Learn How To Animate Cinematic Video Game Characters

Welcome to the Login Screen Character Tutorial series, where we take a look at how motion graphics artists at Riot setup and animate characters using 2D splash art, so hopefully you can apply it in your own work as well!

In part 1, we introduce the tutorial series, and how to prep your art in Photoshop before heading into After Effects. After that,we apply puppet pins and controllers to rig up our character before bringing them to life!

This series shows the more technical aspects of how we set things up and go through our process, rather than our decision making and thought process. Hopefully we can bring you another video soon to elaborate more on that. Another note is that if you're already familiar with League's login screens, you might feel like some things are missing; That's because we typically spend weeks working on a screen, but this tutorial was made in hours to show the basic process. If you put in more time and creativity, your results can be much much better!

If you don't have layered art, or don't know how to create it, check out this tutorial from RefractArt on the basics of separating elements of a character out before you tackle this.

Part 2 - Delay Script

Part 3- Animating

Part 4 - More Examples