PANDA BEAR
For Adobe After Effects
What is it?
The Panda Bear template allows you to create custom animations of giant pandas in Adobe After Effects. This 2D panda puppet is perfect for inserting into your motion graphics or 3D scenes.
With the easy-to-use controls, you can tell your panda bear to do almost anything (keeping a profile-view). Assign any combination of the eleven “primary actions”, such as walk, trot, or sit down, and smoothly transition from action to action. Use the “secondary action” controls to animate the head, paws, mouth, tail, ears, eyes, breathing and more.
Create custom panda bear animations in After Effects!
How It Works
Panda Bear uses the Advanced Puppet Pin tool in After Effects on high-resolution profile images of giant pandas to create complex and realistic movements. Using the preset movements built into each panda bear, the amount of animation work required by you is minimal!
The eleven preset movements, called “Primary Actions”, range from walking to somersaults to standing on two feet. You can assign any combination of primary actions to a panda bear with a few clicks of a mouse, while maintaining control over the timing and duration of actions, and smoothly transitioning from action to action. Each panda bear is on a single layer, so once you have chosen your primary actions, all you need to do is animate your panda bear layer’s position to move across the frame.
“Secondary Actions” offer even more control, allowing you to make custom movements of the paws, head, tail, mouth, and more. Secondary actions have easy-to-use controls, so you can keyframe the different properties. Twitch the ears, blink the eyes, sniff the nose... even adjust the intensity and speed of the breathing. For animators who need even more control, the pins on the panda bear can always be adjusted.
This in-depth tutorial explains how the effect works, and shows how to animate and customize your panda bears in Adobe After Effects.
Need to Know
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This template uses After Effects’ new Advanced Puppet Pin tool, and is only compatible with Adobe After Effects version 16.0 (CC 2019) and up. Works on both Mac or PC. No plugins required.
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The panda bear has 11 primary actions: Stand, Walk, Trot, Eat Bamboo, Sit Down, Sit Back, Sit Forward, Stand Up, Somersault, Stand on Two Feet, and Be Cute.
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The panda bear is created from 2D images. You can place the panda bear in your 3D scenes, but the pandas are 2D (flat) and can only be seen from a profile (side view).
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At 100% scale, the panda bear is approximately 2900 x 1850 pixels when standing.
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You can edit the original images to change the look of a panda bear, as long as your edits stay within the edges of the original panda bear shape. For example, you could overlay a texture on a panda's fur, but you could not add a saddle to a panda bear, since the saddle would be higher than the panda bear’s back, extending beyond the boundaries of the original shape. (However, something like a saddle could be composited onto the final moving panda bear effect).
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This template includes the cartoon panda (as seen in the demo video), as well as some bonus bamboo images. Music and 3D scenes from the demo video are not included.
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This template has been "universalized", so it will work in After Effects running in any language.
The Panda Bear template is not a plugin, so there is nothing to install. Rather, it's an Adobe After Effects project file, commonly known as a "template" because most of the work is already done and the user needs only to make their own customizations. This template is compatible with version CC 2019 (16.0) as well as all later versions of After Effects.
Panda Bear contains copyrighted intellectual property. The animations you create with this product are 100% yours and can be used for commercial purposes, but the sharing or online posting of project files with or for anyone other than a client is prohibited. See the Terms and Conditions for more details.
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