Animator & Rigger

Over the years, I've built a lot of rigs in After Effects for the same basic reason, I did not want to solve the same animation problem from scratch every time. Some of these were made for characters, some for dialogue, some for motion systems, and some were just proof-of-concept experiments to see how far I could push the tool.

These examples show a few of the setups that ended up being the most useful.

Character Rig

This rig uses a puppet-pin mesh setup instead of the more common paper-doll approach. That gave me more flexibility and let the character push into broader, more exaggerated movement without falling apart.

I built in interchangeable hands, a movable head, mouth, and eyes, plus repositionable shoulders and bendable toes. The goal was to make the rig expressive without turning it into a mess to animate.

Mouth Rig

I built this mouth rig to make dialogue easier to manage. It includes a visual reference box that can sit over the spoken phrase, or be driven with a slider, so it is easier to line the mouth shapes up with the audio.

It ended up being a simple way to speed up lip sync and keep the timing more precise.

Hand Rig

This one is very simple on purpose. A single slider controls the hand opening and closing, which makes it quick to use and easy to drop into different kinds of animation.

Sometimes the best rig is the one that stays out of your way.

Animal Rig

For this setup, I used Duik's animal rig to animate a cat. The base rig gives you an automated walk cycle, but I spent time adjusting it so the motion felt better and the character had a little more personality.

It also gives control over the eyes, ears, tail, and body, which makes it easier to tune the pose without rebuilding everything.

Twitter Automation Rig

This was a proof of concept for automated video generation inside After Effects. The system pulled #Mars data from Twitter into Excel, then used that data to populate a video template with fresh content.

Once the structure was in place, it could render multiple versions as new posts came in. It was a useful test of how far template-driven video could go.

Animation & Rigging - Patrick Flaherty