- Hello everyone, this is Evan Abrams. And in this After Effects tutorial, we're gonna be creating
some diverging paths like this thing you see
over here, pretty nice. This is a very on trend kind of look, you can see it in a lot of places. I wanna show you a fairly simple
method to make this happen. There are, of course, infinite methods to do just about anything. We're gonna start with these paths that kind of fly through space, then we're gonna add some layers of detail to make this feel a
little bit more grounded. Even though there is no ground in space, we need something in there so we know which way we're going,
how fast we're moving. And, of course, if you get
stuck in this tutorial, please ask me questions in the comments and I'll try to get you through. And if you make something
cool out of these techniques, and I know you will,
tweet them at me @ecabrams or tag me on Instagram,
@ecabrams on there as well. So if all of that sounds good, then don't divert yourself
from this tutorial. Sorry. (upbeat music) So for this method, and this
is just one of many methods, we're gonna start in Illustrator drawing the paths that we want
the shapes to travel along. We could instead move the objects around and then have paths flow from those, which also has its own advantages, but in this tutorial we're
gonna go for the simpler more two-dimensional approach of letting the drawn
paths drive the movement. That allows us to kind of art direct all of this movement, all of these lines, all the curves outside of After Effects, really plan out the direction
we want these things to go, and then go in and make stuff move. We'll cover that other method
if people are really into it, I guess let me know in the comments, but let's get started. Here in Illustrator, it's gonna be a little bit more show and tell, because I don't think you need
to see me draw these paths, but I'll teel you that in general, when I wanna draw something like this that has a lot of this path animation, the art board has to be
large enough to accommodate all of the length of the
path that we wanna take. Now, I usually start by drawing down a bunch of these 16 by
nine, 1920 by 1080 HD, if that's the final framing that we're gonna deal with, grids. So I wanna put a bunch
of these boxes down, so I can appreciate the framing
that I'm gonna be causing when I draw my paths. If this thing has to play on a one-by-one kind of Instagram screen, then you probably wanna drop down some squares along your path. This is gonna alow us to do
things like put down a grid, and then, consider how
our path is gonna look when we look at our final composition. So planning out all of our compositions, all of our ratios, all of our rules, in this space is a lot easier than trying to do it on the fly. So in here we've got our grid elements, we're drawing in the start and the end position for these lines. And then, for this I set up a few rules about what I'm willing
to do with these curves. So if I select one of these lines, you can see that they're
all very regular curves, and I'm using this grid here to sort of determine how
far I'm gonna be pulling these bezier handles to make sure that all of these paths
are kind of in line and uniform with each other in some way. And there's no right
or wrong way to do it, I also don't worry about the colors, because these are really just here to figure out the shape and
the path that we wanna take. From there, we wanna save our work, we're gonna make sure we've got our different paths on different layers, 'cause that's gonna help us out. And then we're ready to import
this into After Effects. Now, you probably noticed
I've got Overlord, the extension, open in here. Often, I'll use that to transfer paths from Illustrator into After Effects, but for this, all we really need to do is open it up in here. So we'll just go in here, and
we'll just find those paths, we'll open those up and
that's gonna give us this nice, tall comp here. So even if our export
is gonna be 16 by nine, we're gonna work on all of our animation in this big, tall comp. We're gonna start by grabbing those paths, and we're gonna go Create,
Create Shapes from Vector Layer. So this is taking that vector
information from Illustrator, and now we're turning it into information we can work with here in After Effects. Now, there's a little bit of zeroing out I'm gonna recommend you do. When you select a layer,
you can hit U + U, and it'll bring up everything
that's changed at that layer. In here, with this transform of group one, and that position is being changed, I like to zero that out, which is going to move all of
that contents to zero zero. And then the anchor point
I like to reset that to its default value, which you would think would snap this back right to where it belongs, but sometimes you have
to readjust this stuff just to make sure it's all going right where you think it should be. Zeroing out these values
is gonna help us later on to avoid some confusion that can happen when we start using some little scripts to move this stuff around. So there we go, we've had it
all snapped back together. I'm holding down command when
I move layers to snap them. And everything's been kind of zeroed out. So now we want to take something and have it follow this path. We can select a layer,
we can twirl into it, we can grab that path,
and now you can go Window, Create Nulls from Paths. This is a little script
