After Effects Tutorial: Animate Any Object or Text Along a Custom Path

[Music] hey what's going on internet josh noel from sun duck film in this tutorial i'm going to show you guys how you can quickly animate any object along a custom path so if i select my rocket here i created this custom path that this rocket will animate along and also be showing you guys how we can animate text along a path uh and have it bend towards the path and then just in general having the text animate along a very weird path so let's go ahead and get started so here's a new comp all i have in here is a rocket graphic and if i want to create my own custom animation what i can do is hit p on my keyboard and here's position but here's the thing it's like not exactly intuitive because i all i have is our two values here so what we're gonna do is make sure nothing is selected we're gonna go up to the pen tool right here at the top and we're gonna come here and click a point and then we're gonna click another point you know where we want the second keyframe to be at and basically we're creating a custom path right now and i'm holding down shift to drag out these vertices but right now i'm going to have the rocket animate along this path so before we go ahead and turn this into keyframes what we need to do is open up the shape layer tab here go into the contents go into the shape go into the path and we want to make sure the path is selected and we want to copy it and we'll go to our graphic here and remember hit p for position and we'll select the position parameter and we will paste those keyframes right into there and we don't need the shape layer anymore so we can just delete it and if we scrub through here we'll see that our rocket is animating along this path and what's great about this workflow is that if we need to adjust the timing of this we can just drag this last keyframe out and we can have this be set to four seconds instead of the two second preset so this animation is now four seconds long and is animating along this path so let's talk about animating text along a path let's grab the text title tool you know we'll type out our text and let's say we want to revolve this around say a circle let's go up here at the top hold down the rectangle tool and let's select the ellipse tool and we can come here click a point and hold down command and shift on a mac or ctrl and shift on a pc to draw out a perfect circle just like this and then let's take a look at our text and let's open that up let's go into the path options and set the path to mask 1. and that's automatically going to make the text work around your mask and you can go here to the first margin and you can kind of animate this if you want and then you can also reverse the path if you want outside of the mask just like that and then you continue to animate this and then you know add a keyframe for first margin and then we go forward in time and just you know do what we want and now we have this animation along a path and let's just say you want to have the text revolve around the path rather than kind of react to it we'll do exactly what we did for the rocket we'll just come here make sure nothing's selected and we'll just draw out our sort of crazy path like this and of course this probably isn't the realistic example but just showing you guys how this kind of works we'll go back into the shape layer go into the contents go in the shape one go in the path one copy the path and then we just delete the shape layer go ahead and hit p on your keyboard to bring up position for your text and we can just paste that right into there and you know that looks pretty good and the reason why you want to make sure you're using shape layer properties is that if we go ahead and maybe just delete this and we created our own mask within this layer we just did something crazy and then we went into mask one we went in the mask path and we copied it and then we pasted it into the position the only thing is is that the layer would automatically move in a totally different direction something something that you didn't design so the reason why you want to shape layers is so you can have that exact design that you created so just something to keep in mind but with these techniques you should be able to animate any object along your own custom path quite easily so hope you guys enjoyed this video if you did please drop a like and subscribe to the channel for more after effects tutorials just like this and please be sure to hit me up on my social media networks those links are in the description of this video and as always thank you guys so much for watching this video and i hope you have a good day [Music]

Channel: SonduckFilm

Views: 1,383,449

Keywords: Tutorial, After Effects Tutorial, After Effects Tutorial Custom Paths, After Effects Tutorial Animate and Object, After Effects Tutorial Animate Text, After Effects Tutorial Animate Text along a path, How to animate along a path, Animate any object in After Effects, Custom Path in After Effects, Pen Tool Path, SonduckFilm Tutorial, Path Animation, After Effects Animate a Path

Id: tQ5wqg10x_I

Length: 4min 8sec (248 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 10 2017