David Cameron Pervert

OK so this is a test I did cutting up a few speeches David Cameron made before the election. I didn’t really know what was going to come out of it. Finally after much cutting I managed to create this 10 second clip. I added this to my character (who is still in need of a body and a background – which I will work on next).

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.

Animation: Adding mouths and blinking eyelids to your character.

I have one last thing to do before I move my character over to After Effects some extra mouths and some blinking eyelids. I’m going to paint each mouth onto a new layer and the same with the blinking eyelids.

About 5 different mouths are good amount. A small O shape, a large O shape, a wide grin, a large grin and a large open mouth. Experiment until you’re happy. I will be doing a tutorial soon all about mouth shapes so watch out. Tomorrow After Effects here we come.

Animation: Outlines and joints on your character in Illustrator.

I now have my character all coloured and almost ready to take over to After Effects but one of the problems I am going to have to deal with is where the joints of my character overlap. Let’s take an arm joint as an example. First I start off making a copy of the upper arm layer as this has a black line over lapping the lower arm as you can see below.

Next I move one of the Upper arm layers below the Lower arm. This will be the outline of the Upper arm. I’ve made it all black in the illustration below.

Finally on the Upper Arm  layer which is above the Lower Arm Layer I use the paint bucket tool with the no colour fill option to get rid of the outline around the arm. Now I can see through to the Upper Arm layer below.

Of course you can deal with the whole problem by designing your character in Illustrator from scratch. We shall do that at a later date. Tomorrow I shall be looking at mouth shapes and eye blinks.

Animation: Designing your character Part 6

Ok. Here is an arm I rigged as an example of how to break your character up for animation using After Effects.

Where ever there is a joint on your figure that’s where a new piece will begin.

More tomorrow.