Animate Faster with the Flex Tool (feat. Zack Lovatt)

[Music] hey everyone i'm andrew marston for the euchremedia youtube channel and today we are talking about animation prototyping which is when you've got some art to animate and you just need to get the basic ideas of the motion blocked in quickly and in a lot of cases there are actually third party tools that can help make this a faster process so with that in mind today we are joined by the one and only zach lovett his credentials are too long to list completely here but in short he's a highly respected technical director instructor and also the author of a lot of popular after effects tools that you might have heard of like explode shape layers he co-authored flow and now flex and having used flex a bit myself i 100 recommend it whenever you have objects that need to move or scale relative to each other in either lines or grids in the first part of the video we'll watch him block in the motion for some style frames by hand and then he'll show how to use flex to do the same animation quicker and aside from this i want to encourage everyone to pay attention to how zack uses after effects throughout the video he drops numerous tips that'll save you time when you're using the program and lastly i feel a little obligated to mention that both zach and i share a deep love for making terrible puns so you've been warned alright so let's jump into the call alright so here we are with zach lovett thanks zack for being here hey thanks for having me here uh you know i actually at one point did myself consider a career in programming sort of like yourself but i didn't think i could get a raise a a raise a raise no no i get it i get it i just don't know if that warrants uh uh promoting i don't know if i need to make you feel good about that one all right so anyway let's just we just lost every viewer so it's just you and i now um so you're gonna show us how you would animate these boards in two different ways the client has provided us with um these style frames and asked us to prototype a couple animations so i'm excited to see what you're gonna do and more or less i'm just gonna let you go and then i'm gonna um pop in if i have any questions so feel free to take it away cool so a few caveats here are a few notes first the idea here is just some simple motion prototyping of like this calendar week we've got five squares monday to friday and first i'm going to rig them up with all the raw shape layers and text layers just like we're going to zoom in on wednesday and take a look at an event then i'll do the same thing with flex and they won't be exactly the same just because there's different controls they work differently but also i haven't really been an animator in like four or five years and so all of this is more conceptual for somebody who knows how to like make some really good keyframes could do it and hopefully see the benefits of flex so with that said the overall idea is i want wednesday to get pigged and as it gets big and grows monday tuesday thursday friday are going to come like shrink and slink away so let me just see they all are shea players which is helpful and now i'm not entirely sure how i'm going to do this so we're going to figure this out on the fly but i definitely think i'm going to make a null for each of these and just parent all of the content to each note let me just start with uh i'll come up to a friday null i apologize my keyboard is clacky you know two null kind of sounds like tuna okay touche touche what we're gonna do now is let's first um let's first like figure out the desired scale of of wednesday and so i just want to figure out how big it's going to get because that'll determine how and where i move each my other layers too so we're going to make a couple of keyframes i like nice even numbers i don't know maybe for reference let's bring it to 400 let's say 350 and we'll bring this up to there let's keep it square 350 350. cool so this is the sort of desired end result and to do this we now know that we need monday tuesday thursday friday to get out of the way so i am going to go to each again this is like very simple stuff but i'm just trying to quickly work here this more conceptual prototype than anything else definitely going to separate dimensions for all the nulls let's say thursday friday and i'm sure that there will be people watching this who are flabbergasted at how slow or inefficient i am at some of these things i was actually just thinking man he must separate dimensions a lot because he just flew through that menu okay well so if you right-click here if you can actually tap the first letter of each of these and as long as it's unique like s for separate dimensions it just does it quicker i mean it's like the band the offspring says yeah you got to keep them separated this is why i really had you on um all all one one person who puts up with these puns is gonna love this yeah okay so at this point we're pretty much done this is it we're perfect hey but it's prototypes it's a prototype it's something so at this point we've got the scaling up everything slides out of the way i don't really like the lack of scaling on these and again this is going quick and sloppy deliberately um so let's actually go to all of our cyan layers accept our wednesday null we're going to go to scale and we're going to point out real quick for the people watching if you didn't know you could do this he just uh clicked on the layer color and then there is a menu option at the top called select layer group that although it's at the top a lot of people miss it and it selects every layer that is that color of the label so when i was making these nulls i specifically made them cyan so that they're all the same color so that i could use this trick i knew i would have to keep going back to selecting this group and so that was a deliberate choice to help me out later i personally also really like making my nulls guide layers which means they don't render but nulls don't render anyway the benefit though is that if i'm scrolling through these 30 layers of my timeline i can really quickly look at the layer name see where my nulls are instead of trying to parse some other information so right now you're scaling these nulls up with all of the planner pieces attached