Betty in After Effects

This morning I imported the Betty.ai file into After Effects and started pre-composing the different assets that will need to be animated separately.

After organising the layers in a suitable hierarchy including parenting and Null set up, I decided to take a step back from the character and think about every single aspect that needed to be set up so the whole rig would work when it came to animating in a few days. I decided that there was just too much to organise and quite a few assets were quite unnecessary.

After going through every aspect of the character and the animatic, I've found several aspects of the character that I can throw away to reduce the work load. 

Here are the changes to the character:

- Deleted the new nose, SL_NosePoint and kept only the original SR_NosePoint asset because Betty will no longer rotate in 3D space to so much of an extreme amount as initially thought. The shots in which we see the character in poses that can't be used by rotating the character will now be illustrated separately. Any body parts or props that need to be animated will be put on separate layers and animated using pivots and puppet tools

- Deleted the extra rollerskates SR_LeftFaceBoot and SL_RightFaceBoot and just kept the original SR_RightFaceBoot and SL_LeftFaceBoot and renamed them SR_RollerSkate and SL_RollerSkate. The reason I did the extra rollerskate assets were to take in consideration of the shots where we see Betty move across the diner floor so the roller-skates had to be seen facing the same way for both right and left directions. I will hide this by setting up clever posing and framing of the layout so the extra assets aren’t necessary for when the character moves around the layout. I also moved the roller skate wheels into the same layer as the respective roller skate so when they are parented to the IK on the legs, they will move with the skate assets as well. This removes the parenting process for such a small asset

- Deleted the back view of the clean uniform. Similarly to above, I did this to take in consideration of the two shots where the back view was necessary. The full body poses in which these back views of the uniform take up most of the character volume will now be illustrated separately and composited into the layout through a camera set up at a later stage. They will also be animatable as the body parts, especially the arms and head will be on separate layers

- Deleted the Dollar_Eyes asset - these were only going to be in one of the shots so I've decided to create a separate illustration that contains this asset and use it in a new BettyHeadAsset.ai file. This file will be used several time for my film as there are a lot of close ups of her face

- Deleted the coat and dress assets as the shots that have these assets contained in them will now be individually illustrated including the character pose. Again, they will have animatable pieces such as the arms that will have their pivots adjusted, parented and animated to the body.

- Delete all unnecessary hands i.e. the ones that won't be used during shots that will have the whole character in the frame which reduces the amount included in the hand pre-comps and shortens the time-remapping process a little

- All hands included in the rig which have been designed to hold props will have the props included in the respective layer instead of being composited in from a separate Illustrator file and parented to the required hand shape for any particular shape 

Poses for odd angles with some body pieces on separate layers. simple rig (pivots and puppet tool)