Preamble

Mythomen,
Sébastien Périer, Anthony Ménard, 2018
All rights reserved.

Duik is the comprehensive animation and rigging tool set for Adobe After Effects.

Duik’s comprehensiveness, ease of use, 14 years of continuous development and awesome community¹ have made it the leading and the industry standard tool for character animation with After Effects.

It provides the main rigging tools, found in any 3D software, like IK, controllers, and bones, but adapts them to 2D animation in After Effects. With Duik you can rig complex characters and use advanced animation techniques usually used in 3D software. If you do not know what rigging means, it may be because it is a bit too soon for you to use those tools. Please refer to the section entitled Should I use Duik?

Duik has plenty of animation tools too - managing keyframes and interpolations, traditional animation, animation exposure, etc. - and many automations, like wiggle, spring, swing, wheel, etc. which allow you to animate more quickly and easily.

Duik also has some other useful tools, such as camera controls, that are not solely tied to animation but can be really useful for both animators and riggers.

Duik’s comprehensiveness and ease of use have made it a script used in numerous movies across the world². It has an international success; it is used to create TV series, advertising, motion design, video games, music videos, short movies and feature films. It’s available in 7 different languages, and it’s downloaded more than 16.000 times a month on average.

1. Parler le Fracas, Thomas Fourniret, Jérémy Couturier, 2012,
2. The Wind in the Reeds, Nicolas Liguori, 2016
3. La Soupe au Caillou, Clémentine Robach, 2015
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Using this guide

Throughout this document, some conventions are used to highlight useful or specific information, or reference and define specific terms.

Terms followed with an **asterisk *** are defined in the glossary.

Although the sections of the guide follow the order of the panels in Duik’s User Interface, it also makes sense to read them in this specific order, as it’s the usual workflow when rigging and animating characters and props.