4 Beginner Cartoon Animation Techniques in After Effects

in this fun animation video we're gonna talk about four amazing beginner techniques when it comes to doing cartoon based animation hey what's going on Internet this is Josh Noel from Sonic film and welcome to our channel if you're new here be sure to hit that subscribe button so doing cartoon based type animation whether it's for explainer videos or you want to create YouTube content or some sort of video that showcases a ton of information using you know cartoon based characters this video is going to condense a ton of information into four easy steps so you can get started with this type of animation so whether you're just starting off of animation or if you have some experience in Adobe Illustrator and After Effects we're going to take a look at these two programs and how we can get started with cartoon based animation alright so in our first technique we're going to talk about setting up vector files ready for animation now you're probably saying wait well I'm not ready to setup my files I don't have any files to work with well this isn't a design tutorial on how to create your own you know cartoon animations on itself because that's a really large toy but the good news is is that you can get started right now with free vector files and pretty much this website called free pics.com has pretty much every type of vector that you would want for free the only thing about using vectors on this site is that you have to give them credit because they are free that makes sense but essentially you can type in what you're looking for whether it's people or a business setting or a cityscape and you type it in click on something that you're interested in and you can download it for absolutely free and you'll be able to open up that file inside of Adobe Illustrator it's gonna be the illustrator ai file and when you have that loaded up inside of Illustrator you'll have all the elements right here that are completely editable however we need to set this up for After Effects so we can animate this because we can't animate it here in Illustrator has to be animated in After Effects so in order to get to started we need to take a look at the layers menu so the layers menu should be here on the right if you don't see the layers menu just go up to window layers and unfortunately every project file is going to be different from what you see here but I will link this one specifically in the description so you can follow along with this video now you'll see here that you know we can hide each layer here and see what by itself now what we want to do is take the elements that we want to animate in After Effects and put it into this own unique layer but first clean this up so we probably want to get rid of the actual logo here so we don't have that in our animation so we can turn that off and we come into the trashcan icon and delete it and you'll see the background separated which is great and if we want to select certain elements here so let's say we want to animate this plant and after effects all we have to do is select it now a bunch of things are going to get selected so one thing we can do is maybe lock our background because you see that background is separated and one thing we can do is when we control click around our plants isolate it and then simply we can open up our objects window go into the group here and we can see that the plant is right here because the blue icon right here is selected so what we can do is coming up down here at the bottom and create new layer bring this plant icon into our new layer here and we could name this to plant so now this is in its own individual layer so we can animate this separately inside of After Effects without any issues now this was an easy example to show you so let's do something a little bit more complicated let's just select someone's head here so first thing you want to notice if you click on an object sometimes you get a bunch of objects grouped together what we can do here is go to object and click on ungroup and we deselect here and you know you might need to ungroup a few times so now every element here is going to be selected separately so for example I can come here and drag around our face here so first we'll go ahead and create a new layer and we can call this right head and then we'll open up our objects and we'll see what paths and groups are selected and we'll just shift-click all these together and ctrl click anything that's not you know connected and we'll just move this to our layer so now we can see we can turn everything off here however is overlapping with our computer so we could put this leg underneath our main layer and it's back to normal awesome and one thing you might need to do is go through the vector and delete certain objects so like these message tags I don't want those and essentially that's how this works out so for example I can move forward here and group all these different elements together so right in this layer I have a shoe select ik and turn that on and off and the layer icon so I'm gonna be able to animate that separately I have the other heads and I also have each of the lights up here separated so I can animate these separately inside of After Effects and before we bring this over to our effects I want to make this into a video format because we're animating this for 1920 by 1080 a 16 by 9 aspect ratio and how we can change this current resolution here all we have to do is go to window and click on artboards and we can just double click this you know crop tool icon you know document icon right here in the corner and here's the you know though height and width we can set this up to 1920 by 1080 and click OK and this will expand everything and simply we can grab everything here make sure the selection tool here and the left is selected and we'll just and we'll hold down alt and shift on keyboard and click drag this to fill up the size of the composition and