Animating Flock of Birds from still image

hey so today on revenge motion graphics we're going to create this a flock of birds okay they're moving birds and we're going to make them out of a still image like this with some transparency and we'll see how we can make this thing fly all right so let's get started here so I just have a new composition here a standard 1280 by 720 and ten seconds long I have this bird here so the first thing I'll do is I'll set up the one bird here so that it can be ready to fly so so what I will do is I'm going to grab this bird here and I'm going to separate it into three sections the left wing the right wing in the body okay so let's go ahead and give that a try here so I'm just going to grab some masks grab my pencil and I'll start with the left wing here so I'll just do a mask around the left wing and let's go ahead and rename this left wing duplicate this guy and let me get rid of that mask and I'll solo and now we'll do the right wing so let's just do a mask around the right wing and let's call this right right wing [Music] okay and finally what we'll do is duplicate this again and make one copy of this just for the body so I'm gonna grab paym ask around these sections of the bird here and I might need to I didn't do a good job with this but I will let me change my mask color so something I can actually see here so I'll take some of these mask points and I will kind of readjust them so they're not incorporating the actual body but rather not incorporating actual other wings something like this perhaps now I'm not going to be too accurate here because in in the long run it won't really matter that much but just as long as you're getting a little bit of accuracy might even at a point in here and just a definitive sort of body here okay and then I'll bring in the wings and see how badly I did with my masks here so let's correct some of this because I don't want these gaps so the left side I will let me also change my mask something that I can actually see here let's do a darker color so here I will reshape my mask kind of so that it incorporates a little bit of the body leaving no gap do the same thing on and the other side here also make this little bit more visible and then we go just something that leaves no gaps had an additional point here make sure all of it is visible all the right wing so I have my right wing my left wing and my body I'll go ahead and rename this body okay so here is the most crucial part of this is going to be the anchor points so for example the left wing I want my anchor point to be right on that edge kind of a little bit inside maybe something like this and this will help with the flap of the wings because that's what we'll do and the same thing with the right wing also move it a little bit inside here right on the edge and the body can pretty much stay where it is okay so now we've got this thing laid out to get body right wing and left wing let's go ahead and add a new null okay now here what we'll do is we'll make everything 3d and here is my no now the null and the body since i centered both these when I brought him in or actually they were already centered and they should pretty much be in the same location as far as their anchor points are concerned so we're good to go there and these two guys like I said before can have their anchor points on the wings right on the edges so we're pretty much ready to go here so what I'm going to do is I'm going to parents the body the left wing and the right wing right to that null okay and I can even rename this null the control or something more descriptive okay so what this Noah is going to do is it's going to sort of control if I move this thing around the entire bird here let me undo that but before we do that let's go ahead and animate some of these wings flapping so what I will do is go to my unified camera tool and switch this into custom view and what this does is allows me to navigate around my scene here okay so I'm not doing anything to the camera I'm not doing anything to the object I'm just kind of navigating around here so I'm just going to navigate until I see a little bit of my wings in perspective okay I can even zoom in here a little bit and I'm using all of this with my unified camera tool which has these orbit tract X&Y and track Z tools okay yep so I can navigate around and the bird here so let's make sure everything is correct okay so yeah the left wings to the left so what I will do is let me just kind of straighten this out a little bit is I'm going to click them on the on my left wing here go to our for rotate okay and what I'm gonna do and by the way I'm doing all of this in what's known as world access mode what this is basically is an option that turns off the local coordinates so if I have my local coordinates turned on these objects could potentially give me different XY and z arrows respective to the local object but if I turn on world coordinates it should sort of respect the world coordinates in the sense that Y is always up and X is always sideways on the red arrow and Z the blue arrow is forward and backward ok so again I would go to a world access mode so if I go onto my left wing here I do want to animate specifically on the y axis okay so I'm going to click on the Y rotation as you can see I can sort of you know create a pretty drastic angle here I'll keep that to minimum maybe what I'll do is I'll start with a let's see let me kind of do a little bit of experimentation here let's try maybe 45 degrees and I'll click on the stopwatch and then I'll go maybe a second forward and I'll switch this to minus 45 so we got sort of a motion it looks like this okay now I can change that obviously but you know we'll see what it looks like before we do that okay all right so let's see I mean just make sure what I'm making sure here by the way is that there isn't a gap here so if I see a gap like this what I could do is double-click on my left wing go into layer mode and maybe just move some of these points inward a little bit so that you know that gap is minimized let's see if that works let's click on our composition here yep so now we don't see as much as of a gap there okay okay and what I will do is set both of these to easy ease so a nice sort of ramping going on that might be a little slow so I'll bring these closer together okay so ultimately what I want to do is use an expression to loop this behavior here so what I will do is often click on the stopwatch here and type in loop out capital o open parentheses type equals quote ping-pong so what this will do is will create a loop that allows me to loop the wings flapping back and forth as much as I a wine here so if I play this back say this continues forever okay so I will do the same thing on the other side they the right wing here and let's go ahead and go to again frame zero and I can mimic this because from my minimal knowledge of birds flying I believe that these are synced the left wing and the right wing are synced in terms of their flapping so what I could