5 Best Expressions for After Effects

what's up everybody it's your boy nate and today we are finally doing it I'm talking about the most challenging part of After Effects that's right the part that separates the Nerds from the noobs expressions now don't get me wrong you can do a bunch of really cool stuff in After Effects without even having the touch expressions in fact for most effects like the effects and compositing expressions aren't really gonna help you that much but it for things like animations and motion graphics I can't recommend them enough expressions can improve your animations drastically and save you a whole lot of time you're gonna want to stick around because we are going over the handiest the most useful and the easiest ones to learn in After Effects I'm excited I know you are too are let's go ok so the first expression I'm going to talk about is probably the easiest one to remember that was it's called wiggle now I first heard about wiggle from The Godfather After Effects himself Andrew Kramer and ever since I have found myself using wiggle in so many projects it's super versatile and I've used it in a bunch of projects to add a controlled random movement now if that sounds kind of confusing I'll show you exactly what I mean now let's say I have this box here but I don't want it to just be static I can actually add a wiggle expression to its position I'm just going to go ahead and type in wiggle and then parenthesis and let's go ahead and put two values in here because that's what it needs frequency and an amplitude I'm gonna put 10 Commons 20 or whatever hit enter and I'm gonna close that out holy I'm talking about code that sounds so nerdy oh and once I click out of it and I hit plate you're gonna see this box now acts like a kid on candy or a bunch of ravers up at a music festival and it's okay if you don't remember this code exactly because honestly I forget it all the time but I just tend to play around with the values until I figure out which one's a frequency and which ones they amplitude or you can check down in the description because all of the codes are gonna be down there so that you don't have to type them in yourself you can copy and paste it save yourself some time and while you're also going down there and check it out description go ahead and hit that subscribe button because we're going to be talking about all kinds of cool stuff on this channel you're not gonna want to miss out so I've used this effect for creating foam hand-held camera movement and even faux hand-drawn animation stop-motion effect this expression is just so versatile I can't recommend it enough it gets a well-deserved black mixture stamp of approval okay so for a while and after-effects i was doing looping animations entirely wrong if i wanted something to loop i would make a pre comp and then make a ton of copies which would just bloat up my projects and then I would painstakingly move each of those pre comps to the end point of the other pre comp which would just take forever and then pretty much I would only have a loop that lasted as long as my patience and if this sounds familiar trust there's an easier way so instead of doing all of that well we can instead do we can select an animation we like and then pre comp the layer making sure to move all the attributes to a new composition and then we can click enable time remap once that's up we can all click the stopwatch next to time remap and apply one of my favorite expressions the loop out expression the loop out expression will loop the animation based on the out point so if we actually want this to loop out either faster or slower all we have to do is move this one keyframe at the end either closer or at the end of the time remapping this is much simpler right the best part is that this is all in one layer and it's still fully customizable and since there's really only two keyframes I can make a bunch of changes easily without worrying about the looping being broken at all for me having a move stuff around so I've used this on gifs or animations that are really really really really long like this playlist in which to animate this leg swinging back and forth I'm not gonna sit there and animate those same two keyframes over the course of 30 minutes and after-effects instead I use the loop out animation to save me so much time and avoid having to do really repetitive work anyways loop out really useful I love it a lot and for that reason it gets a well-deserved black mixture stamp okay so next on the list is another expression that's super easy to remember it's called time so this expression is really useful for creating things like counters or even making animations that you want constant and based on the time so for example you might use this expression if you want to make something like this animated counter right here and in order to do that all you'd have to do is make a new text layer and then go to the source text and type in time now this is different from the timecode effect in that you're able to still link this with other expressions and you have a lot more freedom with how you want to design this so you can still do things like changing the character styles and it's even cooler when you apply the time effect the transformations like rotation that way you get a clock like rotation without any keyframes at all so it's really handy once you get creative with it it gets a well-earned black mixture stamp of approval whoo okay so now we are getting down to the last two and before we get anywhere into this list I don't want you guys to know right now this is just based on my opinion and what kind of projects I do so since I do a lot of motion graphics and VFX either the ones that I found to be in my projects time and time again but definitely make sure that you know you check out whichever expressions are gonna be useful for you and hey if you got any expressions that you want us to know if you can comment down below alright let's get back into this list okay so number two on this list is one of my favorites of all time is the blink expressions now I stumbled upon this expression as being like one of the first expressions I ever used and that's because coming from Final Cut Pro they had a really cool effect called blink all it did was turn on and off a layer just like a flickering effect but not like a flickering effect in After Effects which will have some x values in between 0 and 100 what this one did was it just turned off the layer on and off which allows you to still do a lot of really cool stuff with it there's nothing that comes like that natively in After Effects so I ended up googling how to do it that's how I stumbled upon this really useful expression I use it in so many projects from a lot of animations to even this general editing of different Clips together love it a lot can't recommend blink enough just make sure you go ahead save this one down into like your clipboard or wherever you're putting your expressions or maybe even into FX console which is a plugin I talked about on this video right here it's like the best plugin for After Effects to me anyways this expression gets a well-deserved black mixture stamp of approval let's go on to number one on this list okay so this expression is really cool kind of tricky to use so I'll just call index but some people call it rotation multiplication or whatever the phone anyways it's pretty cool because what it allows you to return a value based on its index which without getting on to like the nerdy details it lets you do some pretty cool stuff so I'll show you a really specific example let's say I have this box right here and I like this animation but I think it'd be really cool to have an array of it in a circle we don't know what that is I'm going to show you in a second we're gonna go down and just apply this expression which is really easy it's just index times 360 because we want a full circle and I'm gonna put in however many of these copies I want let's say 10 so BAM I put in 10 and all of a sudden if I copy this layer 10 times going to see that each copy gets placed in a circle perfectly and as we hit play all the animations are still there it looks great so there's a lot of really cool stuff that you can do with this especially when it comes to motion graphics might be a little niche but it's pretty much the only thing that I can think of to save you this much time in After Effects when doing something like this and for that reason it gets a black mixture stamp of approval anyways that is it for the list now I want to know what you guys think you have any expressions that you just use anything we should absolutely know about please leave a comment down below I'm gonna love reading it I'm sure everyone else will too if you haven't already make sure you hit the subscribe button from we're gonna be talking about all kinds of cool stuff oh if you haven't already make sure you still enter in the giveaway that one's still going on till the end of this month hope you guys are having a great start to your new year and I hope to catch you on the next one peace I would donate the video to boom-boom all right what should go at the end of the video like I feel like I always try to give them something cool I gather the video of I have no idea where it's given here maybe I'll just [Music]

Channel: Black Mixture

Views: 35,494

Keywords: blackmixture, after effects tutorial, adobe after effects, visual effects, motion graphics, expressions after effects, expressions after effects tutorial, motion design school, animation tutorial after effects, top expressions, top expressions after effects, best expression after effects, wiggle expression in after effects, time after effects, expressions after effects list, after effects faster, sonduckfilm, ben marriott

Id: dtpsAcKeosw

Length: 9min 10sec (550 seconds)

Published: Sat Jan 18 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/oldsyoung21]

it´s any expression to follow the motion of a 3d camera in after effects?.

-if i have any object in my composition and i want this object follow the movement of the 3d camera, like a tracking.