Head Animation

How it is made?

Basic Head Animation Rig without plugin using Adobe Illustrator and After Effects.

I started by Illustrating the head in Adobe Illustrator. In this video I separate the drawing in 5 layers.
Layer 1: Glasses
Layer 2: The fringe and the eyes
Layer 3: The face and the mouth
Layer 4: The ears and the neck
Layer 5: The hair and the background
(as shown in the Illustration below)

Make sure you save the document in AI file or open layered file.
Drag the AI file to the After Effects timeline.

Choose this Settings to keep the layers.

Your timeline should look like this. As you can see the AI layers are separated automatically for easier animation.

Turn on the 3d icon on all the layers then add new camera layer.

Select 2 views/horizontal layout. Use “LEFT” view in the 1st camera angle and use “ACTIVE CAMERA” in the 2nd angle.

You will see that in the “LEFT view” all the layers are in the same position. Move each layer to the right on top of each other as per the arrangement in your timeline. (see the video below)

Once you finish the above process we can now start with the animation by switching to 1 view on a “ACTIVE CAMERA” angle.

Click the camera layer in your timeline and hit “P” on your keyboard to show the “Position” settings. I put a few keyframe starting at the beginning of the timeline and so on. (see the video below)

Now you can made your own Head Animation without Plug-ins and most of all it’s FREE!