thanks for this tutorial, I got stuck at a few moments and there were times where you lost me... but all in all I was able to make the perfect mouth rig. On a side note I added gums to the teeth shape layer because the sneer tends to stretch over the teeth.
Nolan Renshaw thanks for hanging in there! This is the most complicated tutorial I've put out there. hope you can make some cool stuff with your new rig!
I followed the tutorial correctly but for some reason, one of the controllers is not response. I have all the controllers working but the lower lip movement. It's not moving after I created the teeth
It's basically that when I'm typing the negative value of the "side" slider, it sort of mirrors the shape but vertically not horizontally, and distorts it. So I'm basically stuck at 09:42
When creating the side jaw shape, at 07:22 make sure to paste origin before creating the new shape. In creating that shape, I only move the bottom lip points to the right. Also, the sliders in your effects panel of your slider null should never be rearranged. They are referenced by stacking order so re-sorting them will cause confusion with the tools.
Hey Mike, I really appreciate your help, so much. I've got one more question about the tongue in this rig however - specifically the tip. On sounds like "L" and "Th" we use the tip of our tongue as opposed to the back. My thought right now is build a second tongue piece and have it pop up for these sounds instead of the mid/back tongue piece shown in the video. Just wanted to see if you had an existing idea on this as well. Once I finished the rig I realized that you really only ever have to build this ONCE. Now, all of my characters have dynamic awesome mouths. THAT is amazing. Thanks again.
When I use the path to establish a binding, the binding does not produce any effects. I am using the Chinese version of ae. Is it related to incompatibility?
Great video! I'm a newbie to all this. I had everything working and then when I renamed my SlideController the slider stopped working. Every time I change the values in SlideController Panel and click on update button, nothing happens. What am I doing wrong?
Hi. Love this and following along. Somehow getting broken after I went back and rigged the right side pinch and smile. The Mouth.r joystick works as it should but the Jaw and Mouth.l joysticks are now unbound it seems. Not certain how to rebind them (or rather which layer to select and which joystick to bind to!). ?
Hi Liam. It's hard to tell from your description what exactly is going wrong. The tricky hack about this process is your Slider Null (1 layer) is controlled by a series of joysticks, where most often you would have one joystick control several layers. But say for instance you have four unbound properties in your slider null layer, and you want to only bind two of those to your joystick. By default, J and S will bind all unbound properties in a layer to your joystick, which is not what you'd want in this case. You can trick J&S into skipping over a property by temporarily nudging the keyframes to the right by a frame. If a property does not have a keyframe at frame 0, it won't bind it when scanning for properties. Another possible use for this trick is if you have many shapes contained in one shape layer that you would like to control with different joysticks.
Mike! Great job man. I have a question about making the F,V mouth shape, where the bottom lip goes under the top teeth. It seems like I could create a separate matte and just cover to match the top lip. Would that work? Is there a pre-existing solution? I'm starting on my rig right now, but thought it would be a good idea to toss this question out to you as I got to work.
Yeah, I think a matte parented to the upper teeth that you manually turn on and off could let the lip slide behind the teeth. Good idea! Though I am often able to get away with having the bottom lip just meet the upper teeth to create a convincing F/V shape.
Hey Mike, Great tutorial! I'm having an issue in the first step where I get my poses looking correct by setting the rotobezier tension (so it doesn't look like a ninja turtle mouth) but when applied to a slider it goes back to the ninja turtle mouth. I know the plug in has been updated since this tutorial so the paths update on the fly, did the change in after effects paths recently break this?
Toby Meadows after rigging your mouth, right click on the path in your comp. Uncheck the rotobezier option. If you turn off rotobezier after rigging, you should get the correct result.
