Designed by Apple - Newton Tutorial

hi and welcome to this tutorial on how to create the physics simulations in the most awesome designed by Apple spot that buck created where I'll let you see the whole spot on your own but we're basically going to focus on this section here where the ball is kind of drop in and fall there and then it tips over and all the balls fall out so again we're going to do this little section here as a balls drop in and then when it tips over and falls out and you're going to see how easy it is to do this with with Newton so there's two things I just want to say in advance one is I did not create the original animation I do not know how buck created the original animation so what I'm going to do in this tutorial is do an approximation of how I would do this effect and it's going to be pretty close but it's obviously not going to be exact and obviously I'm not going to do every little detail and I should also note that this part here which kind of looks like it's physics simulation was probably most likely done by hand so that's why we're starting with this section here so let's just dive right into it so the first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to bring the QuickTime movie in for reference just so that we can kind of follow along and notice that I've already trimmed the comp and the QuickTime movie just to this section that I want to work in Newton works the it simulations from frame 0 of the comp so you're going to want to trim your comp to where you want your physics simulation to work and so even though it's coming in from below it the simulation is going to actually happen on the sort of layer here in the middle so we're going to basically start here and what I'll do is I'll start where the balls are already all kind of falling into place so I'm going to zoom in here so I'm going to just pick kind of here where so this is moment where the balls now there's one other thing worth exploring is that this is going to happen in two sections and if you see here clever this animation is because it makes it seem like it's all one fluid animation but it's actually a lot of pieces put together so once these balls drop if you if you really analyze the QuickTime movie here you'll see that basically all the balls fall off to the bottom and then we're just left with this one ball and then this is an easy way for you to be able to like create your animation in pieces and then seam it together later so then when this one ball comes in you can just sort of simulate that one ball by hand and have it match up with the and the rest of the animation and then again when this tips over you'll see here that again it's sort of like it wish wish pen so you see how all the balls kind of follow out and we just are left with a few balls and you can see that between the white and the black there are actually different animations so that's another great way of making that transition so we're going to do the same thing we're going to work in two pieces we're going to first focus on this animation which is where all the balls drop in and then we're going to cut and make another animation here where the balls drop out so back to After Effects so we're going to pick a place where all the balls are in place and even though Newton works with shape layers shape layers can be a little funky and After Effects and my funky I mean sort of unpredictable they're not going to behave in the ways that you always expect them to behave so I try to avoid them if possible so in this case we're going to do juice normal solids with masks applied so we'll just do a new solid and we don't need it to be very big so we'll probably just do like say we'll try 200 by 200 and essentially you want it to be kind of big enough for the biggest ball but you also don't want it to be huge so you just kind of want to get close enough and then if you go to the mask tool here we're going to select the ellipse tool and here's a little trick if you just double click on it it's going to apply the circular mask well whatever it's the because the solid was square it ended up being a circular mask but it applies it to the boundaries so it's a nice little chat so once we have that there we're going to zoom in and we're going to reveal the I'm going to hit S on the keyboard here to reveal scale and I'm doing it kind of this way so that I can actually hide the wireframes I'm also going to lower the opacity I just hit T to lower the opacity so I'm just going to do it so I can kind of see now there's one other little trick I need to mention notice how the balls know the dots here seem a little bit there's like space between them but when you see the animation you'll notice that they they kind of collide and animate with the space built-in so the way we're going to accomplish that is by taking advantage of a little of another little trick so the mask shape which will turn on the boundaries here and we'll turn on the mask shape if you can see the mask shape will make it a more obvious color like red okay so you see that the mask shape is currently the size of what we're seeing our blue dot and that's what Newton will use to calculate all the physical simulations but if I twirl down the mask here by twirling down the mask or I could also hit mm twice so the letter M for mask twice it reveals all of the things we can see that mass expansion and you can kind of like go in or out in the mask expansion so we're actually going to go in a little bit and I think minus 20 seems about right and what that's going to do it's just going to make it so that Newton calculates the physics simulations to where the mask is but visually they'll be this kind of like negative space between what all the balls and it will create a similar effect to what we have here okay so once we have this and we can go ahead and hide this