Animate a Map in Adobe After Effects (without Plugins)

on today's episode of Monday Maps I'm going to be animating these tanks along this map without using any plugins today's video is sponsored by envato elements stick around to learn more about how you can bring your animations to life with elements from envato okay so for the first step I'm going to grab a super sweet map to use as my base map and I'm going to head over here to David rumsey's map collection and this is going to be a World War II style map showing like a tank moving across the German Countryside during World War II so I'm going to search the keyword Germany what's really cool about this website is you can actually filter out all the maps by these different categories and I'm going to go down to when scroll all the way down here and then at the bottom you can see World War One World War II and there's 169 entries wow there's a there's like 500 almost 600 maps for World War one and I really like this one and I really like it because it's National Geographic there's a little export button up here and you're gonna see all the different resolutions I'm just gonna go with uh extra large and I'm going to bring this over here into Adobe After Effects and now I'm going to create a new composition standard HD and then I'm going to grab my map bring it in here so what I'm going to do here is I'm going to have a tank moving between two cities here and I'm going to have it moving over here from Nuremberg basically cruising down here to the river and there's a little town called mooseburg so the first step I want to do here is I want to add two null objects referencing these locations so that when I attach when I start to animate and bring Assets in I want to be able to attach them to these two locations this is a really busy map too so I also just want to be able to quickly reference where these locations are so to do that I'm just going to go to layer a new null object and then I'm going to call this Nuremberg and then I'll hit Ctrl D to duplicate it and I'll call this one mooseberg during World War II my grandfather was actually captured by the Germans in Italy and they brought him to this big POW Camp in this little town called mooseburg and he was liberated by General Patton who came with all of his tanks and came and liberated the camp my grandfather has like cool letters explaining the experience of like what it was like and so I'm just kind of creating a map based on that story so I'm going to grab the mooseberg one here and the Anchor Point if I turn off the map you look the Anchor Point of a null is at the top left so I want to make sure that Anchor Point is over the city here so where'd it go here it is so I want it to be right there so there we go now I can grab Nuremberg and we'll bring that straight over Nuremberg right here and you know what I think I'm going to bring the opacity of the map down because it's just really way way too bright can't really see what's going on and maybe I can change the label color of this now I'm going to grab both of these null objects and I'm going to to parent them to the map so that if I move my map around now these locations are going to stick all my visuals or all my animation is going to take place right in here I'm going to go grab my Anchor Point you can hit the y key to grab this Pan behind tool and you can you know I'm going to put it like right here so now if I scale rotate it's all going to take place from the center now I'm going to add some map markers to both of these locations so I'm going to go to window and then open up effects and presets and this year I don't know if you saw the tutorial but I got to create I had an incredible opportunity to create animation presets for Adobe I got to do 10 of their new animation presets and one of them is a map marker so if you search map marker you're going to find this right here simple map marker make sure you don't have any layers selected in your timeline and then double click this and it's going to create this cool little ellipse that has a pinging stroke and has all these customization options here it's just a looping animation so I'm going to come over here and kind of configure this so we'll scale it down to like 5 15 and then I'll turn the stroke width way down to something like 3 and then we'll change the animation duration to four seconds so now we have this slow kind of ping map marker here I'm going to rename it I'll call this one mooseberg map marker and now I'm going to grab the parent pick Whip and I'm going to hold shift as I release it over the mooseberg null and now you can see it's sticking right there and now this is all connected even if I move the map once again that map marker is going to move now I'll duplicate this map marker and I'm going to call this one Nuremberg and do the same thing we've got Nuremberg and then I'm going to grab parent pick whip hold shift drop it over Nuremberg now we've got our little map with our map markers okay now I'm going to go grab some actual assets and features that we can drop over our map like the tank we want to we want to get a texture and start to really bring this together big shout out to my tier three patrons Tyson the keymaster Mike and Sandra over on YouTube at flumi plus one Barnes creative Studios Josh and crookie thanks folks for making this video possible all the elements I'm using today I got from envato elements they're actually today's sponsor but you can find assets like these for free available on the internet if you head over to like free SVG I found a tank top view here and paper textures you