My mouth works and followed the tutorial and everything. I was just wondering why there's a lag between what my locators are doing and how to get my mouth layer to actually follow my key frames? it's like a step behind what my locators are doing : (
Hi Danny, That is very odd. Are you saying that your mouth and locators aren't synced when you create animation in the timeline? I'd really like to take a look at your .aep to see what's going on. If you might have discovered a bug, I would like to fix it. You can open a support ticket here and upload it for me to check out. aescripts.com/contact/
Hey there- thank you for the prompt reply :) I ended up doing some more troubleshooting and it ended up working it in the end. I guess every time I set keys for the Joysticks- I need to remember to update it before doing a RAM preview. I always find that when I have exhausted what I think are all my options and post online for help I end solving the problem myself :P sorry for the inconvenience but thank you so much for the reply and the awesome product!
If you mean to change the thickness of a stroke along a bezier path, no, there is no reasonable way to do this. Tapered strokes has been on the wish list of After Effects users for years. You would have to create two shapes for the inner and outer line of the lips and do a Merge Paths to cut the center of the mouth out.
hey man, i was using after effects for character animation, for long time. But now im working moho 12, it;s so good. it s amazing for character rigging, so quick and easy. After effects can't compare to moho in that field
I've used Moho for many projects in the past as Anime Studio Pro. It really is very good for rigging. The process of animating wasn't to my liking though in that the easing control was very rudimentary, akin to Flash. It seems they've made some great leaps with Moho. Spine for Unity looks very interesting to me too.
yes, timeline and easing in moho are strange, but rigging is powerfull. I never used spine but i have seen few videos and it looks interesting. I wihs you the best :)
Hi Mike, this is incredible, I've been following along and doing fine, but when I try to pickwhip the mouthmatte to the mouthshape I get an expression error - any solutions?
Very odd that something like that would cause an error, but I'm glad it now works on your end! I'll look a little further into it when I have a moment. Don't know if it is an Adobe bug or an Overbeck bug.
Hi Mike. I recently started messing around with Moho and the blending you're showing off with Joysticks 'N' Sliders is very similar. It seems great. I'm not a 3D guy at all, but the idea of blending shapes in a rig is new to me. I like your thinking! I've watched your videos multiple times but I still have a couple questions: • the biggest downside I see with this advanced rig is that the paths don't seem to update in real-time with the sliders even when the sliders. As a 2D artist and animator, the biggest obstacle with any digital software is being able to immediately see exactly what you're doing, what your lines look like, what your shapes look like. Is there a limitation in that After Effects can't show changes to vector path data when connected to other controllers like your sliders? • for this reason, I seem to prefer the possibilities of the joystick. Moving the Joystick around and seeing immediate results. You show the transform properties being controlled by the joystick, but can the PATHS of shapes ALSO be controlled by a joystick? Or is this again a limitation of After Effects being able to show it in real-time? • and if so, my first inclination is to see about using multiple joysticks to control the path data/shape of a mouth. Maybe one joystick controls the whole head, turning the eyes, nose, and mouth POSITION, and a second joystick controls the SHAPE/POSE of the mouth (neutral, open, closed, clenched, and "ooooh" perhaps?) • and if that's possible, can you have multiple joysticks control the SAME points on a path? So one joystick could control the pose, and one joystick could control the "mood" (neutral, happy, sad, angry, shy perhaps?) affecting the same points. Hmmm...maybe not if you're binding the whole layer to a joystick. • and that make me wonder what happens if more than 5 poses are used on a joystick? Maybe nothing as the initial 5 frames/poses inform the illusion of a head turning. Anything more is probably ignored. Hmmm...well hopefully you can see my train of thought here. I want to blend shape data dynamically in real-time to make mouth shapes and turn heads and to do both at the same time. I might hafta fool around with your script and experiment myself. I hope you don't mind this barrage of questions :) Thanks! -bob. www.bobrissetto.com
Hi Bob, That is correct, within After Effects, you can't pull apart vector path data and manipulate it with expressions, which work in realtime. You can do that with scripts, but the only way to apply that data back into After Effects is with the path shape baking that I employ. As users, we often ask the Adobe developers for access to more data through expressions and scripting, and they have slowly been doing that. I think path shape manipulation through expressions will happen one day. Other properties are represented as numbers or numerical arrays, which can be manipulated in realtime with expressions. Shape data is stored as an object, which can't be accessed the same way. Your idea of having a joystick control mood is certainly possible. I had once thought of making 3D joysticks, which could let you move your controller around a 3D cube, but I don't think that would have been very user-friendly. Joysticks 'n Sliders will never become a replacement for a 3D workflow, but it brings some of the tools that 3D riggers enjoy to a 2D workflow.