again so we can now scale this back up so we want to basically match kind of closely to what we have here and so then what I would just do is I would now duplicate this layer move it over here and then hit scale again and because that mass expansion thing is already taken care of I can kind of just focus on here now you're going to have want to like very that mass expansion from dot-to-dot and what not so that you can approximate obviously we're here we're basing it on this design but the idea is that you would just do your own design and just kind of point this out so you can see how this was accomplished anyway I'm not going to bore you with having to do all of these dots so I will just delete these two that I already did and unshowered and you'll see that I've already kind of done all the tracing here I made red dots before um so sorry that was at that place for it to be paused so as you can see here I've kind of traced all the balls kind of in place and then there's two other things I need to do create two more solids and these solids are just going to be squares and rectangles sorry and I'm going to go ahead and place those rectangles right below the balls and that's because again if you look at the animation you're going to see that there's this like sort of invisible ceiling here and that we're going to accomplish that by having these solids so then what I did is I went ahead and I'm going to reveal my layers again and I'm doing that by doing command shift H for hide and reveal and I believe on Windows that would be ctrl shift H and so they'll have the left solid which is this one here and what I did is I move the anchor point and by choosing the move Anchor Point tool which is this guy right here Pam behind you can move the anchor point and so as you can see I put it right below where I want it sort of the pivot of this to be which is right below this dot and then I went ahead and parented this second what I call the right solid to the left solid and if I reveal the rotation and position you're going to see that I also went ahead and did the little animation of the kind of things happening but hey we're getting ahead of ourselves that's going to be the next section for now we just need to worry about where the balls being in place and the solids being in place now this is a good point to make a duplicate of our comp just so that we kind of have this is a setup case we want to go back we want we don't want to redo all the work with the tracing of the balls etc etc so I'm just going to go ahead and reveal this I'm going to reveal this in the project and actually um let me just go ahead and hide these this is what I was practicing with before I made the tutorial so this one's called intention so sorry it's too high though alright so not too confusing so this is the compet I just was working in so I'm going to go ahead and duplicate this sorry edit duplicate and I'm going to call this we'll call this one here so that we know this is the beginning stage so we'll go ahead and open this up and if we go back and look at this quick time you'll see that essentially all the balls are dropping into place so how are we going to do that tower we're going to accomplish that the ball is drop into place well let's let's really analyze what's happening here this little move up we're going to do later we're going to just assume we're going to do all the animation in place up here first and if you if you analyze this you can see that this kind of bottom row of dots it's kind of just in place and it just comes up and these two dots are the first two dots that kind of drop in and bounce in and once that happens then we kind of have the rest of the dots all kind of dropping in kind of in order of where they are and you know in height so that it kind of slowly builds up so we're going to do the same thing I'm going to go ahead and zoom in here and we're going to first we're going to isolate I'm going to go to my arrow tool it's going to isolate well this one actually if you remember this one is actually one of the ones that drops in on the left these two drop in so we're going to isolate all of these sort of will call them bottom row dots so not that one but this one this one this one this one this one it's easier if you select the little guys first this one this one this one this one this one this one and this one I'm sorry this one is not part of it so I'm gonna shift unselect that one so what I'm going to do is I'm just going to change the label color here so I can keep things straight I'm going to make these yellow and I'm going to move them to the bottom of the stack so I'm just going to drag them here and this this sort of organization it's just to kind of help keep me sane keep going down I might need to go down and then back up put them just above the blue solids all right so that's the yellow row and then I'm going to kind of go to the next row which is like this guy not that guy this guy this guy and maybe these two guys here this one's already put that row so now these I will make the next color down aqua and I will bring those down here and then I'll just keep doing the same thing so you can see well it's easier to grab the little guys first so let's hide the masks and we just want to select the layer so okay so that's going to be my next layer and I'm going to create this one pink move it down and then keep going that one's already part of the pink row that was part of the pink row and these here will create these as lavender move these down so let's see I forgot to select a few of them so that one is part of the original drop this guy should probably have been part of the let's see what's next to it I don't forgot to forgot a couple of them I would say let's make them part of this group which is the aqua group so all right so I'll make these two part of the aqua group and