Fabien Rousseau – Fake 3D Walkcycles in After Effects

Fake 3D Walkcycles in After Effects by Fabien Rousseau is designed to teach you how to create realistic fake 3D animations using 2D assets in Adobe After Effects.

You will learn how to create fake 3D that will look so realistic that no one will ever get how you do that. I will teach you all my tricks and life hacks on the example of this cute little pigeon.

What is this After Effects course about?

Learn how to tame this pigeon from start to finish in After Effects. In this masterclass, we will be talkin’ about Faux 3D, Puppet Tool & a small dose of frame-by-frame animation.

I will also guide you through some of my techniques, my workflow, and custom expressions. Better keep this folk as wiggly as possible, right?

What You’ll Learn In Fake 3D Walkcycles in After Effects?

LESSON #1: Shape the Character in Illustrator

Basic shapes, pen tool & a tiny bit of nonsense, that’s all you need for designing this peep! We will also use masks, pathfinding and a few other cool AI techniques.

LESSON #2: Prepare Layers & Setup Workspace

Don’t rush straight into AE! A tidy workspace and good naming are the keys to be more effective. Let’s Marie Kondō this workflow (I assure you it’s fun).

LESSON #3: 3D Turn: Fake it!

Infinite round and round and round and round… Hacking 2D shape layers to get a 3D look requires some intricate knowledge, or not 🙂

LESSON #4: Supercharge the Puppet Tool

It’s time to see the wobbly magic hidden behind this creepy function. Pin it, link it, offset it, these are some good ol’ tricks!

LESSON #5: Secondary Wavy Action

We will see what a simple path animation can do for you. Meet your two new friends: Vertice and Tangent.

LESSON #6: Frame-by-frame Walk Cycle

Okay, after all this warm-up, we are ready to punch some serious keyframes. And there will be a lot of them in this section. Let’s roll for cel-animation basics in AE.

LESSON #7: Wrapping up & Finishes

You’d be surprised how simple finishes give another dimension to your design. I love shaking this screen, and you?

LESSON #8: Bonus

Access 2 more project files to go deeper into the masterclass principles.

More courses from the same author: Fabien Rousseau