EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

Morgan Williams: Okay, today I want to talk about why we're using After Effects for 2D character animation in this class. And just sort of get in to some of the technical stuff just a little bit, and also talk about some other options for doing digital 2D character animation. A few different things that we can look at. 

To start with, let's just kind of talk about why we would choose After Effects. The first reason is really just because it's very common. Most creative professionals working in the field nowadays have a subscription to Adobe's Creative Cloud, and After Effects is available to you basically just a click away if you have that subscription. It's also not all that expensive to add if you're doing kind of ala carte. 

It's common and even if you're unfamiliar with it, it's not all that difficult to learn if you have some familiarity with Photoshop and Illustrator, because so many of the functions and buttons and terminology and effects are all the same. It makes the learning curve, if you're pretty comfortable with Photoshop Illustrator, you can get into After Effects pretty quickly. 

It also allows you to easily collaborate with anybody who's using Adobe software. This is really significant because again, most creative professionals are using Adobe products. If you're working in After Effects, you can very, very easily swap files back and forth and work between people all on that system. 

Another great reason is that in a lot of cases, in a lot of production flows, a piece of animation is going to end up in After Effects eventually anyway. It's began its life as post-production software. This was actually something that Mike Roberts talks about in our interview with him, is that it's going to end up in After Effects anyway, so why not just start there? And what's great about that is it means it essentially as you're working you're doing your final compositing and you're finishing as you work. That's another great advantage to be basically ending ... beginning where you're going to end. 

After Effects is designed to manipulate 2D imagery, so when we're working with 2D characters, After Effects gives us this myriad, a collection of means and opportunities for changing and editing and manipulating and bending and doing all kinds of things with 2D imagery. The software is bent towards that purpose, which makes it pretty handy for dealing with 2D characters. Especially because 2D characters come to us with so many different potential looks and styles. Really in many ways a lot more than you see in 3D animation. 

Adobe I think, at least this is my opinion has a great UI design. Now again, that's personal opinion, but in my experience with other animation software Adobe UI is pretty great and pretty intuitive. Also nowadays we have some amazing new scripts, like Duik and other plug-ins that make character animation really pretty user-friendly in After Effects. I think Duik honestly particularly with the update to 15 is really becoming a game changer for doing character in After Effects. 

Also, Adobe is adding their new Mocap system, which they actually call character animation or character animator, excuse me I think. That is pretty interesting and will have some great applications for character animation. Just a side note, Mocap is never a replacement for character animation particularly with 2D characters. If you look at examples of animation created with Mocap systems with 2D characters, a lot of times the animation is really bad because guess what? You have to perform well in order for the animation to really look good, and most of us aren't that great a performer, so if you're going to use a Mocap system, you got to get a real actor. You've got to hire an actor. 

Well how many budgets do we have where we can hire an actor, right? I think the Mocap capabilities especially because it's built-in, doesn't require any hardware and comes with the Adobe Creative Cloud, it's pretty amazing. Absolutely I think it should be something that any good character animator would want to look at bringing into their workflow in some way. I just think there's a lot of fun possibilities, but there will always be a place for just plain, old animation not just Mocap. Mocap doesn't replace it. It's just another tool in our toolkit. What are some of the down sides of using After Effects for 2D character animation? 

First of all, it was never designed for it. It was never designed to be character animations, so we have to kind of coax it into doing what we want it to do. Honestly, Duik tools is one of the things that makes it quite a bit more comfortable and possible to do this kind of work. After Effects itself hasn't really supplied a whole lot of support for character animators with the exception of the introduction of the puppet tool back in I think CS3. That was significant, but it's taken scripts like Duik to actually make that puppet tool something that is really truly user friendly. 

The puppet tool on its own is pretty goofy, but you apply what Duik offers with the ability to parent the puppet pins to nulls, which then allows you to create parenting and IK Chains with the nulls, all of that really improves things. But it's also evidence that After Effects wasn't actually made to do this, so we are kind of tricking it in a way into being a character animation tool. After Effects also doesn't handle 3D elements quite as well as it could. It's kind of 2.5D approach. It's always been a little bit odd and has some clunky-ness to it, compared with 3D software. The motion graph editor is arguably weaker than the motion graph editor is most 3D software as well. 