move this down too so that it's order and you're going to see why this is helpful to have them in sort of the same unselect that one bring this down you'll see why it's helpful to have this or an order like this and see what else did we forget I think just the first two and these will also create a special color of their own will so make them purple or something and we'll meet and it will move these to the very bottom because those are going to be the first ones to drop above the yellow ones okay so the yellow unto the bottom row alright fantastic so now let's zoom back out here what we're going to do is we're going to create some key frames here and after-effects so that the balls are drop it in so we're going to first go to the sort of like the finishing spot which is like around here and we're going to select all the ones that are actually dropping in which are everything except for the yellow group to select all of these I'm going to hit the P for position and I'm going to just set a keyframe for position here so just hitting the time watch there setup position keyframe for all of them and then I'm going to move back and how far I moved back is actually not important at this point but what I'm going to do is I'm going to just animate them so that I'm going to move the whole stack up and I'm holding the shift key down so that this atom this stuff is actually animated directly straight up because if you kind of go kind of sideways the physics as you know will probably make things fall off to the right or left and you kind of don't want that you want it to fall straight down all right so I've kind of moved this all up and if I look at this just animating down right now I'm going to hide these right now they just kind of fall all together right let me just turn off the reference animation I would probably also want to turn up the background to be white so it can kind of look similar alright so here we have all our keyframes and they're all just falling down all right now what we want to do is we kind of want to stagger the fall so that the first two things fall just kind of mimic the style of the animation that they did and to do that we're going to use a little script that we have also on AE scripts called rift rift is an awesome awesome script it actually allows you to do a lot of really powerful staggering and shifting and sequencing things with not just layers but key frames which is really what we're going to focus on right now and so we're going to and the reason we want to kind of go in order is because we want to fit we want to have things animate kind of from the bottom up so what I'm going to do is I'm going to drag all these keyframes and move them I'm going to move them here to the beginning and I'm also going to grab the last keyframe now make make everything move a little bit faster I'm just going to move it in so that kind of just drops in pretty not a good rate I should actually be previewing this quick thumb alright so I forgot I need I want to turn off that rotation animation here so I'm just going to turn off these keyframes all right because again that's going to be part of the second animation so I just want to make sure that this is animating down at a good clip which it looks like it is there okay once I have this I'm going to select all of the keyframes and in rift I'm going to make sure that I in the effects section I'm going to say turn off the all the layer checkmarks because I don't want it to affect the layer I just want it to affect the selected keys so on their keys here you can see I have selected and everything else is set to its default and then here in stagger which is what I'm going to want to do oh sorry and I'm going to set the default unit to frames and I'm going to change the stagger to two friends I wanted to kind of stagger all of my keyframes for two friends and I wanted to do in ascending order so ascending meaning like I wanted to go from the bottom up and once I do that I click this little button to kind of do it and you can see that it very quickly staggered all of my keyframes kind of in order and the last one was kind of the place where I wanted this whole thing to end so if I preview this now you can see that it's already approximating the look of the final piece obviously missing the very important bounciness and physics simulation but the core animation is there and again we have not really done a lot of work we've been using all these tools to help us do this a little bit better and a little bit faster so we're done with rift thank you very much sir and in the original animation there's a little bit of a further delay between these two first guys and everything else so I'm just going to select just the keyframes for everything else so kind of go there and just wrap all these guys and so again everything but the purple ones and I'm going to just lay all these just a little bit longer so that it feels like just the first two things come in first probably even delay it a little bit further so now it's just the first two and then everything else okay so again if we refer back to this you'll see it's kind of like you'll see these first two things and you see the first two kind of animate in so they're they're the first two balls here that I've already kind of animated in and then kind of like the rest of them kind of fall in a bit of a deluge deluge okay so now that we have our base animation we are ready for Newton so Newton is selected from the composition menu not the effect menu so just remember that and we just go into Newton so here is the Newton interface for those of you who are not familiar and here you have all your layers which are called bodies in Newton because that's how a physic simulations work and what we're going to do is we're going to select everything that is at the beginning and that we don't want that