After Effects Tutorial - Gradient Stroke Lines (Motion Design Techniques)

yes we've made it it's 20/20 thank you everyone who has been recently subscribing to the channel it's super exciting and I'm looking forward to what 20/20 may bring for the media workbench channel but for now let's create something really cool let's create this super hypnotic gradient add stroke lines without too much key framing in fact there's only two properties that we need to keyframe in order to make this animation happen so let's jump right on into it learning this new motion design technique [Music] so we're here in a brand-new After Effects project and we're going to create a new composition it's going to be 1920 by 1080 25 frames per second and we'll go for say 30 seconds so I've created it here and firstly I want to type my text for the big 20 20 can you believe it so I have picked the montserrat fonts here and it's the extra bold you can get this from the font Google specimen montserrat download it from there now here we're going to select our layer right click and select create shapes from text we'll get a Boop that it's going to hide our text layer and create a new shape layer called 2020 outlines you can see here it's filled it but what we want to do is just have a stroke so we're going to click on the fill options at the top here we're going to then I click this one here which says none then we'll click on these stroke we're going to make a solid we're gonna make it white for now and we'll make it a thickness like four like so and we can hide these safe titles you can see there it is there now selecting our layer it down the bottom we're gonna click the little arrow it's going to show us content and transform we want contents and we want to click over on the add where this little arrow is and select trim paths trim palms applies to everything above it and so we're going to find ourselves some space here go to the 1 second mark we're going to set a keyframe for both of the 0 and the 100 at 1 second drag it forward to 3 seconds and we're going to set another keyframe now at the start we want both keyframes to be at 0% both the start and the end and at the end we want both to be at a hundred now we're going to select all of that and hit f9 we're going to now apply some easy if you're unfamiliar with what easing exactly is you can check out my tutorial on all things to do with easing here otherwise we're going to jump into our graph editor and we're just going to manipulate this graph so I'm dragging over the at the bottom you'll see gives us these little yellow handles and these are what I'm going to be manipulating so I'm gonna click on it hold shift just to drag it forward like so and then same with the end and because it's one second start one second at the end and a second either in between you can see a two second mark actually lines up with the very middle of our animation and so we know that when we've got a nice peak here we've lined up our easing to be nice and smooth across our animation now we're going to select our start keyframes and drag them forward a little bit so now if we preview that this is what we've got so far which is super cool already you can see it draws out our 2020 text like so now we're going to select our layer and we're going to go to our effects go down to time and select CC force motion blur dragging that onto our shape layer you can see it applies like so and this is where we get these really cool gradient hood strokes there's a lot of different ways to do gradient strokes and I found that this one's probably the simplest because it only requires one effect to get the really cool look you're not trying to keyframe a whole heap of stuff in fact the only keyframes you have is for the actual motion itself so super handy what we're gonna do is bump our motion blur samples up to 40 and then we're gonna up our shutter angle a whole lot let's go to 3500 like so and you can see it really brought out that like so if you find on your animation you're starting to get a little bit of this sort of bumpy gradients that's because your sample size is too low you can bump it up a little bit more and that'll smooth all that out so here we go this is now looking very nice if we preview that again you can see now it's got this nice gradient as it fades into that movement and nice gradient at the end but if you remember in our animation we showed up a start our very first line that comes in doesn't fade in in fact it just starts like a solid line and then fades out so in order to do that affair we're going to have to take our layer here and hit ctrl D to duplicate where they're now selecting that layer we're going to turn off the effect and then in the track map for V layer underneath it we're going to select alpha matte and you'll see there it's really cut it down the animation and you can see it starts with this solid edge and then goes forward with this really cool sort of faded out sort of look so if you were wanting to do like motion lines and stuff in your sort of animations this is the way to do it you just draw out lines as a shape layer do this effect with a force motion blur and then apply this alpha matte on it but for us we're not stopping here we're going to then add some extra colors in there so we're going to take the layer and duplicate it again we'll turn this one on turn the force motion blur on so we get it back and then we're going to go to the stroke color and select a different color let's go for this sort of canary yellow now we'll drag this layer forward and that's where we start to actually reveal our original animation and you can see it fades into our other animation like so so we can drag it forward a metal kind of influence how long between one and the other like so you can see it's now added in a bit more and we could even duplicate this again drag it forward and let's do a different color again let's do a pinky color like so so now if we go forward we just preview that we're going to really see the combination of those different colors as it transitions between those different layers that it's been revealing so you can see we've got this white we then have this yellow this pink starts coming in and it's going to look super cool you see it fades out like so now what if I wanted to make this start sort of really cool and glowing you'll remember that so what I'll do is I'm going to go back to our bottom layer our shape layer for the white color and duplicate that again turn off the alpha track map because it's going to start trying to interact with other ones and I'm going to drag it all the way to the top now for this point we're just going to work on just this layer don't want to see everything else so I'm gonna select this little circle here and that's just going to preview Vallejo we're working on now if I select down here to contents to trim pods you'll see I'm going to our controls for our trim paths keyframes I'm just gonna select these start ones and drag it forward quite a bit like so so they're really close to each other then I'm going to go up to the force motion blur and set the shutter angle to something more like 200 so now we've got little itty bitty lips now in our effects let's go to blur and we're going to select the fast blur apply it to that layer and drag it out a little bit and that's just going to make it have some little blooms like so and then to our blending mode here I'm going to select add now if I unproven see now I'm getting these really cool sort of lights right at the tips of my little lines that are animating in but they're not too bright so I'm going to go over and select curves and we're just going to brighten them up a bit by selecting instead of a a red green or blue Channel selecting the Alpha Channel like so and just dragging that line up like so you can see it starts really popping and if I drag it like so well and get a nice s-curve it's going to make it a lot more contrast see just super cool maybe it's a bit much and we can also play with how blur we blow it out a little bit too much it's good for like a 15 so you can see there it's a little bit of blur and if we want this blur to be longer all we need to do is go back to our trim pads and make that animation a little bit longer like so so now if we go back and we just get a preview how that looks you'll see we start off with not just the white but those little bulgy bright lights as the animation comes in and it's going to follow that line around as they Zen happen like so and reveal everything else and we don't need to even just stop here we can even duplicate this pink one more time and maybe we'll add in a blue right at the end just to kind of cap everything off so we'll go change this stroke to like a Louie color hit okay and then again we can duplicate this turn the effect off and also turn the alphabet on for the one underneath and that's going to let the hard line be at the start and then after that fade out so if we wait and preview all of that you can see what the effect is of everything all together which is this super cool multicolored stroked line thing you can see we haven't had to do much key framing it's only taken one effect to do so it's super easy to do and we can do this with any sort of shape layer we can do it with basic geometric shapes like circles or squares or lines just to add emphasis we can even do it with more elaborate things like icons or stuff in your infographic information or typography just like this so you could see there's a number of different applications for it and we have a number of different ways we can do it with both the blurring in and fading in from a start and end or having that hard straight line at the start so you can see there's the effect right there throwing it all together and look it hasn't taken much time at all to throw together so there we have our gradient stroked lines in After Effects if you have any additional questions comments other thoughts of how you can apply this go ahead and leave them in the comment section down below until next time my name is bench thanks for watching [Music] you

Channel: MediaWorkbench

Views: 12,627

Keywords: adobe, after effects, photoshop, tutorial, media, workbench, media workbench, bench, michael, gradient, stroke, line, multicolor, multicolour, fluro, outline

Id: Y8pungTpYJc

Length: 11min 28sec (688 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 29 2020