Create a Faux Zoetrope in Adobe After Effects

hello everyone this is evan abrams and in this after effects tutorial we're going to be creating this wonderful zoetrope project inside of adobe after effects it's built out of 3d layers so we're virtually simulating what a real zootrope does uh in real life i've always enjoyed this kind of analog movement where things seem to you know go really fast then they go in the other direction and then they kind of normalize uh into an animation and while we'll be making this project specifically there's a lot of great things that i hope you can generalize out to your own work we're going to talk a lot about the speed graph we're going to talk a lot about camera movement we're looking at pre-comping and time remapping so there's a lot of great things to learn in here so please stick around as we take this technique for a spin and before we get into it i want to let you know that all the footage we make use of in here is supplied by this tutorial sponsor yellow images yellow images is the 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yellow images [Music] this technique starts with the base animation that will be arrayed around the circle this is a 14 frame loop of a skull spinning around this is one of the image sequences you can get from the aforementioned yellow images and whatever animation you use pay attention to how many frames it is because that's going to be an important number as we keep going from here i applied a few effects to get this look and i just dropped them all up on a little adjustment layer here we have some curves to bring in the detail clamp down the values and to make this a little bit more dramatic then i use a little find edges because i really only want to find the contours of the skull i click a little invert button here to swap the colors around and then finally it curves on the top there to tamp down the results the first curve sets where the lines will be drawn and then the second curve is to treat the results as we find those edges then we have this lovely frame made of a shape layer and for our reference i've put a little text layer on here that will show us what frame we're looking at this expression on the text source math.floor and then in parentheses time divided by this comp dot frame duration that will display the current frame number by rounding down the result of the time in seconds divided by the frame duration also in seconds so it returns the number of the frame now we need to make use of this to make our virtual zootropes so let's drop this animation holder into a new comp and let's duplicate that 14 times one for each frame we want to see around the circle and we want each of these to show the correct frame so we go layer time freeze frame and then we'll place a hold keyframe on the now revealed time remap property we just need to set each of these to the right number frame 0 for you frame one for you and so on you can do this manually or you can use an expression like this one where variable i is gonna be equal to the index number of the layer subtract one and then we're gonna say have a look at the comp named animation holder and then find its frame duration in seconds and multiply that by variable i with that done we can copy the time remap property select the other layers and then paste and we can see that they're all displaying the frame we want based on their layer index number next we need to array these around in a circle and then we will want to spin that circle around as you would with a real physical zootrope so let's rotate all these layers appropriately and then move them outwards we used an expression to offset the time let's do the same for the rotation property we're going to make the layers 3d we're going to hit r to call up their rotation now we're going to drop this expression on the y rotation variable i it's going to equal layer dot index minus 1 we've seen this before and then we're going to multiply that i variable by this chunk in parentheses it's going to be 360 for the number of degrees in a circle divided by the number of copies that we have arrayed around the circle in this case that's 14. now if you're happy with that go ahead and copy the property paste it to the other layers and everything we need will be rotating as we want but if you feel like you need this to be a variable something you might change later or maybe you'll swap this out for a different animation you need this to be hooked up to a slider so i'm going to make a null here i'm going to grab the slider effect and pick whip that 14 that we typed in i'm going to pick whip to the slider property here which will replace the 14 with whatever we have on the slider in this case i'm going to just set it back to 14. but now if we copy this rotation property and paste it to all the other layers this should work out fine but now we just need to push them away from each other i'm going to change this up to custom view 1 here so we can appreciate what's going on next then we're going to open up the anchor point here by selecting all of these and hitting a which will call up that property i'm going to change the zed component here right now it's at zero and we're going to set this up to be oh i don't know negative 1080. that should be far enough look at that we now have the ring of a zoetrope do make sure that your null is below all the other layers since we are referencing the index numbers in expressions we need to maintain the layer order stack if you will now the next step is to get it spinning and put a camera in the scene to look at it from our desired angle the spinning part will be accomplished by parenting these layers to that null so let's make that null 3d so that both of them can communicate in 3d terms and then parent all of those frame layers that we arrayed around to that null so now we can rotate the null like the hub of a wheel now we also want a 3d camera in here so i'm going to go ahead and create a 24 millimeter preset camera and we'll leave it as a two node camera meaning i want to control both the position and a point of interest that the camera will look at i'm also going to turn on depth of field here so we can have a nice shallow depth of field that will look fun i'm going to set the f stops here to a nice low number maybe like a one then i'm going to set the focal distance here to be something like 500. so i'll dial that in later after the camera is moving where we want it to go and then we can make it focus on what we wanted to focus on we should start by getting our camera and the zootrope lined up in the kind of movement we want them to have i find that in a single subject situation like this we