Rigging a Character with Duik Bassel in After Effects

Music : [intro music]
Morgan Williams : Hey everyone, Morgan here from school of motion. And in this tutorial, we're going to take a quick look at doing a very basic character rig using the new DUIK facile. Now do it's been around for quite some time, but this latest update to DUIK Bassel is really amazing and provides a whole new set of tools and a whole new procedure for rigging characters in after effects. And it's really a game changer in a lot of ways. Now we're going to do a very basic straightforward rig here, but if you're interested in learning a lot more about rigging characters and after-effects please check out my rigging academy course at school of motion. So let's take a look at the character we have to rig here. This is Mo Gran, whose name sounds suspiciously like mine and who looks suspiciously like me designed by the amazing Alex Pope.
Morgan Williams : Now let's take a look at the way this character is broken up. The arms are broken up into upper arm for arm and hand pieces and note that the upper and lower arm and the hand, they all overlap each other with perfectly circular overlaps. And those overlaps are indicated by these marker guides here that we're going to be using as part of the rigging process in rigging academy, we talk a lot about prepping artwork, but the basic idea is especially for limbs knees, ankles wrists, you want to try to have perfectly circular overlaps between the artwork whenever possible. This is going to give you the greatest range of motion. It's also a good idea to create these markers, to mark, where those circular overlaps are. And you'll see why. Once we get a little farther in here, the legs are divided with a thigh, a calf, a foot, which is basically the ankle, the heel up to the ball of the foot, and then a total layer sticking off the end there.
Morgan Williams : And once again, all of these have the circular overlaps that we talked about. Now, in this case, we're using a jointed torso. In other words, we've separated the torso into separate pieces. Now the truth is that I don't generally recommend this. It's often not really very possible, especially if you have complicated or textured artwork, and it's usually better to use the puppet tool when you're rigging torsos. But for this simple lesson, we've created a very simple torso with separate pieces. We have a pelvis piece, a belly peace in the middle there, and then a chest piece sitting on top and then a separate little neck piece right there. We also of course have the head, which in this case is just one layer. If we were going to be creating facial rigging, we'd actually want separate layers for all the different facial features and then pre composed together.
Morgan Williams : But for this simple rig, we just have a single head layer as before we've created circular overlaps for these torso pieces. And this is one of the reasons why I generally recommend using the puppet tool because it's often very difficult to get these kinds of circular overlaps depending on the design and artwork style of your character. Now, in order to rig up this character, we first need to create a structure for the character. Now doing basil structures are one of the most exciting innovations of this new update structures are basically bones and skeletons that we can rig and then attach our character artwork to this emulates. The way 3d rigging works, where you create a skeleton and then connect the mesh of the character to that skeleton in doing basil, these bones or skeletons are called structures in the DUIK basil window. The structures tab is this very first icon here, this little sort of jointed arm icon.