How to Add Squash and Stretch to After Effects Animations...Efficiently!

i'm about to show you a great trick to quickly animate rounded shapes without ruining them or your sanity in the process hey i'm steve savali a freelance animator designer and educator and sometimes animating is just hard or other times you just want to see other people's techniques so today i'm going to show you my biggest trick to animating a perfect smear and distorting a shape every time animating shapes is super fun it is hands down one of my favorite things to do as an animator and it's a very popular trend right now the other thing is it really gives you an opportunity to push and rely on the basic principles of animation today we're going to do that we're going to focus on squash and stretch which is going to give us an amazing sense of weight we're going to look at anticipation there's going to be a little bit of build up and we're going to have exaggeration to an extent also known as smears we're going to create this to give us a sense of speed in this fake motion blur before we begin be sure to download the project files in the link below so you can follow along with me [Music] alright so let's make a new comp we're going to go 1920 by 1920. let's just name this circle so we stay somewhat organized 24 frames a second is perfect and we're going to go with just a second just because today we're going to be talking about the technique not creating a finished piece so let's hit ok let's go through just try to keep this organized and now knowing that we're going to do a circle and then we're going to have that nice bounce by default it's really quick and easy to go into your shape builder tools and just use an ellipse i like to do it a completely different way though i will go in and i will actually use a rectangle and holding shift i'm going to pull out to get a perfect square shape you'll see that my anchor point snaps to the middle i'll click onto my layer go to my position and i'm going to separate those dimensions right out the gate i'm a right-click separate so that way i can tackle these individually today we're only focusing on the y position and then we want this to be in the center of our comp our center of our comp is going to be half of our comp width so if we go into com settings 1920 we know if we go 960 we'll be in the dead center so we're creating just a nice easy nice quick bounce and we want a little bit of build up in the beginning so i'm not going to set a keyframe for the y position right here at the start because i want at least two frames where it kind of builds up and you'll get better over time of assessing and knowing how long things should take so i'll set a keyframe here let's go forward let's say eight frames we'll pull our object up holding shift then let's go forward another eight frames and then i'm just gonna copy and paste that keyframe so i know i get a perfect start stop point so i'd get a nice clean loop so if i watch this this looks terrible and you're like how does this become a circle how does this become appealing in any way so right out of the gate i want to show you one of my favorite tricks and i treated this kind of the same way how you could treat a rectangle or a square in adobe illustrator i'm going to go through and scroll down to the rectangle path convert to bezier path now this gives us the option to have bezier handles if we want or just our 90 degree hard edges which is perfect for this case because then i'm going to go in i'm going to hit add and i'm going to go to round corners what that's going to do is it's going to give me a radius option and i'm going to hold ctrl shift h on a pc which if you watch our toggle mask shape path visibility turns on and off so i can see it and i'm going to pull this until it becomes a perfect circle and i don't really want to go too much further past that so i'm just eyeballing it it ends up being about 166. the reason why i don't want to go too much past that is because we're going to animate this and if we shoot this up to 500 well trying to get into 500 and then we go back down to 100 on the radius at another point of this animation it's just going to get sloppy you're going to rush through 400 points before even getting to anything so we're going to just keep that at 166. we're going to watch this and now we have just a nice clean ball bounce let's move this keyframe over with terrible movement so we're going to grab our y position we're going to go into our graph editor i like to animate with both my reference graph and value graph up that's just my personal preference so we're gonna start to pull out these bezier handles i'm holding alt right now and i'm clicking and i'm just trying to create what would be a nice ball bounce which means we're going to leave the ground fast we're going to ease at the top so we get that nice little hold and then we're going to go screaming back down into our contact point so if i set up my ram preview area here and here let me watch it's passable that might have been a little bit too extreme i just want to make sure that this is solid first before i do any squash and stretch or any smearing because if i adjust this later on down the line i may have to go backwards and start adjusting the squash and stretch and it just becomes more of a pain so i make sure that this looks really good first then anything i do from this point on i know it's just going to be icing on the cake [Music] now let's talk about getting into squash and stretch i have a comp here where i have just a basic ball bounce going and here's a couple issues that can happen right out of the gates i animated this ball with the anchor points in the middle because by default it should be or it will be close to the middle now if you were to animate a ball bounce and you wanted to do anything with scale with squash and stretch a lot of people will actually use scale so they'll uncheck this box and they'll start scaling it in the x and scaling it in the y so now if i show my rulers hitting control semicolon it kind