Showing that there are more than one way to do things, Henk Visser presents a method for creating head turns in After Effects for your animated characters.
[pullquote]a very convenient and intuïtive method to add head turns, eyewinks and lip sync to DuIK rigged characters[/pullquote]In the past we have seen two methods for creating things like head turns in Ae. One method from David Legion sets a time remapped “lookup” layer in another composition that you can reference with a bit of expressions.
The other method we have seen from Daniel Gies who used a combination of methods including using Mettle’s FreeForm Pro to create a semi-3D shape that can facilitate the head turns.
But what if you don’t have the help of a third party plugin or are not so expression / script savvy? What options do you have?
Henk shows us how he approaches the character head turn by using a disc of head poses that he can then turn to display the proper head for that particular set of frames in the animation. By setting a “view window” for the heads disc you can mask out the rest of the heads to only show the correct version at the top of the character.
