Mechanical Dragon - Adobe After Effects Tutorial

Jacquelin Vanderwood April 15, 2004 1 In this demonstration you'll learn how to connect the pieces in a parenting format while making the mouth open and close. I've imported the whole piece from Photoshop as a composition and then placed each piece individually into their original structure. You can see from the timeline that each piece is named. To access the layer and change the name, click on it once and hit the Enter key.   2 Select the layer containing the rod 2 and pickwhip it to the rod 1 layer.   3 So the process goes as follows, with rod2 layer selected pull the pickwhip onto rod1 layer. With rod3 layer selected pull the pickwhip onto rod2 layer.   4 Select the fiery hair of the dragon layer and pickwhip it to the rod3. Connect the eye to the head; connect the jaw to the head; connect the bolt to the rod.   5 Instead of using the pickwhip you can also access the layer name located next to the pickwhip.   6 Using the Pan Behind tool, select each moving part and readjust the anchor into the proper position for a joint.   7 Below is an example of where to place the anchor points. Rod2's anchor point is located at the left top right at the joint. Rod3's anchor point is located at the bottom at the joint. The head joint is located at the end of rod3 and so is the jaw anchor point. Zoom in and make adjustments as necessary.   8 To make animation easier, click on the layers that will not be animated directly such as the eye, etc., and then click the shy button. When all the necessary ones have been made shy, click on the main Shy button at the top of the timeline to hide the layers. So now we can select the layers easier.   9 Select all of the layers except rod1 and hit the R key. Click on the clocks to set the first keyframe at the beginning of the timeline.   10 Using the Rotation tool, move along in the timeline and make rotations to the pieces of the dragon. When you are happy with the results, hit F9 to ease.   11 For the flame layer, make it a short layer where you want the flame to show in the animation.   12 Hit the Home key and press the spacebar to watch the animation. Make the necessary adjustments in the animation. Render it.   Copyright 1998-2004, Jacquelin Vanderwood, All Rights Reserved