3D Rocket/Missile Launch in Adobe After Effects 2021

this was actually inspired by an episode of history 101 that i saw on netflix there's an episode about the space race and there's a scene in that particular episode where the ussr and america fire rockets at each other and there's these cool little path animations where they're criss-crossing the cool look that they created is like this 2d map that they have a path animate off of to create the 3d look so that's what i'm going to be playing around with today i'm going to show you what i came up with um the results of what i've been playing around with for the past day or two inside of adobe after effects and if you enjoyed the tutorial be sure to give me a thumbs up and if you want to see more map animations like this be sure to subscribe to the channel and hit the notification bell today's video is brought to you by skillshare so if you follow me on youtube clearly you're a fan of adobe after effects well skillshare is an online learning community with a ton of useful ae content available for motion designers it doesn't really matter if you're a seasoned veteran or you're totally new to the program personally i've always struggled with using the graph editor so i'm taking jake bartlett's animating with ease class the class focuses on how to use the speed and value graphs how to properly perform overshoots work with motion paths and how to loop animations in addition to the graph editor you can also check out general motion design classes how to do data visualizations character rigging and even how to properly run your freelance business it's ad free so you can stay focused on the content and they're always adding new premium content to the site and the first 1 000 of my subscribers to click on the link down in the video description are going to get a one month free trial of skillshare to start exploring your creativity today all right so this might be a long one so i'm going to try to move relatively fast alright so this is a screenshot that i took of google maps it's like my little world map that i'm going to be working with here so for the first step i need to create like a launch pad area where all the elements are going to come from so let's go to central florida here so i'm going to attach no layer there so you can right click and go to new null object but i'm using a premium extension called motion3 and i'm sure a lot of you already own this tool it's very very powerful so i'm going to be using this to do a lot of my animation work so right up here i can click on null that gives me this null i'm going to call the null layer launch pad and then i'm going to zoom in here and i'm actually going to move this to eastern central florida where the actual launch pads are in the united states for like spacex and nasa uh fun fact actually was born in a little city called titusville it's like 12 miles from the actual launch pad so i lived there for over 30 years saw the space shuttle launches it was super cool all right so i'm going to parent the null object launch pad to the map and now everything will attach to that launch pad null object when i animate the world map around it everything will be cool so uh one quick note i want to get all of my elements together in a 2d space before i jump over and start tinkering with things and layers in 3d space because then you add that third dimension and it opens up a whole world of like new issues so it's easier to rig everything up in 2d space at least i find that workflow to be easy so the next thing i want to create here is the flight path of the rocket so i'm going to grab my pen tool i'm going to turn the fill off and i'm going to turn the stroke on and the stroke is set to width of 2 color of white that's fine now i'm just going to draw out a quick path um something like the start point and then a little end point so we have like a little curved path here i'm going to rename the layer flight path so i want to be able to manipulate this layer i want to be able to rotate it and move it in 3d space so to do that if i want it to attach to my flat 2d map i want the anchor point of this particular layer to be attached to where the launch pad is i'm going to go grab the pan behind tool and i'm going to grab the anchor point of my flight path layer and a really cool tip is if you hold ctrl it'll actually snap to your paths in your bounding box and now i'm going to parent the flight path to the launch pad and another cool tip is when you're parenting things if you want to overwrite the child parameters with the parent parameters like for instance if you want the position you want to snap to that position just hold shift so i'm going to grab the pick whip and i'm going to shift and then release on the launch pad and it'll snap that anchor point there if i control z i'm going to show you one other tip if i drag this over and then i zoom in if i want it to snap on there i just hold the control key and it should snap into position there all right now we need to create like a little spacecraft or our rocket for that i'm going to go grab the polygon tool i'm going to turn the fill back on to solid and i'm going to turn the stroke off and i'm going to draw out a shape here now i already have a triangle now the one of the ways you control the polygons of the polygon tool is you hit the up and down arrow as you're clicking and dragging and it's going to change the number of points so i have the triangle here i am going to hold shift to make sure it's aligning it like this then i'll bring it down make it small okay so now i'm going to center this up by going to the transformation properties i'll quickly zero this out and that puts it in the center then i'm going to grab the layer rename it rocket and then with motion 3 i'm going to set the anchor point to the bottom center because i want that to be the attach point when it's attaching to my flight path and i'm manipulating it i want to manipulate it from the back end of it so that's our next step i need to connect the rocket to the flight path and have it animating along the flight path so how the heck are we going to do that well there's a really cool tool called create nulls from paths so if you go to window right down here it says create nulls from paths so this was an extension introduced in after effects and i think 2018 so if you're using an older version you might not see it