Create Smooth Trails in After Effects - After Effects Tutorial

this video is sponsored by wondershare repair it hey guys i am nikhil from dopemotions.com and in this after effects tutorial we will create a trail effect that follow along with the text inside of after effects and that too without using any plugins it's a super fun effect looks very amazing and very easy to create with that said let's jump into after effects and get started [Applause] [Music] alright guys so here we are in after effects let's start by creating a new composition just like we always do 1920 by 1080 30 fps and 10 seconds long let's call this render as our main render comp hit ok then let's create one more new composition which is going to be our text placeholder so let's call this text hit ok and then you can select the text tool and type in whichever text that you want i'm going to type in smooth absolutely incorrect all right let's align this into the center so there we have our text let's go ahead and add some animation to this so i'll go to around 1 second and 15 frames select the text hit s to bring down the scale properties create a keyframe hit r to bring down the rotation properties create a keyframe and hit u so i can see both the keyframes go back in time let's set the rotation to minus 90 and the scale to zero so now we have a very nice and simple animation with this i want to add a tracking animation so in order to add that i'm going to go into the animate section and let's add a property of tracking so let's go to one second and 15 frames where we have the keyframe let's set the tracking amount somewhere around 30 should be fine create a keyframe go back and let's set this to -30 [Music] so now we have a really nice and simple tracking animation now select the layer hit u so we can see all the keyframes select all the keyframes you can hit f9 or right click keyframe assistant easy ease go into the graph editor right click and make sure you're working in the edit speed graph and let's zoom in a bit select these points and drag the handle holding shift to the left just like so so now we have a much more smoother animation which looks very nice so our animation is ready now let's go back into our render composition drag and drop in the text column just like that so here we have it i'm going to hit ctrl d duplicate it so first one is going to be our fill text so i'm going to leave it at text we can change the color of this layer to red so that we know it's a different layer altogether and let's call this one trail then go into effects and preset and search for echo let's double click to apply this up and now if i go back you can see right off the bat we get a nice echo at the back so we can obviously increase the number of echo store on let's go with 50 and you can create some really interesting stuff using this so as you can see it looks pretty awesome so let's bring down first of all the echo time to minus let's go with minus 0.003 all right and then bring down the start intensity to 0.5 and the decay to 0.94 so now if i go back you can see we get a very nice and a smooth echo but in some cases you may still find a bit of a jitter into our text as you can see in this particular section so in order to fix this i can select the layer go into effects and preset and search for gaussian blur let's double click to add that i'm going to add a very minimal amount of around two so that should fix it if you want to add more you can obviously add more and that is going to make the complete trail smoother but i think three or two is a sweet spot so that is looking pretty good and now i can go ahead and add color to this so in order to add the colors i'm gonna use colorama let's hit double click to apply that up now in the output cycle we get number of different presets so i can you know play around with different presets and you know get a really interesting look so first of all let's go into the input phase and change the get phase from to alpha i believe yeah so now you can see we get a much more smoother trail and again as i said before we have number of different presets so i can try out each one of them to get a really interesting look so the one that i'm looking for is at the top that is ramp red and then what i'm going to do is let's double click to open the color palette and then you can select any color that you like i'm going to go with something like a pinkish red color and i'm going to hit ok so we get this really nice look and for the main text i can add a fill on this double click and then we can pick up the same color or same pink but i'm going to keep it very subtle not as intense as the background or the trail color so that is actually looking pretty awesome you can see it looks really really cool so now i want my trail to be much smoother and much longer so in order to create this let's select the trail composition and also one more thing that you need to keep in mind is to um turn off the composite over layer so i'm gonna first of all turn that off and then jump into the modify section and turn off the modify alpha so now we have our trail ready i can duplicate this hit ctrl d so now we have trail two i'm going to call this long trail all right and then jump into the echo first of all let's tweak some settings here so i'm going to set the echo time to minus 0.01 all right and then let's increase the number of echo to 150 so it's going to make it look a bit more smoother bring down the starting intensity to point 15 and um let's leave the dk at 0.94 that is fine i think obviously i'm going to increase the blurriness of 15 and then go into the output cycle right here and what i'm going to do is delete this black point so all i have to do is select and drag it out like that so now we have this nice trail that you can see and then as you can see it's very light so in order to increase the intensity all i have to do is duplicate this so hit ctrl d and boom we have a nice trail now you can obviously tweak a tweak the settings basically you know so i can set this a point maybe 96 it's going to