simply do is go to my left wing here are for rotation again on the y axis like what I can even do is copy these points so wire rotation at frame 0 paste now what happens is that obviously get this okay which is normal considering we just copy and paste it but what I can do is select these keyframes right click keyframe assistant time reverse keyframes and this will reverse that motions now we have something like this okay looks pretty good and again I'll make sure that the right wing also has an expression there okay so now we're kind of getting somewhere now if I do see some gaps on the right I can also do the same thing you know what I can do is double-click on the right wing and also extend that mask a little bit more okay all right and finally what I'll do is if I kind of move this around what I'm noticing is that some of these wings you need to sort of be aligned better so what I'll do is I'll go to my left wing here again make sure your world access mode is on the right select tool and I'll move this on the x-axis and maybe that's a little too far let me undo that and actually what I'm just gonna do is move it on the z-axis up a little bit so it's not creating so much of a gap or rather it's not offset from the body so much like that click on this guy also on that axis okay so maybe something like this so if I rotate this a load right around see we've got okay so I will actually push this a little bit closer the left wing a little bit closer to body maybe the right wing as well okay listen let's see we got it looks pretty good don't see any gaps or anything really that bad here okay so this is basically the setup of the bird is just kind of flapping around and now what I can do is I'll go back into my active camera which basically is the top kind of a flat view of this and now I can actually click on the control and what I will do again I'm going to click on the rotate tool mixture in world access mode I can rotate this bird around may be facing sort of the the right direction here on my z-axis I'll kind of move it forward or rather rotate it on the z-axis and kind of have it facing diagonally and I can you mean push that a little further so I'm going to again click on my control node here go to my move tool or select tool weather and they move this down so then the wings are sort of outside of the range and I'll go ahead and actually make this smaller as well again all control by the control node okay maybe something like this again if you think that the flapping is a little bit too slow bring those guys closer together and again you know one thing I'm noticing as I did before is a little bit more gap here on the left wing so let's go in on that a little bit and this is something we can fix I believe pretty easily let's just move this down there we go so now I'm not getting as much gap there and this is something that you'll just have to deal with if needed although your results could be a little different if your wings are placed differently okay so there we go now we've got this bird sort of at an angle and I can even if I want let me go our for rotation we can even do a little bit more rotating as needed here so maybe I want it a little bit more on its side like this alright there we go now could have done the same thing with my x y&z rotation but orientation is fine in this case all right let's move this up just a little bit okay so now we've got our sort of flapping bird here now one thing I will do is again this is something that I noticed with Birds is when when their wings are are up there they tend to be lower then when their wings are down so that they're kind of pushing themselves up so maybe what I can also do on the control here P for position create a keyframe there raise these guys up a little bit on the down flap and then bring it back down on the y-axis so now kind of does that again I will easy ease these and I'll copy that same exact loop out expression if I can get to it there we go right on that position of the null so now it kind of looks like this so there is our flapping bird here now again we're not really dealing here with a lot of detail and that's kind of why one of the reasons that we can actually get away with this rather simple motion here so there we go let me go back into my rotation a little bit orientation and I'll kind of want to rotate it a little bit more like this on the x-axis here okay looks pretty good all right and now just so that everything is nice and efficient and all that so we're going to precompose this whole entire thing let's go ahead and go a layer pre-compose and let's call this main bird flapping at least that's what I think that motion is called flapping wings right okay so there it is since we have this as a pre-comp I kind of want to get rid of all this extra space I will double click inside this pre-comp and I just want to get rid of a lot of this extra space here so maybe what I'll do is I'll click on my region of interest now this has a lot of different uses one of them is you can actually draw out an area for an object in this case and maybe we'll get rid of some space this way now I'm gonna make sure there's enough room for the the wings as well as the bottom nothing gets clipped here and then what I'll do is go to composition crop come to region of interest okay so now we've got that bird pretty much only in our scene I can also move the bird up here a little bit or I can command K increase the heights a little bit as well now since I know what I'm gonna do with this I do want to make sure that after the crop I do have an exact square width and height this will help with the the next step which is going to be particles alright so there we go and let me rename this rather than com2 I'll just call this flying birds and you can see some of the properties I have here there we go so now we've got our bird here okay so now I'm gonna make a new solid here doesn't matter what color make sure its make a comp size and I'll add an effect CC particle worlds and I'll put this on to my solid so by the fault and then we turn my bird off here I'll go to off transparency this is what we have you know not really useful for our purpose and we're gonna do a lot of tweaking to this so that we get birds flying so I will do a solid background here and make it kind of a gray background put that on the bottom and let's just rename this BKG for background and for our particles here let's go ahead and get started here so I'm gonna open up a lot of these things let's do let's twirl down physics particles all that stuff so first thing I'll do is I'm going to if I play this back things aren't going really fast and things are not going in the right direction so let me change this to 50% first thing I'll do is I'll change my animation from explosive to direction and now I have sort of it go in sideways here then I will increase my radius of my producer here so kind of is doing this thing and I will change the velocity let's bring that down to maybe a 0.1 don't really need gravity in this case zero and we get