360 Head Tutorial Part 1: Design

This is Part 1 of my massive After Effects Tutorial on how to make an expressive rotatable head. In this section I'm going to discus the design of the character, the madness, and the method.

 When I designed my character I really just wanted him to have more expressive range than the norm.  Especially from what we're accustomed to is wooden performances that are not too dissimilar from Clutch Cargo. I wanted to imitate the squash and stretch in the film Twice Upon a Time.  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SmcX_OX1VzA

Now I was in some ways pretty utilitarian in my design going so far as ditching 5 designs during production. If it didn't look good or convincing or if it wasn't functioning like I imagined it - I tossed it.

Form pretty much followed function in the end.

Now first off it should be simple. It is not impossible to construct a wrinkly jacked up monster with giant cysts for eyes it is just strongly inadvisable. After Effects is a nitch program while it can do a few things real well it is no substitute for your standard modeling package. Especially if your going to turn and do a 360 rotation.

With that said you can deviate from what I've done, however simplicity is key. The rules are simple:

• Use shapes that have horizontal symmetry for the head. A triangle becomes a cone, a circle a sphere etc...  This is important if you intend to connect it to a neck and not have the head rock back and forth.

• Use the same color to hide seams and blend objects into a cohesive unit.

• While it is possible to give the character a ponytail keep hair simple in fact the easiest head you could make is a bald one - and I don't even think you need Freeform for that one.

Ears have a similar process to ponytails. I'll probably discuss how to go about these extras last as they are further down the comp stream.

Now to cover some deficiencies of this method:

This chart shows where my original rig visually breaks - the red line in back represents the falloff. If rotated just by its Y axis the head will never break it is completely stable with some give in the X axis before -25.  There is a lot more leeway for him to look down because I was considering story. The story being all about fear of heights, so he has to look down eventually. The red line does come to a point somewhere below - where it becomes evident that the bangs and the back of the head are separate features.

The other possible deficiency is render time, which is a silent killer if not dealt with early. The bulk of this problem comes from Freeform and how many subdivisions it creates under the quality tab.  However this render problem only really arises once you start using the puppet pin tool. Which lets face it has its issues (we'll save that for another tutorial).   

Speaking of render issues it is preferable to animate within After Effects at a low resolution.

I think this covers the basic design aspects of this process. In the next tutorial we'll take a look at the mouth and eyes.

Head Tutorial:
Nimbus Link: First Post
360 Head Tutorial Part 1: Design
360 Head Tutorial Part 2: Eyes and Mouth
360 Head Tutorial Part 3: The Head

Nimbus Link: First Post

Nimbus Link was my senior film that I worked on at SCAD. I used only what was within the vanilla version of After Effects CS 5.5.

Apart from the DuIK Tools plugin, which can be found here: http://ik.duduf.com/
DuIK helped with posing the legs using inverse kinematics - which is a time saver.

What is notable about this project is that I am mostly a 3D guy, so I rigged this character as if it was 3D. The truth however is that it is not - it only appears that way. It is straight up cutouts using masks, puppet pins, and assorted distortions.

Every layer in this character rig is pretty much flat, however I also used a plugin already within After Effects (as of CS5.5) called Digieffects Freeform. Through Freeform I was able to create a 360 degree rotatable head.

This plugin allows you to use displacement maps (along with other attributes) to create what appears to be a 3D surface - trouble is it doesn't actually interact with 3D layers or anything else outside the layer it is affecting.

I will be doing a tutorial on how to assemble such a character rig in After Effects on this blog.

Seeing how this is my first post I might as well state what my objectives are:

This blog will have tutorials like this and general updates from within the heart of darkness known as animation. I'll say animation is fantastic, there's a lot to offer, but I'm not saying it's magical - that's just presumptuous it is trial and error if anything.

Alright now that's a knife!

I have my Machete lets weed through some minutia together.

Head Tutorial:
Nimbus Link: First Post
360 Head Tutorial Part 1: Design
360 Head Tutorial Part 2: Eyes and Mouth
360 Head Tutorial Part 3: The Head