okay i see where you're going with this yeah and again i'm just like okay well why is this one super tall and these are still a little short and chunky um which is relatable i understand but not entirely what we want at this point i am just kind of going super quickly to just sort of like explore do some motion explorations like i like this it kind of feels like um like a fisheye lens but with rectangles not just when i'm doing rapid prototype but like if i'm doing animation tests this is very much how it would work like this isn't aesthetically pleasing it's very chunky nothing's even but like first what is the broad strokes of the movement i'm like okay this is what i feel like i want to happen but this is so uneven and that's not really nice and so at this point is when i'm going to go in and just make these spacing a little bit tidier a little bit tighter more consistent is really the big thing so i know if i'm starting at 12 48 i really like going in and just saying like give me some numbers and for those who didn't know um he just you can write arithmetic into property values like you just took the original value and added or you just divided so the verdict for this uh thursday card despite the f there is that it's 300 pixels it's moved 300 pixels so i'm going to do this same thing 668. was minus 300. so now i'm going to go to this one i'm going to double click here to get the value in a different viewer say minus 200 all right so it's still inconsistent the gaps here uh which we could fix we could use like the distribute or we can't use distribute because this one's scaled but either way we've got some stuff now for the last trick here what i'm going to do is have my monday tuesday wednesday thursday friday well i want these to follow the shapes and so you know if you want something to follow it what you do is you parent it right so let me just parent the f over here whoa okay so that's not going to work what we're going to do here just for a little bit of a flex is is i'm going to separate these dimensions and i'm going to use some expressiony stuff so that they always follow so first thing i'm going to do with my separated positions here is i'm going to take the x position and just use the little pick whip over to the x position of the null and instead of parenting parenting will have something similar but parenting also messes with the scale and everything and i don't want to scale the letter because you know this is being scaled up a lot what it means is that it's always just going to follow where the f is now i have two options for the y position i can write like a really complicated expression here so like look at the bounds of this box and to figure out okay well where's the top of the box do that value with the scaling of it minus 50 pixels to put it above but we're actually going to cheat this quite a bit put a keyframe at my position and then another keyframe up at the top it is not elegant but it works i'm just going to go ahead and repeat the process i'm going to hit tilde on my keyboard to the left of the number row on a us keyboard to go full screen and pick whip this here so this is what we've got right now and this is i'm going to leave it like this for the first phase of shifting the dates around i think this is okay we convey the thought yes there's easing to be done but that's a separate facet i now want to realign the wednesday widget just so that i have a little bit more space they've decided that we should have some text going in this big green box over here so to do that i need everything else to get out of the way i'm going to start by this w event four let's go to its position uh let's separate it out actually let's go to all these and separate them out and we'll start by taking the box go down to two seconds whoops i hit the wrong button and slide it down maybe a hundred there's no reason this is a hundred i just like round numbers so that's now sliding down and because everything else is scaling and shifting and add some keyframes and make this half whoops make this half the height so it slides out of the way great now the next thing i need to happen is i want all three of these to scale up vertically to take up more space and so i actually think this is where i'm going to break out into a second null so i'm going to make a new null come on down to w we'll call this w event null typical exact form make it a guide layer and i'm going to position this right at the intersection of the three layers so that it can control all three of them and first i'm going to take my event null and parent it to the full wednesday day null and then take my not those layers just these three layers and parent it to the event null and now everything works the exact same as it did but with my event null i have this extra capability of scaling this up which is what i want so let me just hide some other stuff so now that we're here i'm going to make these three bigger we'll put a position a key from the scale go up later let's make it cool scales up we scale up all right that's pretty good and so the idea here is that this i want to like collapse it away sideways and these two also just like expand sideways so the way i'm going to do this is by actually going to these layers and changing their anchor points to the left so that now when i scale this it's going to scale in this way and again there's like a lot of ways to do this i'm just showing one way so that would be really great if somebody invented like a script that you could like make grids so that you could easily move stuff around and it scales to the grid lines have you ever thought of that that sounds like a really good idea i'm gonna i'm gonna think about that that sounds like a cool idea yeah um and if anybody at this point in the video has forgotten what i'm doing i'm right now trying to show the sort of annoying way to do this type of animation before i can show a better way and i'm i think i'm nearly done this phase one thing i've noticed is that i need the green bar the green box to get bigger than this blue one so when i put the null here what i really should have done is put it down here and this one up here so that as i'm scaling up what i can also do is scale the y height down maybe dance 100 and this event just 600 there we go okay so without