Using Photos for animation. Preparing your character.

I’m making a character using photos of a famous person: Daivid Cameron. I’ve chosen him because being elected the next British Prime Minister it should be easy to find photos of him on the internet. In the last blog entry I gathered a few pictures of Cameron to work on. Today I’ve concentrated on his face and below you can see the alterations I’ve made.

A few alterationsto make David look more pompous.

I’ve collected a selection of different mouths that I will animate tomorrow. Notice below how I have put the eyes on a seperate layer. I’ve made sure the pupils rest on a slightly off white other wise the eyes look a bit too bright.Check out the next post to see an animated Gif of David Cameron turned into a Floating Head. Click here

Animation: Roody Roo ready for animation.

Here’s the finished character of Roody Roo ready to animate in After Effects.

Adding detail to animal character for animation.

Having transported my character into Illustrator and converted all the pieces into vector based layers I’m now going to add some detail. I’ve added ears, eyes and a mouth.

Next time I’ll be finishing off my character all ready for animating.

Preparing animal characters for animation in After Effects

Following on from the entry on Wednesday I’ve imported my animal over to Illustrator and converted each part into a vector based layer. I’ve also coloured it.

Tomorrow I shall add details to my character

Animation: Moving your character in After Effects using rotation points.

I’ve come a long way from designing my character, to preparing it in Photoshop, then rigging it Illustrator to be used in After Effects. I’ve linked my layers and put all the character’s mouths in a seperate composition that I used time remapping to enable easy switching from one to the other. Now I am finally at the most exciting stage moving my character using rotational points.

Follow the link here to find out how to use roatational points in After Effects to animate your character.

Animation: Converting your Character in Illustrator.

I’m going to convert my Photoshop file into an Illustrator file. So first things first open it up in Illustrator making sure you click on the box which asks ‘Convert all Layers to Objects’.

Now I’m going to convert each layer so it will become vector based. I’m going to select one layer to show you how this is done. I’m choosing one of the eyebrows. With it selected I go up to the button on the menu which reads Live Trace. I click on that to convert the layer.

After I’ve done that I want to make the layer editable in Illustrator. On the same menu line to the right there is another button which reads Live Paint. Click on that and now you can use the paint bucket to add colour and other things that I will talk about at a later date.

You’ll notice that at the moment there is a white box around the eyebrow. I want to get rid of that so I’m going to use the paint bucket tool and fill with the no paint choice. Clicking on the white around the eyebrow makes it dissapear. Next I’m going to select all the layer and convert them using ‘live trace’ and then ‘live paint’. Finally I’m going to through all the layers getting rid of the white using the paint bucket tool and the no paint fill.

Here is the finished character all ready to colour which I will do tomorrow.

Animation: Designing your Character. Part 4

Okay I’ve tidied up the illustration I showed you yesterday. First I converted it to just black and white lines as you can see below.

Then I took the photoshop file and opened it up in Illustrator. I converted that image so it was all vector based and coloured it in. Example below.

We’ll look at how to do this later but tomorrow we shall prepare the rest of the body so that we can animate it in After Effects.

Animation: Designing your character. Part 3

Today I’m tidying up the sketch I posted up on yesterday’s blog. I’ve approached this in perhaps the worst way. I’m using Photoshop to convert my picture into a black and white image and then paint out any grey messy areas. This is what I’ve done so far…

The best approach is sketch your image in black and white to start off with but I wanted to convert an image I’d originally wanted to do as a painting. By using a black and white sketch you can save yourself a lot of time. More tomorrow.

Animation: Designing your character

Whatever medium you’ve decided to do your animation in it’s a good idea to design your character. Animators usually make up what is known in the trade as a model sheet. This is a sheet with the character drawn from different angles or in different emotional moods. The example below shows Goofy drawn from different angles.

Start off doing a few sketches. Try to experiment until your happy with an initial character. Tomorrow I’ll show you some examples of my work.