An Intro to Forward and Inverse Kinematics in After Effects

The first 1000 people to use the link will get a free trial of Skillshare Premium Membership: skl.sh/ecabrams16
When rigging, there are two methods to consider: forward and inverse kinematics. Commonly called FK and IK, these are the methods you want to know when rigging characters of any kind and shape. We'll talk about what these methods are, how they work, and what you'll want to consider when rigging and animating characters.
00:00 - What is all this?
01:38 - Intro to FK
02:07 - Practical FK in Ae
03:06 - +/- of FK
03:45 - Intro to IK
04:36 - Practical IK in Ae
07:07 - +/- of IK
07:34 - Blended Systems
If you have any questions just let me know in the comments.
Connect on the Internets
www.EvanAbrams.com
www.Twitter.com/ecabrams
www.Facebook.com/EvanCAbrams/
www. ECAbrams
Suggest a tutorial topic: docs.google.com/forms/d/13A2e...

[@obv_design9310]

This is awesome, Evan! 😍Thank you so much!!!😁

[@jakubjezovic]

Great stuff Evan! Thank you!

[@damilolailesanmi4722]

Thanks for your consistency Mr. ABRAMS. Your tutorials have helped sharpen my skill.

[@ECAbrams]

Glad to hear it. Hopefully the quality continues around here ;)

[@TipTut]

Fantastic tutorial, great summary of the concepts! :)

[@ECAbrams]

Thank you so much!

[@fabianjax4659]

Instablaster...

[@timeijs12]

Dude these videos are sooo good

[@bush9686]

so good!

[@seanhallihan7048]

Thank you so much, really useful, been using DUIK for a while but this will be super useful

[@ECAbrams]

Duik is pretty rad. So many lovely things to be done with it in some pretty complex rigs.

[@arekopo]

Nice! Thanks!

[@walkthroughgamingworld14]

Thanks for clearing my doubts and conceps

[@blackdesigns2085]

Thank you so muchhhhh

[@dsalainti]

mister your tutorial is very useful not just for newbies, but for me also an intermediate specialized in vfx. i currently want to sharpen my motion graphic skill and i found your channel is very useful 🙂👍

[@ECAbrams]

Glad to hear that! If there are any topics you would like to see covered more ket me knoe!

[@nahdejda]

You've just saved me from the mental breakdown in the middle of my struggle to figure out the hell IK and FK are. Bless you

[@ECAbrams]

Glad to hear it. Always guard and protect that mental space!

[@jungkook-wts-wangtanboys8807]

thanks sir !

[@yassineboudouch2428]

thank you soooooo much

[@beMOTIONdESIGN]

Good stuff! It's funny, I was wondering what you were using to drive the physics of the flowers in the vase, and now that I see that you did that manually, I can see it in the animation. So well done because had I not known that you did it manually, it looks like you're using Newton or something to drive the dynamics. Well done!

[@ECAbrams]

What if the greatest physics engine... is the human mind. Ka boooooooom!

[@beMOTIONdESIGN]

@@ECAbrams 🤯

[@NERV0USMONKEYS]

Abrams Evan = After Effects

[@alializadeh8195]

Thanx

[@AbstractBlackArt]

Hey ECabrams! Hope you are doing well! You said towards the end of this video that you'd be down to talk about characters picking things up. I am in the depths of character animation and I've just stumbled onto this problem and have been looking for a clear solution for it. Do you have any advice or maybe know a video that kinda describes this process and maybe how to rig a character to make it as easy or at least as straight forward as possible? Thanks for making these incredibly in-depth after effects tutorials! They are always extremely helpful!

[@ECAbrams]

Glad you enjoy the tutorials. We need to get into Multi-parent rigging when picking things up or throwing them. Some plugins try to handle this by re-engineering the parenting relationship. But, the most common workaround is switching. Imagine a box that we duplicate to make 3 boxes. One is parented to the hands. One is on the ground where it starts, and the last is on a table where it ends. Then we trim each instance of the box for when they're needed. It's a cheap trick, but it works!

[@AbstractBlackArt]

@@ECAbrams So basically if I were to have my character holding the box, I would have to have the box as one instance in the place it was first positioned, one instance of the box attached to my character and the third instance where the box is going to be positioned? I think that makes sense if I am understanding you correctly.

[@yokochris]

a video about walk cycles would be awesome - maybe a comparison of best tools, techniques, plug ins - in a similar vein to this one

[@ECAbrams]

I'll put that on the list for sure! Great suggestion.

[@legrainproduction2760]

wow the bike man is just insane Oo

[@ECAbrams]

Thanks!

[@awiggan1]

I want to learn to rig all of those things you mentioned 😂

[@awiggan1]

Unfortunately I don’t think my wetware is up to the task

[@BoboMedia007]

walk cycles please!

[@blackdesigns2085]

Please teach us 🙏🙏

[@jaloejuice]

The way this guy talks makes me not want to click out cuz i feels like I’ll miss something important. Lol idk why 🤷‍♂️

[@ECAbrams]

Probably just a trick of the tone and tenner of my voice. Hopefully it's a good thing.

[@jaloejuice]

@@ECAbrams definitely a good a thing! Learned a lot from this. thx!

[@mareialshareef]

Do you think Limbre is the best way to start learning to move characters?