any easing or prettiness this is what we've got right now okay you know this is this is beautiful this is baby's first after effects project and of course like it's slow it's not eased the offset like it's super stiff that's not the point here the point here is looking at how you would scale layers dynamically and have items respond to the other elements in the scene and keep reflowing down and the i mean the kind of the only way to do this is with like a lot of nulls a lot of narrows chained to another scaling each one as you scale other ones away there's some expression checks you can get here but at a certain point this is effectively the way it works it's sort of a hack and it's also difficult to change but it works it still works yeah and that's the thing like again this isn't about the animation quality which i'm getting more and more ashamed of by the second it's just about the overall concept of how you would build this and i think i'm going to leave it at this um oh one one last little tidbit we'll go from two seconds uh i do like working on whole seconds when i'm blocking out animation for what it's worth when i'm doing real animation jobs it's just like it's not about pasting it's about movements and iteration but you can see i just turned on this text layer for like the actual event text so i'm going to slide this over here and now let's come in a little bit beautiful fades then this is from your plan all right 11. oh yeah yeah i thought so yeah that that what don't you do that at 11am though like i thought this was universal i tried to take an hour a day poor plans only an hour okay either way uh i'm gonna leave this as it is with some super slick zack animation hire me um okay so let's just look at how i would do this with flex so as you can see i've done a little bit of prep work beforehand just to make my life easier and also if i was animating this scene from scratch a little bit more intention i would probably pre-comp things out and the idea here is just like look they're solid shapes we can scale these pre-comps in x and y and it doesn't matter also now i can drill into any of these days and modify stuff there without dealing with the full comp setup so i've just prepped the comp by grouping everything up into big precomps that i've now scaled down to 25 i'm gonna hide my date labels and right away i've got five items here now flex is all about making line rigs and grid rigs and what i mean by this is it's all about having your layers be responsive to the other layers so instead of with all of our nulls where we have to animate all five nulls here we can animate one layer and have the others just respond to it so in a really quick way i'm just going to do a line mode which is not what we're going to do i just want to show something super quick which is look i have five things in a row i want them responsive i'm going to hit rig row they're all up here and now i can take my wednesday i've got this little controller i can scale it up and the rest shrink down is there a way to get that gap back between them so i have this little gutter control which adds in the gap now it's not the exact same thing and we can absolutely go in here and animate stuff like okay well i have a little scaling control we can scale them up so you still get the height but i'm not actually going to use the line mode but already just with one button and like just tweaking that gutter value you can see that they're all responding just from the one i can go into each layer and shrink them down or up as needed and the rest will just respond that sort of flexibility isn't really doable without expressions and flex just makes that easy to apply and you've pretty much already shown us two or three different prototypes that you could quickly send to the client for a quick gut check versus what we just did in the manual version i mean it's pretty much that like you saw with all my little shortcuts of right clicking and making guide layers and stepping dimensions it was still i'm sure very painful to watch me work with all these layers hopefully flex a little easier but i'm just going to undo all of this or you know what i'm going to hit this remove rig button that just unrigs all of this because line mode is neat but it's really just for dealing with that single line and it's a little constrained uh so as i mentioned rigging a line like a row or column only gives us that one control of how heavy is this one element like how much weight does it have and so i want finer control over where each line is and how it performs so i'm actually going to use the grid mode and grid works differently it's still the idea of responsive layers but whereas line you just get a single value grid you actually get controllers to affect how things move and where they move so with that said let's look at how grid works first thing i'm going to do is select my layers and hit rig row and now we've got these two really long shape layers going on and the way this works is i can grab these shape layers and stretch them up or down and everything is going to be stuck between them and well remap so the next thing i want to do is be able to move things left and right and to do that i need to make columns in this case each layer should be its own column so i'm going to go to the first one hit rig column okay now i have one row and five columns it is a grid which makes sense for the grid rig if i select let's just say like two of these controllers i can slide them around and everything will respond appropriately to make this a little easier to see i'm going to go back to my controller and increase the gutter just like we were seeing on the other rig just say about 30 and now we've got that little gap back so at this point we've got our five day blocks and again i'm going to do the exact same idea now i want this one to get big and i want the others to get smaller so i'm going to start by selecting these handles and these handles go to position and let's make a keyframe on x position of each exposition [Music] i'm holding shift and tapping left and right to move it in discrete chunks now we're going to go to these two lines go to position add some keyframes in y position come back to 1 and do the same thing i was wondering if you were going to write an expression to link one