Liam Hill has packaged up a collection of his handy scripts centered around animation in After Effects, specifically dealing with taking the kluge out of character rigging or puppet animation in After Effects.
A collection of tools to help improve animation workflow and take the frustration out of puppet animation
The script pack offers five different scripts, including Pin to Parent, Sprite Swapper, a Strobe Simulator, Auto-Orient, and Step Key, all coming in a dock-able panel in After Effects.
- Create Null controllers for puppet pins and parent them together or to other layers, giving mesh deformation all the advantages of a hierarchal animation system.
- Quickly link layers or frames in a composition to slider controls to enable easy sprite swapping and keep your timeline neat and functional.
- Easily create the illusion of animation strobing when and where you want it, eliminating the ‘tweeny’ look of digital animation while retaining the original curves.
- Create point constraints and direction constraints for any object despite it’s ancestry, to make working with rotations simple and fast.
- Instantly bake any section of any animation curve into a series of hold keys at a specified interval, to allow for quick blocking and timing work.
The Leem’s Animation Tools have a special intro price for two weeks only. (Until May 15, 2013), and are available on AEScripts here.