Ah, I see. Hopefully Adobe will open the doors to the object data someday. Thanks for replying! Hmm...maybe there are some creative ways to build a mouth that can be manipulated with numeric properties and joysticks. Regardless, your tool looks like fun to animate with. Thanks again!
I have used Moho, back when it was Anime Studio Pro. It is a fantastic rigging program. Just not a big fan of its timeline editor, and I always had to export pngs to bring it into After Effects for compositing.
Yeah, Moho opened my eyes up to rigging. I have a 2D background and I've used Flash since it's Macromedia days because it's the one program that you can draw in with a timeline to playback. And then the symbols and nesting became so powerful that they didn't even realize they built an animation tool instead of a web authoring tool. It's 2017 and Adobe JUST pledged their support to animators. But I'm jealous of certain features in Moho and ToonBoom and AE and so I gave Moho a shot. Like ya said, the rigging is so good, but I'm constantly surprised how some things are less intuitive in software packages. Like Moho's timeline, or AE's particles, Flash still can't parent things easily, Toon Boom is trying to do everything and completely confuses me. Not sure if Anime Studio supported this "new-to-me" feature, but Moho can rig vertices of a mesh warp to smart bones so that you can effectively do head turns/animation with raster images. Since it's all just math and data the potential rigs are pretty cool. This would sorta be like controlling pin positions in AE with a joystick. And the pins would pull around points on a front-on image of a painted head. I like my art graphic and cartoony so I favor vectors, but it's all about the tools and potential.
Hi, I think I followed the steps you taught here, but I couldn't create a slider and it says "you cannot create a slider without at least two keyframes on the property." Why you can create but I can't?
Make sure your first keyframe is at the very start of your timeline and every pose thereafter is on the very next frame, with no empty frames inbetween. If you have gaps on your timeline, you will get this error.
thank you, I think I figured it out. But when I created a slider, it says there is an error with the line 7, I could not do anything with it. What is it happening? Also, I could not find the update pathshapes in my joystickers
That is very odd that you wouldn't have an update Pathshapes button. Perhaps you are working with an old version? Make sure you have downloaded the latest version from aescripts. If you're still having problems, you can open a support ticket aescripts.com/contact/ From there you can upload an aep that I can test to try to figure out the bug.
Whoops! That's my go-to temporary name. It's a clean funny-sounding and easy to type word. I sometimes temporarily use it to swap the names of elements without getting confused.
i've been looking for something like this for a lot of time! thanks for sharing your knowledge :)
thanks for this tutorial, I got stuck at a few moments and there were times where you lost me... but all in all I was able to make the perfect mouth rig. On a side note I added gums to the teeth shape layer because the sneer tends to stretch over the teeth.
Nolan Renshaw thanks for hanging in there! This is the most complicated tutorial I've put out there. hope you can make some cool stuff with your new rig!
A very nice lesson!
Would there be a time to update this tutorial to the 1.5/1.6 version?
Thank you, 😇angel!
great dude , but i lost you in that slide thing , so if you can make a tutorial about it , would be so great
I followed the tutorial correctly but for some reason, one of the controllers is not response. I have all the controllers working but the lower lip movement. It's not moving after I created the teeth
As it's always the case of step by steps, it doesn't matter if I do exactly same things, follow each step super carefully, the result is not the same
I would need to see what result you are getting to help you through it. You could perhaps post your screencast so I can see what's going wrong.