can find those all over the place and for these explosion elements premium beat actually has a free pack of those I'll link to those down in the video description but I went ahead and already downloaded all these assets here so first let's uh let's maybe add a texture to the map so I've got this map I'm going to crank it back up here and this is just looking really bad so I'm gonna go grab this old paper texture that I got from envato and I will scale this down and I'm gonna go search for the tent effect and drop that over the texture so it turns it grayscale then I'm going to switch the blend mode to my multiply yeah we'll switch it to multiply okay so right there we've got something looking pretty cool and you know I might want to bring it down ever so slightly you know bring this down ever so slightly and I think on the map maybe I can apply an exposure or no Hue and saturation let's go grab Hue and saturation drop that on the map then I can turn the saturation of this down maybe a little bit and I can also bring the brightness of this down something like this and to bring this together a little bit make it look a little nicer I can switch the blend modes of the map markers I'll switch those to Overlay so they kind of are a little bit more Blended in here okay cool now I'm gonna go grab my tank top view I've got this Sherman tank I'm gonna drop this in here now it's way too big so I'm gonna scale it down scale it way way down now I want to animate the position here I want this tank to move between these two locations and you know it's really not sticking out that much on this map so I'm gonna you know I'm gonna turn the map off just so we can see I'm gonna turn the texture off so I've got this tank I want it to animate from Nuremberg down to mooseburg so this is really simple all I need to do is hit P to bring up position I'm going to bring my playhead to the beginning and just add a keyframe and I'm going to bring this tank over here and I'll hold Ctrl and it'll snap right over here to this position here we don't have to be perfect so now we have a position keyframe here I move my playhead back over here to the end and I just grab this tank and I'm going to hold Ctrl to snap again and I'm going to snap it to this location and you see it adds another keyframe so now we actually have an animation okay so we have our base animation here of this moving the position changes but we want to make it look nice it's kind of like sliding sideways I'm going to right click go to transform and there's a little button here called Auto Orient and you can have it Orient along the path click ok now it's facing straight this might not always be the case depending on your asset you might need to go hit R for rotation and just rotate it around manually to make sure that it's facing in the right direction I just got I kind of got lucky with this one okay so now our tank is actually moving forward it's just you know going straight there maybe we want it to do take some turns and stuff so what we can do here is grab the Sherman tank and you can actually see the motion path here and I can grab these keyframes so I can actually move move these position keyframes wherever I want them which is very cool if you can't see the whole path go to edit preferences and I think it's under maybe display is it under display yeah and there's a section for motion path I think it actually defaults to no more than five seconds so you may need to switch it to all keyframes so that you can see you know both the start and in keyframes and everything what's cool about this is if I go and hit p and I grab position you'll notice these little circles here and these are actually bezier handles so I can grab both of these and just start to move them around like this be careful not to grab the bounding box of the tank because then you're going to go you don't want to do that so just grab these and let's say we're going to have our tank kind of cruising around like this like it takes a turn and then head straight in to now we see our tank leaving Nuremberg heading around and then cruising on in for The Liberation my next problem is is that this tank is not popping out from the map that much I need to draw the visual attention to this so there's a few things and ways that I can do this first I'm going to go add a let's maybe add a levels effect and if you look you can see it's just very dark so I can brighten this up okay so that's brightened up a little bit now I want to it's still looking very flat so I can add a drop shadow to it if I just grab a drop shadow and drop it on the tank really crank what I like to do is crank the distance out so you can see it and then bump up the softness to make it look more realistic and then you can change the position of it here now let me show you what why this isn't the best method so what you've got here is that this tank it's looking better now it's looking you know like it's looking more 3D which is cool but if I play back the animation you'll notice that the shadow animates with the tank like it's rotating like if I come down here and rotate the tank watch The Shadow the shadow is not realistic it's like rotating with a tank this has to do with render order the way the effects are rendered so the effects are rendered are basically rendered before the transformation property so we don't want that so I'm going to delete this if you use layer Styles instead if I go up to layer layer Styles drop shadow these will be rendered after your transformation property so it'll it'll do the rotation first and then it will add the drop shadow let me