Attach Arrow Tips to a Shape Path in After Effects CC 2018

Hello animators. Morris Barrier here with a quick tutorial for all of you After Effects CC 2018 users. If you have it you probably know about some of the great new updates if you don't have it, pause this video and I'll wait while you go upgrade, because this awesome tip is useless without CC 2018. Okay, I spend most of my time in shape layers, so when Adobe announced that you can connect a null object to a path I got pretty excited because I'm kind of nerd like that, and what this means is that you can attach other shapes to that null and in this case we're gonna be adding an arrow to a line so let's get started. I'm gonna go ahead and create a new comp and the duration matters most to me. I'll say 5 seconds. What we're gonna do today is add some lines and I think we're gonna draw them on this map. Let me go ahead and tint this and I'm just gonna use these colors that I went ahead and found on Adobe Color Themes which is pretty cool. I like it. I'm gonna go ahead and take that down a little bit to get a little more contrast and if you're wanting to know where I located this image I got it off of pixabay.com it is a great site for some free artwork, whether it's pictures or vector objects. I will leave a link to that in the description below. And let's see, where do we want to go today? Well, I am in Dallas so we're gonna start here I'm going to click and drag and I'm gonna go over here to Uganda, because it's across the ocean and it's the only African country I've ever been to so we're gonna do that. We're gonna click and drag again and kind of create this arc and then maybe you can make that a little higher there. So there is that and we will go ahead and rename this to "line" because I'm original and go down here so let's start by animating this. So we're gonna go ahead and add a trim path to our line we go over here and click on this go to time where it has the timeline values and we're gonna hit four and hit the stopwatch on the end time to get a keyframe. And hit the HOME key and we're gonna go ahead and make that zero. So it is going across as you might expect I'm gonna hit F9 to turn on easy ease for these keyframes. And something I like to do just to make things a little more exaggerated as far as the speed goes is, I hit the graph editor and if you have the speed graph on then it will and you drag this to the right and you drag the one on the right to the left and now you have a little bit more exaggeration in the middle when it's flying across and it really goes slow there at the end. So the new feature in After Effects CC 2018 is not an effect like you might expect or or it's not located down here either. It is located up here and if you go to window, and you can access some of the scripts right here and you'll see this create nulls from path .JSX and we open that. Let me drag it over here and what this tells you right off the bat is that this is a script that's going to be run against the layer. And it may add expressions or it also may add effects to it and what we have are three things here the points that follow the nulls and if I were to click this then you would have a null here and here and wherever you move the null the the path would follow as well and that has some really great uses we won't be using that today and I'd like to create another tutorial another time and then the null following the path that's just the opposite of it so wherever the point is moved to the null will follow also. And then the one we're going to be working with today is this trace path okay. And in order to make this work and not get an error you have to go down into the shape folder and then you have a subfolder and then you have the actual path, and the way you'll know that is because there is a stopwatch beside it. And from here you can click the trace path button and immediately it creates a null. And so I'm dragging the playhead here and you'll notice that the null is not anywhere near the playhead and it kind of just keeps looping through and that's because this script has added two expression controllers, one being the checkbox and the other looks like a slider control. And I don't exactly know why they go ahead and they add loop by default but that is what is added so I'm gonna go ahead and turn that off because I don't need it in this case the second thing you'll notice is that there's a blue shading on the stopwatch so what that means is that there are keyframes and by default it goes puts it in a one second set of keyframes from 0 to 100 on this progress and while it is following this path it's kind of going in his own rate because these keyframes are overriding and pretty much enabled on their own. That doesn't matter to less so what I'm going to do is turn off the stopwatch in that way we're at zero. And I have this expression here and because I've already created a zero to 100 on this trim path I can just drag my pick whip down here to the end value from this progress and now it's going to follow it perfectly and that is exactly what we want. And so we are pretty much set up and it's all done with two keyframes so now we just need to add a shape to the end of this. And I'll show you a shortcut that I would do. I could create a triangle or some like that right here in the comp but really an easier way is just to go ahead and create a new comp. And we'll just say "arrow tip" okay and I will go up here to the polygon tool and if I hit the down arrow key maybe twice go ahead and put a fill on here so I've created my arrow tip here and here back to my line comp. Let me go ahead and change the anchor point on here because the nulls always are at zero zero and so we want it to be right in the middle there. And I'm gonna hit command D or control D on a Mac to duplicate that and the reason why we create our arrow tip in a different comp is because I can select it and I can select the null and I can hold down the Option or Alt key and drag down. And it will do a replacement you'll see that absolutely nothing has happened. Well that's because the opacity on a null is zero so let me turn that up. The arrow is pointing up and the way you have to resolve that is if you go back into the arrow tip and wherever the origin is for this whether it's going from left to right or right to the left you need to fix your orientation of it here. And so in this case I'm going to do the 90 degrees and go back over here and let me do a scale and kind of make this go down just a little bit. It's kind of big and I'm gonna do command shift H to hide and that way I can see a little bit about what's going on. And you'll notice it's not perfectly centered there, and that's because I kind of eyeballed it. And if I go over here to align and I select align to composition and I do the vertical it will kind of move up a little bit and let's see if that fixes it. And that looks a lot better and one thing you'll notice that you don't have to do is go over here to transform > Auto Orient and you'll notice the auto orient along the path is turned off. It doesn't need to be turned on because it is expression driven. So this path is already respecting the orientation of this line. Another great thing about this script is that you can go over here and let's say if you want to make a change and you decide to create another vertices, you can go and add that and you can completely do it however you want to. And because it's all expression driven the null or the the arrow tip or whatever it is you have is going to completely respect that and it will follow in the exact same orientation and it all works there. So that's pretty much all I wanted to show you there. Again it's all dynamic if you want to go in here and I have this little airplane that I want to add and you make it go and it kind of does its thing or so it's kind of that Indiana Jones type look if you're a fan. And you can go down here into the stroke and turn on dashes and you know, turn that up a little ways and then you've got the plane going and its doing its little dashes. This is a very simple tip. I appreciate you watching this, and if it was useful please give me a subscribe or a comment or something like that. Any of that is very much appreciated thank you and have fun animating

Channel: Morris Barrier

Views: 109,047

Keywords: adobe after effects (software), ae, after, after effects, basic, basic training, basics, easy, effects, fast, help, learn, motion, music, simple, slow, slow motion, tips, training, tutorial (industry), CC 2018, After Effects CC 2018, shape path, line path, null object, arrow, arrow tip, arrowhead, null, animation tutorial, after effects tutorial, trim path, attach null to line, attach null to shap, attach null

Id: wt1-A0EYvao

Length: 10min 51sec (651 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 09 2018