Apple Motion 5: Laser Tutorial

hi this is simon from tokyo productions and welcome to another tutorial for motion 5 and today we're going to be looking at creating this laser effect so let's have a look at how it's all done what I wanted to do first of all was explain the general principle of how to create the paths that the laser is going to follow if you've done my weld tutorial you'll know that I used a technique where we went into Adobe Illustrator and we exported the paths from there but I wanted to show you how we could do it inside motion and it's really not too difficult probably a lot quicker in the long run so what I've done here is I've made a guide letter and to do that I've used my text tool and I've used this font here which is kind of fairly unusual what I've done is a come over to appearance selected outline gray color and I've set the width to 2 what I've also done for the purposes of this tutorial is to create a grid that shows you how this is going to work you don't need to do this but it'll just hit help to explain the process right I'm going to turn off the grid just one second and I want to come down here and I would just select my Bezier tool and then I would come up here and I want to show HUD and I'm going to use this nice yellow outline color and I'll have a width of 4 so what I'm going to do is I'm going to use my guide letter and I'm going to draw around it so I'm going to start on this top right hand corner here start at this easy bit here where we've got these nice corners so I'm going to click here click here click up here cliff up here and click down there and because I'm simply clicking to add points what I'm getting is linear corners and those of course will be nice and sharp but what am I going to do when I come to my curves here so this is we're going to turtle the grid and what we actually need to do is we need to find in this instance the horizontal and the vertical tangents so these these lines here where the curve of the circle with this horizontal line and the vertical line in this case and so on as we go around the shape so let me just click here and what I'm going to do is not just click simply but I'm going to click and drag and I'm going to drag horizontally because we've got this horizontal tangent and then I've got to come over here which is where our vertical meets our curve and I'm going to click and drag and again I'm going to drag vertically to get that curve to match up and then I'm going to come over here which is again where we've got this horizontal tangent clicking and dragging come down here well we've got a vertical one come down here we've got a another horizontal one and I'm going to click over here and that's getting a slightly wrong but I'm not going to worry too much about that because we are going to revisit that so that was just a click because we've reached another corner come in here and click and this is the easy bit as we did before we're just going to click in all of those corners and then here we've got our horizontal tangent so we're going to click and drag here we've got another vertical tangent so again to click and drag over here we've got another horizontal one so we're going to click and drag horizontally so vertical one here click and dragging horizontal one here oops probably gone too far there and let's just click to close it on up so if I turn off my grid you can see we haven't really done too badly there if I turn on my overlays we can now just come in here and adjust these handles as necessary so I'm going to drag that one out like that make the curve match come to this one here just shorter that one shorten this one a little bit as well and come down here and I'll pull that one out so that curve matches a bit better a little bit of an anomaly here maybe we just roll that over just a little bit like that and despite the fact that's quite a complex shape that was very easy to do because we were looking for these horizontal and vertical tangents and simply using those to position our points so the key thing about this process is that we're using the absolute minimum number of points to define the shape and that's how we can get these nice smooth curves and do everything with the minimum effort if you start adding too many extra points it becomes much harder to control the shape then when you've got these nice big sweeping curves like that okay so that's our guide example let's just now turn on our text that we want to use for the purposes of this tutorial and again I've done the same trick and I've created this outline using the text tool and in this instance I've used a font called cgf locust resistance and if you go to dafont.com you can download that for yourself if you want to use the exact same font as i'm using so essentially we're going to do the same thing as we did before and in this instance as you see we've got lots of nice right angles which are going to make life pretty easy so let's again come down to our Bezier tool select that and as we know we're just going to do the easy bit of marking on these points and I'm going to come here to where that curve begins and now hang on what do I do I don't actually have an available vertical or horizontal tangent for this but actually what it is is it's a 45-degree tangent so if you imagine there's a 45 degree line touching this curve here that's where I'm going to add my Bezier