Connect Dots - Adobe After Effects tutorial

hello everyone this is Evan Abrams and in this After Effects tutorial we're going to connect the dots so what does that look like well it looks like all of these dots with lines connecting them and we don't use any particle systems or anything and it's pretty simple to start us off I'm going to go ahead and create a new composition just call it you know something probably like the dots exploding gar just like that should be good it does really matter any of these settings you might want to make yours larger than regular but let's leave this as the HDTV 1082 5 frames per second preset duration 30 seconds then we're good to go first we want to make some dots sort of explode apart so I'm going to make dots by double-clicking on this ellipse tool and you know what just if you want to make squares or triangles or rectangles or kitty cat faces you can do that too this has nothing to do with what this shape is it could be dots could be whatever so first I'm going to go here to this ellipse path you know make it a you know manageable size like 100 by 100 ought to do it for me so it's a pretty pretty nice-looking dot I'm also going to need a control layer so I'm going to get a new adjustment layer and I'm going to rename that layer control or like control whatever just call it you know something that you know this will just be controlling the movement of the other layers all right now I'm going to apply to this control a slider slider a slider control I really go for some sliders right now it's a miniature hamburger for some reason it's because after you eat too many of them they have to slide you out of your seat with some kind of device because you're so full of sliders anyway this one I'm going to call a amplitude and this is going to be used to define how exploded or how far away from the center these things are so it's going to be amplitude and for another one out there and this one is going to be the random seed so this would be determining you know how far away and the speed showing what mode of craziness we are looking at so first off let's go ahead and call up this thing's position by hitting the P and the scale by hitting the S or in this case shift s to call up also the scale so if you want to call the property hit its corresponding hotkey if you want to add to what you're looking at you just hold down shift and then hit that property key so that's fun shortcut thing for you I guess anyway we're move on so let's apply some random motion to these we are going to use expressions holding down alt clicking on the stopwatch and then typing in some expressions and we're going to link those expressions to this so I'm just going to lock that right there so it's not going anywhere and now I'm going to type in something hopefully interesting here first thing I wanna do is go seed random ra n random yeah that's how you spell that and then some brackets and inside these brackets I'm going to just take this pick whip and put here on the random seed slider because it's defining the random seed of this so I guess that works out and then I'm just going to go comma true should do it our our our angry angry angry error line 0 blah blah blah all right we'll stuff your angers in a sack mister I'm working on it so if angry at me I'm going to keep working on the on the lines of code here anyway type in wiggle and then 0.01 comma and then let's pick with to the amplitude see how this goes all right now it's not angry anymore it was angry because I was setting a random seed on here but it didn't apply to anything the wiggle uses the random seed to say you know what mode or you know what a way of doing things am I going to be operating under so check this out I put the amplitude here up to something right now I'm going to start hitting new random seeds you know on seed for this is what it looks like on seed 5 this and so on like that so that's great that's super good you know that's good if and say if here if you want all of the things to have the same random seed I would like to also add so I like the plus in here plus index meaning for each time I duplicate this the random seed is going to be for example zero plus two meaning to so if i duplicate this it's going to have you know a bunch of buddies that are all using different random seeds because they all have that index the index references the layer index number to create a new value for each thing so i think that'll do that should be fine so we have that changing now i'm gonna have the scale do a very similar thing so i'm going to just copy this and paste it certainly that's you know not what we're after we don't want to you know have this thing go totally nuts on us so we need to add some different things in here what i'm going to do is type in x equals so i'm going to have x equal this thing and then put a little colon right there so that's at least good and then i'm going to have a y you know it can be any letter but anyway y equals x divided by i don't be divided by like ten or something be divided by you know whatever you would like but we're going to do that for now put it put an end to this and then the final output here i want to be value value all right and then we're going to add to this value the y component and it's going to be y we're only interested in one part of it so square brackets put a 0 in there and then we're going to going to copy this put a comma paste it and surround that whole thing in these square brackets square brackets all right there we go alright so what does that mean well it means that this is now going to be changing different random seed here it's going to be changing you know pretty considerably but I can alter it based on just sliding this so you know we've got to some variance in its size going on so I think I'm pretty happy with how that's working out so we have this thing going on let's go here to the control layer and set some keyframes here on both sliders I'm going to hit you to bring that up and we're going to do is I'm going to keyframe this slider to go from zero go ahead ten frames go to 540 go ahead ten frames go back down to zero and then you know once that's happened we're going to want to change the random seed but I'm going to go ahead and toggle hold keyframes on that because I don't want any animation between there so now I'm going to go like to ten I'm going to take these went to easy ease those by hitting f9 zoom in on these and I'm going to pull the handles like so so it's like boo-boop cool and maybe I'll pinch these handles like so so it's even more dramatic whoa just like that I'm happy with this okay I'm gonna copy these put the playhead right there and paste and paste and paste and paste okay let's knead so what's it doing boom boom okay so each time that I change the random seed it will be something totally different happening alright so 20 and then 30 and maybe 40 I don't know who cares so how's that goes this way goes this way goes this way and this way and that's that's great it's really interesting so we now have one dot you want to make some more dots we'll just duplicate duplicate duplicate duplicate duplicate make six dots alright and as you can see they go one arrow and then back whirl and then borrow okay cool now since we've built in we can scale these up or down at our leisure we can just do a little thing like this see now they're tiny dots whoo cool I am really on today with this okay great so now now we have these things going on won't put some lines between them I guess that's