Study Task 4 - DUIK

DUIK is a very similar tool to the puppet pin tool on after effects, used for character animation but unlike the puppet pin tool it has more precise movements and has a less chance for warping of the asset. It does however take much longer to set up than  the very simple puppet pin tool, so for simple actions puppet pin tool is more suitable but for longer and more complicated movements like a walk cycle.

To start DUIK you open it from the windows selecting this box.

This will open up the DUIK control panel. To make the rig for the model I only needed to use the Bones, Controllers and IK tools. I did try to use the auto rig function but this resulted in a rig that didn't appear to be attached to the actual asset for some reason. No one could understand why this happened so i restarted with the help of Oscar Baraney who went through how to make a rig manually.

First you need to import your character into After effects as a psd document so that the layers are separate and can be worked on. This is the key different between puppet pin tool and DUIK, the separate layers stop the warping of the character. 

To start the rig use the puppet pin tool to put in your wrists, elbows, shoulders, knees etc in their respective layers. (such as Knees in legs) and label them as L or R their respective part s the rig understands that you have a left or right knee. This element is mostly for the auto rig to recognize which part of the rig corresponds to which limb.

Of course it also helps with Organization.

Parent each part of the rig from the furthest part from the body geadually working its way up to the body so that when the body moves the limbs will follow and the limbs will bend when the initial parent is moved. Now select all the pins on a layer and click in the DUIK menu, bones, this will create a set of bones layers.

This is actually from the auto rig but this is the result of the bones tool when done individually as well. Then the limbs are selected in their groups and controllers is selected this creates a main controller for each group which is located at the initial parent (Wrist, Foot).

Again this is the auto rig so only the hands and feet should be selected. Finally highlight each group of layers in order from the wrist to the controller and select IK this will make it so your characters limbs will bend properly and not distort. 

The characters rig look something like this.

Now the character can be animated. But their is a lot of layers now so to keep it organised I found out about the hide tool to keep the layers that your messing around with visible.

This is my animation. The final installment of not limbo, Not Limbo III.

Oscar wanted to also make something using my character and rig so i thought id include it as a thanks for the help.

Here it is with sound.