curve so click a drag and then we're going to click here where the curve ends and we'll click to close it on up but again we can just do a little bit of adjustment of that handle as necessary so although the general rule was to use horizontal and vertical tangents in cases like this you will need to be using 45-degree tangents so here you go I've just added a 45-degree line so you can see what I mean and if we turn on our I realize you can see that that is indeed the point at which the 45-degree tangent is meeting that curve so that's what we're doing in this instance so I went waste your time with all the other letters they're obviously just the same principle the a is very easy it's all just corners the s again we've got these 45-degree tangents at each corner those are easy and there's only one thing I need to point out which is that the e although in our minds it's one single letter for the purposes of this process we need to treat it as two separate shapes so we've got our main shape here and then we've got the cross bar here and we'll need to draw separate shapes for both of those now I've shown you an example where I've used the text tool to create the template but of course you could bring in some artwork if it's a a logo with some that's not text based you could equally well bring in that and use it as a guide so this technique is is pretty adaptable okay so I just need to talk about our project here let's come up to the project properties as usual 1920 1080 24 frames a second and I've made it 10 seconds long right the next thing we need to do is come up here to object create a new group and then we want to come into the library generators and we want to look for the lens flare and we're going to bring it into the new group here let's call this group flares and what we should also do is go through and label all these text objects so I won't waste your time do that but you'll see very shortly that I'll have labeled all of these you'll see that I've labeled the bar of the e as a bar and the other bit a mane okay so our lens flares here what we need to do is we need to come over to the inspector and let's just adjust the size down to 20 and intensity up to two and let's just increase the fall-off all the way up to ten so it's not spreading out too much so now I'm going to come to the library I'm going to come to behaviors basic motion and I'm going to grab motion path and I'll add it to that lens flare and then I'll come to the inspector path shape I'm going to select geometry and here you'll see it now has a shape source well what I'm going to do is I'm going to take Bezier L and add it to the shape source and if we play that you'll see that that lens flare now travels around the shape that we've made what I'm going to do is I'm going to duplicate this so we've got six of them so right click duplicate right click duplicate right click duplicate right click duplicate what are we up to we're up to five and one more right click duplicate so then we just need to name all these so we've got one for each letter segment so I'll come back when I've done that so those are all labels then we want to come to lens flare a come to the behaviors I will just drag the Bezier a into the shape source well again come to the lens let s come to behaviors drag the S shape into the source well come to email behaviors drag the e main shape into the source well come to the motion path for the ebar and drag the ebar into the sauce well come to the motion path for the R and drag the shape into the source well so now we play let's just follow around those paths as you would expect I just like to put out one thing which is that obviously the start point for all of these paths is the point that we chose as the start point when we were drawing the shapes but supposing for example with the L here if i zoom in we wanted to start not at that top left-hand corner but this at corner here so what I could come do is come to my busy a L let's show overlays and let's come to edit points and if I right-click on this point here I can now set that as the start point and you'll see that the lens flare pops over there and the animation will start from that point so just think about doing that for any start points you're not happy with okay now we need to look at the overall pace of the animation now you're probably not going to be using the word laser you'll be using some text of your own choosing but with a really important thing is to carefully think about the timings for the right on of each letter before you go too far with the project and once you've got your timings you need to make sure that you write them down so let's concentrate on the L for a second I'm going to come to 20 frames on the ton line I'm going to come to the motion path for the L and I'm going to hit a on the keyboard and if we press play you'll see the lens flare moves around the path in just 20 frames okay so what I'm also going to do is now come to the L shape comes to library come to behaviors shape and I'm going to add a write on behavior to the L again let's come to friend 20 and with the write on behavior selected let's hit o and if we now play you'll see that that those two things neatly follow each other what what we need to do is we need to add a right on to all of those characters servers very quickly do that this let's come to frame 20 let's select the right on