of works but as i start to leave the ground and if i start to counter animate things i may have points where the shape isn't resting on the ruler it starts to get sloppy and then the other part is if i scale in the y now because i didn't move my anchor point i've created more issues because now i should be on this ground plane but now i have to go in and i have to start counter animating and that's going to get sloppy because if i do that and i start to move forward there can be times where maybe i dip below and this is my opinion i don't like seeing any shape distortion where it's just scales because it's not giving me any sense of weight i don't feel like this thing is getting heavier and trying to pin itself to the ground i'd love to see some of those heavier points kind of hit and push off the ground rather than it always being that center contact point so that's why i do it a little bit different i'll go in and knowing that we've created this using a square i'm going to hit ctrl shift h just so i can see my visibility again i'm going to twirl down my options i'm going to go into my path i'm going to set a keyframe i'm going to go into my rounded corners i have a keyframe here and then using the quick key you with the layer selected i'm going to hide everything except for the properties that i have animated for me this makes it a whole lot cleaner when i get into animation so right out the gate we know we have a perfect shape we need that kind of squash stretch so what i'm gonna do is i'm gonna go forward two frames before we even leave the ground i'm going to grab this and i'm going to start to move it down and i'm going to also move it out a little bit might be a little bit too much and if you look at this all right now we're starting to get a little bit more sense of weight but it still feels a little sloppy you look and you're like steve this isn't much different than scaling but that's where our radius comes into play and this is where i said don't go too high on the radius because now holding ctrl shift h i'm going to hide my visibility again i'm going to just start to kind of create what i feel is a nice shape that this circle would go down to so now if i scrub pull up pull down a ruler you can see i stay on my ground plane i distort and i actually feel that sense of weight and as we fly back up into there all i have to do is take these keyframes from the very beginning and i'm just going to copy and paste them into place so we get this right back up nice sense of weight the other thing is now that we come back towards the ground we also want to feel that squash and stretch we want it to feel like it's made contact so i'm going to do the exact same thing i'm going to grab set these keyframes because i know i want it to be a perfect circle and once it hits i'm going to grab my squash point right here i'm going to copy and paste those i'm going to move forward just a couple frames and these are just rough keyframes right now i may end up moving them along it's just to give me a sense of hey is things working [Music] so we're now out the gate we're looking at this and this already starts to feel much better we get a nice squash and stretch we feel like the shape's actually deforming let's have a little bit of fun now we want to do some smears we want to add that little bit of you know motion blur and if we look at our example it's just a quick little snap you don't want a smear to last more than two frames so here's what i want to point out i love echo echo works amazing for a lot of types of movement that you can get in a case of a ball bouncer when an object follows the same path that it's traveling it can break a lot so i'm going to show you this like it's a poor stupid infomercial where somebody can't pour a cup of water without using this product that they're trying to sell you but if we move forward you can see what echo does is it starts to repeat that shape and it looks at the time in seconds so if i go negative one it will be one second before echo kicks in we need that to be far less than that so we'll go negative point zero zero one as we start to go we can't see much so we'll move the number of echoes up now we're starting to get a little bit of that smear which looks really good except for as it starts to follow the same path you'll see we go down we hit the ground and as it's flying back up the object never followed it all the way to the ground um i mean technically it did if we go in and we start doing decay and intensities we can see that but it just becomes a lot of you're messing with the program now you're not allowed to just be creative you're fighting tools and that's never a good way to work the other reason why i like doing this with a square is let's just say you like doing scale and you're like cool steve i'm just gonna do scale and i'm like all right i got it if i go in here and i troll this option down i go into contents ellipse and i right click and i convert that to a bezier path so i actually can mess with the handles as i move forward and i want to squash or if i want to stretch this start to pull this off you're going to see you're getting like kind of a weird taper and it may work for what you're looking for i personally don't tend to go that route because now i have four points i have a lot of handles and if i'm even like the slightest bit off on anything you're gonna start getting really weird and organic sloppy shapes in my opinion just not a clean way to work so let's undo all of that let's go back into our circle and now we have this thing set up with a square so we're going to have 90 degree edges it's much easier to adjust a shape like this so we want that smear to be at our fastest point so it looks like we go the quickest in between frame three and four and at five we start to slow down so what i'm going to do is i'm just going to try to copy and paste some keyframes so it's essentially the same thing all the way up this is more of a cell animation approach where you're forcing it to do what you want it to and i'm just going