It's basically that when I'm typing the negative value of the "side" slider, it sort of mirrors the shape but vertically not horizontally, and distorts it. So I'm basically stuck at 09:42
When creating the side jaw shape, at 07:22 make sure to paste origin before creating the new shape. In creating that shape, I only move the bottom lip points to the right. Also, the sliders in your effects panel of your slider null should never be rearranged. They are referenced by stacking order so re-sorting them will cause confusion with the tools.
Hey Mike, I really appreciate your help, so much. I've got one more question about the tongue in this rig however - specifically the tip. On sounds like "L" and "Th" we use the tip of our tongue as opposed to the back. My thought right now is build a second tongue piece and have it pop up for these sounds instead of the mid/back tongue piece shown in the video. Just wanted to see if you had an existing idea on this as well.
Once I finished the rig I realized that you really only ever have to build this ONCE. Now, all of my characters have dynamic awesome mouths. THAT is amazing. Thanks again.
Just to answer my own question here, this tongue works fine for both sounds listed above.
Hey Bro, how were you able to make eyes boring and normal like without eyebrows?
When I use the path to establish a binding, the binding does not produce any effects.
I am using the Chinese version of ae. Is it related to incompatibility?
Great video! I'm a newbie to all this. I had everything working and then when I renamed my SlideController the slider stopped working. Every time I change the values in SlideController Panel and click on update button, nothing happens. What am I doing wrong?
Hi. Love this and following along. Somehow getting broken after I went back and rigged the right side pinch and smile.
The Mouth.r joystick works as it should but the Jaw and Mouth.l joysticks are now unbound it seems. Not certain how to rebind them (or rather which layer to select and which joystick to bind to!). ?
Hi Liam. It's hard to tell from your description what exactly is going wrong. The tricky hack about this process is your Slider Null (1 layer) is controlled by a series of joysticks, where most often you would have one joystick control several layers.
But say for instance you have four unbound properties in your slider null layer, and you want to only bind two of those to your joystick. By default, J and S will bind all unbound properties in a layer to your joystick, which is not what you'd want in this case. You can trick J&S into skipping over a property by temporarily nudging the keyframes to the right by a frame. If a property does not have a keyframe at frame 0, it won't bind it when scanning for properties. Another possible use for this trick is if you have many shapes contained in one shape layer that you would like to control with different joysticks.
Dang. I think this version is different to the one I'm using, so I can't follow it I'm afraid.
good
What program is used to create this software
hey can u share the project file please
Hello Brasil
Mike! Great job man. I have a question about making the F,V mouth shape, where the bottom lip goes under the top teeth. It seems like I could create a separate matte and just cover to match the top lip. Would that work? Is there a pre-existing solution?
I'm starting on my rig right now, but thought it would be a good idea to toss this question out to you as I got to work.
Yeah, I think a matte parented to the upper teeth that you manually turn on and off could let the lip slide behind the teeth. Good idea! Though I am often able to get away with having the bottom lip just meet the upper teeth to create a convincing F/V shape.
Thank you so much for the reply. You're doin the Lord's work.
Hey Mike, Great tutorial! I'm having an issue in the first step where I get my poses looking correct by setting the rotobezier tension (so it doesn't look like a ninja turtle mouth) but when applied to a slider it goes back to the ninja turtle mouth. I know the plug in has been updated since this tutorial so the paths update on the fly, did the change in after effects paths recently break this?
Toby Meadows after rigging your mouth, right click on the path in your comp. Uncheck the rotobezier option. If you turn off rotobezier after rigging, you should get the correct result.
Thanks Mike! That worked a treat, Keep up the good work!
