Smart Ways to Travel is the title of a 30-second animation that I made for my Animation & Motion Graphics class at QUT. This is my first foray into motion graphics, and in particular character animation using After Effects.
The assignment required students to make a 30-second long motion graphics video, and I decided to do one with character animation. The idea for the different transportation modes came about from my observation of 'vehicles' people most commonly use here in Brisbane. I myself usually either walk, cycle or take the public bus.
Vector path or Puppet Pin + DuIK
With a simple character such as this, there are two options to animate the arms and legs.
First option is to use recreate the limbs using AE's vector shapes and animate the paths. This method is the simplest to set up and provides the most control over the limb's curvature as you're directly manipulating the paths. However because individual vertices cannot be selected and parented to another layer, you'll often be limited to the most basic character rig, which means a lot of manually animating all the other parts of the character.
The second option is to use a combination of puppet pins and the DuIK plugin, which allows you to set up an IK rig for the character. Rigging a character requires a lot more effort than the first option, but once it's all set up posing and animating the character is a breeze. The downside to this option is that because the limbs are manipulated using puppet pins (which deforms the layer) you can sometimes end up with some unintended pinching and/or bulging in some places.
In the end, I went ahead with the second method as that allowed me to set the poses quickly. I then went over the animation again to smooth out any kinks or unintended deformation.
Credits
Car design from 'Motor Finance Wizard'.
Car design from 'Motor Finance Wizard'.
Background music - "Stomp" by Gyom. Purchased from PremiumBeat.
SFX - "Bubble Pop" recorded by Sound Explorer.