for the a character and hit I on the keyboard that'll shorten it to start at that point let's select the motion path for the lens flare a and hit I on the keyboard then I'm going to step forward to frame 50 and I've got my motion path selected I'm going to hit oh I'm going to come down to the Bezier right on and I'm going to hit oh let's look at what's happening there so e.l rights on and the a rights on now you'll notice I've chosen 20 frames for the L to write on and 30 frames for the a to write on and that's because the a is a much longer path so you Rindge be thinking about the distance the effect has to travel for each of your letter paths and time yourself out accordingly okay let's come back to frame 50 again we're going to concentrate on the letter S well select the right on for the letter S and hit I well select the motion path for the lens flare s and hit I then let's step forward to frame 90 because I want this to take place over 40 frames got our motion path selected so I'm gonna hit o and again we'll come down to the right on and we'll also hit oh let's play that let's come back to frame 90 we're now on the outside of the e so let's select the e main right on and hit I let's select the e main motion path and hit I let's come forward to frame 120 and hit ohh so that's trimming the motion path for the e main let's select the email right on and again hit oh there select the right on for the ebar and hit i let's select the motion path for the e bar and hit i and oh that's just a really short distance that that has to travel so I'm going to make this happen in ten frames so I'm going to move forward to 130 and hit o to trim the motion path come down to the ebar right on and hit Oh let's select Lee right on for the Bezier are the motion path for the lens flare are and that's step forward to frame 160 hit o to trim the motion path come down to the right on and hit oh and now if we play that whole thing for the beginning we can see how that's all working so we also need to trim the lens flares so they start and enter the right places so let's step forward to frame 20 I'm going to hit o with the lens flare left L selected and then I'm going to select lens flare for the letter A and hit I fare let's step forward to frame 50 and hit o for the lens flare a move up to the Ed's let s hit I step forward to frame 90 hit OH select the lens flare II main hit I step four - 120 hit OH select the e bar hit I step four to 130 hit Oh select the lens flare are hit I step forward to 180 because what I want to do is I want it to fade out this one so I'm going to just hit o at 180 and let's come over to the library behaviors basic motion I love you to add a fade in fade out to that lens flare there and let's set the fade in time to zero so that's all just fade as it hits its final so all in all that looks like this so not just a word about timings if you've got a very long word and you don't really want it to last this long have a think about maybe just starting your animation halfway through it'll still look perfectly nice what you don't really want to do is go any much faster than that I'm already going because otherwise the effect is just not going really going to be visible or plausible but if you want something short you just always start in the middle or even just right on the last few characters and it'll look pretty nice okay so where are we we've got our lens flares we've got our right on and all that it's all looking pretty nice but we still need to create our laser so let's close up that flares group and the guide text group and let's come to the top here let's come to objects a new group I'm going to come down here and select the circle tool come up here window show HUD turn off outline turn on fill and let's make that white and I'm going to hold down the shift key and drag a small circle notice how in 5.2 small circles and they're not really circular there's a good reason for that it's just a little bit annoying but you are getting advantages so I'm not going to complain too much okay let's Center that up and let's select that come over to object come down to replicate okay so we've made a replicator out of that circle let's select line for our shape let's increase the number of points up to 100 just for now my start point I'm going to set to 0 on X and minus 540 on Y so it's done here at the bottom of the screen I'm going to set the x end point to 0 and I also want to make this 3d so click on the 3d switch what I'm now going to do is I'm going to select the endpoint and then I'm going to right click add parameter behavior link and here under the source I'm going to at one of the knee flares and I'm going to link it to lens flare l and under source parameter I'm going to select properties transform position all and now let's have a look what happens there my replicator end moves along that path along with everything else all rather neat ok so let's just make a little bit of an adjustment there let's come to the replicator itself let's come down to the scale and let's reduce that down to maybe about fifty it depends on how big you've made your original circle and I'll increase the number of points the trick here is to find the number that's going to give us a smooth enough line without actually overdoing it because the more points you add the more it's going to take to render so that's really not too bad 150 maybe 