After Effects Project Breakdown: Workflow & Textures

hi I'm Ben Marriott, I make weekly motion design tutorials and this week I'm going to take a deep dive into that project the pineapple on a pizza let's begin so I started sketching this out on the iPad using procreate and the main sort of theme behind this animation is a confident pineapple surfing atop a slice of pizza flipping off everyone around as if to say I'm on a pizza deal with it I have no problem with pineapple being on a pizza I think it's fine I would order it myself or go out of my way to experience it but you know it's fine and all working files will be available for this down in the description half this animation was animated in Photoshop which is all the sort of hand-drawn line elements of that and then all the positing and coloring we did in After Effects so first let's go through the Photoshop file you can see I've got this toolbar down at the bottom which is a free plugin for photoshop called Anim Dessin2 I'll leave a link to that down in the description and basically that just helps you draw frame by frame in Photoshop I go to my frame by frame process in a little more detail in my video animating the art of Furry Little Peach but essentially this Anim Dessin2 plug-in makes just animating Photoshop a whole lot easier that's intuitive shortcut toolbar here which is just really handy each one of these boxes represents a frame of animation and just creates a new layer in your layer panel over here this will the final output of Photoshop look like but let's go through hide all of these and go through one by one so at the bottom we've got our reference layer here this is a still I exported at procreate so I put my colors that I can drop in just so I can reference all the shapes here on top of that we have this 3d reference layer as you play this back this is gonna look excellent and I made this in After Effects really quickly just use as a reference for the 3d shapes because I figured animating a lot of this without a reference it's gonna be very difficult especially this top sort of spinning spiky bit of the pineapple you know the leaf part to be honest if I was to try to attempt to do this and just frame by frame without a reference it would take me so long and I don't know whether I could ever get a realistic look on top of this pineapple so in After Effects I just you know whipped up some 3d shape layers and just sort of rotated them around a centre null to create this video which you know it's gonna be rough because it's not relevant at all to the animation we're gonna be animating completely over the top of this so doesn't need to look pretty at all the next thing I did was animate roughly over the top of that 3d reference layer I did this using rough animator on the iPad which at time of recording is probably the best animation app on the iPad the best that I found anyway the main purpose of this rough layer is to convert that 3d reference layer into something a little more tangible that I can clean up in Photoshop and actually you know create something nice out of I've also added a butt at this point as well of course the next layer here is pineapple top layers let's take the transparency of this reference layer down a touch so we can still see it a little so the pineapple top layer is just a cleaned up version of that rough just just with the outlines for now and then on top of that we've got that pineapple skin layer which is these diamond skin pattern for a pineapple and I've just drawn over every frame of this just repeated the drawings traced essentially what was underneath and I've animated this on tools so I believe this is a 25 frames per second and each image gets for two frames here and then we've got our butts layer coming in around the edges here and we've got our pineapple top shading on top of that and this is just me filling in all the shading of this top layer here and now we have a body outline and you'll notice if I play this it goes missing after four frames now I've done that because the body doesn't really move essentially it's a an ellipses which could stay pretty static throughout the entirety of the animation but I wanted to give it a boiling effect an animated boil is if you go and look closely this man in frame by frame animation each each sequential drawing isn't exactly the same as the previous one so you get this little boiling which is sort of the jittering effect if you notice if you look down here it pulses slightly because of the difference in each frame so even when it's a static elements I like to draw it three or four times just so I can switch between those and it sort of gives a bit of life and movement even if the actual object isn't itself moving now I've only drawn four here because I'm going to loop that inside After Effects I'll continue throughout the entire composition once we get into compositing now I've got a layer for the glasses which is a fill layer this is the colored version of the glasses outline layer which I probably would have drawn first so I would have drawn the outline first duplicated that and then just filled it in with the brush tool and we've got our mouth which just says line it spins around armed which are referencing this 3d layer here as well the hands and I separate the hands and the arms which could be on the same layer just to make it easier I find it easier to go through animating just one object just drawing the lines so I can concentrate just on that shape between each frame so I'm just drawing a line here a line on this frame a line in this frame rather than worrying about during a line and a hand and another line and a hand focusing on one thing at one time I find is really helpful when doing cel animation and here we've got a wave foam now the way foam is also just four layers I wanted this to loop so if I drag out working area down here and you can see I just sort of move these wavy elements a little bit between each frame so it kind of repeats then we have our wave on top of that which is pretty much just a repeating boil of this main shape and then I've copied the the position of this wave foam with a shadow here as well on top of that we've got our wave line long which is just this sort of shape that's going to indicate the movement of our wave and give the illusion that the water is sort of rushing upwards continuously throughout this wave and also got wave line short which is just a shorter version of that because I wasn't sure exactly how this is going to look once composited all in after-effects and I thought I'd do two variations of this so I have more options to see which one would work better or maybe both of them would work together and on top of that we have a pizza layer which is again four frames of me outlining this pizza from our still of reference layer here on top of that we've got a layer called extra speckles now if we play this now you can see that this is just sort of some random sort of shapes and sketchy lines that I've added throughout a sort of wave sort of area here this is really influenced by a video artist called ruff mercy I loved all of his video artwork he does a lot of sort of hiphop music videos and does a lot of crazy stuff the textures and has a lot of this hand-drawn frame-by-frame little little elements that I think really add heaps of personality and I thought I'll try a little bit of that in my animation and see see how that works I've also got a set the layer for the speckles on the crust and for speckles on the pineapple and I separated these onto three separate