Easy After Effects Transition Tutorial for Animation

hi I'm Ben Marriott I make weekly motion design tutorials and this week we're gonna talk through how I made that 2d cell looking transition effect all in After Effects let's begin let's start a new comp called spread and we've got our transparency on and the first thing we're gonna do is draw a little blob in the middle so let's turn our title action safe on to get a little crosshair so we know where the middle is and zoom in a bit and with that pen tool selected I've got it on no fill and then on a sort of very dark gray stroke set to 6 pixels we're just going to draw a rough sort of blobby shape in the middle there we go I'm gonna select the time line down here or anywhere just to click off of that shape and then I'm going to draw another shape which will create a new shape layer and I'm just gonna draw around that shape again in another rough sort of blobby fashion and from here you can move the anchor point to sort of you know finesse the shape a bit to your your liking because this is you know gonna be such a loose sort of look that we're after I'm not gonna worry too much about that and then I'm gonna repeat that process again and each time just drawing fairly close to the original shape and you know not being too precious to follow the original curves in that shape either just sort of get it getting a rough shape on there all right and I'm gonna continue to do this until we've reached the whole edge of our frame it won't take that long I think this will take probably less than 15 minutes but lets them let's let's meet back here in that time all right now I'm gonna draw one last layout which is just gonna cover the complete composition all right now they didn't take too long but it was very tedious perfect time to you know put on a podcast or audiobook or little Mars X on repeat now I'm just gonna go through and make sure if there's any areas in here that I want to clean up maybe this area down here has just a little too straight so I'm just gonna make some slight adjustments to that but otherwise I think I'm pretty happy all right now we're happy with all our shapes let's sequence them so we can see them animating to do that I'm going to select them all with control a and move my playhead to the second frame calls all to option and click the right square bracket and that's going to trim them all to play just two frames in that sequencer you want to select the one you want first in the sequence which in our case is the bottom one hold shift click the top one right click and select keyframe assistant sequence layers and click OK and that's gonna play them and if we play that back look at that got our animation going might need to extend our comp a little bit as well there we are and for our last frame I'm gonna spread that out a few more frames and let's trim that comp to that length there we are now this is the point where you want to adjust any frames you have if it's going too slow you can delete some frames if you don't like some of the shapes you can get rid of those but I'm pretty happy with this for now so I'm gonna select all of our frames with the ctrl a and I'm going to select that palette over here that I've already created in Illustrator and then select the fill on these select the eyedropper and I'm just gonna hover over till we get this dark orange perfect and I've got this in orange actually let's rename its comp to calm spread orange one duplicate it with command D we'll do that twice so we got orange one orange two and orange three and I'm gonna select orange 2 select them all choose that palette select that lighter orange there we are and do that for the third one as well all right now with those three comps selected I'm gonna drag them down to a new composition window click OK and that's going to create a new composition with all of those inside let's go through and recolor these to make it a bit clearer now we're gonna sequence these layers but I think this time it's really best to do it manually so when I drag this one 4 frames across same with this one nothing playback we should be able to see the basics our animation look at that alright starting to take shape you know let's duplicate these three layers by selecting them press command D or command right bracket to bring them all up and then I'm going to shift them across four frames so now it repeats more do Matt do that one more time with them all selected again and I'm going to do that one more time and extend the comp a little bit as well now we've got pretty much the bulk of our animation made now we could have sequenced our layers using the keyframe resistant sequence layers but because we have these in a very specific order of the different colors thought it'll be easier to do them manually without reshuffling and it doesn't really take that long so now that we've got this sort of psychedelic tunnel sort of opening we want the end to be transparent so to do that I'm going to duplicate this last layer I'm gonna color that a different color and call that spread end I'll change its blending mode to stencil alpha which is just going to play like an alpha matte for all the layers there we are notice we don't have a stroke on this last shape here so to do that I'm just going to duplicate another one of these comps over here call it spread stroke inside that and select everything hold alt and just click on fill until we get no fill and then back in our transition I'm gonna add that stroke layer on top over here there we go and that these two comps we can drag them anywhere to close off the comp a little earlier so if we drag them across here that's just going to close up and eat all I composition there where we have it you can even drag them right up to the front here to where the second composition starts and then you just get this one ring of animation happening and you can even use that for some sort of like energy blast or something if someone punches or makes an impact radiating outwards but for us I think we want to have at least one frame where the whole composition is filled with this sort of animation which should be around here there we are and I'll just trim these comps at the back here and now if we play it the transition fills up the screen and then wipes it away now you can also set this up by only using one comp instead of these three and to do that you could make one comp and let's just call this black white and in that comp you keep everything a white fill and a completely black stroke not that dark gray and then in a new comp with that layer you duplicate it a few times and then you can add the tint effects from over here in the effects presets panel and then map the white or whatever color you want copy that effect apply it to another layer and then you can change the color from here as well and there you go but the benefit of using a separate comp for each color is that we can add something like a texture to that comp so that to preserve underlying transparency and now you've got a texture over all that comp let's change its colors with the curves bump that up quite a bit gets a nice contrast let's invert that as well and we're gonna change the blending mode to multiply there we are and when we go back into our transition comp you'll see that all instances of that color have a texture applied which can give a neat look if you want to apply that to all the different layers but let's turn that off for now now let's trim this transition comp to where everything is now transparent which is here press n on our keyboard right click trim comp to work area now if you've got an edit where you've got two pieces of footage that you want to transition between you can simply drag that transition over your comp play it back your this nice little psychedelic transition the project for this is available for download down in the description if you've used anything you've learned in this tutorial please tag me on instagram at ben_marriott_ so I can take a look and to give you lots of compliments I can't wait to see all you make please let me know down in the comments what else you'd like to see from this channel would you like some more tutorials some more process videos a breakdown of the tools I use I'd love to know and don't forget to subscribe share hit that Bell icon and like I'll see you next week

