Animating Icons in Adobe After Effects

hello everyone this is evan abrams and in this after effects tutorial we're animating icons if you're a beginner to after effects or motion design in general i hope these can get you started with some useful tips we'll be examining many methods to help you animate icons of all kinds we've got many many examples to unwrap here so there are chapter markers in the description to help you navigate around it's a real chocolate box around here or maybe like an advent calendar or maybe stocking stuffers it's many small things instead of one big thing that's the idea all the icons you see animated in this video come from today's sponsor yellow images yellow images the number one marketplace for high quality premium mockups creative fonts 360 degree images and a massive creative store full of amazing graphical assets like lettering illustration patterns textures presets brushes and oh yes icons now they're mostly known for their mock-up templates if you're doing branding or product work you can quickly and professionally show clients how your designs will translate into real world context these mock-ups have excellent texture and lighting lending a professional edge and realism to any design presentation so you can spend more time on the core design of a logo or identity and less on how you're going to show it off for this tutorial we're using these lovely holiday icons from the creative store but they have fantastic icon sets on so many themes most of them come in both colored and live line versions all the formats you need to work these up customize them to your needs animate them please anyone making stock assets leave the strokes as strokes i really appreciate it i also appreciate that yellow images are hooking us up with a discount for anything you might want on their site the first 100 people to use the coupon code ec abrams 20. get 20 off when you use the link in the description so please enjoy some of the amazing assets from yellow images when working with icons we need to get the path information from illustrator into after effects i've got the eps file from yellow images open here i tend to work with this kind of file by using the overlord plugin to quickly push the paths into after effects since this is a big part of what i do for clients it makes sense for me to streamline the process with a plug-in but don't worry the process of importing paths even without fancy plugins is not hard at all to do that i like to open up a new file for each icon using a nice large square artboard maybe 1080x1080 then i copy and paste the specific icon in there aligning the artwork to the middle center from there we want to make our plans and see what we need to separate out into distinct layers maybe we need to extend some of the lines depending on the movement we want or the techniques we're going to use for example check out this candle icon if we wanted to animate the saucer first and then the candle we would want to fill in the connecting lines back here and likely apply a fill to the cylinder shape so that when we bring these on later they're visible and then covered as we would expect but in general bringing artwork from illustrator to after effects means breaking these into layers to keep things organized then saving your file with maximum compatibility then importing into after effects once you're in after effects we can choose to convert these vector layers into shape layers if we want to manipulate the paths and get even more granular with our animation which i do i recommend keeping a layer that is the whole flattened artwork just as a reference just in case your animation gets off model as we say also a point about style here i'm working with these mono stroked thin line graphics in black and white so that i'm then able to style them up to have this neat moving gradient on the lines i want kind of a glossy foil sticker look when i'm happy with the animation i pre-compose it and you can see i have a mix of black lines and then some white and transparent voids in here i invert that with the invert effect and then use it as a luma matte for the gradient comp and that comp is a solid with a ramp on it and then colorama to remap that ramp into a more metallic look i like to use colorama because then i can just animate the input phase easily to have this gradient kind of cycle through look at it go this simple little expression just keeps the value increasing without a need for keyframes and then i use a little hue and saturation to make it a little bit more holiday themed so with those general notes on style out of the way let's get specific into these animations up first since we have these mono stroke line style icons our minds might turn right away to write on techniques since we have these strokes as well strokes and just basic factor strokes we can just use the trim paths to bring them on and off that's nothing new but here's something that may save you time and hopefully produce some good results if we take this fairly intensive icon of a snowflake for example as you can see it has many lines breaking this apart and animating each component individually would be taxing but by slipping our trim paths below everything in the contents of this single layer when everything is on a single shape layer we can trim all the paths at once now results will vary as this is the quickest and dirtiest method here we have the strokes set to happen individually that means that right now zero percent of the strokes are visible and then 100 of them are visible and the order that these come on is determined by the order in the hierarchy here and the direction they come on is going to be determined by the direction that you can swap back and forth this little arrow button but this causes a very staccato look for smoother results we can have them all happen at once meaning all the paths at the same time are going to be trimmed from 0 to 100 percent and that's great we don't have a heap of control now granted there are plug-ins you might buy to help you along this process but with just vanilla after effects we can produce some very nice results with just a little bit more effort here's an example of the same icon i've