Building and animating a CGSnake

Posted on 09. Mar, 2007 by Jerzy Drozda Jr in After Effects

Build your first chain-based rig in After Effects. Find out how flexible this technique is and how you can turn the rig into a snake.

Learn how to create a dynamic animation based on a “chain rig”. Animate one layer using keyframes, expressions, or both, and make other layers follow the leading layer. See how you can texture the rig and find out how flexible it is.

First 9 minutes will show you how to build a basic “chain rig”. The rest of the tutorial is about texturing and making the final look.

Download: Tutorial project file (After Effects CS2)

The idea for this tutorial came from CGTalk forums, where someone who calls himself GetToTheTop asked for a way to create a snake in After Effects. See the oryginal thread.

Tags: animation, expressions, Tutorials

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18 Responses to “Building and animating a CGSnake”

Suzanne

15. Mar, 2007

Great tutorial! I love how you incorporated using expressions and the slider. I will certainly use some of this knowledge for any of my future projects.

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Luis Beyles

07. Jun, 2007

finally i figure out how to add texture to a stroke, thnks!

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Adam

02. Oct, 2007

Fantastic tutorial Jerzy, thanks for sharing.
Plus, I remember Alien Vs. Predator too! Such a scary game, haha.
Cheers,
Adam

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Maltaannon

02. Oct, 2007

Glad you like it. There is a lot of potential in this technique. Snake is just a simple example.

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Paul Jones

18. Oct, 2007

This is just about the most awesome thing I’ve seen done with expressions to avoid those pesky keyframes. I’m using it along with the looping expression to make a conveyor belt in a factory. Cheers Maltaanon, your tutorials are always enjoyable.

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Maltaannon

18. Oct, 2007

Sounds so cool. Make sure to pass me a link to a preview or something. I’d love to see how it looks. Cheers!

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Joe

03. Dec, 2007

For some reason, this video stops at 1:26 on both my work and home computers. The work one is, sadly, a windows machine and the home computers are all Macs.

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Maltaannon

03. Dec, 2007

Thanks for the tip. It should be working now. Sorry for the inconvenience.

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rol247

10. Jan, 2008

malaannon youre pretty cool man, thanks dude!
expressions are still a bit compilcated for me… i have to get into that…
rock on man

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Paul Jones

19. Jan, 2008

Here’s the factory I did that borrows from this tutorial: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S_iMqKM8ZO4

Sorry it took so long to respond, been kinda busy recently.

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fredrik olsen

10. Feb, 2008

that was pretty amazing :] i really enjoy your tutorials dude…

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Fred B.

08. May, 2008

Wow. Really cool tutorial. There is a lot of potential in this technique to create some other awesome effects, i think!

Thank you and keep on blowing my mind :)

—> Fred

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Samantha

01. Mar, 2010

First comment in a while, but this tutorial was great! It really helped me out on my animation assignment. Thanks!

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