How to Animate a Map In After Effects!

[Music] hey what's up youtube my name is iate adamczyk from filmmakers vfx guide and today we're going to learn how to do the 3d map animation it's quite simple but i have quite a few tips and tricks for you that you can use for other projects so without further ado let's jump in okay so obviously the first thing we need is to have the image of our map so where do we get this image most likely from google maps but what's the best way to obtain it from what i've found you could do multiple screenshots and then connect them in photoshop but there is actually a better way to go to google.com mind maps then go to create a new map go whatever you need let's do the new york we're gonna do a trip from newark up somewhere here so what you need to do is find your city um get it on your screen in such a way that it fits click over here and then print map choose the a3 size image in the orientation landscape and click on print you can cancel that but what we have is a high resolution image of that map that we zoomed on so right click on it save as and just call it a mapped image and save it and then we can import our image and as you can see it's a really high resolution image and that's perfect okay let's create a new composition and name it map and let's drag our map into our composition as you can see it's way way bigger so let's shrink it down hold shift to scale it uniformly like i said maybe let's animate from newark to let's say empire state building okay so what's the first thing we need to do well let's draw our path so to do that we select the pen tool with the g or select it over here notice that my roto bezier option is turned off and i'm starting to draw over the highway don't mind the shape and the fill for now we will adjust the shape later so this will be our path let's click on this arrow down go to contents shape and this is where we can manipulate whatever we have on this layer so let's delete the fill which is that white area we won't need it click on a stroke and let's change color to let's say nice orange change the stroke width to in our case 5 is fine and then we can click next to dashes to create a dashed lane it doesn't really matter it's a personal preference you can change the dash length over here you can move the offset if something doesn't look right let's make it a little bit wider change it to 12 and that looks good so now we want to adjust the shape of our path in such a way that it aligns with the roads so what we have to do is select the pen tool and click on the shape so now we have the handles with which we can manipulate the curve with as you probably remember if you press ctrl and click on one of these handles you adjust them individually independent from one another so let's click ctrl and step by step adjust the curves for the road if something doesn't look right we can obviously always add the point and manipulate it separately okay great yeah that looks fine as you can see our dashes didn't really make it to the final destination so you can either make it a little bit longer or use the offset that i've talked about that's what it's for okay so that was super easy so let's start with animating the path how do we animate the path well it's really simple you go to the shape layer click on add and select trim paths now we have a new option under contents called trim paths and then if you take a look i am animating the end of the path if i move the start i'm animating the start so let's go to the first second and click a stopwatch we can move this keyframe to let's say three and a half seconds and then bring it to zero so let's see how it looks and we have animation of our path great let's easy ease out easy is in to make it a little smoother okay so far so good so let's add the shadow obviously there are a few ways to do that but i think the simplest one is to use a built in drop shadow effect to access it you click on shape layer right click layer styles and select drop shadow as you can see the layer styles effect showed up then you can go to drop shadow options and we can control how our drop shadow looks we can change the angle [Music] we can change the distance this is all fake animated this isn't really a distance in 3d space so keep that in mind we can change the size so basically a softness of our shadow as well as color now we can change the color a little bit why not let's get fancy make it dark blue cool and as you can see the shadow is also animated along with the path so one small touch i like to do is to add the gaussian blur because if it's way too sharp it always looks fake i mean we're not going for photorealism obviously but that jarring sharpness that sometimes occurs is not always a great thing let's use the one and a half pixel blur and actually we can do it also on the map so i just copied over that gaussian blur but this is just a stylistic choice you don't have to do it obviously okay so now the fun part let's create a new camera right click new camera so i'm going to show you later one more advanced option with the camera but for now let's pick a one note camera so we only control the orientation of the camera as you probably remember with a two note camera we have to control the camera itself but also a point of interest so we don't really control where the camera is looking we do this separately by using a point of interest the focal length is 24 mil that's fine going to be pretty wide okay so let's now make both these layers 3d if it became blurry you probably have a depth of field on let's turn it off for now we'll deal with that later so let's plan our scene let's say the first second to reveal keyframes up until this point it will there will be a track forward with the camera over the airport and then we want to kind of follow the path with the camera and