Advanced Shape Layer Techniques in After Effects - with Alex Deaton

are you tired of cluttering up your workspace with alpha mats and messy precomps the break as soon as you infinitely rasterize them or make them 3d fret no more hi my name is alex deaton and i've been a motion designer for almost 10 years along the way i've picked up some after effects workarounds that save me from daily adobe induced frustration migraines one of these techniques is a shape layer workflow i utilize in almost every project to avoid layer clutter and overcomplicated matting and pre-comping issues in this tutorial i'll show you how to build single layer shape pre-comps utilizing groups merge paths and simple path expressions so you can kiss those redundant matte layers goodbye forever to make things easier you can download the project files i'm using in this video to follow along or to practice this technique after you're done watching details are in the description [Music] alpha mats and precomps can be useful tools for combining several visual elements in a complicated design but they make your timeline messy and introduce frustrating glitches and comp failures when infinitely rasterizing precomps or making layers 3d let's work around this by taking advantage of after effects shape layer tools we're going to start with a pair of eyes because this is a really really simple way to use this trick i use it all the time and it'll get you sort of uh oriented with the methods here so that you know what you're doing before you move into something a little more complicated like that vase so let's jump into an empty empty comp here so the first thing we're going to do is just go up here and grab an ellipse and real quick we're going to twirl that down and change the size to 500 by 500 seems about right get rid of this stroke i'm going to duplicate it and then i'm just going to name this bottom layer here i i'm going to go ahead and call it i'm main so i know that that's that's my main eye layer then up here i'm going to name this pupil cool so first i'm going to take this eye layer and change the color to white and i'm going to go to this pupil layer and i'm going to shrink it to let's say 300 by 300 great so now we have our eye and our pupil so first what i'll i want to do since i'm going to make this eye blink and i don't want to just uh you know use the dimensions here because that would look a little awkward i wanted to to have like a more realistic looking blink i'm going to change the path here to a bezier path so all you have to do is right click on the ellipse path and click convert to bezier path and that way i can animate the handles of the actual uh ellipse itself like like so so then once i have that finished i'm going to duplicate the eye main layer rename it i mask and then simply pick whip the path of the mask to the the main layer there like so and then i'm going to take this drag it up here highlight both the eye mask and the pupil and click command g to group those two together i'm going to rename this whole group pupil so now that we've got our pupil inside of this group here with our eye mask all we need to do is make it so that the pupil itself can mask through the eye this is where all the magic happens so you just need to select your pupil group go up to the add drop down over here and select merge paths when you do that it's going to drop the merge paths along with a stroke and a fill inside of your group go ahead and get rid of that stroke we don't need it and just make sure that the fill color is the same as your pupil i just do a quick command c command v on that to to copy it over once we have that finished you want to twirl down the merge paths drop down and go select intersect and voila you have a masked layer now you can move your pupil all about you can see it'll stay inside of the eye mask and this will be true even if you go in here and you animate the eye shape like so so the next thing we want to do is get the eye moving we're just going to animate a little blink very simple just click your path layer here to get that going and you're going to want to let's just step forward two frames let's say i'm gonna grab this i'm just gonna fold it down into the bottom layer here and then uh get out my pin tool and do the same with these two bezier handles over here and then sort of maybe bring it up a bit so it's not so so much lower than the actual eye there you go okay so we got a little blink going um then maybe we copy that easy ease our eye here jump in just sort of max out that easy ease and okay we have a blank looks like it's going a little fast though so we're going to add another keyframe in there just to get it to hold for a second all right but as you can see when it closes it's got this weird little sliver here there's a quick fix to that i just want to show you real quick something i do all the time i'll add a stroke to the eye layer let's make it the same color as the pupil which is like a sort of a dark blue oops great and then just i animate the thickness of the stroke width when it blinks so that we have a nice eye line that appears on the blank so we don't have some sort of like disappearing eye thing happening there it's a nice little trick so go ahead and i'll add a uh hold keyframe on that for the blink take it off when it opens once more take it off when it opens and then we gotta blink boom boom all right now that we've got our blink looking good it's time to uh i think move the people around a little bit yeah let's uh let's do that so let's jump in here i'm going to rename this layer i first let's jump in here and go to our people and select the position of the pupil layer and then i'm just going to set these all on hold keyframes this is something i learned from animates uh animate learns series way back in the day uh the one they did on eyes pretty much taught me how to animate eyes they they dart around they don't they don't sort of like you know move around like that they kind of so i pretty much always animate eyes on hold keyframes like this unless i'm doing something really specific that way it just looks a little more realistic it looks pretty good and it's really easy too because you just go to the place you want to move the eye select it move it hold keyframe just pretty much puts it right where it needs to be so we do that we got a little blinky eye you can see you could take that wherever you want you can put it way over the edge there he's