175 let's go for that okay so now that's all well and good it follows around the L but then it stops so how are we going to make this all work but what we need to do is we need to take that link behavior and we need to duplicate that so we've got six instances of it so right click duplicate right click duplicate right click duplicate right click duplicate or we up to five right click duplicate and always a good idea just to name these so come back when we've named them so that's link L okay so they're labels as per our shapes then what we need to do is we need to just update all of those source objects with the appropriate lens flare paths so let's drag the a into like a scroll up and let s into link s e main into linkie made ebar into link ebar and finally the are into that one there so this is not quite right either because it's only the R that's operative so we just need to go through and we need to trim these so first of all we're going to come to frame 20 which was where the a begins we're going to select the link a behavior and hit I then we're going to come forward to 50 frames where the S begins select the link s and hit I come forward to frame 90 we're ve main begins hit I on the link email come forward to frame 120 select the licky bar hit I come forward to frame 130 and select link are and hit I and what I'm just going to do is up just for the purposes of showing you how this is playing I'm going to reduce the number of points down to about 100 and then we can see that on the run so now my laser is drawing all my letters so just going to come to a frame 160 with the replicator selected I'm going to hit oh just so they'd pops off at that point once it's dice drawing okay so now we've got the animation sorted out we need to look at the styling of the whole thing so I'm going to open up my text group I'm going to select all my letters so that's shift clicking them first in the last come to these shape and here on the outline brush color I'm going to make that white that up and come over here select filters color correction I'm going to select colorize and add that to that guide text group come over to the inspector click on the black make that black click on the remap white and make that something like that then I'm going to take this guide text group and I'm going to right click make clone layer and I'm going to set the blend mode for this to linear Dodge then I want to come over to the library I want to come to filters blur Gaussian blur and and that come over to the inspector let's have a mount of 15 let's come over to the library again what I want to do is again onto the blur category I want to select channel blur and I'll add that above the Gaussian come back over to the inspector let's turn off blur red and blue green and let's set the amount all the way up to 64 like that then I'm also going to come to over to the library filters color correction add a levels above that inspector it's going to crunch down the RGB just a bit like that and I'm also going to select the Alpha and I'm going to punch that up as well something like that so obviously we also need to style our laser itself so let's select the replicator here let's come to the library let's come down in this instance and use a glow so to the gloww category add a glow to the replicator group I'm going to set a radius of five and let's turn the threshold down to zero let's duplicate that glow so right click duplicate let's increase the radius to 40 and the opacity let's reduce to 0.5 let's duplicate it again right click duplicate this time let's set the radius all the way up to a hundred and just want to select that a replicator group and we need to adjust its blend mode and we'll offset will set that to linear dodge of that so it's all burning through nicely then we'll come over to the library filters color correction we'll grab a levels add that above the glows there and let's select the blue Channel and crunch down on that so we're getting nice blue glow like that and finally let's come back to the library let's filters blur and let's add our channel blur above that again let's turn off the red and the greed we can turn off the alpha in this instance and you can see if I turn that on and off how that's made our blow nice and blue we still got a nice bright core okay so that's a start we're going to do is I've brought in a background texture you can bring in anything of your choosing I brought that into a new group right at the back there at the moment this is not looking right at all because we need to add some lighting so let's just tidy things up a bit let's close down that flares group and this group here that I've made just above the text let's call that glow close that down as well and this replicator group let's call laser and close that up as well close up our background and let's come to the top here object new light so I want to set the intensity to 300 and then I want to link it to the path of the laser so in order to do that I'm going to come over to property click on the position right click add parameter behavior link and from this menu here to I can select flares lens flare L and now that's following along that path there can't really see it because we need to offset it on Z so let's come down to the Z offset here and type a value of 15 and you can see that's now brought it sufficiently for forward from our background that