make it look much more intense i can actually jump back into the trail and you can see we get this kind of look which i'm not a really big fan of so in order to fix this i can drag this handle just like that select this and let's switch this to a different color so something like a darker pinkish red i believe that should work fine yeah that is looking much better so now let's go back and let's see what we get so i think we get we are getting a very nice and smooth trail right here pretty awesome so it turned out pretty nice now before i proceed further with this tutorial i just want to take a minute and talk about today's sponsor when to share and repair it wondershare repair it is a one-stop solution to repair corrupted videos and photos regardless of their level of damage events such as sudden power surges and failures complete system crashes updating errors and file mishandling can cause video files to become inaccessible and this is where repair it comes in handy it has a very intuitive interface that makes it simple for anyone to repair corrupted videos very very quickly with repair it you can fix your corrupted files in just three steps first let's go to video repair section and click on add to add any video that you want so i can simply select a video click on open and it's gonna add your video and then just click on repair it boom just in few seconds your video is gonna get repaired it's very simple and easy to use for more information check out the link in the description below now let's hit ctrl y to create a new solid called this bg for background i'm going to keep it completely black let's put it at the back and let's add some glow to this so in order to add that i'm going to right click create a new adjustment layer call this glow let's put the text layer that that is the main text below the above the glow because i want my glow to only affect the layers below the text layer the main text layer so i'm going to select the glow adjustment layer go into effects and preset and search for the traditional native after effects glow double click to apply that let's increase the glow radius to 100 and it should be fine i think and one thing that is the most important whenever you're working with the glows is always switch to 32b pc so right now we are working at 8bbc let's hold alt and click twice so it's going to switch to 32 and this is going to give us much more prominent glow so i can bring down the intensity to point one and even at point one the glows are very nice and organic so if i maybe increases the point two so that you guys can see it more properly you can see we get some very very nice glows and i think it's looking pretty cool now obviously 32bpc is going to make your project look a bit more heavy now obviously 32bpc is going to make your project a bit heavy but it's going to be worth it let's also add a gradient ram to our background just to add a little bit of color to this so i'm gonna drag this point right here drag this out and switch to radial ram swap the colors and for this one i can actually pick whip the same color but in a darker tone and finally i will add some noise onto our glow so i can search for noise just so that we don't get any kind of color bending so it's nice and maybe around three person should be fine yep we can obviously increase this if you want to go with that kind of a retro feel but i think um three or four person should be fine and there we have a smooth trail animation now the best part about this effect is you can do any number of different changes in the text composition so i can even change the text to something like um maybe something like let's type in a trail and we can change the way it animates so i can get rid of all the different animations that we have right here and i can only animate probably the tracking so i can alright here let's increase this create a keyframe go back set this to zero so we have a very simple animation um select the keyframes we can hit f9 or keyframe assistant easy ease them go into the graph and let's someone quickly create a simple animation so i can add a loop expression loop out and let's type in ping pong i want to select the keyframes and let's add keyframe assist and easy ease so now we have something like this all right and now if i go back into a main ready comp there we go we have a different look all together which looks pretty cool now one more thing i would i think i could add here is scale so i can hit s create a keyframe go back set this to maybe 50 i don't know yeah that looks good and um let's smooth out the keyframe by adding easy ease i'm going to hit u actually and copy the expression so hit ctrl c hold alt click on the stopwatch hit ctrl v so now we have something like this which looks which is going to look actually pretty cool i think so let's preview the complete animation and as you can see by creating a very simple animation we can get some very interesting result using this technique so you can animate the way you can animate your text in number of um different ways and get a really interesting look out of this effect so i hope you guys enjoyed this tutorial and if you did please do consider uh liking this video and do let me know in the comments section below and if you're watching my video for the very first time please do consider subscribing to the channel and you can also follow me on instagram dope.motions i have mentioned all the links in the description below so with that said i will see you guys in the next video till then take care and always stay raw stay creative peace out

Channel: Dope Motions

Views: 34,629

Keywords: Smooth Trails in After Effects, text effect in after effects, text animation after effects, text animation tutorial after effects, text animation after effects tutorial, motion trail after effects, after effects text animation tutorial, after effects, after effects tutorial, after effects animation tutorials, dope motions, dope motions tutorials

Id: V3VWS7M6D5o

Length: 14min 15sec (855 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 23 2021