this is going to allow us to animate a null object that moves along the path so i actually have to select the path of my flight path and i actually have to grab it and then hit trace path and that created this new null object right here and it's actually animating along the path now but you'll notice that it's looping so if i hit the u key you can see that there's keyframes here and if i go to effect controls you'll notice there's trace path with a progress bar that goes from 0 to 100 and a loop so if i turn off loop and then i move this keyframe here i'm going to move this all the way to the end what that's going to do is that's going to animate the null from 0 to 100 along our path so that's going to be the control of like where our rocket is how it's launching so these two keyframes are what i'm going to animate for the movement of my rocket launch now i want to attach my rocket to this so i'm going to grab the rocket hold shift and parent that to that and then voila i've got this rocket moving along here however it's sideways so i'm going to go hit r for rotate and just move that 90 degrees and now you've got that flying along the path now however let's say i want the path to animate on behind the rocket for that i'm going to go to flight path and i'm going to add a trim path and i have the start and end parameters here you can see n goes from 0 to 100 so we need to animate the end from 0 to 100. now i could hand keyframe that but our progress bar of our trace path is already animating on from you guessed it 0 to 100 so i can just attach or property pick whip the end of the trim path to the progress bar of the trace path and it's that easy okay so everything's all rigged up in 2d world here actually i forgot one element there's a really cool shockwave explosion element that i got from premiumbeat here this is a free element if you want to check it out you can go down to the video description and there's a link to download a bunch of free explosion elements so i want to use this as like the rocket blast off i want this shock wave to happen so what i'm going to do here is well first i'm going to move this anchor point because it's not in the right position so i'm gonna grab this and i'm gonna move it right to the center it's gotta be a mistake now i can shift and parent this to the launch pad and then deck that's gonna snap right there and then i'm gonna move the shockwave element just above the map and scale it down to 15. all right it's a good start okay now we're going to start messing with some 3d stuff so let's just dive right in and i'm going to turn all these layers to 3d and let's watch the carnage unfold you notice two things right away the rocket's now gone and the null object for the trace path is just totally not in the right position now i didn't know what was going on here this is a pretty complex error and it's with the fact that the tr the way trace paths um the expression is working in space uh in the space world of after effects so i found the answer to this problem on a forum in creative cow so this guy named benjamin figured it out so what you do is you open up the position of the trace paths null object and then down here it's set to to comp so you just delete comp and you say world and then bang everything will work in the 3d world now so what does that mean what did i just do i don't know if you'd like to find out why buy the power of expression at any scripts.com affiliate link in the video description okay now i'm going to bring my playhead over here and i'm just going to grab the camera tool which is c and i'm going to quickly like rotate whoops i'm going to grab the world map and i'm going to rotate down like this okay so now you can see we've got this flat 2d map you can see everything's flat here so if i grab the flight path you can see once again i have the anchor point here so all i need to really do here is i'm going to rotate the map so i can see it a little better here and now i'm going to grab the flight path and i'm going to rotate this right here so i'm going to bring this up and now as i rotate around again you can see that we now have a 3d path coming off of a 2d map however there's a problem check this out if i look at the rocket the rocket is looking a little wonky it's not right rotation wise so it's kind of like the past coming up like this and it's attached like this this can be very complex as well but what i'm going to do is i'm going to take the rocket and i just want to attach the position right now it's parented all the attributes are parented to the trace path null i want to attach just the position to that so i can control the rotation of the rocket separately from the trace paths so what i'm going to do here is i'm going to unparent the rocket and then i'm going to go over to rotation and i'm just going to zero out all this stuff so we still have path like this now i'm going to grab position of both trace path and rocket and i'm going to shift click to make sure that's still connected now i just need to go to the rocket right click go to transform and then auto orient that to follow along the path now you can see if i mess with the x rotation here all i need to do is set this to negative 90. okay so now this is launching and the arrow is working well in 3d space here i got to be honest that took me a long time to figure that out all right so now i just need to do like some final touches i'm going to go to the path here i can change this add some dashes to it you know there's some dashes i can go to the rocket and let's actually you know bring the size of this down it's much too big so i'm going to go to the radius here the outer radius turn that down to 15 or 10 and i can actually have this spin so if i want like this to you know spin endlessly i can go to the y rotation and i can just add a keyframe here keyframe here and then have it rotate one time for one second you can see it's like and now we just add a loop out expression loop out and now this thing this rocket is going to spin around these astronauts are going to be so sick and let's just throw a deep glow on there depot is another premium tool from plug and everything awesome awesome tool let's bring the radius down to like 250. i'm gonna actually animate this on because you can see down here we have this issue of it like intersecting if you know uh what's causing that or the work around from these