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

Editing in After Effects with Dynamic Link

The good thing about working with the Adobe Dynamic Link option is that it’s all automated for us. We really don’t have to do anything beyond importing the Character Animator project file into After Effects and getting to work.

Why use After Effects?

Let’s briefly discuss After Effects before we dive into editing with Dynamic Link. After Effects is an incredibly deep program with limitless uses. And one thing it’s good at is allowing us to apply visual effects quickly and easily, something that would be more difficult to pull off in Character Animator alone.

Do we need these visual effects? Not necessarily. As stated before, you could use what we exported in the preceding section as your completed piece of art. However, since we have access to After Effects, why not see what it can do to enhance the scene?

Importing and understanding Dynamic Link

Here is what we need to do to get going:

  1. Launch...