that's the next step so we're going to go ahead and create a new solid alright and yeah whatever who cares put this below everything and let's look at only two of these for now call up their positions and scales and we are going to use an effect that people rarely use and I mean why would you it's called the BM beam called the beam alright so when it starts out the beam looks really dumb this is probably the dumbest thing you'll ever see first thing you want to fix this so that both of these inside colors and outside colors are black and the softness is zero and thickness is like five I guess something like that and the length should be a hundred percent and why we are using the beam because the beam comes with these cool things here has a start point it has an end point and we can very quickly link the start point and the end point into these things so it's going to the effect into the beam start point and end point obviously you've probably figured out the start point is the position of this one right here the end point is the position of this one boom okay so where did it go where's what's that thing okay there you go it's connecting these two dots now huh pretty radical right no idea where those dots went but you know wherever they are they are connected by this line all right that's pretty good now the only thing remaining to do is to set the starting thickness to be somehow related to the scale of its you know start so what happens when I linked it indirectly and we multiply that by some kind of a number or we divide it by some kind of a number or maybe we would like to do see how that goes now I feeling at 0.1 0.5 okay maybe maybe I can live with that we also want to make sure that everything has the same color you can see the stroke is a bit darker than these circles because these circles are not totally dark okay cool and yeah we're going to also make sure copy this go to the ending thickness paste it make sure that it's pointing at the correct layer like this so now it looks like that you know and if you find that this is too thick well then you're going to want to do something like dial down this number here you know maybe times 0.3 rule so that's a neat so you got that going on all right so as these things move apart and they're they're scale changes which kind of mimics being far away or it's big making it seem close then these kind of take on a 3d aspect or you could not do that you leave them straight lines if you want you don't have to mess with their scale at all you can do do whatever you feel like just we're adding those extra layers and I want you to know about them so whatever so let's connect more things all right so all you're going to do is duplicate this line hit you you and you're going to put in different values so if we connect two two three just change all of the twos into threes right just like that borrow now all the twos are connected to all the threes and so on so I think that's it's a big whoop Dee let's duplicate this again hit you you let's connect all of the threes to the fours let's do that three connects to four three connects to four like this and I think you get the idea of how this little rodeo works but yeah so uh also I going to say about this you can make as many connections as you would like and if you want to do like I did in the intro having more things explode each time well all I did was I just started with a few of them you know like this and then each time I just added another bunch of layers so we go like this mm-hmm and more so each time there are just a few more things and likewise you just add you know more lines each time you do this so you know you start off with you know there's one and then maybe there are two so you want to have you know the lines that connect them and then you want to have the lines that connect the next ones and ones that connect the next one so you know and see how see how that goes so you know depending on how many connections you want you might want to you know make sure that everything is connected so you want to make sure that four is connected to one and it's you know it's scale here's going correctly so you know just connect stuff man just connect it all together makes interesting shapes and lines and what-have-yous people seem to like this for infographics I don't know why I guess it shows like the connectedness of businesses or ideas or something so whatever the great flexibility about this is you can make these into like icons or something I can just go in and edit this however I would like I mean you know I can even go in here and I guess you scale some of these up so now if I grab one of these ago like were on its its icon is getting so much bigger and you can keyframe that so if you want to highlight part of the presentation you can do that if you get to a part where you're like man I really don't like how this is working it well you can you like mess around with the random seeds to pick a totally different thing you can animate the random seed you can animate whatever you animate so many aspects of this but the reason that I actually did this is a buddy of mine Scott down in Memphis says to me Evan what you think of this this plug-in I'm thinking about getting it or I don't know if you think about buying it but it was interested in doing what he saw on the plug-in and the plugin was like 25 bucks and it said I'll you know it puts lines between things let's think I'm like well I know a way to put lines between things that's free so let's give this a go and perhaps the plug-in uses some kind of fancy math but if it is using that much math it's really worth it I mean really in my mind you have a use a technique like this or you use a particle system to have real 3d things moving around and connect them with lines I think trap code has some awesome products that can make that happen for you but not everyone can afford that so this is a pretty low cost and low resource sort of thing like it's pretty the easy to render this real cheap and dirty stuff and you can keyframe all the aspects of it so if you're doing a project where maybe you want to highlight some of these points or something you can do that just keyframe it so whatever it does make a lot of layers but I'm sure it's nothing you can't handle anyway this has been Evan Abrams giving you some tips tricks and whatever in After Effects hopefully you've enjoyed it I know I enjoy talking about it that's why it's been like 15 minutes of this crap if you want to hear more about After Effects and visual effects and motion graphics then you should subscribe to this channel I try to put up new stuff all the time but I'm a busy man so I don't always get around to it if you want to ask questions if this gave you trouble ask questions in the comments that's best spot for them and if you have questions about After Effects in general or whatever then post on the facebook hit me up on Twitter at ICI Abrams Google+ maybe I don't know if that's a thing all the links to that are in the description and hopefully you you enjoy this as much as I do thank you so much for watching and I'll see you around the Internet

Channel: ECAbrams

Views: 610,263

Keywords: adobe, after effects, after, effects, tutorial, lesson, how, to, how to, tips, tricks, instruction, help, ECAbrams, Evan, Abrams, dots, connect, lines, explode, infographic, info, motion graphics, Graphics (Field Of Study), mgra, Adobe After Effects (Software), array, random

Id: elHqinIm4RI

Length: 17min 31sec (1051 seconds)

Published: Sat May 10 2014