can get some nice nuanced motion by manipulating the camera and the thing we're focusing on at the same time so i'll start by setting keyframes on the orientation of the null as well as the position z rotation and the point of interest of the camera then i'll just tap the u key to only look at the keyframes that i've set i'll also tidy up my timeline here by making these layers shy and then hiding shy layers we don't need to worry about them anymore because the null will be handling their movements so i want the zootrope here to go from being a circle to being on edge so we'll use the orientation to make that happen easy stuff with some keyframes on the orientation changing 90 degrees on the x-axis at the start then going to zero and then back from zero to 90 degrees at the end look at that now i want to be moving the camera in there so we'll get the position backed off at the beginning here pushing back back back on the z-axis that's right i am a canadian then we'll move closer closer in here and at the same time we will have the point of interest move from looking at the middle center of this comp to focusing on the edge of the circle and then we'll just do the reverse out at the end the combination of camera movement and subject movement can give you a bit more nuance and lets you offset those keyframes till you get where you want do make sure that you're easing all of your keyframes here because you want this to be nice and smooth and then we'll set a little zed rotation on the camera maybe just so we have a little wobble or drifting feeling another way we can achieve a bit of a drift feeling is by taking these kind of first and last keyframes when we're close to the subject and modifying them just a little pushing one of them closer one of them further order them up and then one of them down so we have a few kinds of movement overlapping here compound motion can look better than just moving one thing so keep that in mind if you're doing your own camera movements also make sure you're offsetting keyframes from the various properties so the motion seems to overlap rather than line up and be robotic unless that's what you're into this is also a good time for us to dial in that focal distance so that it is nice and narrow so we're kind of pushing the camera into that focal plane so the subject is coming into focus here being blurry at the beginning so that's how we do the artistic motion uh let's get into the science part we need to fake the motion of a zoetrope so we need to get this spinning at the right speed so that we can see the animation playing thankfully we can use a speed graph to make things go at whatever speed we want but what speed should that be well we know the animation is 14 frames long so we'll divide 360 by 14 for how many frames that animation is and then multiply that result by 24 the number of frames per second that this comp is and that's going to give us close to 617 degrees i'm not going to get too hung up on the decimal points today but this is how fast it must spin so let's make that happen i'm going to set a couple keyframes on the y rotation of the null here starting from zero we'll run this thing to i don't know negative two because we want it to spin counterclockwise if you want to go the other way just use positive numbers now we're going to enter into the graph editor and make sure you're looking at the speed graph so that we can measure and manipulate speed over time you can change what you're looking at here with this little button at the bottom we can manually set the speed of a keyframe by double clicking on it and then entering it in here so let's do negative 617 since we want it to go that fast per second and in the negative direction and we'll link the in and out speed so we can be consistent having the the incoming speed and the outgoing speed be the same as we pull or push this keyframe around or manipulate the influence handles you can see that the line starts to get a little bit wacky even dipping to the other side of zero meaning that we would see this thing spin one way and then come around to spin the other way i'm actually pretty happy with that because i like that kind of motion like that ramping up cranking one way then going the other way and that's what i was kind of looking for all along here now i just need this to stay consistent at the speed so i'm going to go ahead set another keyframe at a distant number maybe negative 12 revolutions and we'll hop back into the graph editor we want to see a flat line here between these two keyframes to show that we're staying at that particular speed per second so we may need to move this point forward or backward or change the value up or down to get this right where we want it but once this is flat we can see that the illusion is holding and that little bit of variation is causing a nice bit of drift that i like to see then we just need to bring this to a stop so we're going to set a keyframe uh maybe one revolution further work the influence handles in here and we are ready to enjoy our works it's looking pretty perfect to me i would recommend if you're not super confident with the speed graph you play around with these keys and these influence handles to see what the different values do how these impact the graph and how these impact the motion so you can get more conversational with the speed graph as an aside if we just dip into the value graph here you can see that it looks very very different a constant speed here is this line that's on it on a constant slope and that slope represents the constant speed we now have this lovely loop that is maybe suitable for some crypto art yes i did make this tutorial around halloween but that'll do it for the tutorial if you've had any trouble please let me know in the comments and i'll try to get you through if you like learning with this kind of thing after effects motion design 3d camera stuff then please like and subscribe and make sure you turn on notifications we get up new tutorials here all the time so you don't want to miss a single one if you want to see this kind of thing but live then find me on twitch find me on behance i'm at ec abrams on there if you end up making something cool with this and i'm sure you will i would love to see it send it at me on twitter i'm at easy abrams on there and on instagram you guessed it same thing there thanks again for watching and i'll see you around the internet

Channel: ECAbrams

Views: 76,328

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, zoetrope, 3d, layers, camera, movement, spin, illustion, zoe

Id: MVjHdndjbwA

Length: 12min 51sec (771 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 10 2020