just show you what I'm talking about here bump up the opacity and bump up the distance and then you know just like tweak this a little bit try to make it look as good as possible now with a layer style you're going to see that if I rotate this now that that shadow always looks like it's come that shadow is always going to be facing this way which is cool so this is what I want all right so I brightened it up added a shadow that looks pretty cool you know the shadow could definitely use some tweaking it's just needs a little bit more now to really bring attention I'm going to add a new adjustment layer and we're going to call this one vignette and I'm going to add this is another preset that I created it's called noisy vignette and it's just essentially um the vignette the default CC vignette with a noise effect so that that's already given it a little bit more here but let me show you a really cool trick here I'm going to go down to effects in the timeline here open up vignette and I have this little Center area here this is like where the center of the vignette is going to take place or where it's going to be I'm gonna with this property selected I'm going to tap s twice to solo it and then I'm going to go to the tank and I'm going to hit P for position and now I'm going to property pick whip this to the position of the tank and you know what this isn't applying correctly and you know why it's not applying correctly is because this is actually parented to another layer so let's deselect that and now if I property pick with this again now this centers up here and now that vignette is going to stick to here you can see the real subtle movements here with that light which is cool but if you want it to be super dramatic just bring the angle of view way up and it's going to give you like this super dramatic look and then it really brings attention to the tank I mean you can go pretty crazy with it and it almost looks like a light like following a tank okay I'm almost there I pretty much have an animation but I want to bring it to Life by making the map move and make it look like I'm kind of flying in or zooming in on the map with some kind of camera but I want to keep this in the 2D style I don't want to make this 3D so I think the best way to do this is to Simply pre-comp this and call this map animation final because anytime you name something final nothing ever goes wrong and now what I can do is simply bring up position scale and rotation of my pre-comp here position scale rotation I'll keyframe all these at the beginning and then I'll go to the last keyframe and let's say we want to scale this up and I reposition it kind of over here and then maybe rotate it a little bit so let's see what this looks like so now we're going to have this movement like this okay that's cool I like this now I can see the edges of my composition here to get around that I can simply collapse the Transformations here and that's going to show us through but we still have some issues with this Edge and I'm pretty sure that is just the adjustment layer of the vignette so if I grab that unlock it and I think if I just change the parameters here of this that should take care of it yes it did you just got to be careful with this Edge over here and make sure it's not there and now this is pretty much it we have an animation and if I want to you know add anything else to it let's say I want to come in here and just drop a couple of additional assets like I have this top view explosion let's say we want to put this over here maybe right as the tank turns we have this explode I'm going to put it underneath the vignette and then maybe scale it way way down and then you can just you know you can keep customizing this like I could grab the tank and I could duplicate the tank and then with these position parameters I can just change the position like this you know have this start off from here and have it end on the other side so you can have like a whole whole bunch of Tanks here looks like our vignette is following this one now so it's like it's surrounding the city here and you know you can do this as many times as you want [Music] thanks again envato elements for sponsoring this video with a subscription to envato elements you get access to over 56 million assets while it's nice to be able to create elements from scratch that's not always the best method and you can see here how quickly I created this animation using elements from envato this included this 3D tank as well as the top view explosion the paper texture even the sound effects trying to search all these assets on free websites is very time intensive and not always very fun envato elements offers a nice and clean simple lifetime commercial license which is good even after your subscription ends following the link in the video description is going to give you 50 off when you select an annual subscription which will give you access to everything on the site for under 20 a month thank you [Music]

Channel: Boone Loves Video

Views: 32,115

Keywords: boone loves video, boone, adobe after effects tutorial, ww2 animation, ww2 map, wwII animation, wwII map, historical map animation, animate a map in adobe after effects 2023, adobe after effects 2023 tutorial, adobe ae tutorial 2023, ae 2023, how to create a map in ae, ae map, ae map animation, map animation ae no plugins, motion graphics, how to animate a map in after effects, how to animate a map destination in after effects, map animation after effects

Id: UIyeGB3LxA4

Length: 15min 3sec (903 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 21 2022