Portrait Animation

Portrait Animation from Emma Nicholson on Vimeo.

For this tutorial I was asked to prepare a vector drawn portrait of a person that was 1920x1080 and has a number of separate limbs I can animate independently to create a vast range of movement.

One technique I will be using is a living hold and it is used when action in an animation has stopped but the animation is still running through the timeline. For example a subtitle will appear on the screen but will have no animated movement so to make sure the animation does not look frozen or buffering a small moving feature is added like a lens flare or moving texture so there is a subtle element of movement that indicates the passing of time on the animation.

I was told a tip about pacing an animation. If I have a contrast between fast intense scenes with eh odd gentle undertone to create a strong structure within the story.

I am also told we will need to ensure our motion loops seamlessly.

Right so from here I am ready to start, so I created my document and imported the content and set it all in the timeline. I rigged each element up, correcting their anchor points so their movement is natural at the usual joints.

After I had a basic keyframe animation set up for ten seconds I began adding a living hold to some elements using the wiggler function, who’s setting can be found in the window menu. This function adds random movement at a magnitude of my choice, in my case I chose a very small magnitude to add just a minimal range of movement to make my human portrait seem more alive. This adds a level of realism as living things can not hold perfectly still. This feature is also helpful for not animated elements such as backgrounds as adding a subtle amount of movement brings them forward slightly into the animation, merging the foreground and background.

As I added the wiggle to some of my layers I encountered a bug. As the layers were 3D they had 3 axis of movement, so when I added the wiggle it moved the z axis too so the layers move forward and behind each other making them appear to flash on and off screen. So to solve this I selected just one axis of movement, if I wanted another axis I would have to create a second wiggle effect to that axis.

Another feature I was shown was using Javascript to program my animation. To open the edit window I had to alt+click the layer and begin adding expressions. The default code is transform.position. This form of editing is good for complete control whereas the wiggle feature is a completely random outcome.

A handy tip for working with long animations is to create the base product, which is simply the animated objects, before stylising them. This is an efficient way of working as you always have a full product early on and are only making it better after that.

So once I had added some final touches to the animation which included the addition of some textures, I finally ensured the loop was seamless and I finished the animation and rendered it out.

Adding the textures was a simple process, I imported the texture, used an alpha track which is similar to how a clipping mask works in illustrator. This replaced the solid colour with the texture. I then adjusted the opacity of the solid colour and added the multiply blending mode to make the texture more subtle and the colour I wanted.