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Tutorial 195: Forklift
🕑 Added 2019-10-03 14:36:30 +0000 UTCMaster Properties in After Effects enable us to make more complex rigs than we could previously. And because of that, we're going to talk about techniques to rig objects. We start with a simple cube that has some pretty cool behaviors. It can flatten into the ground, which means it comes with its own transition built-in. It can also be scaled without scaling its strokes.
Then we take a look at a rigged forklift. All of the colors have been linked to control layers so you can change the colors of the forklift if you desire. There's an Angle Control that lets us pick between the 4 isometric angles that the forklift can face, even though only two angles were ever illustrated. This is accomplished by scaling our shape layers horizontally to make up the other two angles. While that would normally change our lighting, we've built and rigged luminosity layers—using grey tones and the overlay blend mode—that can swap the lighting back so that the lighting direction doesn't ever change. The forks of the forklift are also rigged so that the main section moves up, and then the rest of the lift sections extend fully.
In short, there's a lot built into this tutorial, and a lot of the techniques are designed to be applicable to all sorts of rigs. For example, one of the expressions shows you how you can build a checkbox that can switch between two keyframes for a property. We use it to change the lighting of the luminosity layers, but you could use to to switch between keyframes on a path, or intensities of an effect. There's a lot of versatility here.
And the best part is that this is only part one. There will at least be a second tutorial, if not a third. The next one will focus on more efficient ways to build this sort of model if you were going to make a whole bunch of different rigs. We're going to show how to take an actual 3D model, render out a minimal amount of frames and yield even more complex animation, versatility, and speed. And there's also something interesting that I want to try, but haven't had a chance to build yet. So please, stay tuned! And if you didn't see Tutorial 188: Isopush, check it out! It's helpful for moving layers in isometric directions.
The expression code can be found on our site here.