to move we want that to be static so if you go up here to the type you want to select type static well actually before we let me just show you what happens if I don't do that basically everything is kind of in the live earth world so if I hit play everything just kind of falls because there's gravity in this world and everything is by default set to be a dynamic body so that means it's just going to fall so what we want to do is say we don't want these to fall we want these guys to stay in place so we're going to make them static so now if we preview this you're going to see that those kind of don't move but these still become dynamic but the problem is even though this looks really cool it turns into a bit of a mess when it falls because all the balls just kind of fall according to how physics would work which would be a great animation but not what we're going for right now so how do we get these guys to fall kind of in that prearranged shape that we set up already well there's a special body type and what we're going to do now is select all of these guys and it just literally drag and select and there's this some special body type called a ematic and a mattock is a really cool body type because what it does is it it allows all the bodies to take the motion from any keyframes that you might have set in your comp but also apply some physics simulation and then there's this these two controls called a Matic damping and a Matic tension that allow you to kind of dial in how much physics and how much you know key frame from your comp is applied and it's done through both tension and damping so you can really play with these two settings and get some really perfect kind of feel in other words add enough physics so that it feels physics but still have it adhere enough to what you set up in your comp so that it you know it actually moves how you want it to move so let's zoom back in here so now that we've done that let's go ahead and preview this and what we might need to do here is oh I forgot one important thing so notice how it's bouncing these are bouncing back up and you're like hmmm what's happening here what's why is this why is this not the shape that I did was because let's go ahead and quit Newton here it's because after the last keyframe a Matic says let's go back to that sort of physics simulation world and what we really want is we want it to kind of stay in the shape that we define and the way we're going to be able to do that is just kind of kind of go back in time way after we're done and select all of the keyframe all of the layers that we animated that is even more and just set one more position keyframe and I'm going to do that by holding alt P and by doing alt P I set a keyframe in place for all of these I believe I could have also just yeah hit the keyframe button here that same difference anyway all that does is it actually just says stay in place now there's a very big gotcha if you go into your After Effects preferences you can see here that there's a preference called default spatial interpolation to linear so you just want to make sure that that is checked if it's not checked what you're going to get is you're going to get a Bezier animation and the way to fix that is to just select all of your position keyframes right click on them and say under keyframe interpolation you want your spatial interpolation to be linear if you hadn't set that preference it's probably set the current settings which is just going to cause trouble so just make sure all your spatial interpolation is set to linear once you have that set we can go back into Newton and you'll see that all our animation is kind of already remembered because by default if this is checked Auto load and save settings everything that you've setup in Newton will be remembered from your last session so if we go ahead and preview this now you're going to see that they're actually falling in place to our pre-arranged position which is awesome it looks almost you know just almost done right so rewind this so what I was the only thing I would I would adjust to this is it to me and it seemed like these two first guy bounce a little bit more so if I grab zoom back out if I grab the this these two balls so I'm just gonna I'm just selecting them here and it might not be obvious but I'm just selecting the two purple guys the two purple layers I'm going to turn up the bounciness to be 0.5 and I'm also going to turn up the density higher density means that it's it the body has more mass so think of it as like like it's going to do more of a thud it's going to be more definitive fall it's not going to be as light and feathery it's going to fall at the same rate but once it falls it's going to think of it as like a sumo wrestler with higher density so I'm just going to double the density to two so when we preview this you can see that it falls now with more authority and you know it still bounces maybe we could even go a little bit more bounce let's try a 0.7 so let's preview that and as you can see what's really cool about Newton is you can just change settings and see the results right away so let's just go really crazy so you can see what I'm talking about so this is a balance of two so maybe the the density is too much here let's try one yeah there you go so you can see what what more bounciness is causing so I actually liked it with the density of two and the bounciness of one let's try that yeah so that it feels pretty good and let's just preview this again again you can tweak this to your heart's content we we just sort of showing you how this can be done and once that's done one last thing is you can see the counter here when you see the preview simulation you can see kind of where it ends which is around there so we'll say about a 1/10 will see 1:15 so just here in the export section just enter 1 15 is the