of those uh one of those row controllers to each other so if you just drag one it does the other one that that would be another way to do it and part of i mean this is self-aggrandizing the part of what i think is nice about flex is that the way you move these controllers is totally up to you if you want to add keyframes you can do it if you want to add expressions that's fine it might get a little weird with parenting but that can be resolved like airspace transforms and things but like because it's all layers you could if you wanted like put a null up here and parent it to the layer and it will be fixed and so you have a lot more control or flexibility over how and where these layers sort of move but already right away we've got that effect and all we've done is add keyframes on each of these elements and if i want to do that little sub animation i will go into my wednesday comp which here we are and i'm going to do the exact same idea select these layers hit rick row and just like we saw it's there you'll notice that what happened was it kind of it stretches this layer between the top and bottom and so we can't see the bottom one anymore that's not what we want so what i'm going to do is hit this button here in the utilities for grid we have a way just to make one of these lines it doesn't have any logic it's just a shape layer but if i move this up to this point in the middle i can go to this layer and i'm going to try this and hope it doesn't break if i hit rig row now what it's done is it's flex has been like hey this green layer there's a layer above me there's a layer below me so you should just stretch to the nearest row columns like row row rulers and so i can do the same with blue which isn't currently rigged up if i hit rig row it's going to automatically detect these and now stretch to fit and so in this way again it's a little bit more setup but now i have all these independent controls for each of these elements now columns are a little different just for this main section i can hit red column and it'll do the same oops the same left and right but because these two are in the same column i don't have to deal with any of that like extra little subdivider i can just hit red column and they will be stretched in the middle there so the last little tidbit here would be this bottom layer now the issue is flex tries to be smart so if i were to say rig row it'll find the nearest top thing and the nearest bottom and merge into it but we don't actually want this layer to go all the way up we want it to be shorter so if you hold shift as as the little pop-up says hold shift to create a new row for your layers so if i hold shift and hit rig row now i can move these controllers independently or these controllers independently and they won't affect each other so it's still in the same grid control system but they're like independent ways of moving and so with all of my layers set i can now start animating to get that same sort of reflow and because they're all in the same grid rig even though they're separate rows and columns my gutter controls are still going to work the same for everything and you'll note that when i change the gutter this bottom one isn't going in on the sides it's because it doesn't actually know that it's part of this column so i'm just going to go ahead really quickly and change that now because there's auto detect if i hit rig column it will be part of that column but within each of your layer we have this flex grid layer which gives you these controls to say you know what just like let me manually pick which layer is the left right top and bottom so in this case the left i'm seeing is column one and if i select that layer it's column three so i can go to this layer and say left is column one right is column three and now that it's part of a column it's got that same gutter going on oh if you do it too much it will go upside down which makes sense let's just add some keyframes so i'm going to do these two first just because it's what i do with the last scene go down here go one second later we're gonna slide it down a whole bunch and i'm actually gonna slide the top down and if anybody is wondering how he just quickly got to one second if you type if you type just a single number like one that'll go to your frame but if you type 1.0 for example now we're going to one second and you can do that for the [Music] minutes and hours as well yeah so it it like jumps to the next iteration of time so yeah one point point will go to the next full minute instead of one second like 1.0 is the same as one point and so you could just use dots to quickly jump like decimal columns it's weird little short codes but i i find it tricky i mean i find it handy especially because i like everything to be even numbers until i go in and refine and tweak but i'm gonna make this over here and i know that i need this middle layer to also be animated so back here shrink it down cool we've got some keyframes and you didn't have to mess with anchor points and externals no anchor points no extra nulls no scaling and parent chains so it's all here and now that it's set up we're going to bring our text back in handy shortcut ctrl shift alt v toggles visibility for stretching your hand and again all of this is us keyboard or us english keyboard and now this is here i'll go here position go down to two seconds oh not position opacity go back to start player zero it animates this fades in really slow fade okay so i'm gonna go back to my the comp that this lives in clicking over here but uh if you want like the super super exact way of doing it i would hit tab on the keyboard and it would bring up the mini flow chart and i can go right back to where the comp is used or if you hit tab from the parent precomp you can see all the other comps that are used in it so this is what we've got and of course it's clunky yes it's i mean yes it's clunky it's unease it's not timed out well but the idea is here you can see all of the same components and the only thing i'm dealing with for all of this is like 12 keyframes in the main comp for the main driving and like another 12 here for the sub shapes whoops and so it's just simpler in my mind have something like this plus at any point you could go and say look we actually need some of this to be a