Book Image

Real-Time Animation with Adobe Character Animator

By : Chad Troftgruben
Book Image

Real-Time Animation with Adobe Character Animator

By: Chad Troftgruben

Overview of this book

Adobe Character Animator is a power app for non-animators that provides easy rigging and easy-to- understand tools that enable you to create entertainment or business videos in no time. This guide to Character Animator gives you a comprehensive overview of the app, helping you learn the entire process—from importing a character designed in Adobe Photoshop to animating a sequence. Complete with background art, multiple character rigs and Character Animator project files, this book will show you how to animate a scene in Character Animator from start to finish. Starting with a character PSD from another artist, you’ll organize and condense the file to prepare it for rigging and animation. From there, you’ll systematically rig the character while exploring advanced behaviors and triggers to animate a complex scene that takes advantage of the app’s best features. By the end of this book, you’ll be able to create appealing animations in Character Animator for any purpose.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
1
Part 1: Preparing Character Art for Rigging
5
Part 2: Rigging Character Art for Animation
11
Part 3: Animating and Refining Your Scene

Creating a walk cycle

Walk cycles are a big part of the animation process. If you can learn the fundamentals of this animation, then anything else you choose to animate will come more naturally.

However, Character Animator is unique compared to other animation software. While it is possible to move limbs, create keyframes, and time everything appropriately to animate a walk, it proves to be a bit more difficult.

Fortunately, Character Animator has a built-in walk cycle animation that can be applied and tweaked for any rig that’s been appropriately tagged and set up. And that’s what we will learn here.

For this example, we will use a modified version of the original Chaz rig. The only difference is that this rig has not been set up for head turns.

To start adding a walk cycle, follow these steps:

  1. Make sure you’re on the Rig tab.
  2. If the body or head is hidden, reveal the layers so that the whole character is visible:
Figure 9.1: Making the rig fully visible will help with the animation process ...