broken it down into branches because that's an element that repeats around here then inside each of those we have these separate layers this is all broken apart in illustrator and brought in individually and it's allowed me to apply different forms of the trim paths different speeds and keep this all nice and modular some of them are expanding out from the middle like these v shapes some are just trimming on the trimming is meant to look like the line is spreading down and this line is fanning out then when we array this duplicating it and then maybe offsetting it in time or maybe harmonizing some of the elements you can see that we have more nuanced control over this write-on than the other quicker methods so my recommendation for write-ons to have the best results is to plan and break apart pieces so you can have them seem to grow from origin points now to make these go away is easy enough we bring them on by keying the end property we make them go away by either retracting that back to zero or by having the start property catch up with it in the case of these v shapes we're actually using the offset of the trim paths to shift that trim path by 180 degrees and then simply reversing the keyframes to pack them up something that works for any kind of icon is a pop-on everybody loves a pop-on at its most basic this is just a change in scale here are three that we can enjoy right now it doesn't really matter what the icon is pop pop pop they all scale up from zero to 100 but within that we have some variation let's look at the graph editor on this one i'm looking at a speed graph i've just pulled the handle here to bring the point of acceleration earlier so things come on at their maximum velocity and then slow that's one look often we want some overshoot though so in this example we look at the value graph and you can see the handles are pulled here and here we go beyond 100 then come back down to it and finally we have more keyframes on this third example we pop in large and then it oscillates back down to 100 i tend to do this manually rather than with expressions or plug-ins because i want to have unreal cartoonish quality to the icon that i can dial in all of these work without having to change anything about the icons at all but obviously not great let's uh pop it up a level shall we first off in mono width icons like these wouldn't it be nice if the lines stayed the same thickness as they popped on maintaining stroke width is a question i get often enough so let's cover it here it's something we can do in a few ways here's an expression that links the stroke width to the scale using a little math you can see that we divide that scale by a hundred and then we divide the current stroke value by that result that means as we deviate from 100 either up or down we'll be scaling or down the stroke to compensate i've used math.abs to get the absolute value one caveat of this is if we scale to zero we'll be dividing by zero which causes an error it won't be too serious since when this is scaled down to zero we don't see it but just be aware and maybe uh don't start your layer scaling up from zero you know you just just trim the layer instead i'll put that expression in the description so you can just copy and paste it these other methods i like a bit more though instead of scaling the layer we can always put the contents of the shape layer into a group and scale that instead now why would i do that if it does the same thing this allows us to pull the stroke out of those groups and put below this main group that is actually doing the scaling that means the paths are scaled first then the stroke is applied so the stroke never actually scales and finally here's a neat little life hack you can use a layer style to apply the stroke since layer styles are frame relative it doesn't really care how the layer scales up and down i've set the stroke here to a very minuscule amount just enough to get some pixels on the screen and then i'm adding the stroke to the layer style sometimes when you want a mono stroke width style what you really want is a layer style okay all this is lovely but pop-ons are still kind of boring then we should break it up and pop in elements in a sequence in these examples we've added more variety and interest and led the eye in a pleasing way by breaking up the icon into elements that logically should be independent and then scaling them in kind of a cascade this is kind of a similar idea to the right on that we talked about break apart we should be broken group together which should be grouped and then pop them on one after the other i also advise that you add in some more properties to your pops get some position and rotation in the mix just a few more keyframes on these properties add a lot of nuance and movement to make it look like it's not just popping abstractly from nowhere it's like it has weight and heft with this position and rotational change as you can see we're still using those overshoot ideas here and even better than just copy and paste these keyframes onto anything this is all happening on a layer level so it doesn't really matter what the content of the icon is so you wrote on you popped on now let's build on building on is the idea that you want one element to lead into the next so in this little hat you can see that one element spawns another and that spawns another that's taking us on that journey as a general strategy that's a great way to approach icon animations consider what element could lead or react or push or drag other elements with it here with this bow we can see one central piece and then the others array out from it and often with build-on animations you need to make use of matte techniques both of these examples use a fair amount of that for the ribbon here you can see we have this large rectangle layer that we're using to obscure the ribbon strands so they start invisible and we just bring them on with position and rotation as they're sliding out from behind it's nothing more than a little set matte effect and a shape layer to bring those things together i'd like to say that all animations are kind of on a spectrum from literal to abstract and so build-ons are no exception here are two examples