layers intersecting i would love to learn about that because i don't know i don't know how to solve that problem so if you could tell me like how to do it because the way i'm going to get around this is i'm going to scale up the rocket so just go to scale here and have this scale up just to avoid um the intersection of that and i'm going to go to the trace path here and i'm going to have the rocket you know ease in or ease out i mean and you know what i'm going to go down to flight path and we'll bring the stroke make it real thin like one alright cool now i've got this animating well now i'm going to get a position for my camera so you can animate the camera so one quick tip if you're working in 3d space you select a layer and you can use the tools to navigate navigate around that particular layer so i'm going to come up like somewhere like around here so that it flies by here and i'm going to go rotate the map a little bit let's rotate the map like this and i want to create like a fake like it's a globe or something or like we're in space so i can double click on the world map and i'm going to grab the pen tool and i'm just going to create a quick mask make it looks like there's some fall off i'm going to invert this mask or i'm going to subtract and then i'm going to feather it out a lot so we're giving it like this fake there we go maybe bring it over even more i'm doing this in the layer panel so i double click the layer and it brings me into the layer panel here all right so what i can do now is i can go to layer camera create camera from 3d view so right now i don't have my 3d camera it's just the default view so now i can create this camera here and i want the camera to follow the rocket so as the rocket moves i want it to automatically follow the rocket so i can go to point of interest right here and i want that to snap to the position of my of my trace path so right here i'll grab point of interest and then shift click that and hopefully that will work yeah so now it's doing the animation for us and now to really make it nice i'm going to turn depth of field on and then i'm going to grab the camera and the rocket left click i mean right click go to camera link focus distance to layer so as that rocket flies the the focus is automatically going to rack so as it comes and gets higher in the atmosphere it should give us a shallow depth of field it should blur out the planet and to make it blur out a little more i can turn that aperture up is that working yeah it is working i crank it way up this is why it's important to learn your camera terminology and let's actually see if i can um front let's see if i can mess with this flight path a little more the flight path just isn't long enough like i want it to be further so i think i can mess with it here so if i grab it here and i bring it like way out here let's see what happens the cool thing is the camera is going to follow it everything should follow it theoretically [Music] i don't know if i should keep messing with the aperture or if i should mess with the blur level let's look at camera options again blur level 200 let's do 150 i really love the link focus to camera and linking linking the point of interest to the the null is just such a cool technique because look at that automatically gives you just does so much work for you like you don't have to keyframe anything and one other cool effect um i could just quickly so now it's launching here let's say we wanted to do like this snap zoom in like right here i could grab the zoom and then i can just zoom now just make sure i've got motion blur on for everything now go to effects and presets and let me add like a hue saturation to my world map and let's just totally desaturate it to give it this cool look there we go maybe even turn the opacity down some make that rocket pop out a little bit and make it look a little bit better [Music] and if you want you could go in here and add um a light like a let me see a parallel light and that's gonna give us like a hopefully give us a shadow so if i go here you gotta actually select all your layers and make sure that shadows are turned on so cast shadows and you can see it's making my rocket path all dark so what i could do is i could go to the flight path and just go to material options and you don't want it to accept lights but you want it to cast the shadows so same thing with a rocket let's see if i set lights off all right so there you have it i hope you enjoyed the tutorial if you did be sure to hit the thumbs up button i had so much fun with this i'm probably going to be tinkering around with this idea for the next couple of weeks or days or whatever just because it's it's just looks so cool it's so much fun there's so many things you can do with it um in addition to like just rocket or missile launches let me know what you think of it down in the comments section i'm thinking i might try something with video copilot or plug-in or have it like launch off an actual globe and like maybe i could have it circle the globe or something actually do like in a real flight path of a spacex rocket or something also i've been doing a lot of freelance work i did some projects some more projects for johnny harris some cool world war ii maps that i'll probably be doing breakdowns of in the future i've been working with a youtuber called ava zubek then doing some map animations from her i did some map animations for tara mater so if you don't follow me on instagram go over there and follow me at boonlow's video i've been sharing samples there it's really really cool and if you want to see something specific um just give me a shout in the comments section and maybe we can make something happen this tutorial is like 45 minutes i'll see in the next one [Music]

Channel: Boone Loves Video

Views: 27,662

Keywords: boone loves video, after effects animation, after effects missile tutorial, after effects rocket launch animation, after effects 3d animation 2021, adobe after effects tutorial 2021, missile launch tutorial after effects, adobe after effects map animation, how to animate maps in adobe after effects, map animation after effects, space x animation after effects, nasa animation after effects, path animation after effects, trace paths after effects, ae tutorial 2021

Id: 6QRy_k9p1_Q

Length: 19min 19sec (1159 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 16 2021