here it is and I think that would be command + Shift on a Mac so when it's all said and done we can go to file save or save as and make sure to save it as an illustrator file so now we have After Effects loaded up and in our second technique we're gonna talk about animating vector files but first we need to import our files so we'll come over here and we'll import our saved illustrator file bring it right here into the project window inside of After Effects that we'll import and it'll ask you how do you want to import it footage or composition I like to do composition and the dimensions should be layer size click OK and we can double click our composition here in a project window and BAM there is our composition right instead of After Effects edie as you can see it's 1920 by 1080 just like we saved it inside of Illustrator and now we can animate our vector files because now we have our layers right here how we saved it exactly in Illustrator and you see I could turn things off and boom we can animate these objects individually so there's a lot that we can do with this animation so let's get right to work so for example maybe we can start off with our light animations here so perhaps what we can do so like all three these light layers hit P on keyboard for position and we can add a keyframe for these will move the keyframes forward in time and we'll just simply have these scale up above our composition select Laskey frames here and just say f9 on a keyboard to make them easy ease keyframes so now we can preview here and you see those just drop down very easily you know maybe we want to just all set these in time by a little bit so they don't all come in at the same time so now we have this very simple animation with our lights things see it's very easy to animate vector icons just with the basic transform properties but let's say the stepbrothers grab our plant here and this time I actually would like this to kind of grow on so we grab say like the paint behind tool here and see the anchor points right there and that means that's where the animation is going to roll around so I want to take this anchor point and bring it to the bottom of the pot here and then go back to my selection tool just hit astron keyboard for scale and we'll add a keyframe for scale move it forward in time and we said scaled down to 0% and of course let's make both these keyframes easy East keyframes by hitting f9 our keyboard so now this plant will just grow in like that nice perhaps we want to animate the shoe here and you can see if I hit R on a keyboard for rotation I rotate this we could potentially mess up our animations so what we'll do is grab the Pan behind tool and put the anchor point right at the base of the leg here and instead of keyframing this animation because that can take a little bit of time if we want to have this you know wiggling throughout the entire thing let's just all click the stopwatch for rotation and let's just type in wiggle open parenthesis let's do like 0.5 comma 20 close parentheses so it should look something like this click off of it so now we have this nice wiggle animation on our shoe and this will go across the entire composition so you don't have to add a single keyframe and you can update these numbers so the first number is all about how many wiggles per second and the second number is how intense so if you increase those numbers it will you know animate faster at a greater value so now we have a little bit of basic animation here and I even animated our hand here of the scale animation with the wiggle expression applied but we don't have a lot of animation going on here I like to animate our heads but in this case I think we can move on to our third technique which is animating with the puppet tools so we can create our own unique animation without having to dive deep into layering inside of illustrator so for example I can grab one of our head layers here I'll grab the one on the left simply we can grab the puppet position tool here at the top and there it is and all we have to do is make sure to begin our timeline double click art you know composition and maybe what we can do here is click a point maybe down here you know at a point here see how much control we have you can see this kind of wiggle a little bit we can maybe add a few more stationary points down here and now we can kind of animate this by this pin so just make sure keep it back where it was now we go back into our main composition and you see that we have our points applied right here and simply all we have to do is just that you aren't keyboard to bring up keyframes you can see these already all have keyframes essentially since I just wanted you a very repetitive animation here those identify that you know pin and we see his puppet pin tool we can all click that stop lock and we'll do a wiggle open for MC 1 comma 10 closed parenthesis so now we have a little bit of animation on our head here very easily and we could do this for our other head and instead of maybe doing the wiggle expression we can just animate this manually by selecting the point moving over I see down here as a keyframe I can move forward a little bit more and we can just move our head over and that's simply how you can take a little extra control with the puppet pin tool completely up to you if you want to use that or not some scenarios it looks great and they're scenarios you might want to add more layering to it and before we move on to our next technique I want to give a huge shout out to animation composer which has over 1,000 motion and presets which will allow you to instantly preview and apply animation presets to any layer instead of After Effects which will help you significantly save hours to even days of time when you're animating a ton of layers on a huge project and this is an extension for After Effects that I've been using over a year now and I can't say how much time it has saved me and also the animations in this pack