Nicolas Dufresne posts the first of the successfully crowd funded tutorials for DUIK, the After Effects rigging and animation tool. This is a look at using the Rotation Morph feature in DUIK, which in basic terms will allow you to link to the property of another layer in After Effects. In real terms, Rotation Morph will allow you to better create a pose for your character.
Detailed explanation of the Rot Morph tool to improve the bending of the limbs.
If you have ever used the After Effects putout pin tools to bend something like an arm, you might have found immediately that controlling how the arm looks while it is bent is not such an easy task.
Ideally, DUIK’s Rotation Morph was meant to control when the object looks like while it is being deformed by DUIK. A similar premise in a 3D application would be a pose space deformation.
These can control what shape the elbow or leg presents while the limbs are being bent or animated. This can be taken a step further by adding an almost automated secondary animation to the character within the pose.
An example of this would be muscles bulging and lengthening as an arm joint bends and flexes. This can ad a new degree of interest to the character as well as the animation.
In After Effects, DUIK will allow you to add simple pose space deformations (using that as a blanket term) to your rigs by linking to the property of another layer.