it's illuminating just enough and following around like so what we need to do is we need to duplicate it so it follows the a so let's right click duplicate and here under our link let's go to the two menu again say like flares select lens flare a we want to come to frame 20 we want to hit AI with the light selected so it doesn't appear until that point again we need to be careful to label these just so we know exactly what's happening so right click and duplicate it again well call it s step forward to friend 50 hit I will come to the behaviors under the two men you will select flares and flare s again we'll duplicate it right click duplicate so II main step forward to frame 90 hit I with the light selected come to the behaviors under the two menu flares email step forward to frame 120 well duplicate this right click duplicate call it e bar and again behaviors to flares ebar finally well step forward to frame 130 oh sorry I forgot to do something there 120 we need to shorten that by hitting I on the keyboard there step forward 200 thirty right click duplicate I'll call this light our we'll hit I'll the keyboard to shorten it select the link under the two menu flares let's let our so there we go that's all our lights positioned and animated let's turn off the 3d overlays and we can have a quick round preview so now that's looking something like this okay and the last thing I'd like to do is to add a camera so I'm going to come up here to object new camera and I want to make sure these groups have become 3d I don't know why that didn't work there 3d group for the laser 3d group for the flares 3d good for my glow there and 3d group for my guide text and my background was already 3d I think that's something to do with my preferences here come over yes if you look here now we've got a new option under preferences where it says new to full group type and I'd selected 2d for some reason the I think the default is automatic so you probably won't see that your these groups will automatically be 3d onesie once you add the camera I want to add the lights rather so you won't need to manually set them to 3d atlases I've done there okay so now I'm going to just quickly select the laser group come to properties and come down to lighting I don't want the light the laser to be influenced by the lighting so I'm going to turn that off I want you to be nice and bright and I think I might do the same thing with the flares turn that off and again with the glow turn that off and with my text turn that off so it looks as though it's self-illuminated okay then I'm going to slow my camera going to come to the library I'm going to come to behaviors the camera setting section and I'm going to select sweep and and I'm also going to select dolly and add that let's select the sweep behavior come to the inspector I'll set the start to minus 45 and the end to zero and the speed I'll set to decelerate so it gently relaxes into its final position I'm going to duplicate that sweep so right click duplicate and I'm going to select the axis as being X and I'm going to step start value as 0 and the end as -10 I'm going to come to my first frame come to properties and I'm going to twirl up in the rotation and I just want to set that X rotation to tend to start off with and so we'll be looking up at it like that I think that's a nice look like so and I'm just going to select the dolly let's have negative 250 for the distance I'm just going to select the camera properties 12 in the position here I'm going to set the Z value to 120 for the end just so we're not running off the edge of our background so we'll be gradually moving out and panning as we go and we just need to finally select our laser come into the laser group there select the replicator replicator controls and as we talked about we need to increase those points so that's line is continuous rather than dotted so let's try for 200 and see if that works I think that's going to be pretty good just one of the small detail we need to take care of and that's to come over here to the start point and adjust the Z position so it's a little bit close to camera so let's enter value of 500 for that and where that means is that when we're looking at it from the side it's going to have a little bit of 3d depth to it if you think that laser is a little bit too wide you can just adjust that scale we could go for 40 that's maybe going to be a little bit better I think I'll probably prefer that so let's have a quick round preview it's looking something like this now the key thing I would advise you with this project is to think about your characters and the timings and write them down on a piece of paper once you're happy with the write on speed write the numbers down on a piece of paper so you know exactly where you are and you can keep referring to it and without that you will be seriously lost also you really do need to label each individual element otherwise again you'll get lost so I think probably seen it's a little bit labor-intensive but once you get into the routine of building it you'll probably find it's quite fun there we go thanks very much indeed for watching and I hope to see you again on the next one

Channel: Simon Ubsdell

Views: 84,050

Keywords: laser, motion, cut, title, after effects

Id: ocEGZnuS7NM

Length: 35min 21sec (2121 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 25 2016