Science of Character Animation (Lessons 1-6)

Get as much life as possible out of your 2d characters with this all-encompassing course into the fascinating world of Character Animation. Markus will cover tonnes of classical animation and character design principles. He will also share his unique techniques gained throughout his long experience of a professional animator and motion graphics designer.

The Struggle is real
Characters are too complicated
A character is a complex system of limbs, body and other parts. And it’s extremely hard to handle all of this at once. Usually you don’t know what to animate first, what kind of dependencies exist between all of the body parts, each step of the animation process just confuses you even more.

But we will give all the necessary knowledge to understand what to start with, what to do next and even where and when you should stop in animating characters.

Something is wrong with my character’s moves
Your character is moving like he has just run away from hospital long before making a complete recovery? Not satisfied with the result and can’t understand why?

In this course you will learn all the essential fundamentals that will allow you to heal your characters from past diseases and let them enjoy this beautiful life you’ve just brought them into!

How to prepare illustration for animation?
You have just drawn the character, imported it to After Effects and here we go… Splitting it into new layers again and again, going back to illustrator and sorting out it in a new way. OMG, is there any rule of thumb?

Sure, there are a bunch of principles you should know and apply while preparing your character for animation. You will be taught all of them.

My characters don’t look awesome
Decided to do a real cool shot for your portfolio but even static characters already don’t look good?

Keep calm, this course will show you not only how to organize illustrator layers but also how to design characters so that they are easier to animate and are still as charismatic as you want them to be.

Rig doesn’t work as I planned it to
Alright, you imported the character to After Effects, and the first thing you decided to do is to rig the limbs. But when you started animating you realized that this rig doesn’t work for your particular case and it’s time to redo it all over again.

This course also touches upon the topic of rigging. So, you will definitely know what exactly, at which stage and in what way should be rigged.