to grab this path i'm going to look at the frame before we're at the ground let's go to this frame let's grab these key or these points let's pull it down and let's say it got stuck to the ground for a frame and the second one we're gonna move forward i just hit control right arrow to go frame by frame or left arrow we can even pull that down just a little bit further so it's more of a abrupt snap so let's look at this and if i need to if this starts to get a little bit too sharp i can go in and i can adjust my radius that becomes way too much of an oval for me but either way i have control and i have control quickly if i watch that that looks good so now if i do a ram preview i get a nice beautiful quick smear i wasn't over here messing with all these tools counter animating i wasn't dealing with all these weird bezier handles i just got to go in and make those adjustments so now if i'm working with a creative director and he looks at this or she looks at this and is like it's too much i don't like it it's literally as simple as me just going in grabbing these and moving it up so now we have a little bit less it takes seconds versus becoming more problematic and sometimes that's the name of the game being able to have quick turnaround so we go back and if i want it also on the bottom i'm going to look at where's our fastest point where do we travel the most and here we had a two frame smear so we know we hit the ground at frame 18. so let's go 17 and 16 is where we'll have a smear let's grab this move it over let's go here i'm going to copy and paste those same keyframes i'm going to drag this thing rather than up i'm going to drag it down to our hit point i'm going to move forward a frame that looks nice everything looks like it's collapsing in on itself if we watch now we get a nice little snap back all you did was a basic ball bounce with a square and then using rounded corners to get there [Music] all right so in this example that you're seeing right here that i created with alan and the furrow you can see that i have the same principle happening the exact same technique that we just talked about you can see that that's what i'm using to kind of launch this out into outer space but you'll notice that it happens at an angle now if we jump back over into our comp we'll just name the circle so it stays somewhat clean if i want this thing to happen at an angle i can't necessarily just go in and rotate it because then we're going to get weird hiccups so we're going to do this in the most user-friendly way i'm going to on a pc hitting ctrl shift alt y create a null object if you want you can also go into layer new null object and find it there but i definitely recommend learning your quick keys i'm going to move this down to the floor anywhere essentially i want this to rotate from is where i'm going to put this and i'm just going to go to our parent link and pick whip from the circle to our null i can name this rotate so i'm nice clean and organized and since these both work together my preferred way of working is i'll color them the same thing so it's easy for me to see i can go in here let's just try to rotate this let's go 30 degrees and if we watch it now we're shooting out on an angle and if we need to make any adjustments or changes i can always go back set this to zero and go back and mess with my keyframes that way or if we're say back at 30 and i say ah that's not far enough i want that to actually go farther well all i'm doing is a y position move all right and that's it i'm gonna go in let's zero this back out so we're at the ground level we can go in we can move this back to the center if i want i can always create a background i'll just steal this one that i have with a ramp with background colors throw it over here drop it to the bottom and if you want to get in and you want to start making cast shadows or any type of ground shadow endless possibilities to do that one little quick bonus technique at the very end what i love to do ctrl alt y it's going to create an adjustment layer if i go in let's grab an eclipse ellipse tool let's draw what our cache shadow would be like let's just imagine the light shining down here i mean we could spend days just talking about lighting and i'm going to add a levels effect let's go in and let's just kind of darken this up a bit now holding ctrl shift h turning off my visibility you'll see that in doing this i'm creating more of a darker tone now why i love doing this stuff with adjustment layers like go in spend some time you'll animate this obviously as an object leaves the ground the shadow is going to become lighter to grow larger but if a client's watching this and they want the background to be a different color maybe i show this and they're like hey can we flip this background color all i have to do is swap colors and my adjustment layer is darkening whatever the color value is underneath it so if i poorly show you can see how my shadow color changes depending on what the color is under so it's just another way that makes my life easier long term with clients and making quick adjustments and that's it it's pretty straightforward and so much fun when you're not fighting the program anywhere near as much and you can just focus on your principles of animation once you get that done be sure to post this and tag schoolmotion and myself in this so we can check out your progress and don't forget to hit the subscribe button and the bell icon so you'll be notified when we release another video and finally if you're looking to step up your after effects game or get a better handle on the foundation be sure to check out animation bootcamp and after effects kickstart each course is packed with lessons to get you to your next level you

Channel: School of Motion

Views: 63,551

Rating: 4.9734416 out of 5

Keywords: Motion Design, Motion Graphics, After Effects, Tutorial, Tips, Tricks, Technique, Learn, Basics, Design, MoGraph

Id: LE87fcprUqY

Length: 18min 2sec (1082 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 30 2020