end frame and you want to apply it to a new composition so we're just going to hit render and we're going to get ourselves a new comp so if we look up here in a project panel we're going to see a new comp called 2 which is now what Newton just created and you can see that all of the position keyframes are there so if we preview this let's zoom out so you can see this better so there we have it pretty cool right again could tweak it a little bit but you get the general idea and to match the animation of what's happening but what because it appears that it's coming in from below so if you look at it there how it's coming up so we're just going to go ahead and select all well first we're going to do a new null so it's just added any null and we're going to go ahead and select all and just parent everything to that null so I think it even parented this QuickTime that we don't want parented so we're going to go ahead and animate the null from where we want it to end which it's like about here we'll go ahead and set a position keyframe there and then at the beginning we'll have the null the whole kind of rig start from below the comp frame so if we preview this you can see what's happening now of course pretty much everything that was animated in here seems to be animated with the most awesome animation curves ever and another tool that we have on a scripts that can help you with this is ease and whiz which I'm sure some of you guys have already heard of but ease and whiz takes this boring animation here of the null coming up and what we do is we'll say so there's different easing types from more extreme to less extreme so expo is the most extreme and in this case i think it's a pretty extreme and we just want it to affect the out point or so the ending of the animation and affect all the keys so we'll go ahead and select all the keys we'll hit apply and just like that you can see now when it animates in it feels you know it comes in with like force but then slows down very gracefully and it feels a lot or like this animation see that alright so again you can tweak that too more but for now this is pretty good so we have this coming in so now we have a little problem that it seems like well we see these balls here and we don't want to see them there so that's going to be pretty simple because if you see it up here we have this moment where they're off the comp area so we can use that to kind of be our endpoint so I'm just going to select all of our layers except for the two purple layers which are the two ones coming in and we're just going to trim the endpoint to that point so I'm going to hold the alt and open bracket so that that's now our important okay so if we hide our layers you can see now that we don't see any of these layers we just see the layers after you know once they're dropping in and then we have another problem which is here we see these these dots here which we don't we kind of want them coming in from the top so let's just go to after the move is done and essentially just unparent both of these two purple layers so that now they just kind of drop in and then they bounce in as the animation comes in so if we preview that so we can see now how that works does that make sense all right now the last thing of course is we just simply need to turn off these two blue solids and put in our text there which you know abundance here with choice but I'll let that be your homework so essentially you know but but the reason that the blue solids were there to help the animation but you can see how easily we can just simply turn them off and you know still get the animation now once we're done with this we can move on to the second part which is going to be actually much easier and again we're going to duplicate this is that we have this saved we're going to go ahead and duplicate the comp so now this one's comp three and in this comp we're going to delete all of the keyframes we going to go to the sort of the finished decision and we're going to go ahead and first we'll delete the null we don't need the null anymore and we'll just delete all of the position creep actually select all and hit the letter U to reveal all of the keyframes and you can see that there's position and rotation keyframes so I'm just going to drag through all of them to just delete all of the keyframes so now we don't have any keyframes and we're also going to move the in point back into the beginning so if we turn this back on let's undo just the reference movies so we're going to go see here kind of where we want the animation to begin so we've kind of again you want to trim your comp to where the simulation is going to begin which is basically right around here so I'm just going to set my I'm going to hit the letter B for the beginning of the work area and make the work area go all the way to the end and I'm going to turn on again my two blue solids because that's again how I'm going to kind of get them all to drop all the balls drop and as you can see here the the the dots are not perfectly aligned if I had played enough with the a Matic settings I could have gotten it to to match perfectly but for for this demo it's close enough and plus you know you obviously would want it to be your own thing anyway alright so now what we need to do is once we've set the work area we're going to have a go ahead and right click here I think you can also do it up here on their composition say trim comp to work area so now my comp is trimmed so that right at the beginning of this is where the simulation is going to start which is what Newton needs to work so now we can turn this off again and what we're going to do is or well let's just turn it on just long enough let's turn down the opacity on both of these blue solids the first thing you notice is that which choice seems to drop there might be more obvious