layers because I know the wave at the crust and the pineapple are going to be three different colors and blue orange and yellow so with these on three simple layers I can change the color of each of them depending on what effect I wanted and at this stage I didn't really know first of all what color I would want these or whether I would use them at all so I choose to separate them just to give myself options in after effects because if I did them all on one layer I could get around that by masking and separating them in there but I think it's always best in any animated project to give yourself as much leeway as you can down the line so I had all my frame by frame animation done at this point to get this ready to import into After Effects the main thing we need to do is just delete these reference layers here especially the videos after effects can struggle importing Photoshop files that have embedded within the movie files and you get a kind of ambiguous error message and the first time I encountered this I was very scared and thought all my hours of frame by frame animation was all in vain because I couldn't import it and it took me a while to troubleshoot and figure out that it was the video layers causing the problem so let's delete our video layers save it and get ready to import it in after-effects here we are in After Effects and let's import that file by pressing ctrl or command I selecting it here and we want to import it as composition retain layer sizes if we imported it as footage it will simply import it just like an image without any layers and let's click OK and the comp in imports will look like this where all of our layer groups will import as individual compositions from Photoshop and it'll even import guides from Photoshop I had this guide here so I could reference my arms and keep my arms straight as I drew them frame by frame and also noticed that some of our elements were much shorter like they were at Photoshop because we only had four frames to create that boiling effect the first stage to process here is to loop all of those compositions so they will continue for the full duration so let's go into our pizza composition and see what we're working with we've got these four frames here that simply end one way to loop them is to duplicate them with ctrl or command D bring those up to the top of the layer stack with ctrl shift right square bracket and drag them over so they're in a sequence and you can simply select them all again repeat that process and do that until you fill out the composition this method will only take a few seconds for each composition so this might be the best way to do this but if you'd like to keep your conversation a little tidier you can simply reduce your con work area by dragging this panel down here right clicking trim comp to work area and then you have just those four frames within this comp we navigate back out by pressing tab and selecting our main panel composition you can loop this composition from here by right clicking select time enable time remapping creating a keyframe the frame before the last deleting the last keyframe option alt clicking the stopwatch clicking the arrow select the property loop out and that will loop those four frames forever or the end of the composition so I would go and do that for all of our layers here and then we're gonna add some shape layers to fill in the colors but that's going to be a bit tedious to go through that whole process so I think it's best if we jump forward to the final state of the animation and I go through and break down each element one by one so this is our main pineapple composition after we've finished all our animations and I want to start from the bottom and explain what each element is doing I'm gonna highlight each layer by just clicking on its solo property down here to make that the only visible layer at the moment we've got this background which is you know just a pink solid they've got here and then we've got our wave composition on top of that which is just our wave elements so let's go into our composition and see what's happening in there all right so the bottom here we've got a shape layer which I just created a solid which takes up the full frame and then I've just created this mask which will follow the outline of our wave layer here you could use a shape way for this sometimes I prefer to use a solid that has a mask on it because I find you know animating a mask might give you a little more options and freedom really there's not much of a difference use a shape layer if you'd like and now on top of that we've got our foam layer which is our layer direct from Photoshop repeating a few times and then on top of that we've got our wave main layer here which is that outline from Photoshop and you'll notice that it doesn't go all the way to the edges because I didn't make it large enough and my hack solution to extend the lines here was to duplicate this layer and just mask off a straight section of that line and just nudge it over until it fills out the rest of the composition and I did that for both sides of the wave and on top of that we've got our wave line long which is these little lines here to indicate the movement of the water and I've just duplicated that a lot of times and offset them in time and I think I've even rotated some of these ones on the edge here so when I played them back it looks like the water is sort of rushing up from the flat state into the into the foam here and they just gives an added illusion that the water is moving and rushing up in this direction here now we have two layers of those extra speckles which these little gritty elements here that you'll see just bouncing around and I separated these into two parts so one which is purple for the bottom of the wave and then one which is blue for the which covers the foam of the wave as well there we are on top of that we have our Pizza shadow which is going to be a duplicate of our pizza layer and that is just parented to our pizza so it bopps up and down and creates the shadow for the pizza so you've got a pizza layer up here and then we have three layers of fills we have that crust our cheese and our meats and we've got a slight animation on a pizza layer with it's just position moving up and down as if sort of bopping as if it was surfing legitimately on top of that we have another layer of crossed speckles which you can see a yellow and just a little bit that sort of in a dancey grit around the crust there and let's unsolid these so we can see the rest of the animation now we've got some shadow layers we've got our arm the shadow layer here which is also drawn frame by frame in Photoshop that's the shadow of the arms rotating and we've got our pineapple shadow layer here as well which is just some repeating frames from Photoshop as well we've got a fill layer for our body color which just fills in this ellipse shape of that pineapple and I've got an extra shape layer here for the pineapples butt which I've animated on each frame that it's kind of visible on the extreme width and when it's sideways on the left and on the right as well and then I've got a color body shadow layer which have done the same process for and then I've got a few frames at that animated for when the shadow has to change to accommodate before the but but the pineapple skin I kind of struggled with getting the look I wanted for this and I'm still not completely happy to be honest even though it's not exactly accurate I worry that it kind of gives the look that it's kind of cell shaded and