My mouth works and followed the tutorial and everything. I was just wondering why there's a lag between what my locators are doing and how to get my mouth layer to actually follow my key frames? it's like a step behind what my locators are doing : (
Hi Danny, That is very odd. Are you saying that your mouth and locators aren't synced when you create animation in the timeline? I'd really like to take a look at your .aep to see what's going on. If you might have discovered a bug, I would like to fix it. You can open a support ticket here and upload it for me to check out.
aescripts.com/contact/
Hey there- thank you for the prompt reply :) I ended up doing some more troubleshooting and it ended up working it in the end. I guess every time I set keys for the Joysticks- I need to remember to update it before doing a RAM preview. I always find that when I have exhausted what I think are all my options and post online for help I end solving the problem myself :P sorry for the inconvenience but thank you so much for the reply and the awesome product!
Is there a way to change the thickness of a vector point?
If you mean to change the thickness of a stroke along a bezier path, no, there is no reasonable way to do this. Tapered strokes has been on the wish list of After Effects users for years. You would have to create two shapes for the inner and outer line of the lips and do a Merge Paths to cut the center of the mouth out.
hey man, i was using after effects for character animation, for long time.
But now im working moho 12, it;s so good.
it s amazing for character rigging, so quick and easy. After effects can't compare to moho in that field
I've used Moho for many projects in the past as Anime Studio Pro. It really is very good for rigging. The process of animating wasn't to my liking though in that the easing control was very rudimentary, akin to Flash. It seems they've made some great leaps with Moho. Spine for Unity looks very interesting to me too.
yes, timeline and easing in moho are strange, but rigging is powerfull. I never used spine but i have seen few videos and it looks interesting.
I wihs you the best :)
Hi Mike, this is incredible, I've been following along and doing fine, but when I try to pickwhip the mouthmatte to the mouthshape I get an expression error - any solutions?
Hi James, Are you sure are pickwhipping the path properties to one another? Not the layer pickwhip, but the property pickwhip.
Thanks for the speedy reply, I seem to be doing it exactly as you demonstrate - it comes up with the error 'unterminated string constant'
I fixed it - there was a space at the beginning of my layer name...oops! Thanks again for your help!!!
Very odd that something like that would cause an error, but I'm glad it now works on your end! I'll look a little further into it when I have a moment. Don't know if it is an Adobe bug or an Overbeck bug.
Hi Mike. I recently started messing around with Moho and the blending you're showing off with Joysticks 'N' Sliders is very similar. It seems great. I'm not a 3D guy at all, but the idea of blending shapes in a rig is new to me. I like your thinking! I've watched your videos multiple times but I still have a couple questions:
• the biggest downside I see with this advanced rig is that the paths don't seem to update in real-time with the sliders even when the sliders. As a 2D artist and animator, the biggest obstacle with any digital software is being able to immediately see exactly what you're doing, what your lines look like, what your shapes look like. Is there a limitation in that After Effects can't show changes to vector path data when connected to other controllers like your sliders?
• for this reason, I seem to prefer the possibilities of the joystick. Moving the Joystick around and seeing immediate results. You show the transform properties being controlled by the joystick, but can the PATHS of shapes ALSO be controlled by a joystick? Or is this again a limitation of After Effects being able to show it in real-time?
• and if so, my first inclination is to see about using multiple joysticks to control the path data/shape of a mouth. Maybe one joystick controls the whole head, turning the eyes, nose, and mouth POSITION, and a second joystick controls the SHAPE/POSE of the mouth (neutral, open, closed, clenched, and "ooooh" perhaps?)
• and if that's possible, can you have multiple joysticks control the SAME points on a path? So one joystick could control the pose, and one joystick could control the "mood" (neutral, happy, sad, angry, shy perhaps?) affecting the same points. Hmmm...maybe not if you're binding the whole layer to a joystick.
• and that make me wonder what happens if more than 5 poses are used on a joystick? Maybe nothing as the initial 5 frames/poses inform the illusion of a head turning. Anything more is probably ignored.
