To further my research into animating techniques, I figured I would have practice within After Effects to get to grips the to the animation I will be doing for my final piece(s).
I decided to test the rubber hose technique that I described recently by having a play around with it in After Effects.
Rubber-Hose 2.0
For After Effects there is a script made by independent creators Battleaxe.co. This script is able to function within After Effects in order to ease the process of creating rubber-hose style animations without having to manually keyframe all elements needed. The technique involved with working this script is by animating elements that attach to the hose such as a body or hand for an example and the script then automatically calculates the position and bend for the hose once applied and parented to the subsequent layer.
I decided to access this script and try it out to help my process when creating my animations. I found the process very easy, I decided to follow a tutorial (linked below). This gave more in depth looks to steps needed for a walk cycle and very quickly helps you learn the necessary steps in a short amount of time. The tutorial is only 11 minutes long, showing how quickly this can be done, I took around an hour and 20 minutes, though this was due to going back and forth from the video while also picking up useful keyboard shortcuts. From what I learnt from the video, I feel I can replicate another walk cycle in a similar time frame to the video.
One of the most useful tips I learnt from the tutorial is the ‘loopIn’ expression that you can type into the expressions section to control keyframes. The full expression is loopIn(“cycle”). Essentially it allowed me to to continuously loop an animation seamlessly rather than creating keyframes for the entire duration. This helped especially for seeing the end result.
Here is the tutorial I followed:
Here is the result that followed from the tutorial.
I also storyboarded the three episodes that I intend to create.
Episode 1
The first episode is a farm based episode where ‘Red’ is driving a combine harvester while ‘Blue’ is running away. Red chases Blue and ultimately runs him over with the harvester though while too preoccupied with that, the harvester runs off of a cliff.
Red is shown in a similar bad state to blue and is mocked by a crow that appears at the start.
Episode 2
The second episode is based within a bowling alley. Red walks over to blue and removes his head. Red lines himself up with the bowling lane and uses blue’s head as a bowling ball. Red scores a strike and slips onto the lane after he celebrates. He slips down the lane and into the machine. The bowling pins reset and Red has been reformed into a pin, while disgruntled the crow mocks him.
Episode 3
The final episode will be based in space. Blue is staring out of the window of their rocket when Red signals him over to the other window. Once staring out of the other side, Red presses the eject button and send Blue flying out of the spacecraft. Red doesn’t realise the rocket is crashing into a nearby planet. The rocket crashes and red is stuck head first into a crater. This time the crow and a local alien mock Red in his situation.
(Click each link to see storyboards).