a little too perfect in 3d even though it's not perfect by any means maybe it just looks too clean I'm not always a huge fan of like cel shaded 3d elements to look like 2d and and I worried that my actual 2d animation looks like it was made in 3d and I think this was because I referenced the 3d layer a little bit too closely but let me know what you think do you think this sort of diagonal sort of skin pattern works as it rotating or whether it looks you know a little too off compared to the rest of the style at the animation and to get this effect where I've got sort of Criss crossing of the orange over the black how I achieve that is I have two layers of the pineapple skin one which is the black diagonal here if I solo that and then I've duplicated that on top and then just create an orange fill version of that layer and then just moved it down a tiny bit so it's over the top of the black layers hiding sort of this intersection area so we end up with it you know just a little bit less of black filling up this main fill of the object then we've got more about outlines and speckles for the pineapple a separate layer for the butt for the butt outlines half filled for the top of our pineapple and then we've got our glasses which is the next more interesting thing so I've got a glasses fill layer at the bottom and then above that we have a shine layer which I've got a rectangle here which is a very long rectangle shape that you can see here and I've applied the wave warp effect just to give it this wobbly edge so you can see if I take that off it's just a straight rectangle and its position is moving just from the right of screen to the left and I've tried to match that so they all still stays it's kind of almost centered with that pineapple as if the light is catching it as the glasses rotate and I'm using a matte of the glasses fill for each of these I used an alpha matte here because I animated this before I really understood how to use the set matte effect properly but the set matte effect would do fine visit instance and then at the top we've got our mouth our arms and our hand animations just sitting in here from Photoshop and we've got our pineapple bobbing up and down as well so I've parented all of our pineapple elements to this body outline layer and that is just bobbing up and down slightly with the position property and that is also parented to the pizza which is also bobbing up and down slightly with a position property as well and that's really all the keyframe animation that I've got going on here and at the top I've got this still image as a reference layer mainly so I can eye drop colors for all of their shape layers for all the fills now let's go up one more layer to a pineapple top layer where we've got all our effects so at the very top I've got these light textures I've got one on screen and one on multiply one creating the light textures here and one creating sort of these darker little patches here as well I go through exactly how to make these in my looping textures tutorial but if you click on the movie file here we can see it's four frames of this gritty textured paper that I've just got looping and set that to a screen and multiply blending mode on top of that I've got my usual effects I've got a turbulent displace with the size set down to two so if we zoom in and to the off and on it just gives a slight extra greediness and roughness to the outline of each layers and we've got a postrize time layer where I set the frame rate to 12.5 frames this is so all the movement of the up-and-down motion of pineapple and our Pizza matches the frame-by-frame animation which was all on tools and I'm using twelve point five because twenty fives is a standard in Australia you can use 12 whatever frame rate you need those are my basic effects that I use on pretty much 80% of the animations that I make but the one new effect I kind of tried ahead to this animation was this sort of miss registered print effect that I've got on the outlines here so I wanted to look like printing a newspaper where the plate for the black line art was misaligned with the fill layers here so show you how I did that I'm gonna delete all of these layers here drop our pineapple main layer back in and let's hide all of these textures as well so we can just concentrate on this comp so this main come here I'm going to duplicate it and call it pineapple main matte and I'm gonna call it purple to keep all my matte purple and on this matte layer I'm gonna add the effect hue and saturation and also the curves effect and the first thing I'm gonna do is take the saturation all the way down and in our curves effect I'm going to move this line here to really up the contrast so all were left with is a black and white version of our comp and I'm going to use this as a luma matte to separate the black line art from the colored sections of this comp underneath so with this pineapple main layer I'm gonna select the track matte luma matte and that it's going to remove all of the black values from this matte over here I leave us only with the filled colors here and we've still got these sort of dark out line shapes on the edges here a little bit left is fine because we're going for a bit of a gritty grimy look anyway so a few little these artifacts hopefully won't show up too obvious once we add all the textures and the other effects on anyway let's get the black outlines we're gonna select both of these duplicate them with command D so we have a duplicate of them on top and we're gonna change this luma matte here to luma inverted matte which is going to create a separate layer for our black outlines so now we've got two comps for our pineapple main one over here for the outline and one over here for the fills so to create the Misregistered look I'm gonna parent our matte of our fill layer to our fill layer here and if I just nudge this whit our arrow tools and add our position you can see it starts to miss register here now I want to animate the position of this miss register effect here so I'm gonna press P to open up my position add a keyframe here and two frames in I'm going to shift again with my arrow tools and just move the field to a slightly another place in the composition I don't want to go too far because otherwise it just looks real wacky it actually could make a cool interesting effect but for the moment we just want it to be subtly misaligned and every two frames I'm just gonna move move the fill layer around I once added a few keyframes here I'm gonna select them all copy them and just paste them to fill out the rest of this composition now if we play back we can see that we get that sort of Miss registered look and it's a little bit different on each frame and now we are all our effects back in you can see the final result you still do get this dark edge around the fill layer but in this case it's barely noticeable and I think is nothing to worry about in this case and now we have the pineapple on a pizza animation completely done you can collect all the working files for this down in the description so you can go in and dissect the layers and have a closer inspection if you use anything you've learned in this tutorial please tag me on instagram at ben_marriott_ I can't wait to see what you make please let me know down in the comments if you'd like to see another deep dive into a project file like this or whether you want some more straight up tutorials and effects I'd love to know so please don't forget to subscribe hit that Bell icon share and like I'll see you next week

