From the course: After Effects Apprentice: 07 Parenting

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Animating the arm

Animating the arm - After Effects Tutorial

From the course: After Effects Apprentice: 07 Parenting

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Animating the arm

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Okay, time for the payoff. Animating this anthropomorphic robot arm to go ahead and reach out to each of these titles in time with our video edits. I pressed Home to return to the current time indicator to the very start of the composition. I'm going to enable Rotation for each of the arm pieces. I now need to start moving it into position. Unfortunately with this default parenting setup, you cannot just grab the end of the arm and move into place, because none of the other pieces are going to follow along with it. To do that would require something known as Inverse Kinematics. There are scripts available to do that in After Effects, but that's not the default. Instead, you need to build stuff from the bottom up. So say I wanted to setup an initial at-rest position for this arm. I will need to manually scrub first the Big Arm to get it into place. Remember, you can hold Command on Mac or Ctrl on Windows to scrub by minor increments. And let's pull down the Medium Arm to a nice at-rest…

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