[@ECAbrams]

Limber has the added benefit that it also creates and gives easy styling options for limbs. In a way it's a very tidy out of the box solution with stripped down controls. "best" I can't say. I recommend always getting the trial version of any 3rd party plugin to see if it works for you specifically and how you work.

[@mareialshareef]

@@ECAbrams thank you very much

[@jkell42]

This reminds me of tools in Adobe Flash Professional circa 2012

[@ECAbrams]

Ah, precious memories. CC Animate is still cool though, right?

[@TipTut]

@@ECAbrams Cool indeed, but a little dated :) EDAP tools is a great plugin for a full IK system in Animate though. It's revolutionary.

[@jaretanderson]

Love the comment about the rebuild knee. If only there was an Anti-pop button for your joints are the doctor's office!

[@ECAbrams]

They kinda did have me on one. I was rocking a pretty gnarly knee brace for a while. Thankfully the surgeries worked out well and I've been back to sport without needing the brace since a couple years ago now.

[@kushalsv]

Please make a deep dive about Limber!

[@ECAbrams]

I think I can do that. Limber does have great documentation by the creator, but I'll see what I can add to the discourse.

[@kushalsv]

@@ECAbrams Thank you! That'd be great! Learning about it from you would be awesome!

[@alarikjagerhorn]

@@ECAbrams Looking forward to this!

[@unleas3d]

How to animate that flower pot flower jiggle in AE Is there plugin for that

[@ECAbrams]

I'm not sure I did use plugins. But, there are a few you might look for. Just check for secondary motion in Aescripts. You can also find similar aids in the DUIK suite of tools. I hope that helps.

[@unleas3d]

@@ECAbrams thank you very much I will search for it I really dont knw how to make that jiggle so perfectly

[@TheLighthouse121]

I am a student, and i operate AE on my laptop. AE hangs a lot on my laptop. What should i do?

[@ECAbrams]

Ae is still very ram intensive. You may want to look into upgrading that if you can. Otherwise, you should reduce all background processes, work in half or quarter resolution, try to keep your work modular with more pre-comping so you don't have to work with heaps of layers at once? Let me know if any of that helps.

[@TheLighthouse121]

@@ECAbrams how does precomps help? I get really confused. Please provide me a solution. Thanks

[@ECAbrams]

@@TheLighthouse121 At a certain point hardware limitations are hard limitations. There may actually not be a viable solution to juice more performance out of your machine, or one that will make significant gains. But the concept of compartmentalizing your work is that you're asking Ae to cache and calculate fewer layers as you're working. Instead of working in one comp with 100 layers, you work in 10 comps with 10 layers maybe. It depends on how your project would actually break down. So when you make granular changes you don't need to render and cache every layer in the whole project on every frame. Now, when you render the assembly comp where the pre comps live, that'll take the same time to render, but you can modify it easier with moving only those larger chunks around. Does that concept make sense with the way you work?

[@blackdesigns2085]

Master can you make Logo animation tutorials? We want to learn how to animate logos like a pro

[@ECAbrams]

You should check out the livestreams I do on Behance.net. I've been animating logos every Sunday at 10:00 EST. Talking techniques and best practices for a couple hours every weekend. Because every logo is unique it's hard to make a single video about it. So I ask the audience to send in logos and I spend a couple hours animating and talking about the process. behance.net/ecabrams/livestream

[@blackdesigns2085]

Thanks bro

[@blackdesigns2085]

Let me join you

[@sfnadim]

Can you make a short tutorial on, how to animate with paths like Scott Johnson, his KZbin channel name is edwin rowin. I have made a more detailed suggestion in your google docs form

[@ECAbrams]

I might be able to do something. I tend to avoid large scale path manipulation as an approach because it really is not cost effective at scale, and a lot of my work is quite corporate. If I'm thinking about the same person, they did like a punk bassist gif a while back, right? Now we could get into more of the why or how we break down an image into paths. But the problem is that to really cover the topic it can't be a short video. The process is long. It has many edge cases and illustration specific issues. I'll put it in the queue here, but I can't guarantee a necessarily "short" tutorial on the topic. It's very similar to the labour involved in Roto animation for example, which is another long manual intensive process. thanks for the suggestion and I'll see what I can do.

[@RDaneelOliwav]

Recognised the topology.svg from freepik ha. Did you credit author?

[@ECAbrams]

Do you mean the topo texture in the branded bumper? That's made using generative effects inside Ae. There's a tutorial on this channel about it if you're interested.

[@RDaneelOliwav]

@@ECAbrams I see

[@RDaneelOliwav]

@@ECAbrams can you point me towards the tut? cant seem to find it

[@ECAbrams]

@@RDaneelOliwav kzbin.info/www/bejne/lZe9aGWtj5hjg6M

[@lovechill2915]

0:50

[@formxshape]

Do a video about Moho.

[@ECAbrams]

What about Moho would you like to know? I don't use it myself, so it might not be a good subject for me to really get into. Maybe I could bring a traditional animator on who would have more comparative thoughts and experiences with things like Harmony or Moho or TvPaint or other things in that same category of tools.

[@oiganamitio]

So, I've been doing this for years and I finally know how it is called lol

[@shoaibliaqat4180]

too fast

[@TouYaeh]

Great summarization of the 2 principles Followed up By Pros & Cons. Left a sub, incredible value. Im Shocked only 30 k People were interested in This matter. Nice Showcase of different Plugins aswell thank you so much.🫶🏼