IK Studio v1.0 officially released
The brand new IK Studio plugin for After Effects has been released!
IK Studio is a powerful After Effects plugin that generates a joint angle using inverse kinematics. It’s a sophisticated IK solver designed for the facilitation of complex character animation and, unlike all other existing After Effects IK scripts, it’s a blazing fast native plugin. IK Studio makes character rigging incredibly easy while providing a huge number of options for customizing your character in any way possible.
Rigging in After Effects is often a cumbersome process. For starters, most After Effects rigging tools come in the form of scripts. Scripts have the benefit of being cross-platform compatible but they greatly suffer when it comes to speed. Almost all currently-available rigging scripts have terrible performance making the animation process painfully slow. Additionally, most tools require a minimum of three layers for each joint: a parent point, the limb, and a child point. This can quickly add up to too many layers in the composition window, once again overcomplicating the process and slowing down productivity. IK Studio, being a native plugin, generates the start point, the limb and the end point all on the same layer, thereby keeping the compositing tidy and organized.
Additional features like apparel need to be held in separate layers and attached to the IK took for most script-based rigging tools, increasing the layer count even further. With IK Studio, apparel options are built right into the plugin, and therefore rendered in the same layer. All of this translates into an enormous layer-count for a character using a rigging script, condensed down to 4 (two arms and two legs) using IK Studio.
Choose from numerous stroking options, including the ability to only stroke along the sides. Add curvature to your limbs for fun, rubberhose-style animation. Scale the parent or child limbs and assign a different length to each for ultimate customization. Use bindings to create your own, unique character limbs and have them respect inverse kinematics. Add outer sleeves, inner sleeves, seams, cuffs and more. Control the sleeve lengths and sizes so as to design shorts, pants, capris, and more.
IK Studio is the ultimate tool for easy-to-use character rigging and animation inside After Effects. Since it’s a native plugin, it’s incredibly fast and requires far fewer layers to operate – thereby keeping your project clean and minimal.
To learn more about IK Studio, check out the product page located here.
You can also check out the tutorials below:
IK Studio v1.0 for After Effects Overview Tutorial