I've been animating characters in AE lately and thought I would share this awesome tool that has made animating a breeze!  It's called DuIK, a plugin for AE that allows for creation and animating using Inverse Kinematics.  It's a great tool that also has useful scripts like renaming and a zero-ing utilities (if that's even a word).

Check out this video to see it in action:

DuIK Tools - Inverse Kinematics for After Effects! from FAMOS on Vimeo.

To download the tool and for more tutorials, click here: http://duduf.net/?page_id=167

This tool has made animating fun and easy!   Hope others can benefit from it as well.

Updated Demo Reel

So it's been a while since my last post and thought I would post an update.  I've been pretty busy lately working on a 2D character animation which is about to wrap up in a couple weeks, but in my spare time I've also been developing my rigging & animation demo reel.

View my demo here:

Stephen Miranda - Animation and Rigging Demo Reel 2012 from Stephen Miranda on Vimeo.

There are just a few additions to the demo.  One, is Rosco fully-rendered (yay!).  I also took the liberty of adding an nCloth animation onto the mocap footage of him fighting.  It's a very subtle animation; since he is a big guy the shirt is taught on his body so I figured not much would move except the straps on his shoulders.  I added a slow-mo shot just to illustrate the movement.

Otherwise I'm still cranking out animation and living the dream!  I'll be sure to post screenshots as soon as they becomes available.