After Effects Tutorial: Light Stroke | No Plugins

[Music] hey what's going on Internet Josh no well from sundeck film this is our 1st 2018 After Effects tutorial and more of a recreation of an old tutorial that I made over a year ago and basically the tutorial was a light stroke animation which will be creating here but I was using plugins in that tutorial and in this tutorial I wanted to do it without any plugins so you can create it without having to purchase any other third-party plugins so let's go ahead and show you how to do it's a really cool effect and its really awesome I like it a lot so it's going to do it and first things first when you have your text in here you have it typed out you know what you want this is the style that you want to go with well if your text layer right click it and click on create mask from text alright and then you're gonna get a solid hero and if you hit em on your keyboard you'll bring up all the mask layers here and you see that each letter is a mask so from here make sure that the masked layer is selected to go to effect generate stroke and from here go to paint style and set this to on transparent so now you should be able to see through the text actually only one letter should be stroked out so go ahead and click on all masks here at the top and now we turn off the mask icon which is right here the toggle mask and shape visibility go ahead and take that off and boom you have your text which is now a stroke and from here let's go to the beginning of our timeline let's add a keyframe for start and set this up to 100% and you can kind of see how each letter is going to animate on individually here so click on the stroke sequentially button here and you'll each letter will come on individually like that so that's pretty cool so just 100% go over by maybe three seconds set it to 0% and now you should have a nice stroke animation just like this and that was looking good so now we want to do the obviously the light leak or whatever you want to call it the lens flare and what we want to do is we're gonna go to layer new solid and we call us one flare one go up to effect generates and click on lens flare alright so from here I'm gonna use a hundred and five millimeter prime just because I'd like the style of it and what we want to do is we decrease the flare brightness by a touch here nothing really spectacular but we're going to modify this a little bit later so what we want to do is toggle switch to the modes until you see the blending modes here and set this to screen or you can set it to add or light in whatever your preference is and obviously now we want to animate the flare with the animation of the stroke so what we need to do is go to layer new null object and we can come here to the outline hit my keyboard where you see all the masks and we're gonna do for the first letter of your title you're going to the mask path of that first letter and you're going to copy the mask path then you're gonna go to the null object hit P or any keyboard for position and paste that mask path data into the position parameter so now this mask is going to follow the animation so here's what you need to take note of so if we take a look here we scrub through it you can see that the null object anchor point which is this anchor point right here is not following the outline of the stroke animation so what we need to do is we need to experiment here so first things first what however long that your stroke animation wasn't start percentage obviously ours went to three seconds you need to bring over the last position keeping over to three seconds if that's where you did your animation and struck through this as you can see we're still not lined up on the stroke so what we can do is like both these keyframes right click them go to keyframe assistants and click on time reverse keyframes now this should be all fine now of course it all depends on what type of animation you did with the stroke effects so if you animated the end percentage you probably wouldn't have to reverse the keyframes so just go ahead and make sure the key finish matched up and you might have to reverse them depending on what you did so now what we do is we can go to the flare layer and we can go to the lense layer effect all click the stopwatch on flare Center and we can pick whip the expression here to the position of the null object and it will click that off so now our flare is going to follow the stroke animation so if you want to continue this you have to duplicate it and put it on the rest of the letters I'll show you how to do that in a second but before we do that I want to modify the lens flare because obviously we only have three different choices we have three different presets here and you know they can look good but the thing is you're going to get all these extra lens flare elements that you may not want to have in this animation obviously you want to keep it controlled and you want to do your thing so first things first let's talk about masking it out so we can grab the pen tool here at the top and what you don't want to do is just mask around your letter like this so you want to make sure that the flare isn't going to you know be cut off at any point so we do this scripted the time line real fast to make sure that the flare isn't going to be cut off and looks right and then hit f1 keyboard for feather feather feather it out to about 100 whatever you need to do and now we have one light in here so let's say you want to change the color of this flare obviously you can't do it with the lens flare effect but make sure the layer selected go to effect color correction and add curves and you can go to the red channel green Channel blue Channel it doesn't matter what you want to do and just kind of mess with the curve here so we want to make it you know maybe a blue may go to green channel you can bring it more purple more green obviously there's a lot of control over this