5 Mind-Blowing Expressions in After Effects

here's my picks for five most mind-bending expressions that you need to know and you can grab all the expressions from the link in the description let's get into it all right so first up we have how to loop paths so if you do a lot of path animations you might know that you cannot loop a path animation using a regular uh loop out expression so if we type out loop out here we get a little error that is not a function whatever that does not work but with this fancy expression here we can actually loop our path animation like this and by default this will uh loop it in like a cycle so it'll just restart the loop but you can see this little note in here right here if you change this ping pong equals to true right here then we will get a oops true then we will get a ping pong which means that it goes back and forth so i'll just go ahead and copy this expression here and then paste it on all of my keyframes all of these and now we will get a back and forth looping motion on our path looping path expressions great all right so the next expression we're taking a look at is these random change to specific colors expression fantastic expression i use it all the time so basically how this works is we just type in the rgb value of these colors on the top line in this case i have four you can do more you can do less and then it's going to randomly cycle between them so to get the rgb values you're just going to type in the three digits of them and then comma 255 divided by 255. when you look at a the rgb codes you can get them here on your color and then you just type in at the end comma 255 divided by 255 255 is like the the top of uh rgb you know they go from zero to 255. i don't really know what that means it's not really important but that's just for reference what that means here but i don't even recommend honestly typing in the values here i think that's a little bit too much work so what i actually do is i will put color controls either on this your layer here or on a slider with color controls and so what that looks like let me go ahead and delete this and start over you can see it's resetting everything because my expressions are broken so what i'll do is depending on how many colors i want to have i'll make color controls so add a color control let me duplicate this four times and i will grab these colors here and then go ahead and pick whip this to color one like this and we can go ahead and change this color to whatever we want pick whip this one to color two and then you can change this to whatever you want pick whip this to color three and so on you just want to be very particular very specific with what you are actually pick whipping in this case and there we go and i get a little error here because it's expecting a closing bracket just read what it's saying here and now we are good and then you can change the ease time where the amount of time it takes to ease between the cycles and the duration that it hangs on each color okay great and then it looks something like this very nice so you might have seen number counters before but this is the ultimate number counter okay so we're gonna paste this expression onto our source text here and right off the bat we're going to get an error because we need a slider control on this layer or on another layer to reference it we'll just put it on this layer so add on a slider control here and boom so now we can just go ahead and put in whatever number we want and the cool thing about this number control why it's the ultimate one is we have all these things we can do here we can put in the number of decimals so we can have we could have three decimal points for some reason we could put in commas if we want so we can say true and now we have commas here once we get over a thousand we could put in um a dollar sign which we have we could put in a percent sign too boom like this and we could also go in and we could change what this thinks a dollar sign or percent sign is so instead of a dollar sign here we could make that be like a um an asterisk or something and we could change the percent sign to be a like i don't know like an equal sign something like this and now we're changing what these actual digits mean something like this and if you want to go over a million then i recommend using and angle control instead so we just add on an angle control and then you can just go ahead and pick whip this to your angle control instead here and then you can spin this around much easier to go over a million ultimate number control sometimes you just got to really quickly mock stuff up in after effects and you don't feel like put down a bunch of keyframes okay so we're going to right click i mean alt click on the opacity boom paste it in and what this will do is it fades in and out this layer based on the in and out points like this okay so if we copy this expression and we paste it on all of these layers that will fade them all in and out and then if we do something like sequence these layers and give them you know 10 seconds of overlap or something 10 frames of overlap now we have this nice kind of fading sequence like a nice slideshow that we just made very easily and it's really flexible we can move stuff around and i forgot to paste this expression on everything but you get the idea come on all right nice slideshow of events very very handy so an expression i've been using a lot lately is a check box control and basically how it works is when we have this check box control checked then my layer is at 100 opacity and if it's unchecked then the layer is at zero percent opacity and it seems pretty simple but it can be very handy especially when you start stacking a bunch of other layers that are linked to this checkbox control so let's see how this could work in action aight all right so we got a null object with a hand and a cursor attached to it and they kind of just float in and hover over this checkbox so let's add some expressions on here so if i alt click onto the hand and i paste my expression on here and right off the bat we're going to get a error because we need to uh link this so what i'm going to do is i'm going to highlight this part here and i'm going to link it to my null object let me pin this up here so what we'll do is we will go ahead and grab this part and we'll pick whip this to our checkbox control onto here and just make sure that this is in parentheses like this cool and now you can see if we flip this on and off our hand will turn on and off now i'm going to copy this and paste it onto my cursor but what i want to do is i want to reverse these for either the hand or the cursor it doesn't really matter i guess either way it could matter if you're really particular about it but now we can turn this on and off and our things flip back and forth and we could add this also back on to our uh check mark opacity here like this so that it looks something like this so when this kind of comes in and animates we could keyframe this right here to have the checkbox turn on so now we have an animation that looks like that pretty great all right you can see how this could kind of come in handy in a lot of ways with some simple rigging like that all right so these have been my picks for five most mind-bending expressions in after effects don't forget you can visit the link in the description to copy the expressions grab them read a little more documentation about them i hope you enjoyed the video let me know what you think these expressions melt your mind thank you for watching and i will see you in the next one goodbye

Channel: Motion by Nick

Views: 7,831

Keywords: after effects, after effects tutorial, adobe after effects, motion graphics, adobe after effects tutorial, motion graphics tutorial, motion graphics after effects, motion design, expressions, after effects tutorial 2021, motion graphics logo animation after effects tutorial, after effects transitions, after effects logo animation, motion design after effects tutorial, motion design after effects, adobe after effects tutorial for beginners 2021, motion graphics techniques

Id: faheQUVMHWw

Length: 8min 55sec (535 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 29 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/Team_Rocket_Landed]

Love your stuff! You're actual work is fantastic and your tutorial vibe is the right level of chill

[u/motionick]

Expressions can be found here: https://www.motionbynick.com/freebies/expressions

[u/Heitorvilarm]

hey nick I did this video inspired on your tutorial!

Check it out!

https://www.reddit.com/r/AfterEffects/comments/oalzdk/loud/

​

big fan!