Create a Template to Easily Swap DUIK Rigged Characters in Ae

Henk Visser shares his workflow for creating rigged and animated characters in After Effects, which involves DUIK of course. Henk takes an interesting approach to the animation workflow.

how to combine a simple layer template with the DuIK rigging method

By creating all of his characters against a simple template that he created, ensures that Henk will be able to swap out the character, but keep all the animation.

Even though DUIK makes character rigging easy in After Effects, you can save even more time if you need to make multiple characters walk. You can even think of it as applying an animation preset onto a new character – only creating a single walk cycle and using it whenever a character needs to walk, not matter what the character.

There are some other interesting bits in this vid, where Henk uses Adobe tools to start the drawing of the character on a device, then switches to a desktop computer to conform the character for After Effects.