1 Video View·Sep 1, 2025 #shorts How to make Framing Guides in After Effects
How to Use DUIK Angela Framing Guides
DUIK Angela Framing Guides are a powerful tool for animating characters in After Effects. They allow you to create and edit custom guides that can be used to position, scale, and rotate your character's elements. This can be incredibly helpful for creating complex animations, such as walk cycles, run cycles, and facial expressions.
In this tutorial, I'll show you how to use DUIK Angela Framing Guides to create a simple walk cycle. We'll start by creating a new character rig and adding the Framing Guides script. Then, we'll create a few basic guides and use them to position the character's feet and hips. Finally, we'll animate the guides to create the walk cycle.
By the end of this tutorial, you'll have a basic understanding of how to use DUIK Angela Framing Guides to create and edit custom guides for your character animations.
Here are some of the benefits of using DUIK Angela Framing Guides:
They allow you to create and edit custom guides that can be used to position, scale, and rotate your character's elements.
This can be incredibly helpful for creating complex animations, such as walk cycles, run cycles, and facial expressions.
Framing Guides can also be used to create and animate camera movements.
They are a non-destructive way to animate your characters, meaning that you can always go back and edit your guides without affecting your animation.
To use DUIK Angela Framing Guides, you'll need to:
Create a new character rig in After Effects.
Add the DUIK Angela script to your rig.
Create a new layer and name it "Framing Guides."
Select the Framing Guides layer and go to DUIK - Framing Guides - Create New Guide.
Repeat step 4 to create as many guides as you need.
Use the Transform tools to position, scale, and rotate your guides.
To animate a guide, select it and go to DUIK - Framing Guides - Animate Guide.
Keyframe the guide's position, scale, and/or rotation over time.
Once you're finished animating your guides, you can use them to animate your character's elements.
Here are some tips for using DUIK Angela Framing Guides:
Use guides to define the key poses of your animation. This will make it easier to animate between the poses.
Use guides to create symmetry in your animations. For example, you can use a guide to mirror the movement of the left and right legs of a walk cycle.
Use guides to create perspective in your animations. For example, you can use a guide to make the character's feet appear closer to the camera as they walk towards the camera.
I hope this tutorial has been helpful. If you have any questions, please leave a comment below.
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so I'll just grab a video actually it
doesn't even matter I'll even grab I'll
make a comp
this is going to be a grocery store
setting so I'm going to drop that in
and then we're going to scale this down
so frame guides what you got to do is
you got to go into do it Angela so if
you don't have it already open
you just go here
and then you can just scroll down and
then here you should see Duke Angeles so
I already have it checked but if you
don't see it you got to check it there
then you're gonna go here where it says
camera now we're going to be living in
this setting for a bit so I'm going to
have this like broken up into different
sections the thing with frame guides is
when you click on it it's going to build
a frame guide here
and so this Frame guide is basically
just shape layers now the cool thing
with the frame guide is if you need a
nice little letter box effect to make
your film look pretty cinematic or even
your animation this is exactly how you
do it now you might be wondering you're
like well now these this Frame guide is
here plus if I render it and it has this
guide this uh Tic Tac Toe icon it's not
going to render so what you would do is
you just hide the grid
just hide all three grids you can still
keep this letter box and then you just
have to right click and turn it into a
something that's going to render out so
now I'll render out but we we usually
you wouldn't want to do that because you
just want to use it as a guide so I'm
going to change that back
and then if you look here I'm just gonna
tone the color down it's going to darken
it just a little bit so you can kind of
see
how you have like the action guide there
now um
there is something here like you can see
there's a you have this Grid it's called
safe frame grid but you have different
grids that you can use even have the uh
the golden uh Fibonacci there which is
freaking awesome but you even have that
so that's really good for framing stuff
and then you have the golden rectangle I
don't use that I I would use the golden
Fibonacci on print not saying that right
even had the real Fibonacci you have the
thirds I use that a lot rule of thirds
if you guys are familiar with that you
have a slant thirds you have uh Center
so yeah it's basically the crosshairs
there you have digital frames
um which is safe this is digital frames
is a lot less grids I would say in
animation I use Thurs the most but
you'll notice something off about thirds
so if I if I hide these it looks
cluttered so what I would do this is
what I would recommend I would keep
these two off and just use thirds like
that because you have multiple grids see
that's like a whole different that's
another grid that's another grid too
but you can have like I would work with
it like this but I would want to turn
off this top grid let's turn this one
off too and then we'll go into this so
now what we have is just this box
let's see what's inside let's open this
up a bit
so we got that so that's the frame ah
there it is
so if we turn off the frame now turn the
grid back on
yeah there we go so if you don't want
the frame on you can still have the grid
here and then just kind of scale it up
if you want but I I wouldn't even bother
scaling this up see the thing is is that
if you turn this off let's turn the
whole thing off so what I normally would
do before I knew about uh do with Angela
I would do all and then the quotation
marks and it'll make this grid now
normally it would be a lower third grid
but this is not lower third gear as you
can see so I would have to go to
preferences and then I'll have to go
into grids which is right here so I
would go into this option and I'm going
to change it right now so if you haven't
done this you I would highly recommend
you do this and then I basically will
change this to three horizontal and then
three verticals and then hit okay
and then I would just click all and then
the colons and then you have your lower
thirds so saying is literally the same
process and if you click on this again
you'll see tone this down but you can
see this is the way it would look in my
opinion I think the way I have the lower
thirds through the software is better
than the way they have it for Angela but
I think they did it for this way for
Angela because it's a cinematic thirds
it's not a normal lower thirds now you
might be wondering like how do I get it
to be more like the green line so what
you could do you could try scaling it up
as you can see that doesn't really help
much you could do this
and now you got what you want so that's
what I would do I would do it more like
that so now if I turn this off
you have your lower thirds and then you
could even save it if you want I'm going
to save this you can save it as a preset
I'm only going to have that highlighted
I could save it as a third
and
now if I want to use this again I'm not
going to double it but if I hit Ctrl
spacebar with Video Copilot typed in
third
whoops it should be there
oh yeah that's right it won't be there
until I reset the software like once I
close out and come back in it will be
there and then if you want to save the
Fibonacci just the same process you'll
just go here save animation preset
you can see third is there so it will
save this stuff
but you would just do it differently a
bit differently let's do golden
Fibonacci
and now you'll always have this if you
need it
so that's how you do the frames like I
said you can change these you can save
them