of the same icon in the first the levels of the brick are being responded to by the other elements i'm using a few position keyframes to make this rectangle push up like the brick is forcing it up i'm having the elements interact like they're literally building a chimney in the second one we're using more write-on elements so that it can be more abstract we don't really care that the lines mean bricks we can respect the literalness of a thing or reject it entirely for purposeful effect but whatever we do we should have a flow and a beat and like a timing to it check out these stockings individually each stocking has some position and rotation change with a fair amount of path changes to get this stretching bouncing feeling i'm doing a bit of matte work with the set matte effect here to make it seem like they spring from behind this board we just turn off the effect when we're clear using the compositing options on the effect but the real thing to talk about here is the timing what is the order of these things for western audiences a little bit easier to read things from left to right so we might array them from left to right or maybe we try like this or maybe something like this where do we want the eye to go it's our principle question if we had text that was going to come on to the right of this thing we'd probably go with that original left to right but if we wanted to keep the eye in the middle we'd probably use a different order then maybe we would want to think about variety and interest so we might mix up the speed so it goes one two three rest and four your choice of pauses and beats has a big impact on the feeling of animation all of these choices are subjective so i'm sure you'd make different and better choices about how things should come on but that's the fun part of the job i think try to stay flexible in your designs so you're able to remix and play with timing to find what fits best with the icons that you might be working with that sounds pretty deep so let's uh continue faking the depth often with icons we want them to feel like they spin or turn in 3d and we can do that in a few ways you'll probably want to combine separate methods to really sell the effect so here we have a texture that's translating using another matte technique this time just the track matte layer using one layer to say where we can see another layer and we're just sliding it horizontally at the same time we have this little ring up at the top that's gonna grow and shrink we're using a technique we talked about before to keep that stroke from warping as we scale the contents of a group together these make it seem like this is spinning add a little bit of rocking with a null and some rotation and i might actually believe it subtle little details can really sell the illusion sometimes another method you might use is parallax moving some elements left other elements right and that makes it seem like particles caught in a snow globe here having the movements all synchronized makes this seem pretty plausible make sure that you have a little interplay and have things go in front of or behind others to really nail it but it's really just changes of position from here to there as this thing kind of rocks a little bit this little star and the texture on the tree are helping too again we're adding up these details to make a convincing effect and finally how about some fake sides i'm using that scale trick again of moving the stroke outside of the group but i'm also scaling from the edge by moving the group's anchor point now there are a few ways you might organize this but so long as things are scaling up and down respectively and it all stays in the middle it can be pretty convincing one thing where this falls down is forgetting that at 45 degrees to the viewer a cube should be wider than either of the faces but not too wide so here we're going from zero to seventy percent to a hundred percent on one of the faces while the other one's going from 100 to 70 to zero the illusion works because of the relative speed and keeping it all lined up check out the speed curves real quick here to see what we're talking about notice they're all the same for the scales and the nulls position that is keeping it kind of here in the middle center and it's the same for the lid of the box as well some real holiday magic i suppose thank you all so much for watching and spending some time this holiday season with me here on this channel if you like what you see please like and subscribe make sure you turn on notifications so you don't miss any new tutorials put up new stuff all the time on visual effects motion design after effects all the good stuff we have a long form series and live shows too that come up here sometimes so make sure you have notifications turned on so you don't miss a single one if you make cool things with these methods i would love to see them share them with me on social media i'm at ec abrams everywhere on the internet i'd love to see what you make with this stuff i'm also doing live streams on behance.net and twitch.tv so if you're into long-form chill explorations of motion design concepts and logo animations come hang out with us on the weekends should you have any questions about the methods we talked about in this tutorial do let me know in the comments i'll try to help you the best i can if you want to see more icon animation methods there's more about this topic you want to know let me know that too we can definitely have a part two a follow up with more advanced methods for animating in different styles that'll do it for me thank you again for watching stay creative be kind to each other and i will see you around the internet

Channel: ECAbrams

Views: 43,219

Keywords: adobe after effects, after effects, adobe, after, effects, fx, mograph, motion graphics, motion, graphics, vfx, visual effects, instruction, tutorial, tut, how to, how, to, help, tips, tricks, after effects tutorial, motion graphics tutorial, vfx tutorial, icon, animation, animate, icons, branding, scale, pop, write, trim, path, build, lines, mono, stroke, keep stroke width

Id: kAjcqAr7C08

Length: 15min 24sec (924 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 14 2020