You can't really draw or paint in the After Effects. That's definitely a con. It has the sort of crude drawing painting tools, but right now they're pretty rough and they don't really offer a whole lot to the character animator. But I would argue in some ways that this is offset by the awesome capabilities that the AnimDessin plug-in for Photoshop offers, and if you're not familiar we'll make sure and put a link to that or at least to some information about that. AnimDessin is a free plug-in that basically turns Photoshop into a frame by frame traditional animation tool. It's absolutely fantastic and if you use AnimDessin in conjunction with tools and After Effects, boy you can really, really do a lot. 

I'm sort of turning this con a little bit into a pro. If you again kind of look at After Effects as being part of the creative suite and look at the capabilities that Photoshop and to a lesser degree Illustrator bring to the table. Another aspect of After Effects that I've personally run into recently working on the great Jenny LeClue game, is that After Effects doesn't output very well for game engines. We created the first rig for Jenny LeClue in After Effects for the trailer and we had hoped to actually use that rig throughout the game, but the big issue really is that the game software really can only read basic translations, and so because of that, it has no way to really deal with the crazy puppet tool. 

Because what we're doing is we're linking that puppet tool to nulls, and so those are providing simple translation values, but the game engines have no way to understand how to translate that to the deformation of the imagery. What that means is that you can only output Sprites for game engines out of After Effects, at least in the experience that I've had. Now my experience with this I will admit fully is limited. I haven't done a whole lot of work for gaming, but that is an issue that you need to be aware of, because we're actually switching to a different software in our case, Cinema 4D in order to recreate the rig for Jenny, so that she can be imported directly into the game engine. 

Little side note there, but something to consider if you're working in that industry. Okay, so let's talk about some other options aside from After Effects. We're doing 2D character animation digitally. I want to make it perfectly clear that this is by no means a complete or comprehensive list, and this list absolutely reflects my personal experience in the industry. You're going to get different perspectives, definitely from different artists, which is part of the reason why we have the interviews for you that we have so you can hear some different points of view. But I just want to make that little disclaimer before we move forward here. 

One of the first options I want to talk about is Flash, because it was a very, very early leader in 2D digital character animation. It is still being used. As far as I know it is still being used in quite a few productions, particularly in Saturday morning television kinds of productions. I want to also provide another little disclaimer right off the bat here, and say that I have a personal bias against Flash. I really, really hate it. Anybody, any of my students who've worked with me for any length of time will tell you that Morgan hates Flash. Now I know how to run it, and I've done character animation in Flash out of necessity, not out of choice because I've worked on productions that were entirely Flash based. 

But Flash is really from the standpoint of a character animator quite frankly a nightmare. There are still animators and artists who swear by it, and would absolutely counter my claims against it. Puny Animation up in Minneapolis which is a terrific studio that has created the title sequences for Super, all the animation for Yo Gabba Gabba among a whole host of other things. Puny uses Flash I think exclusively and my good friend and colleague, Mike Owens, who's a director up there, who's a brilliant animator absolutely loves Flash and will tell you that he thinks in Flash, and he starts his storyboards directly in Flash, and just works right through that process. 

It definitely has its proponents, but I'm here to tell you from the standpoint of getting character animation work done quickly and efficiently, I really would argue against Flash. The pros are there, and we'll talk about the pros and cons, but in general, I think After Effects has huge advantages over Flash, and so does a few other of the options we're going to talk about. So I would put Flash low on your list, and you'll kind of see why as we go through the cons here. What are the pros? I'm struggling here to find something good to say about Flash in terms of character animation, but truthfully I can't. 