that's been shipping with After Effects for a while, and the option we wanna
go with is Trace Path. When we click Trace Path,
that's gonna create a null, and we can see it out
here, it's been plumped up, and wouldn't you know it, we've created that trace path by selecting the green path outline, and if I hit U + U and look
at all these properties, you can see that we have a progress here, this is the progress along the path. And you can see that that null is following along that path, fantastic! That's exactly what we want. So I'm gonna just change
these keyframes here to go from maybe zero to three. We can actually delete
this expression in here, 'cause this is just causing this to loop, if there are keyframes on here. So we don't need that. Everything else we can leave as it is, and now we just need to
stick whatever object is gonna be traveling along
the path to this layer. Now, I think I'm just
gonna double click up here, make a circle, make it, I don't know, 200, this is just to
illustrate what's going on, then we would pick whip from this object to that null holding down Shift, so that all the properties get zeroed out, and the child gets locked
right on the parent, and then you can watch
it go along the path. Notice it follows the
tangent of the path as well, so if this were a triangle or a square, you could see it following
the tangent of that path. So let me just solo these three things, so we're only dealing with this one case. And then you can go ahead and repeat it for however many paths you have. But the green path, we
want this to trim on as this layer is going. So thankfully we can go ahead
and select the trace path, just tap the U key once
to bring up its keyframes. And now, selecting the group, I'm gonna add a trim paths to it, twirl that open, take the end here, and I'm gonna pick whip
that end percentage to the progress percentage. And we can't really
see it super well here, so what I'll do is take this stroke, make it black, good, and
make that thicker, great, say like so, and now, as you can see, these two things are
following each other along. Now, if you tweak the
progress of this path, then, the end here will follow along and everything will
work out perfectly well as it seems to draw on this path, perfect! So then you'll repeat
this for the other paths, and you'll want to go to this progress, probably ease these keyframes, you'll probably wanna
add some nuance to this. So the motion is a bit more exciting, it has points of
acceleration, deceleration, things get very interesting there. Let's cooking show this a little bit, and move ahead to when we're
ready to actually start following this path in a composition. We would go ahead and make a new comp, let's say, we could work
in the 1080 by 1080 space, maybe we're gonna put this on Instagram. Let's call this camera movement. We would then take our paths and rather than using that
janky one that we just did, let's use the paths from the intro example that you would have seen. And right now we're
not looking at anything because we're staring into
the middle of the space. We're gonna make this 3D, we are going to make a new camera, 50 millimeter, whatever. The big important part is make
sure it's a one-node camera. Hit okay, call open its position, go ahead and separate those dimensions, separating the dimensions is helpful. And now we're gonna dial
that y position down here. It's gonna come down, so
we're gonna be looking at the starts, the
origin of our situation. 2700 sounds good. Let's set a keyframe there. If you remember from previously, the whole animation resolves
at around three seconds, so we can actually take this
to negative that number. Oh, that's a bit too far. Let me just back it up a little bit, here we are. So now we're at the end. And now if we observe the animation, oh, we're way ahead I
think, as it starts to go, so we're gonna need to
massage these keyframes. So now the camera is following along as these paths go and dip
and move and go places. Pretty good, so far so interesting. You're gonna want to go
into the graph editor though and play a round with these values. Maybe the camera should be
getting off to a slow start, because it didn't anticipate
for this to be going so fast, then it tries to accelerate to catch up, and you really need to play around with the relationship
between the camera speed and these objects speed
so that we can feel how quickly they're going,
are they accelerating? Are they decelerating? Are we accelerating and decelerating? So you're gonna want to
play around with that to find what actually feels
right for what you're doing. If this is about chasing these things, and they're getting ahead of us, you would probably want them
at the top of the frame, and you would adjust this curve, or these points in order
to make that happen. If we're traveling along with them, then we would probably
change this curve slightly to make that happen. So it's all about the
nuances of this curve, when should you be seeing what, also consider moving in and out, using the z position, whoa! So that can be nice, if you wanna take like a kind of a rising upwards as you go, so we can get even more
of a view of this thing, and then maybe follow
those down into the hole, zoom, you could do that. Everything is on the table here. You are the master of this scene, nothing will surprise you, you can move around as you like. But even with all of the camera movement, we're still a little bit lost, right? Here in the middle, is the camera moving back and forth? What's happening? We don't have enough points
