Animate Shape Layers in After Effects - AE Fundamentals

in this video of the after effects fundamentals series I'll go over how to create and manipulate shape layers a lot of motion designers will either work with an illustrator or create their own artwork in either Adobe Illustrator or photoshop and then bring that artwork into After Effects we'll be looking at that in a later video in this series but for now let's look at what you can do with shape layers remember that I have these handy visual guides that go with all the videos in this after effects fundamentals series thank you the shape tool is up in this top toolbar if you click and hold you can get to other shapes let's just start with the rectangle tool so I'm going to just click and drag in my composition to create a rectangle if you want a perfect square you can just hold down the shift key then to get back to the selection tool just hit V on the keyboard or navigate to it here you can customize the appearance of your shape by clicking on the color next to fill to change the fill color or you can add a stroke by bringing this number up and you can also change the color of it here and if you click on where it says fill there are a few more options so if you don't want to fill you can just select the none button if you want a solid color you would choose this one or you can add things like gradients or radial gradients and the same thing goes for the stroke if you have your layer selected and you use the shape tool or the pen tool to create a new shape it's going to add it to that layer so now you can see that there's two rectangles underneath contents if you want to create a shape that's on its own layer just make sure that you don't have any other layers selected and then you can make a new shape and this one will be on its own layer to rename a layer just make sure it's selected hit return or enter and then you can type in the name and hit return or enter again to save that name [Music] if you click off of your layer and then click back on it you can see this crosshatch here and this is the Anchor Point so this is where the shape is going to move around so if I go into my transform properties and then change the rotation of this you can see that it's rotating around that Anchor Point so before you do any animation it's best to move the Anchor Point where you want it to be and to do that you want to use the Pan behind tool which is why on the keyboard so you can move this anywhere on the shape or even off of the shape and that's where your shape is going to Pivot around so I'm going to move this to the center and if you want to snap the Anchor Point into place you can just hold down command and that will enable it to snap to any of the center points the corners or the direct Center if you had already animated the layer and then you decided that you wanted to change where the Anchor Point is it might actually affect your animation that's why it's good to choose where you want the Anchor Point to be before you start animating [Music] let's look at what all is in the shape layer in the timeline so under contents there is rectangle one and then there's rectangle path if we toggle that down you can see that you can adjust the size here and remember that any property with a stopwatch is something that you can animate here's a handy thing about the size property so say that you wanted to animate your shape scaling up so something like that but you don't want the strobe to get bigger at the same time so see how the stroke is also growing along with the shape instead of animating the scale property you could just animate the size of the shape and the stroke will always stay the same thickness notice how the position here is zero zero this is the relative position whereas this position that's under transform is in relation to the whole composition this position is in relation to the shape itself so we can kind of offset the shape from its Anchor Point by adjusting this position and you can also adjust the roundness of the corners so you can even make a circle by bringing that all the way up so again anything with a stopwatch you can animate so for example you could animate a circle to a square by animating the roundness I'm going to delete these keyframes for now [Music] if you toggle down next to stroke there's a bunch of things that you can adjust and even animate relating to the stroke and the same thing goes for the fill so you could even animate the color changing by going in and changing the color like this if you don't want the fill or the stroke you can click up here and then click the none button or you can also just click the property down in the timeline and hit delete if you decide that you want to add a fill or a stroke you can go to this add button and then choose fill or stroke you can also choose gradient fill or gradient stroke and then once you've added the new stroke you can adjust it so maybe change the color and the weight here notice how when I added this stroke it moved it to the bottom of this layer stack so this is putting the stroke behind the fill of the rectangle so if I move it up you can see that it was covering up half of the stroke before so keep in mind that the layer order here makes a difference [Music] under this rectangle there's another set of transform properties so if you open that up you can see that a lot of these are the same as the transform properties for this layer with a few added extras you can get creative with using these transform properties versus these ones and there's times when you might want to use one or the other or both but that's going to be a more advanced topic so for now just know that shape layers have two sets of transform properties and when you're just starting out you probably usually want to just animate the transform properties for the entire layer so just the regular transform not the transform rectangle or whatever shape foreign if you click and hold the shape tool there's other shapes that you can make so let's make a polygon then under the shape layer in the Timeline under polystar 1 and then polystar path one there's a bunch of different properties that you can animate so you could make this into a triangle by going down to three points or you could bring this all the way up to make almost a circle and you can animate between these two because remember anything with a stopwatch can be animated and then you can also adjust things like the outer roundness which can be kind of fun and you can switch between the polygon and a star with this drop down or you could also just make a star with the star tool and notice how stars have a few more things that you can adjust so you can just play around with all these properties to discover what they do and make some fun shapes if you want to explore other things that you can do with shape layers just go to this add button so click this little triangle here and all of these shape operators are things that you can add on to your shape so for example if I add a pucker and bloat to this shape you can see that it's kind of given it a more organic look almost and you can change the amount to get some really crazy stuff [Music] just like illustrator and Photoshop After Effects also has a pen