over here so if we step through it you can see that it looks like the position drops in Y a few frames and then it rotates down and then abundance seems to rotate as well so we're going to do the same thing we're just going to take the right solid here and rather beginning we're going to set position and rotation keyframes and I'm just going to go down a few frames and I'm going to knock down the position just a couple of friends and then the rotation so that you know opens up the floodgates if you will and i zoom in a little bit and then once that happens oh and of course I mentioned before I had set the anchor points here in the top corner and I parented will actually go back here before I do the rotation a parent I'm going to parent the right solid to the left solid so the right solid is parented to the left solid so now once the right solid has rotated I can then also rotate the left solid so that it kind of helps the drop there okay so now we have this animation again turning off the reference movie right so that's basically the animation that I've set up here and by the same trick that I showed before because what's going to happen is we're going to we're going to set these guys to actually be a new-type watch me I'll just go ahead and show you my Claymore sense so now we're back in Newton and because it's a new comp it's a new scene we kind of have to reset everything again because everything will just fall right so I want these two the two blue guys to be a new kind of system which is kinematic which is similar than it's similar to a Ematic but the difference is that it's not going to try and stay close to your original animation I'm sorry it's not going to vary from the original animation it's actually going to follow the original keyframes exactly until the last keyframe and after the last keyframe it's going to go fully into the physics of the system so if we preview this you're going to see that at the beginning it does the keyframe animation exactly right but then they kind of both fall which is not what we want we kind of wanted to do what with the you referenced those which is kind of just kind of tilt down but then stay in place and the way we're going to solve that I'll go ahead and quit out Newton is just do the same thing I did in the other section which is kind of just go back in time here and just set keyframes for everything in place and again you want to make sure that if I go you can't see this but I'm going on there if I'm right clicking here I'm saying keyframe interpolation and I want spatial interpolation to be oh it's it's not letting me um set it because rotation you want your position just precision to be key from into position you want position to be linear okay this is very important all right so what once I verify that that's linear now I'm going to go back into Newton and it's already remembered my settings so now that I preview it you can see that now it stays in place because you can see there with the last keyframe once so I can actually probably go and make sure that those last keyframes are further down so all the way to the end here so now when I go back into Newton and I preview this you can see that basically this animation is done for us and all of these other guys I just left to their default setting of being I select them all you can actually do another cool trick which is select one of them and then hit the letter C for color and it will select every other item of the same color in this case red and you can do things like you know adjust the friction and the density and whatnot but they're all set to be dynamic by default which is what we want them to be here so again you can play with bounciness friction a lot of stuff but I think the default setting here is pretty good and you know again and then of course they did a camera move in their piece which is why it seems to float up but you basically do the animation in place and then you just take the whole comp or something and then you just animate it to make the transition but anyway then again you just kind of preview this you kind of pay attention to what the last frame is which is there about 110 so I'm just going to go say 115 and then hit render and again we'll have a now a new comp so it's four and you'll see if we preview this so what we want to do is we'll want to turn off the two blue solids so that they're hidden and preview this and that's it we have ourselves the second animation and of course you could create now say a new comp and then have 2 followed by 4 so let's turn out for first and just go to see where this ends and because we used one into the other the big this end right here will match perfectly so if we preview the whole thing together it'll just seamlessly go from one to the other so even though we did it oops I forgot to turn it on that would be helpful so even though we did this in two separate Newton comps and two separate simulations you can see how you can have them all peel as part of one so that's it I hope you can see how easy it is to do real true physics simulation animations using Newton and After Effects and of course this piece is full of really beautiful designed animation and a lot of really great detail that makes it super awesome so I'm not trying to imply that you can create something that great this easily but the physics emulation part is pretty easy now thanks to Newton so hope you enjoyed this tutorial and I'll see you guys the next time

Channel: aescripts + aeplugins

Views: 117,506

Keywords: Workflow, Cinema 4D, Tutorials, Animation, Adobe After Effects (Software), VFX, Tools, Plugins, Scripts, Solutions, 2D, Motion Graphics, Visual Effects (Film Company Role Or Service), Physics Simulation, Adobe, aescripts, After Effects

Id: btqDCgq-XEM

Length: 39min 23sec (2363 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 09 2013