are also very incredible and also what's great about animation Composer you have a lot of control over the animations how long they've run and what they're going to do for your scenes so if you want to check out animation composer I will drop that link in the description there's also a ton of other animation cartoon After Effects templates out there where you can simply download a After Effects project file with you know cartoon based graphics in it and easily set up a scene and be done for your project within maybe 60 minutes instead of taking several weeks to work on your project so if you're currently working on a big project and you would like to save some time I will link in description one of the best cartoon toolkits out there that will help you save time doing this type of animation okay so in our fourth technique I want to talk about animating with shape layers so the special thing about vector icons is that you're able to easily turn any of these into a shape layer inside of After Effects so you can actually animate every element in here without having to go back to illustrator so let me show you what I mean so I can click on our main layer which is objects here if I turn this off you see it's pretty much everything that we didn't separate what we can do is right click this layer or any layer that you want to animate go to create and click on create shapes from vector layer and boom you're gonna have a shape layer right here instead of After Effects it turns off the original layer we can open this up go into the contents and you can see we have a bunch of groups in here because you know we have a lot of elements but we can start trying to identify what is what and I see right here that this coffee cup right here in the middle table are these five groups that have selected here so it'd take a little bit exploring if you have a lot of hump jacks in there but what we can do is click on contents go to add and we'll add another group I know there's a lot of groups in here but simply we can just hit the Atilla key which is the key underneath the escape button it's bring up our entire window here and we can grab those groups and we'll just bring that into our new group and we can rename this group to coffee cup so now we can open up this layer and go to the transform coffee come here to the begin of our timeline and stuff we make sure the layer selected and grab the Pan behind tool and we can see that we have like a small anchor point right here in the middle of composition and with the Pan behind tool selected we can just select it and put it you know in the center of our coffee cup so now we can come here the scale add a keyframe for it and we can move you know move it forward in time and then set the scale down to 0% so now with our shape layers inside of After Effects we've been able to easily animate this coffee cup without any problem and we can do that for every other layer in here if we want to do it so she lip to you how details you want to get and you have a lot of animation technique so as a bonus tip here because this would be our fifth technique I just want to add a little bit overall animation to the entire scene that kind of draw us in so there's number of ways we can do this but one way I'll do this is go to layer new null object and I'll grab all of our layers here and parent it to the null object well move forward to be in her timeline grubber null object and just hit s or a keyboard for scale a lot of keyframe for scale and we'll move forward to say five seconds we say that's the length of this composition and we can scale in word and if you want we can also maybe bring up position hit by hitting piano keyboard and I'll click it and we can type in wiggle open parentheses point you know 1 comma 20 close parentheses in this way I like a little bit of camera shake it's completely up to you you can animate the position if you want and of course toggle switch the modes and make sure we turn on motion blur for all of our layers and turn it on at the top and one last thing I would like to do is go to layer new adjustment layer and go to effect noise and grain and add noise to this and set the noise up to maybe like 5 were you know 4 to 6 percent and uncheck use color noise and this add just like a little bit of noise in there to kind of emulate video in a way but let's completely up to you I like that option and then we're ready to go I'll show you what we got and what's also and done we should have an animation like this and you see it's very subtle and these are not you know over-the-top techniques nothing too difficult to do but the purposes toriel was to help you get the ground running with some very basic concepts so you can start off with animating these cartoon based animations and also keep in mind that there are plenty of animation templates already ready to go on video high of all length some of my favorite packs below and also there's a great animation preset kit that will help you save hours of time animating a ton of objects so if you wanna check those out those links will be in the description so those are my techniques to help you get the ground running when it comes to cartoon based animation if you found this tutorial helpful be sure to hit the subscribe button because we post multiple tutorials every single week like this on our channel you can also hit me up in my social media networks those links are in the video description and always be creating [Music]

Channel: SonduckFilm

Views: 557,759

Rating: 4.9648376 out of 5

Keywords: Tutorial, After Effects Tutorial, After Effects, Cartoon Animation, Cartoon After Effects, After Effects Animation, After Effects Animation Techniques, After Effects Beginner, After Effects Techniques, AFter Effects Illustrator, 4 Cartoon Animation After Effects, SonduckFilm Tutorial, AE Tutorial, Cartoon Animation Tutorial

Id: 29L3JbgDii0

Length: 14min 54sec (894 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 21 2019