George Maestri is the man!

George Maestri was part of the original team that produced the first season of South Park. He was also one of the writers and creators of Nickelodeon's 'Rocko's modern life', which earned him a nomination for a CableACE award. He now has his own animation production house 'Rubberbug' and started sharing his experience in animation and cartooning through online video's at the Lynda.com website. In his latest course 'Creating Animated Characters' he shows how to build and set up a character for digital animation using Adobe's After Effects.

Maestri in one of the recording booths at Lynda's, teaching his skills on 3D animation using Autodesk Maya 2012.

Pixel vs. Vector.

While most cartoon animation today is created in vector based programs like Toonboom or Flash, it's After Effects that rocks the world of motion graphics and visual effects. In his latest course, out last September, George shows how to set up a character for animation in After Effects using pixel based characters in Photoshop. Yes, After Effects is pixel based and therefor able to render the stunning visual effects you've seen in all the computer enhanced action movies or even the most spectacular commercials. With the latest update since the CS5.5 suite released in April, After Effects is 64-bit exclusively and now has more features than ever to create the coolest FX.

In his latest course George shows some great tricks. Although you can import work from Illustrator that contains vector artwork (which can be enlarged indefinately because it hasn't got any pixels) you cannot adjust the shape layers as one would in Illustrator. Something that would come in pretty usefull when trying to animate curves and other shapes. In the course George shows how using a little workaround still enables you to do that.

Setting up hierarchies.

He also advices to create a reverse hierarchy when parenting all the different lower body parts of a character, which is actually a more efficient way to keep a characters feet on the ground. He shows how to use Nullobjects (empty layers) to remain in control of the whole rig. Alternatively, he gives advice on how to animate a flattened character using the puppet tool.

Tackling the problem of having a low quality mesh he has some great tips on how to handle unwanted deformation problems by upgrading the mesh density. He also explains where the secondary puppet tool options come in handy: the puppet overlap tool (to control overlapping parts) and the puppet starch tool (to create rigid body parts).

If you want to learn more about replacement animation, this is definately something you want to check out. In the course George shows you how to enable replacement animation using precomps (nested animation) by sequencing the layers and using time remap while changing the keyframe interpolation to set up a 2D rig. He also explains how to do headturns, which is pretty easy using some digital trickery and he explains how to use some basic javascript expressions to connect different parts of an animated character.

Check out more from Maestri on his site Rubberbug or read his book Digital Character Animation vol.3 which is absolutely billiant! FYI: the first season of 'Rocko's modern life' has just been released on DVD by Shout! Factory. Here's creator Joe Murray's blog update on the second volume, which is coming out soon!