Rigging and Animating in Adobe Animate

If you're coming from the Animate Character Design Course, you will want to check this video out before continuing so that why there's no confusion when creating symbols.

In this lecture I overview the design process for the character we will be using throughout the course.

To ensure a smooth experience, we will take the PSD file into Photoshop, rename layers and compress the file.

With the PSD file ready, we can create a new document in Animate CC and prepare for animation.

By organizing our head into different symbols, we can choose when we want the phases to come into play.

To create different phases of the eyes, such as a blink, we will need to break things down with the original images to make modifications.

By creating different eye phases, we can choose to invoke them when appropriate. Here, we will create eight switchable keys for the eyes.

Along with the eyes, we can create eyebrows that showcase anger, fear and more.

Like the eyes and eyebrows, we can assemble the mouth into a series of keys to set up animation with the Frame Picker.

Like the head parts in the previous section, we are going to assemble both hands into symbols. This will allow us to invoke the hand poses when needed.

Since the ponytail sits behind the body, and the side head view contains its own ponytail layer, a symbol is required to switch the hair phases as needed.

Since we will be using Motion Tweening to animate, it's required that we convert every body part to a symbol. This is useful for also building up your library with reusable character assets.

Placing origin points in the right spots is important for proper character rigging.

With the 2019 update to Animate CC, we can now parent layers, similar to Toon Boom. In this video we will take a look at this system and how to properly parent layers for natural body movement.

Even with all the precautions we took, sometimes errors pop up. In this video we will explore these issues and how to correct them.

By setting up the main Stage and adding a background, we can feel out the space this animation will take place in.

By laying out the main motion of the jump, we can get a feel for the timing and how the body parts will react.

Here we will go through each major motion, adjust the body parts and establish keys to create a jump animation.

In this video we will take the opportunity to make some tweaks to the jump.

By using the Frame Picker, we can go in and animate the eyes and eyebrows.

By adding an audio file and using the Frame Picker, we can create a talking animation for our character.

While animating the mouth is a good start, we can add body movements to help compliment the dialogue. This is a matter of adding more movement to the main rig.

The final thing we need to animate is the hands. This is a matter of using the Frame Picker to choose the right poses at the appropriate moments.

Here we will take a final pass with the animation and add any final touches needed.

By using Adobe Media Encoder, we can export a video out to share with the world.

My final thoughts for continuing to learn Animate CC.