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A real plus for After Effects, an essential tool for animation designers: inverse kinematics (IK):

- This tool is essential in many cases - to animate a character, especially for a walk, a run; to animate mechanical processes of any kind, etc. - inverse kinematics implied the use of very complex trigonometrical expressions in After Effects (see Dan Ebberts's expressions). Duik automates this creation process to allow you to focus on the animation! A simple controller at the end of an arm, of a leg, or on the shoulders, an IK that you created in one clic, now you can animate the entire limb just by modifying the position of the hand or the foot!

You can download here an example of an humanoid that can be animated using IKs. (After Effects CS3 Project)

- When the IK is applied on one single layer, it also allows you to reproduce the "look at" principle: the layer will always point towards a given point, whatever the position. Animating a look becomes easy!

- With Duik you can also create "bones" on certain points of the puppet in After Effects, and then add IK on these bones. You can reproduce the exact same methods like for the rigging of characters in 3D, but in After Effects. The puppet acts like with skinning, and Duik fills out the setup! (You can download here an example of a leg using the puppet (After Effects CS3 project)

Animated walk created in After Effects using Duik:

- Now well trained users as well as the ones skilled in 3D can create characters' rigging in After Effects and reproduce the principles that are used in 3D, combining IK, links and expressions...

- Duik is going to evolve further and numerous new tools will probably be added to facilitate the animation process to you.

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