ident lesson 6

For this lesson we had to use the puppet tools for the first time, there are three tools within the puppet tool section, this is the puppet pin tool, the puppet overlap tool and the puppet starch tool. All of these tolls combine to rig a character/ object read for animation.

The first step we had to do was import the background from the folder, we then had to import the banana and the character seen in the thumbnail of the video.
The first job was to use the puppet pin tool to rig the character, the 'pins' were places on the joint in which movement would be animated, because this was our first time using the puppet tool we only placed pins on basic joint, this included, head, torso, arm, hand, foot, knee and leg. Our job was to rig the character, once we done this we moved on to the next tool, the puppet overlap tool tells after effects which body part moves in front/ behind the other, for example, we used the overlap on the right side of the characters body so that his right hand would swing in front of it, and his left hand would swing behind because we didn't add the overlap to the left side; this gave the illusion of real hand movement when the character was going to be walking. We also added the overlap tool to the left leg so it would cross in front of the right leg, again this would make the walking action seem slightly more realistic.
The final tool we used was the puppet starch tool, this tool freezes a part of the body when it comes to animating, we froze the head and part of the torso, we done this to make the movement of the character look more realistic.
Now the character was completely rigged we had to animate it, the first job was to rename the deform pins so we would know what we was animating, (left leg, right leg... ), we then selected all of the key frames at 00:00:00:00 and moved 7 frames forward to 00:00:00:07, this would be one movement, we then changed the position of each joint to make it look like the character had moved forward one step, once we had done this we copy and pasted, ( CTRL+ C, CTRL+ V) the key frame to make it look like the character was constantly walking on the spot. Now we had the animation of the character walking we had to key frame the position of the overall character to make it look like he was walking forward.
The final step of the animation was to add the animation of the character slipping over the banana, to do this we key framed the rotation of the character and then key framed the characters position so he fell out of shot, that was then the end of the sequence, we then rendered the project and exported it.