From the course: RubberHose Animation with After Effects

Use Starch and effects settings for greater control - After Effects Tutorial

From the course: RubberHose Animation with After Effects

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Use Starch and effects settings for greater control

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- [Instructor] In this example, I've added some more animation using expressions to the different body parts. You'll see here I've got the head image connected to the body, the same way that I connected the body in the previous example. Then I've got the hat attached to the head. And that's just doing exactly the same rotation as the head. And then I've got the dungaree bib attached to the hat, and that's rotating a little bit. And it's just very subtle movements, but it's enough just to give it a little bit more fluid motion. I've also adjusted the timing of the arms and legs a little bit more using the draft editor. So feel free just to tweak it the way you like it. And then I'm going to close up those, and you'll see that I've got another two layer open here. And these are the Left Leg and the Right Leg comp. Now you'll notice that they're not really bending in the right places. What you can do is use the Starch tool to add a fixed point to it. So if I select the Starch tool. Now if I open up the Puppet, I should be able to see the Mesh. Now sometimes you need to select the Puppet Points in order to see the Mesh. Now you can adjust the Mesh settings, so if you wanted more Density, you can add detail to the Mesh by adjusting the Density settings. And you can also add these Starch points. If I want this to stay static, you'll see I add a Starch point and it just straightens up that part of the leg. And I can do the same up here as well just add one to the top of the leg. So it's only bending in the middle. We can do the same to the Left Leg Comp. So if we select that, open up the Mesh, and there you can see if I hover over it, it will show up. So we can adjust the Density and then add our Starch point in. And we'll add one up here as well. Okay, and you'll see that that now gives us a lot more control over how the legs bend. Now the other thing that you can do to adjust the leg bend, of course, is to go back into the ankles. So if I click on the Shy button just to open this up. And I'm going to uncheck, the Left Leg Ankle. And then I'm going to uncheck the Right Leg Ankles so that when I click on the Shy button again, I can see both the ankles. And that gives me access to these values here. The Hose Length, the Bend Radius, all those things are available up here. So you'll see that adjusting the Hose Length also affects how that leg bends. So you can feel free to add your own animation just to bring your character to life. And remember to use the principles of animation. So apply exaggeration and a little sense of anticipation to your animation. So there we go, how to use RubberHose to create a very quick and easy walking character. In the final movie, we'll see how we drop that character into a scene and make him walk through that scene.

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