Flash has pretty fair frame by frame drawing capabilities. For example, for things like sketching out a quick storyboard or any animatic, or doing old fashioned frame by frame, hand-drawn animation, Flash works fairly has. It has onion skinning. It has fairly simple, intuitive drawing tools. It is limited in its visual capabilities because it is entirely vector based. It is fast, and has some really nice features about it. Another overall pro for Flash and one of the reasons why it became an industry leader very early on in the 90s was that it is cheap relatively. It's really fast in terms of its ability to render and create even long-form animations. Because it's a very light-on processors, because it's all vector based. 

You have to kind of flash back to the 90s when having 16 megabytes of RAM on a computer was considered a lot. Back at that time having something that could allow you to create a half an hour of character animation and render it out relatively easily without a giant room full of computers made this very attractive for small studios and individuals. It was quick. It was fast. It was cheap. I think back then it was just a few hundred bucks or something like that. You could buy a couple of max, a couple of seeds of Flash, and you could have a little character animation studio up and running pretty quickly. That kind of brought it to the forefront very quickly. At that time, After Effects really wasn't much more than post-production software. 

It was still in its early stages, so Flash became a very important part of the kind of character animation world. In terms of 2D I should always be prefacing that by saying 2D character animation very early on. Another thing about Flash is that because it was designed originally to be a development tool, creating character animation in Flash makes it integrate fairly well with game engine. It's obviously Flash animation has been used for years in 2D based games. I don't know how long that will continue, but I believe that's probably still going on. 

What are some of the cons? First of all, Flash like After Effects was not designed for character animation, but unlike After Effects, Flash was really not designed for character animation. In fact, the original owners Macromedia were almost stubborn in their refusal to recognize that character animators were actually using their software for character animation. They almost seem to just turn a blind eye to it and never really offered any help in terms of how they develop that software. Flash is ridiculously unsuited for character animation. Almost everything works against you in my opinion certainly. 

You're definitely hearing some of my opinion come through here, but it's basically a constant workaround game. You're basically tricking the software. I said before that After Effects you have to coax into doing character animation. Flash you have to trick it and beat it into doing character animation. It's really kind of frustrating in my opinion. One of the biggest things that you can say right off the bat, "No parenting." Oh my God. Just that alone. Just saying those words out loud make me shudder with horror. It's not fun. I would ... If you have the choice, I would never choose it. I would honestly never choose it. 

Even if you see someone advertising for a "Flash Animator" I always ask, "Does it have to be in Flash?" Or did you just say "Flash Animator" because it's become Kleenex? A lot of people out in the industry, especially HR people and folks that aren't in the trenches, any time they see flat 2D character animation, they just call it "Flash Animation". You might see that terminology that might not mean that they require you to create the animation in Flash. It's a good tip there, if you're out there in the job market. 

Okay. Aside from that, another big limitation I already touched on is that you're much more limited visually because of being all vector-based, and it doesn't really handle raster art very well when you bring raster art into it. You really can't push the visuals very much, unless you output the layers to After Effects, and then that brings us back to our earlier argument that hey if you're going to end up in After Effects anyway, why switch and swap out? Let's move on to ... Let's forget about Flash since it's so distasteful to me, and let's move on to another option, which is Toon Boom. In particularly, we're going to be focusing on their big package, which is called Harmony. That's their big studio package.

Toon Boom does have two more inexpensive packages called Animate and Toon Boom Studio that are kind of limited, sort of prosumer kind of versions. I want to say right off the bat that my experience with Toon Boom, though it goes back a very long way I do not have a lot of recent experience with Toon Boom. I'm going to be talking kind of based on loosely what I know and understand about the software and my experience with it. But I haven't had a lot of recent direct experience. Toon Boom is pretty amazing. Toon Boom on the pro side was designed to do character animation specifically. It was designed to do it in many different styles, which is amazing. It's a complete production package, so this makes it fantastic for medium to large size studios, and it also makes it great for series or features work, because it's the whole thing from sketching, the storyboards ...  

Oh and Toon Boom also makes Storyboard Pro, which is amazing storyboard software, which I do rather recommend for storyboard artist. It's pretty incredible, but they have a complete package moving from Storyboard Pro into production. Harmony is a complete production package that takes it all the way from character development and design and background design to animation and compositing and final output, everything. It's all there. That's pretty amazing. It's very flexible. You can do hand-drawn animation. You can do jointed puppets. You can do 2D. You can do 2.5D. You can even do quite a bit of 3D in the software. Although it isn't quite Maya, but it has fairly robust 3D capabilities and great integration, 2D, 3D integration capabilities. 

