Bendio

Last week we released Bendio, an After Effects plug-in for bending layers and attaching other layers to the bend.

Bends are really, really good for animation because, like FK, they make arcs - a more natural and appealing movement than straight motion paths. Bendio can also give you a better line of action in and between character poses, by curving the torso along a more gestural line. This YouTube thumbnail is a great example of how not to do line of action, but you get the point:

Through animating characters in After Effects, I became frustrated with how hard it was to rig two things: feet, and torsos.

In a lot of walk cycles, you need the feet to bend, so the heel can raise up whilst the toes stay planted. You can do it by splitting the foot into two parts, but shoes often look bad with this method. They need to stretch at the base and compress at the top. I’d try doing it with the puppet tool, but even with a lot of work it tended to look bad.

For bodies, I’d sometimes rig them with a path controlled by nulls, but it was a really limited method that ruled out using existing artwork. Otherwise I could use the puppet tool controlled by nulls, but it somehow made characters look elastic and fake. I much preferred CC Bend It over the puppet tool, but it crops layers too much, and there was never any way to parent anything to it.

You can bend beziers. But if there aren’t enough points…

With some help, I figured out the math behind CC Bend It’s bend, and applied it to paths in shape layers, but I found that it only worked if the path had a lot of points in it, and that made it really slow.

So it had to be a native effect. That’s something I can’t make myself, so I worked with Satya Meka. Satya is a total genius who brought more to the table than I asked for. Once I began using Bendio in production, I saw that it was more useful and powerful than I had hoped, despite it’s simplicity.