looking way off to the side i think i'm going to move that back in just a bit right about there yeah looking pretty good now we've got a blinking eye with an occluded pupil and it's on one layer with only uh three keyframed properties which is pretty nifty um so what why why am i making a cyclops we need two eyes right most most creatures have two eyes well let's not duplicate this layer and drag it over then then you have a whole nother set of keyframes to work with a whole nother layer how about we just go ahead and add a repeater to the bottom of our eye look at that change the number of the copies to two and just sort of move that thing out 600 or so and then you know get these eyes moving right back into the center here all right that's looking about right cool voila go ahead and smack those suckers on a ghost or something now that we've got the basics down for how this process works let's go ahead and kick it up a notch we're going to be recreating this inner shape i made for this little vase animation here and it's gonna i'm gonna show you how all of this can be done on a single layer inside of the main shape layer here i'm gonna walk you through that step by step all right so what you need to do is just go and jump into the vase tutorial composition here and that you will see has a vase right here and then just in case you need to peek at it it's got the completed vase inside of the same composition but i've got it turned off but we're just going to start with the uh the plain vase that doesn't have the shapes inside of it and go from there all right so navigate to the vase layer and just twirl open the contents and you'll see we've got our vase main and this is this has got a bunch of hold keyframes on it for that squishy animation i've got happening i want you to just go ahead and duplicate this layer rename it to vase mask twirl that open to the path and you can actually get rid of the gradient fill as well we won't need that we just need the path so go ahead and grab the path and pick whip it to the path of the vase main all right now that we've got our mask let's draw on a new shape all we need here is a long skinny rectangle so let's just go ahead and plop in four corners there i'm gonna make it extra long so we have space to move it left and right if we need to and once you have that built out just rename the shape to design and let's go ahead and group that together with the vase mask and rename the group design now inside of there just like the eye we're going to do the same thing head on over to the add drop down select merge paths delete the stroke this added a gradient fill i don't want that i just want a regular fill so let's go ahead and do that boop twirl down merge paths and change the function to intersect and then go ahead and jump inside the fill color here and just change that to the dark green at the bottom of the vase that's the uh starting color i'm using cool so now that we have our magic mask set up let's add a few extra ae shape layer tools so we can take this to the next level twirl down the add drop down and select zigzag boom you get rid of the stroke and the gradient there we don't need them so you can see we've got our zigzag kind of showing up on the shape there we're going to twirl that down as well and change some of these properties first of all we're going to make the points smooth instead of hard corners and secondly we're going to change the ridges per segment to 15 or whatever looks good to dial in the size of the ridges and then you'll notice with the rectangular shape the zigzag makes a wavy line on even numbers like so so where the bottom and the top are are aligned with each other and a sort of bumpy in and out shape when it's on odd numbers so we're going to keep it on odd numbers we're going to do lucky number 13. all right so step one here is to animate our path in the position of our design shape so that it moves up to the top when the vase changes to this new color alright so first just set keyframes on the path and the position and next you want to go up to where the vase is at its top right about there move the shape up and grab our path and we're just going to make it thinner like so another thing we want to do is inside of our zigzag here just animate the size of the ridges down that way they will disappear when the line animates at the top and we'll be left with just a flat stripe so let's get that to the top put some easy ease on that [Music] and then let's go ahead and jump inside of our fill color here for the main shape and we're just going to change that to uh this blue that is the color of the first background oops need to do that on a separate there we go separate keyframe push that over there easy ease all right now we've got our blue we've got our line animating to the top that looks great but we need to add a whole bunch of stripes to it and right now we don't have any of those right so how do we get those extra stripes well we're going to need to add another tool over here in the shape layer so go ahead and select your design shape inside of your design group go to the add drop down twirl that down select repeater okay so you'll notice that when i added a repeater to the design shape inside of the design group that is masking through the vase there it disappeared so this is key if you're going to add multiple shapes inside of let's say you wanted to nest multiple shapes inside of the the same vase mask layer here or if you want to do something like add a repeater like we just did you have to add emerge paths inside of the design layer go ahead and kill that put it at the bottom yeah and just leave that on add so what that will do is it'll essentially take all of your repeater shapes that you're just adding here and essentially merge them all into one layer so that the that after effects can read that shape as a single layer so it'll function appropriately with the merge paths in the outer group here hopefully that made sense [Laughter] so here we're going to go ahead and we're going to crank up our copies to you know something like 30. twirl down the repeater and change our position to 64 on the y-axis let's go ahead and put a keyframe on the position there go back to the beginning and you can see that all the copies here have kind of blotted out the bottom of the vase we don't want that so we're going to animate them away from the bottom of the base you know about 245 looks like it's doing the trick go ahead