Channel: Ben Marriott

Views: 77,667

Keywords: after effects workflow, after effects workflow tips, after effects tutorial, benmarriott, pineapple on a pizza, after effects project breakdown, animation workflow, motion design project, after effects process, animation process after effects, animation in photoshop tutorial, photoshop after effects tutorial, photoshop after effects animation, animdessin 2, animdessin2, after effects tutorial project, after effects texture tutorial, after effects texture animation

Id: qWiWgwqvXyE

Length: 20min 50sec (1250 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 05 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/Q-ArtsMedia]

Sure. Why not. A lot of folks do not know any frame by frame or the process of getting from photoshop to AE or any other app.

[u/Robot_House]

Instead of a straight up effect tutorial, I thought a really close look at a project file and what's going on under the hood would be interesting to explore. Is this useful, or irrelevant?

[u/Luma_Bakery]

Cool tute. Thank you. I'm 100% new to frame-by-frame so this was an interesting intro.

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What software would you recommend using to create the rough animation if you were using a desktop and not an iPad? I know you rate Rough Animator, but do you ever do that stage not on an iPad?

Also, I've just subscribed to your channel and I'm so impressed with your output and the quality of your work.

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I noticed in your cover art you've promised a tutorial every Thursday. As a fellow YouTube creator and someone trying to run my channel alongside paid freelance work, can I ask -- how is that commitment going? I envy your work ethic because you must have to be seriously hustling to get out tutorials of this length and depth every week. It seems to take me ages. Do you think it's sustainable? Any advice?