end up here so let's do that we're going to need at least two views to make it efficient so let's say this one will be our active camera view and this one will be our custom view so let's rotate our camera a little click r after you select the camera and change the rotation let's say 60 degrees i don't know we'll see we'll have to adjust that over here i have the world axis mode because i found in this case that local axis mode is a little bit tougher to control where it's going as you can see as i'm going closer to the camera our map is showing up over here maybe let's change the angle to 45 or even 35 yeah i like this one so let's set the camera to the proper location okay last chain 25 that's it so now let's see if this is our yeah i think this is our original frame so let's go to the frame number one click shift and p and make keyframes everywhere in case we want to change things up for now we can move this a little bit further back so during the first second we have a slide zoom in and then we will follow the path and as far as how many keyframes on the way it's really individual try to match it up in such a way that it just looks good there is no set in stone way so let's go further let's change this way this time to the front so you can see we have a camera looking this way over here and i can easily now change it to follow the path and we can do a slide track forward or rather down to get the camera closer to our destination you can see the camera really started going a little bit too soon so we can move this keyframe over here and see how it looks so this whole thing is a little too quick for my liking but we can easily fix that so what you have to do is just go to the shape layer stretch the end maybe to 5 seconds and to not adjust all of these keyframes separately select them all click alt and then we stretch everything so let's see how it looks right now okay that's a little better what i want to do is to easy ease out over here and easy is in so i don't really like that ending over here it's a little too sharp for me so i'm going to delete this keyframe see how it looks okay so now i'm going to move it and lay it down over here this will be always a little back and forth until it looks right for you yeah i actually like this let's see how this looks okay cool okay i can think we can switch to one view so let's turn on the depth of field open up the aperture way too much to really make sure what's in focus and change the focus distance so our line is always in focus okay so far so good here we can make a keyframe so let's make a focus distance keyframe over here again we will not have such a shallow depth of field this is just to make sure that what's in focus is in fact in focus make a keyframe over here and now we want to make sure or you can leave it out of focus actually it really depends on you and you can turn down the aperture so we have a little bit more depth of field okay let's see how it looks right now okay great you can always make it slower make it faster really depends on your animation if for some reason we don't have this right now but if you were seeing black bars so you don't have to do it i'm just doing this for demonstration purposes as you can see we have black bars over here and that means we are seeing outside of the bounce of the picture so there's a really easy fix just type in repetile and lengthen towards that direction that is sticking out so let's see expand left a little bit and for tiling select unfold and then it's mirrored but nobody will ever notice and you just fixed that black part obviously do it as little as possible as this is a little more a memory consuming but we don't need that so let's get back to 24. so let's do these markers that you've seen at the beginning of the video let's create a new composition select the ellipse tool make an ellipse go to ellipse ellipse path right click convert to bezier path this way we can modify these points so now that we click on ellipse let's use the vertex convert tool to make it a sharp point select these two points grab them move them up hold shift and this will be our marker now let's select this layer again click once again on the ellipse tool and create a circle let's move it to the center now click on contents add merge paths and now we can use subtract but we want to subtract the second from the first so just move it to the top and this will subtract the second one from the first and this way we have a hole cool so let's give it some color so use four color gradient let's get back to our composition and select the same color that is our path go to contents shape stroke click on the color we can copy this color over here and click paste to each every one of these four gradients now we have four controls move them and then make this one a little lighter this one a little darker and you can see we have a cool way to do a gradient again add the gaussian blur maybe three pixels and also we want to have a little bit smaller composition so let's click on region of interest and select only our marker now go to composition crop comp to region of interest and we can now select our shape layer select align to center to center and awesome let's save it and bring over our comp which is this let's rename it marker and bring it to our composition let's make it 3d let's scale it down like so now choose the anchor point tool which is pan behind tool select y now we are moving only the anchor point and we will move it to the very bottom of our layer over here this is our layer so now let's use the selection tool and rotate it 90 degrees hold shift to move in 45 degree increments actually it doesn't have to be a strict a 90 degree angle just make sure it looks good on your map you can move it down or up it might be going in and out of focus and that's just because of the depth