Suggestions - rig and animate multiple vector Character Animations

[Daniel_Peterson]

So basically have a bunch of characters like this... Set Business Characters Working Office Vector Stock Vector 583789495 - Shutterstock​

And I need to animate some walking, some talking, some hand movements etc... My thought was to 'rig' one character than apply that rig to all the other characters, but not sure if DUIK, Character Animator, or some other tool is the best method... Any suggestions on how you would approach this? Thanks!

[Mylenium]

You can't really just replace or duplicate a character and hope the rig keeps on working. Unfortunately the tools involved in character animation are too specific and neither AE nor Character Animator really implement them in a way they would produce reusable rigs, especialyl once stuff has been animated. Therefore I'd simply tackle this on a shot by shot basis. There seems little point in applying a complex walk rig to a character who will ever only raise a hand, anyway. It would be unnecessarily messy and choke performance due to how expressions in AE work for instance.

Mylenium

[Daniel_Peterson]

Hey Mylenium, yeah I understand what you mean... but there will be multiple characters requiring walk cycles and similar movements, so if there was a way to apply similar animations / rigs to another character that could potentially save heaps of time, but moving forward on one character at a time is what I am currently doing.

[angie_taylor]

If you want a quick, easy way to animate your characters then Character Animtor is defi Troy the way to go. If you are an accomplished character animator and you are happy to spend more time on it then Duik, Rubber Hose and Puppet Tools are a more controlled option. Neither option is “easy” though so I recommend following a structured course before you begin. Let me know if you need some recommendations for good courses.

[Daniel_Peterson]

Thanks for these thoughts Angie, 'quicker' is definitely preferable in this case, so will have to look into character animator at some stage! Definitely understand no option being necessarily easy though, haha.

[Kyle Hamrick]

If you were using multiple characters with the same parts, but say, different heads, you could build with that in mind. I'd imagine it wouldn't be too hard to make a duplicate rig with the swapped head. When you start dealing with body parts with different dimensions, you might be able to reuse animations, but you'd have to adjust the rigging to compensate for any difference in torso size, limb length, etc.

Depending on how your animation needs to look, you might be able to get away with creating one male body and one female, and doing some smart head swaps/body coloring to give variety.

[angie_taylor]

Character animator is fantastic for a walk cycles. So I think it’s definitely your best bet. The character animator forum is a brilliant resource for advice tutorials et cetera. It’s a fantastic application I think you’ll love it! 🙂

[angie_taylor]

Can you please mark the answer that is correct so that this thread will be marked as resolved and others can easily find a solution thanks 🙂

[Daniel_Peterson]

Hey Angie, I'll mark the correct answer after I finish the project as I'm still working through it and learning the different methods.

[Daniel_Peterson]

Ok so the solution I went with was the good old Puppet tool. I found that it was the simplest and fastest method for this project.

Because a lot of the characters in this project had similar proportions (mainly varying colours and hairstyles) I precomped and applied the puppet tool to each body part. Then used a combination of simple rotations / transforms and the puppet tool to make walk cycles and movements.

For a new character I would duplicate a character comp and it's precomps (I used true Comp duplicator) and tweak the keyframes.

If the proportions are too different though you'll get some tearing where a body part (e.g. hair) is outside the predefined mesh (from the previous character). In that case I had to apply a new instance of puppet tool to that precomp and re-keyframe. But thankfully because each body part has it's own instance of the puppet tool I didn't need to re-keyframe the whole character.

[Daniel_Peterson · Accepted solution]

Just a quick update on this old thread. Going through DUIK 16 and discovered it is now a good tool for swapping out multiple characters while retaining the rig... check this vid by Jake

Duik 16 (Bassel) Jumpstart - After Effects Character Rigging - YouTube

[elayarajaj51641616]

https://youtu.be/eEOP0Zla9mw