something like this again that really what we want let's also for right now zero add extra angle and extra and extra angle and I'm going to change my particle type to textured quad polygons so what this will do basically is ask me under the texture what layer they won't do I want to use as my texture and again we're gonna use main bird flapping so I'll do main bird flapping and if you play this back let me go to fit we get all these birds kind of you know not really flying they're just kind of being thrown around here so let's fix all of that so what I will do is I will for right now increase my birth and death size so if I switch these to larger values maybe even something like a one for each okay and again we get this kind of crazy thing going on here so what's happening here is that this is adding a lot of rotation it's adding a lot of unnecessary stuff to all of our scene here so I'm going to 0 some of these out so let's see we're going to zero out a couple things here first thing we'll do is we're going to zero out rotation speed and initial rotation so they're all kind of flying the same direction okay and then we've got some other problems here one is our there's way too many of these guys so our birth rate let's just limit that down it's like a point one okay so that's going to give us just a couple of these birds and a lot longevity we'll crank that up to maybe fifteen so now we've got something like this so obviously we're getting there but there are there problems here so one of the things is there's a lot of opacity going on a lot of opacity animation which I don't want I will go down to the bottom and I will set my max opacity to 100% and more importantly I will go to opacity map and this is basically why it's sort of fading in and fading out at the birth and the death I will take my pen tool here or rather if I just hover over this I get a pencil and I'm just going to make this one constant color basically like this so what this is basically is a way to control opacity but if it's something that is a constant color it should not have any opacity change okay so this one we have okay so it looks better not great but better next thing I'll do I'll go to my position X and I'll move my emitter sort of out of you here because I don't want my birds to sort of appear right in the middle of my center of my screen here so now I have these birds coming from someplace okay now there's what still wait too many of these guys and I can't get go lower than point one like I can't put in a point O five because it will still take me to point one but what I can do is I can animate this so for example if I click on the stopwatch and let it play out I can maybe at this point change this to zero and what this is going to do is just give me a couple of birds and then stop committing okay now if there's two little birds I can always move this further out and that way it will go to zero a little bit later while still emitting some of these birds okay so maybe what I'll do is I'll push this out a little more here okay so maybe something like that alright and now the main another problem is is they're all flapping sort of robotically at the same time and that is because what's happening is that the particle itself is taking its particle its current texture time which is current so let's change this from start and now we have slight variation to them kind of flapping around okay still not as much as we want so maybe what I'll do is I'll increase a couple things and one of those things I will do if you go to the extras this is just one variation of the randomness here I can mess around with this a little bit and get a couple other different variations so from there happy with the first one maybe something like that perhaps and since they're all still kind of uniform more or less I can also increase what we basically zeroed out before and that is the extra angle so I can increase that a little bit and that's going to do is sort of randomize a little bit of their fly pattern here okay and maybe I'll go back and increase some velocity as well then we kind of brought it down so let's just do a point two five yeah that's a little better that gives them a little bit more life I think than just having them it was so slow okay so now we're getting a little a better result here okay and you can also play around kind of to taste here for example I can you know if I increase my radius here you know the birds will have a much wider range across my screen here or I can bring that down to kind of a tight area and have it just in the center going left to right so it's kind of up to you okay now one thing that I know I'm noticing also is that some of these birds are still not quite as dark as I want them to be only go to fit here so I'm gonna add a new adjustment layer and let's put a effect color correction curves and what I'll simply do is increase the contrast of this a little bit so the birds are more or less black here there we go so now we've got a little bit more definition at least in terms of contrast okay all right and the one thing one other thing I'll add to this for my adjustment layer I'm going to add something called CC force motion blur what this is going to do is gonna create motion blur because at a hard time actually turning on the motion blur my main birds flapping here and have it transfer to this so instead I think a workaround is put that in the adjustment layer and it will create a little bit of a motion blur for these birds it'll take a little longer to kind of give you a preview but not too bad okay so we're looking pretty good here and there's some other kind of properties we can mess around with in our particle system for example I can always go back into my scatter settings there is scatter I can increase that a little bit what that's going to do is again randomize a little bit more the motion here it'll also bring some of the birds closer to camera some of them away from the camera in this case a virtual camera and so you know some things that you might want to look out for is things like these birds kind of flapping close to each other because these look kind of robotic so again you can always mess around with a random seed and have a different variation on the flights all right so that's the basic tutorial so you can actually use this to have you know generate your own birds bats butterflies you know whatever you guys are into you know and let me switch this Y radius back to where I had it before and you feel free to play around with this because ultimately it's just a very non-destructive way of creating these things all right well thanks for joining me for another episode of revenge motion graphics feel free to comment to like subscribe and all that and I'll be making more of these as I go along [Music]

Channel: RevEng Mograph

Views: 24,009

Keywords: After Effects, Particles, Animation, VFX, Adobe, Birds, Flying, Motion Graphics, Tutorial

Id: HzR-kPdrC_4

Length: 29min 40sec (1780 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 24 2018