Hmmm...well hopefully you can see my train of thought here. I want to blend shape data dynamically in real-time to make mouth shapes and turn heads and to do both at the same time. I might hafta fool around with your script and experiment myself.
I hope you don't mind this barrage of questions :) Thanks!
-bob.
www.bobrissetto.com
Hi Bob,
That is correct, within After Effects, you can't pull apart vector path data and manipulate it with expressions, which work in realtime. You can do that with scripts, but the only way to apply that data back into After Effects is with the path shape baking that I employ. As users, we often ask the Adobe developers for access to more data through expressions and scripting, and they have slowly been doing that. I think path shape manipulation through expressions will happen one day.
Other properties are represented as numbers or numerical arrays, which can be manipulated in realtime with expressions. Shape data is stored as an object, which can't be accessed the same way.
Your idea of having a joystick control mood is certainly possible.
I had once thought of making 3D joysticks, which could let you move your controller around a 3D cube, but I don't think that would have been very user-friendly.
Joysticks 'n Sliders will never become a replacement for a 3D workflow, but it brings some of the tools that 3D riggers enjoy to a 2D workflow.
Ah, I see. Hopefully Adobe will open the doors to the object data someday. Thanks for replying! Hmm...maybe there are some creative ways to build a mouth that can be manipulated with numeric properties and joysticks. Regardless, your tool looks like fun to animate with. Thanks again!
I have used Moho, back when it was Anime Studio Pro. It is a fantastic rigging program. Just not a big fan of its timeline editor, and I always had to export pngs to bring it into After Effects for compositing.
Yeah, Moho opened my eyes up to rigging. I have a 2D background and I've used Flash since it's Macromedia days because it's the one program that you can draw in with a timeline to playback. And then the symbols and nesting became so powerful that they didn't even realize they built an animation tool instead of a web authoring tool. It's 2017 and Adobe JUST pledged their support to animators. But I'm jealous of certain features in Moho and ToonBoom and AE and so I gave Moho a shot. Like ya said, the rigging is so good, but I'm constantly surprised how some things are less intuitive in software packages. Like Moho's timeline, or AE's particles, Flash still can't parent things easily, Toon Boom is trying to do everything and completely confuses me.
Not sure if Anime Studio supported this "new-to-me" feature, but Moho can rig vertices of a mesh warp to smart bones so that you can effectively do head turns/animation with raster images. Since it's all just math and data the potential rigs are pretty cool. This would sorta be like controlling pin positions in AE with a joystick. And the pins would pull around points on a front-on image of a painted head. I like my art graphic and cartoony so I favor vectors, but it's all about the tools and potential.
Hi, I think I followed the steps you taught here, but I couldn't create a slider and it says "you cannot create a slider without at least two keyframes on the property." Why you can create but I can't?
Make sure your first keyframe is at the very start of your timeline and every pose thereafter is on the very next frame, with no empty frames inbetween. If you have gaps on your timeline, you will get this error.
thank you, I think I figured it out. But when I created a slider, it says there is an error with the line 7, I could not do anything with it. What is it happening? Also, I could not find the update pathshapes in my joystickers
That is very odd that you wouldn't have an update Pathshapes button. Perhaps you are working with an old version? Make sure you have downloaded the latest version from aescripts. If you're still having problems, you can open a support ticket aescripts.com/contact/
From there you can upload an aep that I can test to try to figure out the bug.
If you're having trouble following this (like I did too) then check out this infographic chart with all the info:
i.redd.it/b33iyjvxynoy.png
This is really helpful! Did you make this? Mind if I tweet it?
Are you the guy that did that flash animation on Anthrax?
Does anyone else see a content frog @3h07? Just me...? =D
Whoops! That's my go-to temporary name. It's a clean funny-sounding and easy to type word. I sometimes temporarily use it to swap the names of elements without getting confused.
I just meant I see an image of a content/happy frog in your explanation @3h07 :)
Great tutorial by the way, quite challenging!