Channel: Ben Marriott

Views: 158,404

Keywords: after effects tutorial, motion design process, motion design tutorial, 2d transition, 2d transition after effects, after effects transition tutorial, after effects wipe transitions, motion design transitions, motion design transition tutorial, benmarriott, motion graphics tutorial, motion graphics transition, frame by frame after effects, animation transition tutorial, after effects transitions, after effects tutorial animation, after effects process, adobe after effects

Id: doSmYieyIgw

Length: 8min 49sec (529 seconds)

Published: Wed May 29 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/sweaterliciouss]

I love your style and tutorials!

[u/aespyrcranberry]

Nice work! Good pacing, easy to listen to, great result :)

First thought I had when watching was to try and save all the headache of drawing all the paths by just making a regular ellipse on your shape layer and then adding a Wiggle Paths. You can set Wiggles/Second to 0 so it doesn't animate. A low detail and points set to 'smooth' gives you a pretty similar result to what you have.

Now dupe the layer and change the radius of your circle for each ring and voila. You now have a something more procedural! Want to make the lines more squiggly? Up the detail in the wiggle paths. Want it to be spikey? Change points to Corner.

Not that different of a result, and definite loss of fine-grain control, but much easier to control (and make changes to!) a system rigged up like that than having to manually move points one-by-one.

Keep 'em coming!

[u/[deleted]]

Design aside, you're an absolute joy to watch mate. Gotta be one of the cleanest, most concise tut videos I've seen in a long time. Just watched your whole channel and cannot more expressly urge you to keep dropping these vids.

If I didn't live in the mountains stockpiling canned goods and dousing myself in chlorohexidine every morning, you'd have an eager sub. All my design pals will be getting a beep on their pagers shortly.

[u/Domje]

Love this, not sure when I will use it but it's awesome!

[u/[deleted]]

Wonderful! Thanks for sharing

[u/wazzledudes]

Really cool style and great tutorial. I'd love to see what you used it for but mostly I want to see more of Michael J. Hotdogman.

[u/[deleted]]

I love these tutorials man. Keep up the good work!!

[u/ChabowJackson]

I dont know if I will ever use it 1to1, but I learned some neat little tricks through this video. Thanks for that!

[u/The_Bald]

On top of your immense skill you've got a great attitude as well. Keep doing what you do!