Building and animating a CGSnake
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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 Project File: CGSnake.zip (After Effects 7 Pro)
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.
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.
Suzanne said this March 15th, 2007 at 14:55
finally i figure out how to add texture to a stroke, thnks!
Luis Beyles said this June 7th, 2007 at 0:36
Fantastic tutorial Jerzy, thanks for sharing.
Plus, I remember Alien Vs. Predator too! Such a scary game, haha.
Cheers,
Adam
Adam said this October 2nd, 2007 at 21:34
Glad you like it. There is a lot of potential in this technique. Snake is just a simple example.
Maltaannon said this October 2nd, 2007 at 22:52
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.
Paul Jones said this October 18th, 2007 at 6:28
Sounds so cool. Make sure to pass me a link to a preview or something. I’d love to see how it looks. Cheers!
Maltaannon said this October 18th, 2007 at 8:40
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.
Joe said this December 3rd, 2007 at 5:45
Thanks for the tip. It should be working now. Sorry for the inconvenience.
Maltaannon said this December 3rd, 2007 at 11:20
malaannon youre pretty cool man, thanks dude!
expressions are still a bit compilcated for me… i have to get into that…
rock on man
rol247 said this January 10th, 2008 at 20:25
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.
Paul Jones said this January 19th, 2008 at 14:20
that was pretty amazing :] i really enjoy your tutorials dude…
fredrik olsen said this February 10th, 2008 at 1:26
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
Fred B. said this May 8th, 2008 at 0:41