the position properties to move the character across the screen and also the rotation to give the effect that when the character reaches the banana skin he falls over in a comical way.