out here in the scene to really tell us what's happening. We can sell this a lot better. So what I would recommend is having some kind of texture, some kind of detail that tells us we're moving
from one area to another. We can accomplish that by just putting something in the background. So let's make a big rectangle. And with this rectangle,
I'm gonna want it to be three dimensional as well, so you can see it goes way up here, and I'm just gonna go ahead, unlink the sizes of this rectangle, and I'm just gonna make it super large. Super large like this, so that takes up the whole space. And then, what I think I will do is I will give it a gradient
fill, oh, a cool gradient, and I'm just gonna stretch these points to run from this corner
up to this corner, good. And now I'll change that fill, and I'm gonna use some of
these libraries over here. Let's go from this dark color, and now let's go to maybe, I don't know, maybe this not-quite-as-dark color, and we'll see if this has
improved our scene at all. So now we're going up
and it's becoming darker, oh, and we're moving away. So I think what we'll wanna do is actually expand this out, keep expanding, keep expanding. So now, our journey
takes us from lightness into darkness. That's okay. What I would really recommend is, because we have a 3D layer
and we have a 3D camera, we might as well do
something that plays in 3D. If we can play with the
depth here in some way, we'll know that these things are moving, if there's a stationary
thing for them to pass. It's for those reasons that if we go into the original intro, and again, this is gonna be a little
bit more showing and telling than doing for this part, notice this little star field, that we kind of blast through, turn off these little rectangle layers, this star field makes us
feel like we're moving because we're actually
moving through something, we move past it. And we can tell that these objects are moving relative to
those other objects. So those are all just
a little trap code form a few spheres that have
been put out into the world, a base form that is,
quite frankly, very large, but with not too many particles in them, you don't need that many particles in this kind of a box. And then just using the disperse to kinda make a little bit
wacky and star-like out there. And you end up with particles that are gonna be in front of and behind your main actors here, your main subjects, and I can add a nice little bit of depth as we're moving through this scene. You're gonna have access
to trap code particulars, you can also just drop
some 3D layers out there to tell more of that story, or you can use other
particle systems as well, it's wide open. Another element that can
really bring this together are these speed lines
that as we're moving past, zoom, zoom, zoom, zoom. These tell the story of
speed all on their own. Each of these is just a little rectangle, and I'm animating the anchor point to cause these to drift past. A little linear anchor point change. That allows me to use their position to move them left and right, and then just adjust them
in time, ahead and behind, to get this kind of staggered look. And that's what you can do for any object that's gonna be flying past here. These don't have to be 3D at all, there doesn't have to be
anything interesting about them. They're just kind of
floating on by our view. But all these elements will work together to convey this feeling
of speed as we're going, we got the camera movement, we've got objects for us to pass, and then, we've got objects coming at us. And these kind of build up
this feeling of progress, this feeling of change. And speaking of change, should
you ever need to come back and alter some of these little trails, because we've linked everything together, using expressions and using that path to become these nulls, you can grab points of these paths and move them around willy and nilly, and everything will adjust accordingly. We can add points, we can take some away, doesn't have too big of an
impact on the trace paths. Just remember that as you make
this path longer or shorter, because we're measuring
by percentage of path, it's gonna change kind of
the speed and timing nuances of this little object's
journey along the path, but there aren't that many keyframes, so you should be okay. But a lot of this movement, and a lot of what looks good about this really comes down to taking your time and designing what you
want this movement to be, where you want these trails to go. But I hope this gets you
where you wanted to go. Thank you so much for watching and spending some time with me here on the ECAbrams tutorial channel. If you had any troubles
making this happen, then please let me know in the comments, and I'll try to get you through, I try to answer all the
comments when I'm able. And as always, if you make
something cool with this, I would love to see it. Tweet it at me, @ecabrams,
or tag me on Instagram, @ecabrams on there too. If this is the kind of
thing you enjoy learning, motion design, After
Effects, visual effects, then consider subscribing to this channel. So far we're at five out of five tutorials up every week here in 2020, we're keeping that streak going. So if you wanna see
when new things come up, make sure you turn on notifications. Thanks again for watching, and have a great day.