and and we'll keep it around there and of course you can hide the null object if the little box is getting annoying so you can hide it and doesn't affect anything and scriptor here obviously now we have a nice lens flare so what we can do here is also animate the flare brightness so it has a nice flicker to it so alt click the stopwatch for flare brightness type in wiggle open parenthesis 0.5 comma 20 close from sea soap so the first number in expression deals with how fast it's gonna flicker and the second number it has to deal with the amount so we come here it's gonna be a nice slow flicker you're probably not going to notice it compared to say we just did this at 2:00 you can see that there's gonna be more of a parent flicker to it a little bit quicker so we'll keep it out 2 comma 20 and I'll zoom in real quick so you can see that on YouTube so wiggle open from C to comma 20 closed parenthesis alright so now I think we're looking pretty good obviously we don't want the flare to be here when the animation starts so hit T on keyboard for opacity at a keyframe for it move over just by couple of frames lower the opacity to 0% and go to the end of the animation so right here add another keyframe and now three seconds close it down to 0% and before we start duplicating this one last thing I want to do is I want to take the last keyframe on the null object position hit f9 and keyboard to make that easy East keyframe and do that for the start as well for the stroke affected make that easy east keyframe as well but making that and after nine easy ease and I'll just slow it down towards the end instead of coming to an abrupt stop okay so now let's go ahead and start duplicating this on to the other letters so what we want to do is just grab the flare layer and go to edit duplicate so we just have that and then go up to layer new null objects to create a new object don't duplicate the null object as you'll have to reparent things and it gets a little bit more messy but make sure you keep those layers on top of everything and then what we can do is go back to zoo the outline layer copy the mask path go to the first key for a first frame of your timeline go to hit P on keyboard and paste it into the position parameter and make sure you drag the last keyframe out to 3 seconds here and you might need to time reverse the keyframe depending on how what depending on what parameter you used and weight loss' keyframe and easygeeze keyframe now all we have to do is go back to the flare Center I'll click that and pick whip it to the position of the null object so basically from here we are just duplicating things and repeating the process until we're finished here and of course you can go into the duplicated flare and you can always change the color depending on you know what you want to do what colors you want to you know mess with all about the palettes sold ooh pink there so I'm gonna be right back while we duplicate this so as you're duplicating your lens flares you're going to need to probably move over the mask that you created if you decided to customize the lens flares so make sure to hit my keyboard select new mask path and you can't just select your mask and make sure to put that mask over the letter that you're working on because if you don't if I move this over all the way you can see that that last lens flare is not there so make sure that the mask is over the letter that you are applying your lens flare to and running through all this obviously now we have all of our you know lens flares in here and it looks really cool when we did this without any plugins obviously I would still prefer using optical flares from videocopilot or at least no like factory from red giant but if you don't want to purchase that obviously the lunch flavor effects will work just fine just with a few limitations obviously we don't have the ultimate control over the customization and it doesn't have as many parameters as those plugins - so that's really the only downside to do it this way but you can still get some amazing results and it just takes a little bit more work and creativity to make it look nice make sure to turn on motion blur for all your layers and I want to talk about one technique that I did in that tutorial about a year and a half ago is I did a little bit of 3d animation to it so if you want make this a 3d layer go ahead and turn on 3d right here for all your layers go up to layer new camera and click OK and what we can do here is we can hit PR and keyboard for position and we can move this to like five seconds and we can grab the camera tool at the top grab the orbit camera tool and you can orbit around this maybe what we'll do is we'll sleep all these keyframes right click them and we'll reverse the keyframes here so now and for example you can see that you can put the lens flares in 3d space and this can look pretty cool well other than that looks really good I still suggest using optical flares so you can definitely control some of the lens flare elements a little bit better but it looks really nice and you should be able to create some nice work with this effect so so I hope you found this tutorial helpful if you did enjoy the video please be sure to drop a like on it because helps my videos out tremendously and please be sure to subscribe the channel for more after text videos and hit me up on my social media networks those links are in the description of the video and always be creating [Music] you

Channel: SonduckFilm

Views: 537,124

Keywords: Tutorial, After Effects Tutorial, After Effects Tutorial Light Stroke, After Effects Light, After Effects Stroke, After Effects Tutorial Light Stroke Effect, After Effects Tutorial Effect, After Effects Tutorial Stroke, Light Stroke Effect, After Effects Stroke Tutorial, After Effects Tutorial Lens Flare, SonduckFilm Tutorial

Id: va-OvAdPcck

Length: 10min 45sec (645 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 05 2018