The comprehensive course about Animation with After Effects, by Duduf, the developer of Duik himself.

Character rigging with Duik and After Effects is one thing, but one other thing is animation! It’s time to learn how to make characters move, and even better, to give them a soul and a heart, to animate them! In this very comprehensive video course, I’m sharing my experience as an animator with you. You’ll learn:

• how to think to prepare your animation
• practical and technical tips and tricks to get nice and precise motion at first,
• then, how to characterize the characters, to give them their soul, intentions, and temperament.

Pardon my French! Please, keep in mind that I’m French and I live in France, so recording this tutorial in English is not easy 😉 Please pardon my hesitations and my accent!
If you understand French, cette formation est entièrement disponible en français aussi !

We’re going to focus on animation, on motion. This course is not very technical: I won’t talk about character setup, (you can follow this course about character rigging) and I won’t talk much about how to use After Effects animation tools – I just explain a little bit the important Graph Editor at the beginning of the course. That means you should know at least a little how to use After Effects before following this course!

A few prerequesites (this list is not exhaustive)

• Having some knowledge about keyframes and eases (types and how to use)
• Having (tried to) use the Graph Editor
• Knowing the important keyboard shortcuts (“P”, “U”, “R”, “W”, “V” etc.)
• Knowing what the “shy mode” is and what it does on layers

This being said, this course is made for beginners in animation. As this course already lasts more than 8 hours, I’m talking about “semi realistic” animation only, somewhere between cartoonish and realisitic, but with these basics you can then practice other styles of animations. I would have like to talk about the “animation exposure” too, something originally used in traditionnal animation but which can be very interesting when animating with softwares and rigs too. All these matters may be covered in another tutorial one day…

The nice characters used in this course were designed by my talented friend Justine Cunha. Watch her work here or on Instagram! The character rigging has been made by Léa Saint Raymond and myself, using an early version of Duik Bassel. All these files are available with the course.

I wish you a nice course, and I can’t wait to see your animations!

A note about Duik

Although this course was recorded a few years ago and thus uses an older version of Duik, you can perfectly follow it with the current, latest version, as everything is just about animation, and not character rigging. All rigged character files are provided with the course so you can start to animate right away!