10 After Effects Tips & Tricks in 5 minutes

all right we've got our circle rotating and we want the square arrow box to follow that rotation but we want the arrow to remain upright so we need to parent this Square layer to our circle here and at the moment it's just going to follow that rotation but the arrows is going to you know go wherever it wants to go so to make it stay upright we need to press R to bring up that rotation property option or alt to click the stopwatch and drag the pick whip to this rotation property here now currently it's going to follow the rotation of the shape and this little shape is going to spin at the same time as well so we've got a double spinning so to cancel out the spin that it's inheriting from the circle rotation we just need to type in to the end of this expression * which is asterisks "* - 1" now if we play it back it'll follow and the arrow remains upright also while we've got a parenting expression on this property after effects will let you add keyframes to it but it won't let you change the value of this keyframes because the value is coming straight from this expression so to change that all we need to do is add to the end of this expression" + value "now we can add our own little extra animations into here now it's going to follow the properties from the expression plus our own keyframes here there we go now edit this texture to this comp and it doesn't quite fill all the way to the edges and we don't scale it up because then it's going to lose some resolution so what we're going to do is we're going to add the effect emotion tile here and we're going to select mirror edges and we're gonna extend the height and extend the width now you will get some mirroring on the edges here but for something like a texture you're not gonna really notice that much and it's only a bit it should go undetected all right so we've got this animated pre-comp and we want to use this three times we will want each instance to have a different set of colors for these shapes so we can do that by making sure inside this pre-comp each shape has specific color values this one is 107 white this one 25% gray 50% gray 75% gray and 100% black and you can check these by clicking your fill property up here and just making sure this value is 25 50 75 hundred or zero and back in this top comp we can add the effect CC Toner and select Pantone up here and that will map those five color values to these new ones here so we can click on any one of these and then change the color value and that will affect only the shape with that white gray mid gray black whatever color so we can copy that affect paste that on another instance of that comp and we going to start eye dropping other colors and change the colors of each one of these this is very useful if we want to change that animation inside that pre-comp later now here we want to create a vignette the default vignette effect doesn't give us a lot of control not as much as we need so to create our own we're going to press ctrl Y and create a black solid and with that black solid selected we're going to double click our ellipse tool up here and that will create a mask the size of our comp and we're going to click inverted and we're going to press F to bring up a feather property and drag this to as much vignette as you need and if you double click that mask you can press control shift and drag it up to increase the size and from here we can also add more Anchor Point with our pen tool and adjust the shape and we can even add a turbulent displace layer and to give it some more sort of grit and grain and some you know more variation now we've got this sort of rectangular shape animating by using the trim paths just using the offset property here we want the shape to be rounded so what we're gonna do is we're gonna add a Gaussian blur effect and we're also gonna add a levels effect now we're just going to bring the blurriness up a little to around maybe 20 and with our levels we're gonna change the channel from RGB to alpha and I'm going to drag these two handles very close to the center to crush that alpha channel to make it nice and rounded now to add a stroke to the shape what we can do is duplicate this layer with ctrl D and on the bottom layer we can change this stroke here to the color that we want which is white and we're going to add the effect simple choker and if we drag our choker matte down it's gonna expand our shape there we go and you can expand it further but it will get a little weird after a while so don't push it too far for a thin stroke you should be fine okay we've got a square that we want to animate along this path but if you playing back it's gonna be a little uneven and janky and we want to smooth out that motion so we're going to select all of our key frames right click and select Rove across time and that's gonna automatically put these middle key frames where it thinks they should be and now I've got a smooth motion got our shapes in our design here and it's all looking a bit too smooth and clean for us at the moment so we want to add some a little bit of grit and texture to these shapes so to do that we're going to press ctrl alt Y to create a new adjustment layer and we're going to add the fact turbulent displace and we're gonna change the amount to 30 the size to 2 and let's change the complexity to 5 so if we zoom in we could see all the edges have this nice just a little bit of roughness that just adds a little bit of grip just makes it look a bit more hand-drawn all right now we've got this animation here we've got all of our key frames all doing different things at different times with the position and rotation across these shapes and we need to make this animation a little bit slower so instead of dragging all the keyframes and trying to re-time them manually what you can do is just select all these keyframes and while holding alt if you select the very first or the very last keyframe you can just drag it out and it will maintain the proportions of the timing between these so it can make it much quicker or you can hold alt and drag and make it much slower and it will maintain all the easing and keep the animation in proportion please let me know in the comments was this tips and trick video helpful would you like me to do another one and make weekly motion design tutorials and I thought doing one simple of this every once in a while might be helpful I don't forget to subscribe hit that Bell icon share comment I'd like thank you so much I'll see you next week

Channel: Ben Marriott

Views: 90,395

Keywords: animate in after effects, beginner animation, basic animation tutorial, easy animation, after effects basics, after effects tricks and tips, how to use after effects, after effects tutorials, ben marriott, smooth transitions, after effects tutorial, after effects, adobe after effects, after effects simple, after effects tips, after effects tricks, after effects hacks, AE tricks, ae tutorial, ae tips, ae quick tips, ae quick tutorial, adobe ae tutorial

Id: Pmmv_PBWVqU

Length: 6min 2sec (362 seconds)

Published: Wed May 08 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/TheGreatSzalam]

For creating a stroke on something, I prefer using the Vegas Effect. You just set it to use the alpha instead of the intensity of the layer. Set it to only have one iteration and make it not transparent at all. That way you can keep everything on one layer.