tool it's right next door to the shape tool so I'm going to select the pen tool if you've never used the pen tool before there's a little bit of a learning curve to it but let me show you the basics of how to use it so to start drawing with the pen tool you just want to click to create a point and then move your pen tool and then you can click to create another point and that'll just create a straight line if you want to create a curved line you just want to click and then hold and drag out these handles and then you can always adjust the handles later and now to join the shape you just want to hover over your first point and you'll get that little circle icon next to your pen tool and then you can click on that point to join the path and now we have a closed shape then with either the pen tool still selected or you can go back to the selection tool you can adjust these handles to adjust the curve or you can move these anchor points to make a different looking shape if you decide you want to add a point to your shape you can just go back to the pen tool and then hover over the line and it will probably guess that's what you want to do it'll see that little plus icon next to your pen tool so you can just click and add a point if you decide you want to delete a point if you click and hold on the pen tool there's other options here so you can go to the delete vertex tool and then just click this with the minus symbol next to your pen tool to delete it if you want to add handles to make a pointy Corner rounded or take away the corners to make a rounded Corner pointy you need convert vertex tool so if you go up to the pen tool click and hold then you want to select the convert vertex tool and then with this you can click to make this pointed Corner rounded so it'll add those handles and then if you use the selection tool to adjust these handles they'll stay locked together but if you use the convert vertex tool to adjust the handles they won't be locked together so you can see that these handles are not locked they can make different shapes that are independent of each other or if you were using the selection tool and you don't want your handles to be stuck together like this you can hold down the option or ALT key and let's say we want to make this point more pointy so to take away the handles you can also use the convert vertex tool you just click to zap those handles I'm going to go back to the selection tool with v on the keyboard if we toggle down the layer in the Timeline under contents shape one and then path one there's a stopwatch next to the Path property which means that we can animate the shape of this changing with the Path property so I'm going to click the stopwatch to start setting keyframes and then move forward in time and now if I were to try to click on one of these vertexes or anchor points to adjust it I'm going to end up moving the whole shape because all of them are the solid Square so that means that they're all selected so what I need to do is just select one of them so I'm going to click off of the shape layer then click back on where it says path one now the path is selected but the anchor points themselves are not selected so now I can just select one Anchor Point and move it and then maybe I want to like adjust this and you can see that when I adjust the path another keyframe is automatically created at my playhead and so now I've created this animation so this can be super powerful to animate all kinds of cool morphing shapes [Music] at some point you'll probably need to animate a line in After Effects so to create a line you just want to use the pen tool you can click to create a first point and then hold down shift to make sure your second point will be perfectly horizontal or the same would work for vertical and now we've created a line I'm going to go back to the selection tool and this line actually has a fill color which we don't need because it's a line it's also not showing up but I'm just going to click where it says fill and just select none just so we don't accidentally see that later now let's toggle down into the shape and look at some of the stroke properties so under stroke you can change the color opacity stroke width and you can also change the end of the line so butt cap is going to be how it is now or you can make the ends rounded like that the line join is for the corner so you can have rounded Corners beveled corners or just pointy Corners which is the default but obviously for a line there are no corners and then you can also add things like dashes so if you hit this plus button next to dashes you can add dashes and then it'll give you two more properties so you can adjust these the offset amount will just move the dashes along the line and if you click the dashes button again you will have an option for the gap between the dashes you can keep clicking this button multiple times to get different size dashes and different size gaps I'm just going to delete all of these dashes and gaps to show you the next option you can also add tapered Strokes so if you toggle down next to taper first you need to either set a start length or an end length so let's just make this like 50 of the line and then you can adjust the start width so you can make it a little bit wider 100 will obviously be just how your line was before or you can bring it all the way down to zero to make that really tapered easing will just kind of make that more of a curve rather than a flat line that increases those are the basics of these settings you can play around with them to get exactly what you're looking for I'm just going to click this reset button to get rid of the taper and let's close that up and the last option is wave so with this you can add a wavy effect to your line and you have different options to adjust the wavelength and you could also adjust the phase and remember any other properties with a stopwatch can be animated I'm also going to reset the wave and show you one more thing that might be useful to do with lines I'm going to close up the stroke and then let's go up to this add button and go down to trim paths and then let's toggle this one open and what trim pass do is allow you to have the line draw on and off so right now the line is all the way on so the start value is at zero and the N value is at 100. so to animate this on let's bring the end down to zero and then set a keyframe for the end value to be zero right here and then let's move the playhead and then just bring the N value all the way up to 100 and now the line will animate on to animate this off coming from the left to the right you could animate the start value so the start will be zero to 100 or if you want the line to start drawing off as it's drawing on you could just overlap these keyframes like this so there's a lot you can do with trim pass but this is just the very basics in the next video in this series we'll talk about parenting in After Effects it's basically like connecting layers thanks for watching until next time happy animating [Music]

Channel: Animation Explained

Views: 53,805

Keywords: Adobe After Effects, Animation, 2D Animation

Id: mKvYoLU1gIo

Length: 15min 46sec (946 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 24 2022