Generate A Comp Of Thumbnail Stills From Your Animation

Generate A Comp Of Thumbnail Stills From Your Animation

on Nov 6th 2012 with 5 comments
Tutorial Details
  • Requirements: After Effects
  • Difficulty: Intermediate
  • Run Time: 15:58 min

Final Product What You'll Be Creating

Download Source Files

When it comes to video games, it’s a common technique to store all the frames of an animation in one image and shift the UV coordinates instead of having to load a bunch of images, which is heavier on the graphics card/processor. Knowing this, I thought, “What if you made an animation and wanted to show it to someone who wouldn’t take the time to look at an entire video… but would be willing to have a glance at one single picture which contains poses?”

So I’ve put together a few fairly simple expressions and made them a little more complex by adding sliders for parameters such as: X-repeat, custom width and height and skip frames (displays every other, every 3rd etc. frame). This tutorial contains a lot of stuff the fresh and eager expression writer needs to practice. Lets jump in!

Tutorial

Download Tutorial .mp4

File size: 124.1 MB

 
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I live in Berlin, where I studied Biology but then discovered that CGs are fun. The two programs I use the most are Blender and After Effects and now I am quite eager share my knowledge with the world.  

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  • Owen

    This video ends very abruptly, there seems to be an editing mistake.

    • everettoptions

      I’ve fixed the video so it plays to the end now. Thanks for the heads up. :)

  • http://twitter.com/onemorechris Chris Kelly

    this is really clever and super flexible. motion work in my portfolio will now have a still for loads of rames. super super! Thank you

  • Marshall

    Its Muybridge, and thats only one horse and jockey. He set up a bunch of cameras that were triggered when the horse ran by. Its basically the first “motion picture” it just isn’t set into motion. Nice tut, thanks.

  • Ib

    Yes, this is a clever use of expressions. But in REAL production WHY would anyone do THIS? Here’s the preferred workflow: 1) Do your animation in AE; 2) export a png sequence (or your fav still image sequence) – make sure the frames are appropriately numbered as you normally do; 3) Use a Sprite Sheet making utility like Texture Packer (http://www.codeandweb.com/texturepacker ) to turn that still sequence into a sprite sheet. No expressions to code, done in less than ⅓ of the time!

    Using Texture Packer has the added feature of producing a texture atlas for import into the game engine to make positioning the sprite images on the game sprites easy. Oh, wait, you CAN’T do that with this tutorial …

    This tutorial is in the category: clever, but not practical.