little different so let me just select these and i can bring them down here and now it's going to animate down to the bottom right instead so now that we've got our big planner here we've just heard from the producer andrew these ukra media taskmasters are pretty rough that we need to animate a series of like flowing little icon wibbly bits inside of one of the dates because on tuesday there's a lot of alerts and that's crazy so i'm going to go into the tuesday pre-comp and there's actually a little event here for when we want our icon flare so i'm going to go inside of that and i've got a rectangle cool what the hell inside of elements inside of icons we have all of our little icons if we solo them we got a ticket we got a suitcase we got a people oh i guess the icons tell us what it is but either way the idea here is that we want all of these just be arranged in a line and thankfully we have flex who knew it's like an as seen on tv commercial where the exact setup you can answer with your tool how crazy is that so what i'm gonna do is actually i don't want ticket we're not really traveling the whole cova thing um so i'm just going to take these items here and just go to my line mode and hit rig row oh that's it i mean that's not it but like look we've just done the bulk of the work and as we saw before we can come into each of these layers and scale them up and the others will respond so i'm just going to and maybe this is a little silly uh with pseudo effects you can't just keyframe them all let's go into each layer weight add a keyframe okay so if we play this out we've now got our little icons coming in in whatever order and i'm actually going to shrink all this down and uh for those who don't know how you just shrank all those key frames the timing can you explain quickly how that works yeah so when you have a bunch of keyframes if you just click and drag them it's going to move well all the keyframes if you hold alt or option on your keyboard and click away from where the playhead is so right now the playhead this little current time indicator is at zero and i'm going to click the last keyframe like the furthest in time if i hold alt and drag it's going to proportionately scale the timing of the keyframe all of the the relative timing all the values are the same it's just now instead of this animation taking a second and a half i can make it take i don't know 10 seconds and we'll fall asleep but all the animation preserved so it's a really quick way to first lock up the animation then grab them all and just make it snappier which you still want to go and refine the values but you get this idea we've got this here and this is fine and all but i've just heard from mr andrew that we actually need to add that ticket back in because covid is fixed and now i just don't have my little ticket in the rig so i'm going to have to add it in now it's a little annoying because like i rigged everything up and blah blah blah but with flex you can hold shift again click rig row and it's going to add in that icon into your existing scene and so that's it you can just take other layers throw them into your rig and everything else works the exact same way like we still get that same animation you do see that our layer starts existing that's just because i haven't animated the layer weight yet but if i bring this over here drop it down to zero really easily we've just added this into the whole system that's that's very flexible oh i'm catching on to to this pun game that you've been doing oh it's it's pretty good and you know they're they're not shaped layers they're png so if we wanted to set the color we would do like we could apply a fill effector you know somebody made this thing called swatcharoo some layers just hold a button that's actually a terrible color i'm not gonna do that um maybe this nice lavender uh yeah actually i'm okay with that like apply colors and stuff we'll close that we don't see it cool and i just wanted to give you a tip um just i'm pretty sure you don't know this if you wanted to quickly animate the interpolation of those keyframes with like a visual sort of representation there's a there's a plug-in called flow yeah that is i use it all the time i can't open my extensions window right now because there's stuff there that shouldn't be seen but if i could i would open it up show flow and it'd be a wonderful tool so ever where can people where can people find flex zac on a scripts and a plugins or ascripts.com flex it is there i have a whole bevy of tools and little helpful utilities to make your lives easier to name a few for those if you've never heard of uh zex any of zach's plug-ins explode shape layers flow flex uh those in my opinion are uh essential they pay for themselves quickly whenever people ask me what essential plugins that i work with that i feel like every after effects user should have explode shape layers flow i think you gotta have it there's a bunch i i have this very simple motif of rows of buttons to do things but hey all sorts of stuff it works yeah cool well thank you so much zach for for doing this and i hope that everybody out there goes and buys flex and yeah thanks all right thanks for having me okay i'm going to stop recording all right so we made it through all the puns and hopefully you guys learned a thing or two thank you very much zach for taking the time once again and if anyone out there has a project where objects need to move in correlation with each other then i highly recommend that you consider buying flex so what else am i supposed to say subscribe to this youtube channel click the notification bell so you don't miss a video and click the like button on this video so that youtube knows to promote it to the entire internet alright thanks guys and have a good day [Music] you

Channel: ukramedia

Views: 4,662

Rating: 4.9569893 out of 5

Keywords: Prototype Animations Faster, Animate Faster with the Flex Tool, How Animate Lines & Grids of Objects Faster, Animation Prototyping Process, Rapid Animation Prototyping with the Flex Tool, Zack Lovatt, Flex, Flow, Motion Graphics, motion design, mograph, motion graphics design, adobe after effects, after effects, andrew marston

Id: iLXyVb_l0KY

Length: 35min 53sec (2153 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 07 2021