donQmedia Weblog

The Duik Bassel manual

Besides the tutorials on this website, there are, of course, many other resources you can find to learn more about Duik Bassel. Some of the newest material has been created by Duduf (Nicolas Dufresne) himself. If you're looking …

In this final installment of the four part series about rigging Stickman for a body turn, we will modify Stickman's artwork to coordinate its visibility with the previous video's rigging of the joint nulls. The process involves duplicating…

In this video we will modify Stickman's structure rig to give him the ability to make a full body turn. This, of course, is an illusion, but it is easily pulled off by keeping the construction of the puppet simple and manipulating the joint positions and body scale. This can be done with complex puppets as well, but requires…

In this video we will do something a little different with the feet animation. Instead of creating switch layers, we will animate the vector points of Stickman's feet within compositions. Then we'll connect this animation to sliders via time remapping expressions. This will create a smooth movement when either…

In this video we will start modifying Stickman's rig to add more than Duik can achieve by itself. While the Duik rig is invaluable, expanding on it through modifications can create a sophisticated and versatile puppet. We'll start by…

In this video we'll polish our auto-rigged Stickman up a bit. We'll start by checking out the rig's parenting to make sure there are no errors. Then we'll use Duik to quickly modify controller position properties which will allow you to move Stickman to his resting position…

This video is a complete remake of the old Duik tutorial about rigging Stickman, and was created to reflect the massive changes made in Duik Bassel’s rigging process.The Stickman tutorials, while suitable for beginners, does assume you have a basic knowledge...

Downloadable project files are now on the page of their respective tutorials. I found keeping a separate page for downloads an unnecessary option, as it made more sense to keep the files directly on the page where the project is introduced – a one click stop, if you will.

While I wanted to start on the new Stickman rigging series of tutorials based on the Duik Bassel release as sooner, I felt I had to complete the Controllers and Expressions Series first. Now that it's complete, I will be adding to the new Duik Series here.

This series is  in 2 parts which run a little over 26 minutes.

The Angie rigging series of tutorials was retired after the release of Duik Bassel. Eventually, I will most-likely update the full rigging of Angie, as I have also changed a lot of my rigging techniques.

The are thee joint-leg configurations for land mammals: plantigrade, digitigrade, and ungulate. The first section below defines these, while the next section contains a 7.5 minute video that shows how the reverse kinematics works on each type of leg when using Duik.

You probably noticed that most lines in the various blocks of code on this website end in a semicolon (if you ignore the comments). Basically the semicolon separates statements in the code, similar to periods in a sentence, so After Effects doesn't get confused by a single, long run-on sentence. While writing the…

JavaScript operators are symbols used to execute arithmetic operations, comparisons, assign values, determine the logic between variables (boolean), and other tasks.

A variable type that returns one of two possible values: "false" or "true."

A variable can be thought of as a container you use to store information. You create a variable in After Effects by simply giving it a name and assigning it a value.

Adding comments in your code can help you remember or clarify what's going on within all those symbols, values, and variables. Often, when writing…

The pick whip is an After Effects tool that can save you time typing and, more importantly, typing errors that might escape your attention. It does this by creating chunks of JavaScript code that you can be confident contain no formatting or spelling errors, and placing …

I will apologize right up front for delaying the first Duik Bassel tutorial. My previous announcement said it would be up by October 29, and that isn't going to happen. Not for want of effort, but because of an incessant feeling that I really…"

Welcome to the final video in the Controllers & Expressions Series. In this final installment, I going to show you how to lip synchronize your puppet's mouth to a audio track using the icon grid built in the last two videos. This will also show you how keyframes…

This video completes the icon grid project with just 6 lines of code. However, this series is about leaning some JavaScript so it goes into an indepth explanation about how and why each line of code is used. You'll see how you can easily convert that code to fit any size icon grid you decide to create for your puppet.