It's very, very flexible and allows you to work in a lot of different ways. Those cheaper versions, Animate in Toon Boom, make it possible for somebody to get into the Toon Boom world without stepping into a huge price tag, but those versions are limited to some degree now, because I haven't had direct experience I can't speak to that. I would investigate that fully before I would make any purchases. What are some of the cons. This all sounds amazing, right? Wow, Toon Boom. Well, a couple cons are it's expensive. It's expensive for individuals, that Harmony version. Now Animate in Toon Boom are less expensive, but they are limited. That Harmony which is that really complete professional package, that's a pretty steep price tag for an individual or even for a small studio, particularly if you're already paying for the creative cloud. 

It's designed to be kind of self contained, so integration with Adobe is not as seamless. I mean and it ... It imports and exports things that are Adobe-friendly, but once again, if you're moving outside of the Adobe universe, you have to accept that there's going to be some issues with seamless tracking back and forth. If you for example still want to do your compositing in After Effects, and I would be willing to guess that a lot of studios that use Harmony may still be using After Effects for final composite, a lot of those studios you could argue once again. Well, if you've already got the Creative Cloud, you've already got After Effects and you don't want to make a big investment in not only buying another piece of software, but learning another piece of software. Then Toon Boom may not be such a great choice. 

That's another con is that you would have to learn Toon Boom. If you already know After Effects, Illustrator, and or the kind of Adobe world, moving into Toon Boom, you'd have to learn their way of working and their system and their UI. Now the last time I worked with Toon Boom software, which I will admit was a long time ago, but the last time one of the biggest complaints we had with it was that the UI design was very clunky. I imagine that these days they've improved that tremendously. But I would have a hard time believing that it's as good as Adobe. I just would have a hard time believing that, because they started in a pretty rough place. 

By the way, I did start with Toon Boom very early ... The first animation studio I worked at Mike Jones Film Corporation which was actually a beta tester for a software called Animation Stand. Animation Stand was precursor to the whole Toon Boom family of software, so we were right there at the beginning and saw its early stages, and then in the second animation studio I spent most of my time at Realworks. We had a Toon Boom software package. It's very similar to Harmony. It may actually even have been an early version of Harmony, but it was a similar idea, was a self-contained ... This was designed for a small to medium sized studio doing 2D character animation. 

Our experience with it was essentially that we really only used it for scanning pencil drawn artwork and doing quick ink and paint. We always did our final composites in After Effects, and as we went on that ratio kind of shifted. But we're really using it as a replacement for the actual tracing of cells and painting on them that you would do in traditional animation. I'll talk about that more in one of the other podcast. Toon Boom have some great pros, but it definitely has some cons, and it really takes quite a commitment to character animation if you want to even consider something like Toon Boom. You would have to be pretty committed or your studio would have to be pretty committed to doing that kind of work. 

Okay, so one of the next things I want to talk about is using 3D software for doing 2D character animation. This is also entirely possible. First of all, there's the actual creation of 3D puppets that then you toon shade in 3D. This is something we've all seen. This is definitely an option if you have and are familiar with 3D software that is definitely an option. But what I want to talk about is actually using 3D software for animating 2D characters, characters that are designed to be 2D. That's significant, because there are certain types of character designs that really cannot survive the translation to full-fledged 3D. We'll talk about that in some later podcasts as well. 

What I am talking about is when you have a character that is designed to be 2D, that is meant to be 2D, that looks 2D, and feels 2D, and that you don't want to try to translate into some kind of 3D toon shaded look, which quite frankly is a really different look from a truly 2D character. When we're looking at creating a 2D animation in a 3D software, Cinema 4D or Maya, there's also pros and cons. One of the big pros is that you get all of the amazing rigging capabilities that you have in 3D software. 3D software is honestly way ahead on the concept of character rigging from 2D software, although I think some of the Toon Boom and Spine that we'll talk about in a minute have some pretty advanced capabilities as well. 

