Hello, I am studying After Effects (just started, so I am really a big, big noob).
I would like to use it to animate a cartoon character that is extremely simple to create in 3D.
I would like to know if it is possible to create a 3D rig and animate it in a 3D world in a practical way?
I would like to know about pitfalls or benefits compared to a traditional 3D environment as I am keener to go for AE, but I have lots to learn and if it's not worth it I would probably move to something different 🙂
AE has no dedicated character rigging tools and the default 3D is more like 2.5 D - flat planes in space. All that being the case it's probably fair to say that you are a far, far way from truly being able to achieve much. Rigging would require to use expressions and tools like DuIK, which in itself adds its own level of complication, you'd ahve to have a fundamental understanding how parenting, pre-composition, coolapsed transformations and other things interact with one another and affect the render pipeline, you'd have to have a good understanding of AE's basic keyframing and concepts like time-remapping and so on. All of that in itself presents a steep challenge. You have to essentially to learn the whole of AE instead of such a limited sub-set of features because it ultimately was never specifically designed with CA in mind. Pretty much everything is a workaround or a creatively sideways used feature. All that being the case, if at all you probably should start in Character Animator and then import files created there into AE for refinement work, but otherwise even some 3D program as unintuitive as Blender is easier to learn and offers better features for CA.
Just having a simple 2d character and DUIK rig adds a high level of complexity to AE, and the time needed to create a neat animation and the time AE needs to eval all the expressions increases noticable. Having two DUIK rigs on one comp is like throwing an anchor to the render pipeline.
Working in 3d space in AE is such a throwback in performance, that the combination of both is no win at all.
I am evaluating the possibility to creating a 2d puppet instead, would that be a good option?
I don't see much benefit in using Animate as I need to transfer everything to Efter Effects afterwards... I am a little rusty with the new version of Animate (I used Flash CS5 at the time), but I think that there is a 3d camera as well on it now.. I don't know, I am really confused 😄
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