Basic Body Movements in After Effects

Basic Arm Movements

Towards the end of the first week, our animation skills had already improved from what we initially had. We had learnt the basics of animating a moving person, analyzing what goes into a simple walk animation in both body, arm and leg movements. One of the first animations that we worked on is a stationary arm and animating it to look like it was in a walk cycle:

Give this man a hand...

While It's not pretty, it helped with understanding how basic arm movements worked as well as understand how the parenting tool works in After Effects. 

Walking/Take off animation

Upon completing that, our next task was to take an already existing character model and apply a walking animation to it. What made this task easy to me was that the character given to us had separate layers created which associated itself with each part of the body (right foot, left foot, etc.). This made it significantly easy with parenting body parts to one another and from there animating the character walking:

My people need me.

Towards the end of the animation, I ran into a problem with fixing the character's movement to a straight line, causing the character to fly upwards. Knowing I didn't have a lot of time to fix the error, I worked around it and made it so the character takes off and fly.

Bowling Animation

The last animation that we had to do with our character was making it look as though it was rolling a ball on it's knee. Like the previous animation, this wasn't too much of a challenge to animate but gettng the movements to look realistic enough and function the way I wanted it to was a hard obstacle to overcome. Eventually I got the animation to work but when it came to adding the ball itself to the animation, well, its best to watch for yourself:

"Objects that are in motion don't require gravity"

Turns out parenting the ball to the throwing arm makes the ball follow the arm.