But 3D software has been on this for much, much longer, and so the rigging capabilities are just honestly light years ahead. Moving into that 3D software, you gain a lot of capability on your rigs, which is terrific. 3D software makes integrating 2D animation with 3D or live action elements easier, because you're working right in that environment. Although that kind of integration with After Effects is pretty smooth as well. It's also better for outputting the game engines, because it is all based on translations, even down to the deformation of the artwork, which would be on polygons. That allows it to be output for game engines in a way that the puppet tool information and After Effects cannot. 

What are the cons? Well, first of all, 3D software is expensive and difficult to learn. Not everybody wants to buy it, not everybody wants to learn it. Many of you listening to this may have 3D software. Some of you might, some of you might not. But once again, it's a pretty big commitment, if you want to get into that kind of work. There's the learning curve of learning 3D software, which is historically pretty difficult. Those are definitely cons. The other thing that I think you'll find and I found, because I've been doing some of this kind of work myself is that the software is kind of fighting against you a little bit, because the software is built for dimensions and space and fully volumetric forms. Everything about the software is bent toward that purpose. 

To push it back to just being two dimensional means you're kind of once again tricking the software into doing what you want it to do, and kind of working against the software's nature to a certain degree. That can be very frustrating. One of the areas that I find very frustrating is just the lack of options from easily manipulating 2D imagery. When you're in After Effects, you have so many tools to make 2D imagery do different stuff. When you're in that 3D software I was working in Cinema 4D, you're so limited in terms of what you can do with that 2D imagery and you keep having to bounce back to software like Photoshop and creating sequences and different things that in After Effects you would just throw together with a couple key frames. 

That I think is definitely something that you have to think about, if you're kind of consider 3D software for your workflow. Now that brings us to the last software that I'm going to talk about, which is a newcomer to the block which has some pretty exciting capabilities from what I've seen. Now this is very new. I have not downloaded a trial yet. I have not worked with it. So I'm totally talking from just the little bit that I've seen here. I just want to make that full disclosure. We'll give you some links for this on the PDF. But Spine is actually a 2D character software designed specifically for game developers, so it's very, very interesting. 

A couple of the things that are great about it is first of all it's remarkably inexpensive. They have a trial version that's I think under $100. It's designed for 2D character animation specifically, so like Toon Boom, it's really bent towards what you were trying to do if you're working with 2D characters. It seems to have some very strong rigging capabilities including dynamics and built-in IK systems, and a lot of things that you would expect to see in 3D software, it seems to have readily at hand, which is pretty great. Then because it's built to output for game engines, it seems to be potentially a terrific tool for doing 2D character animation for games. 

Although again, I haven't tried it. I guess that would be one of the first cons. It's new. It's untested. I don't know anybody who's worked with it yet. It also may not work as well for narrative productions. It may not be really built, for example, to create a cartoon or a series, or a narrative advertisement or something. Although it might. Again, that's something about it that we'll have to see once some people get a chance to play with it a little bit. Then just the fact that it's third-party software. Any time you're dealing with third-party softwares, many of you may know questions can arise. Compatibility with other software, potential problems with translation back and forth. 

You always want to be cautious if you are tossing a third-party software into your workflow. Just something to consider there. But I would definitely check it out. It looks really fun, and I'm definitely looking forward to playing around with it some time in the near future. Now there are of course other options out there and you're welcome to investigate and try different ones. In fact, I'd love to hear from some of you guys if you've run into something that you think is interesting. But those are the ones that I am familiar with, and I think for the most part that kind of leading players in the world of 2D character animation. 

Again, I really think that After Effects is a great choice. It's a great option. I find it particularly these days with Duik tools, really friendly for the character animator and all those pros that come with it are really advantageous, so I hope throughout this course that you'll enjoy the process and that even if you might look at or eventually move to a different process, I think you'll agree that doing character animation, 2D character animation in After Effects is really pretty fun.