Making your own animated characters from scratch is energy and time consuming. Instead why not try a readymade character construction kit? The beauty of these kits is that all the hardest work is done for you, leaving you with the task only of customising the characters to suit your own needs.
Today we'll showcase the top character construction kits for After Effects, available from Envato Elements and Envato Market.
Top Character Construction Kits for After Effects
Featured Template: Pictogram Character Kit
This is a versatile character construction kit that offers 60 animated characters, 130 accessories and 100 animations that you can use to create a wide range of scenarios. You can use the kit in four different ways: combine modules, create loopable animations, use fully rigged characters, or generate high resolution images.
Key Features
Download and Try
Envato Elements offers a cost-effective monthly or yearly subscription that includes unlimited downloads of After Effects templates, plus thousands of audio tracks, stock images and videos, fonts, mockups, graphics and more.
More Character Construction Kits for After Effects
Unlimited downloads from Envato Elements means you can try out as many After Effects templates as you want, so if our featured template isn't quite what you need, here are two great alternatives from Envato Elements you can try instead.
Flat World Toolkit contains a variety of customisable animated characters, objects and backgrounds that you can use to create explainer videos, cartoons, presentations and more.
This is a fun character construction kit that offers 22 compositions that are highly customisable to suit your needs. It is modular in structure, fast to render and no additional plugins are required.
Other Resources for Animation Videos
If you're looking for other resources to help make beautiful videos, check out these items that are all available as part of a subscription to Envato Elements.
Backgrounds: Polygon Backgrounds
If you're looking for digital backgrounds for your animation projects, Envato Elements offers thousands of eye-catching professionally designed background, like Polygon Backgrounds showcased here. This template offers one concept in 10 different colour schemes. All the files come in high resolution JPEG and PNG formats.
Font: Magdelin Typeface
Magdelin font family is a clean and easy to read typeface made up of 40 font styles that offer loads of flexibility when you are creating an animation project. Some styles will be better for titles and headers while others will lend themselves well to captions and speech bubbles.
Illustrations: Character Illustration
If you're interested in custom rigging your own characters, you can cut the work of creating characters from scratch with awesome illustrations from Elements, like this character illustration.
More Templates for After Effects
Here are more top After Effects resources and tutorials to try from Envato Tuts+:
From Photoshop to After Effects: How to Customize Rigged Characters for Animation (Part 1)
9 Top After Effects Character Animation Templates for Bone-Rigging
How to Add Special Effects to Cartoon Animation Using After Effects
How to Make a Talking Avatar With Cartoon Animator and After Effects
About This Page
How We Picked
We looked at projects and considered all kinds of variables, including organization, complexity, experience required and overall difficulty, minimum hardware specifications, included versions and options, formats, resolution, file size, dependencies and required plug-ins (if any), language options, software versions supported, style, design, and cost. You can read more about how we select items at How We Pick Video Templates to Feature on Envato Tuts+.
About the Authors
Nona Blackman wrote this. Jackson Couse edited and published it.
Share Your Craft on the Envato Forums
Did you try some of these templates? Let us know on the Envato forums. We love to see what you create!
