character animation tutorials (and more) from Robert Powers

Robert Powers provides a series of video tutorials on the Slippery Rock NYC website. He focuses on character animation using Flash, After Effects, and Photoshop.

I appreciate Robert’s tutorials very much because they go into a lot of detail about techniques and concepts that will come up time and time again. This is in contrast to so many tutorials that I see that are too shallow to be useful or too bogged down in details that aren’t generally useful—often both at the same time.

Keep up the good work, Robert!

• “After Effects and Flash similarities” shows basics of using After Effects from the perspective of someone who is familiar with Flash Professional. This is a good supplement to this page.
• “Creating a character in Photoshop” is a detailed walk-through of a document in Photoshop in preparation for rigged and articulated character animation. This is a good supplement to this page.
• “Using time remapping for lip synch” shows how to use time-remapping with a small number of still mouth images to animate a character along with a soundtrack.
• “Using parenting and Puppet tools” shows how to use parenting and the Puppet tools together and separately to animate a character.
• “2D to 3D photo conversion using a displacement map” shows how to create and use a depth matte and use it as a control layer for the Displacement Map effect. The result is then used by the 3D Glasses effect to create a stereoscopic image.

(Thanks to Lester Banks, without whose blog I may have missed these.)