And so - you decided to make animation. Now I will show you how you can easily create your own cartoons or participate in creating animations with us. As an example, I will use our charming symbol of 2018 - the Yellow Dog.
Visit our website general-animation.com Go to the “Downloads” section of the main menu of the site. Find there the article "Models for Animation 2018", click on the picture with the Christmas tree and the Dog and download the archive "Danny Dog 2018.rar" Unpack this archive using Winrar, and you’ll get the folder "Danny Dog". In this folder you will find another folder "Christmas tree" with Christmas trees, photoshop files "Christmas background.psd" with a New Year background that you can use in your cartoon and the file "Danny Dog Rastr.psd" with a rasterized model of our Yellow Dog. But the most interesting are the first three files, the names of which begin with 01, 02 and 03. These are ready-made projects for the Adobe After Effects program, in which we assembled the model of our Yellow Dog, and now we will tell you how to work with these models.
Let's start with the project "01 Danny Dog.aep" In this After Effects project the simplest model of the Yellow Dog is assembled. That is, we just imported a file with parts of the dog "Danny Dog Rastr.psd" in Adobe After Effects, tied the eyes and mouth to the head, the head to the body, hands to the body, and so on. And got the simplest model of a dog that will perfectly suit your first experiments on animation. Open this project with Adobe After Effects, move hands and feet with the “Rotation” parameter, and make your cartoons about the adventures of the Yellow Dog.
How all this can be done we tell in detail in our fascinating video lessons on animation in the Adobe After Effects program. These video tutorials you can find on our website General-Animation.com
Do not forget also about our free course on the Udemy website, where you will find even more interesting materials.
We continue our acquaintance with the contents of the archive "Danny Dog 2018.rar". I think the greatest value for true connoisseurs of animation is the file "02 Danny Animette.aep" This is the same model as in the project "01 Danny Dog.aep", but in it added animation of walk and speech cycles. That is, you do not have animate each time the movement of hands and feet when walking. It is enough to set the parameter "Go" to 1, and the dog will start waving his arms and legs, representing walking, and you will only have to move the model over the composition. It's also easy to do speech animation: use Keyframe Assistant to convert Audio to Audioamplitud for an audio file, insert the resulting keyframes into layer 6 “Danny Audio Amplitude”, and the dog will start opening her mouth and waving her hands to represent the speech. What is Animettes and how to use them I described in detail in one of our lessons.
And finally, the exemplary project "03 Animation Sample.aep" in which our dog runs around the Christmas tree. You can learn how the animation is done in this project, how to modify it and use it in your cartoons.