I continued my tutorial (or more like "self-teaching") with Flash and FXG files. As stated in part one of this foray, I am starting off with all the parts of the character in separate layers.
I then moved the Anchor points of all the characters to have the rotation match the ones I had in Flash. A little tedious, but so far so good.
Once I did that, I made sure to parent the limbs in the correct manner in order to make sure, for example, the hand moved with the forearm when I rotated the upper arm. I did this with the pick whip.
What I did was this:
- Parent the Hips to the Torso.
- Parent the upper arms, the upper legs, and head to torso.
- Parent the lower arms and legs to respective upper counterparts.
- Finally, parent hands to respective lower arms.
I made the head and the hands compositions because I am planning on MAYBE using them to hold different hand and mouth shapes. That's for later, though.
Once I did that, I decided to make a quick running loop. I tried to only animate around 2 seconds of running and do a loop_out("cycle", 0) expression, but I had some trouble with parts of the body disappearing I didn't realize I could fix it with a simple opt+End to extend the timeline to the absolute end. Just messy work!
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| It looks wacky! |
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| OMG! MESSY! |
I decided to put a black outline around the caracter. The way I did that was create a copy of the character layer ( CMD+D ), then use the copy to tweak the alpha a little:
I first use the Tint effect to cut out all the color, making it totally black. Then I applied a Simple Choker effect. What this is supposed to do is tighten up a matte in case a tiny little bit of green is spilling over. Well, I set it for NEGATIVE 10 (tweak to what suits you, of course).
and finally I put in a Gaussian blur because I LIKE gaussian blur!
And that is how I did it.