and easy ease those let's go to our top here and make this visible so as you can see the vase sort of animates up and then the stripes just sort of top stop there i don't really like that i want them to keep going a little bit so i'm going to add another keyframe out here and then sort of back these stripes down a touch just so we have like a little extra ease on the the back end of this animation so the stripes sort of have a an overhang where they're still settling into place once the vase has done its transform so i'm just going to really push it so that it goes up into the stratosphere there and then sort of has this real soft ease when it lands all right excellent we've got our transition going so we just need uh to do one last thing let's animate those properties returning to their original positions during the second base transform so i'm going to go ahead here and i'm going to duplicate my position keyframe so with an easys duplicate my repeater duplicate both my path and my size and then right back down to where we started just sort of copy all those keyframes over and work backwards we're going to need to copy our color keyframes as well so that it transforms back into the the green we can fiddle with these keyframes to get the animation just right last thing is i'm going to add a position keyframe on the the little waves so that they have a slight move to the left here at the end that way it kind of looks like it's settling after a spin when the vase lands if you wanted to get crazy too you could also jump inside of your your main design shape up here let me go up in here inside of the group comp you don't have to use a fill you can use a stroke although i don't think that would be as useful at least in this case as you can see it sort of a little weird but you can do it if you were so inclined let's see what that looks like oh kind of weird kind of cool yeah uh i don't use this one as much as i do just a a plain fill but it's there for the using if you wanted to use it and you could also if you so please use a gradient fill which i actually do use quite a bit and that'll allow you just to bring some extra dimension to the the intersecting shape if you want and what's excellent is that let's say i have a gradient filled just like i do here just a plain black and white one you can also do blending modes from the group layer here on top of your main layer so let's just put on a multiply boom suddenly you've got this whole simple shade thing happening with the shape there that wasn't happening before so there's all sorts of options all sorts of ways to play around with with shape layers and and merge paths and and different sort of blending modes and effects and stuff like that all inside of shape layers in after effects [Music] now there are a few drawbacks to this approach that should be mentioned i'm going to jump inside of a new comp here just to show you what i'm talking about we'll go ahead and call this comp drawbacks perfect so one of the drawbacks to to this approach is that you can't use strokes so let's see if i wanted to go ahead and draw a little wavy stroke onto this shape like so and add emerge paths if you get rid of that fill you'll see even if you change the mode to intersect it closes the loop so essentially after effects is reading the stroke and its intersection with the shape it's being masked through as a single shape so you can't just mask you can't you know the same way you would if you were to just have a stroke duplicate the circle layer and then just alpha matte the stroke through the circle layer you can't do do that with this method which is a real shame i mean it still has it's kind of a cool effect and i can imagine there'd be ways to use it but you know oftentimes you just want to be able to mask a stroke through the shape and you just don't have the freedom to do that with this method there is a work around and that is to essentially design a closed shape with a fill and the shape of the stroke that you want and so then you just go ahead here swap out a stroke for fill change that to an opaque color and you know do your best if you wanted it to be a a mono width line do your best to replicate the look of a stroke and then you know play with it as if it's a stroke it's not perfect but that is something that i've done before to to replicate the look of the stroke if i still wanted to use this method otherwise i would just duplicate the layer and alpha mat it through and then you you know just like a typical alpha matte you you have all the uh advantages there the problem is of course you just added two more layers to your comp i don't like that so i like to avoid it as much as i can but you know it's not perfect sometimes you have to do what you have to do another drawback to this approach is that you can't add effects to the shape that you have being masked through because of course it will apply those effects to the mask layer since they're all on a single shape layer so for instance let's say you wanted to add a blur go ahead and add a gaussian blur that out oh no all i wanted to do was blur my intersecting shape this is blurred my entire shape so that's that's a real bummer and same story as before if you if you wanted to apply a blur to your your intersecting shape layer you would just have to do that on a separate layer being masked through you know just alpha matted through a copy of the original shape so not ideal uh you know it does get a little annoying if you want to add any effect to your intersecting shape at all you you have to go ahead and avoid this method but it is what it is so that about does it i hope you learned a few things and feel more confident using these tools in the future if you're ready to continue your education check out advanced motion methods from school of motion you'll learn how to structure animations according to geometric proportions found in nature deal with complexity create cool transitions and learn tips from a seasoned after effects veteran if you liked this video please subscribe to the channel and hit the bell icon so you'll be notified when we drop the next tutorial we'll see you next time [Music] you

Channel: School of Motion

Views: 77,061

Rating: 4.9858322 out of 5

Keywords: Motion Design, Motion Graphics, After Effects, Tutorial, Tips, Tricks, Technique, Learn, Basics, Design, MoGraph

Id: heYi6xLWvB0

Length: 22min 40sec (1360 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 11 2020