of field so either you can make a depth of field larger as you remember by closing down the aperture over here or you can just make this a little bit smaller and voila go to the front view as you can see we have our marker over here we can duplicate it let's name it marker start marker and select the marker end and we can move it to the end position of our journey let's make a small animation select s when clicking on that marker we are in the beginning let's change to active camera again adjust it in such a way that it looks good for you let's make a keyframe on a scale and let's set it to zero it can even overshoot a little bit so we have the final scale is 13.5 so let's change it to 16 and there will be kind of pop cool copy these keyframes go to the end select the scale and paste these keyframes you can do it over here let's see how it looks okay cool so a few final touches it looks a little bit flat for me so let's select our shape layer select local axis mode and move it just a tiny bit up again go to layer styles go to drop shadow and maybe increase the distance just a little bit and if you'd like you can add the motion blur obviously so let's turn it on and see how our final composition would look like and you can use it anywhere when you can show your character moving from one place to another when it's important to the story when you want to show how to get to for example your client's location um i don't know what whatever you need to do to carry on the message you want to carry perfectly so that's a good job i want to show you one more cool thing and i sort of came up with i found doesn't matter it's a cool trick that i sometimes want to attach something to the end of this point so let's turn off the motion blur it can either be an arrow or it can for example be a point of interest of the camera so let's create a new composition duplicate it and open it up let's delete this camera we still have our animation [Music] let's create a new camera and change it to two node camera guys i'm going to be honest uh operating the tunnel's camera is often a pain in the butt um let's turn off the depth of field and what i mean by this is if i only move my position you can see my point of interest is staying where it is so if i use these gizmos the point of interest is moving with it but if i'm using these tools so orbit around a point it's often really hard to really nail that composition that movement uh and actually it requires a lot of practice that's why there are plugins like handycam plugin and whatnot but to the point let's change it to custom view and move this camera just a little bit closer to the center let's check the front and it's going to move like here like so so let's move it down [Music] cool so now this is our active camera right so let's create a new null object and i'm going to first place it let's make it 3d i'm going to place it exactly over our starting point so now we will need this null to follow the path exactly how do we do that well i found an expression and i found it on motionboutique.com trim dash path tricks let's copy this expression and paste it on the position of our node so alt click on position and paste it we will obviously have to adjust it a little bit so first we create a variable called shape group so this takes this comp layer path layer maybe let's rename it to path let's get back here let's change it to path let's make it a little bit bigger it goes to our path layer content shape one so let's see yeah that's the right name then creates my path which is our shape group which is this group we created before and goes even more into the content called path1 yep and it takes the path variable great then we create a trim end trim end is the exact point on our path so to grab that it gets shape group content trim paths 1 and takes the variable called end and then our final position would be my path dot point on path trim end which is basically just a percentage of the path and converted to a point on that path if you don't understand don't worry okay it complains here that method name trim pass one in class group doesn't exist oh because when i click the add trim paths i didn't select the shape but rather contents but it's all fine all we have to do is adjust to it so we can change the shape group to this comp layer and it should be good to go let's see let's copy this and see if it worked it doesn't complain great so oh what do we have over here it's offset okay this is because our current value right here doesn't take into the account our current value so our position that we set it on previously right so all we have to do is have all of this movement as it is but just use value plus so instead of replacing we will be adding we might need to adjust our current position so let's move it over here and over here and it should follow it exactly okay that's awesome so depending on your shape structure you might need to modify this a little bit just like i did if not you can use the original i will link everything in the description under the video so good it was a good learning opportunity to spot how we can use these expressions that are already on the internet to adjust to our needs okay back to the video quickly go to point of interest and use the pick whip tool and pick whip it to the position let's see how it looks right now and awesome it follows the path exactly to not see obviously all of these corners what we can do is change the focal length so double click and maybe change it to 50 mil so let's see how it looks awesome as you can see we have a little bit of the edge right here but again cc reptile expand up just a little bit change it to unfold and it's fixed if you have the gaussian blur you might want to [Music] put it before the gaussian blur to avoid any silliness over here so this is one fun way to adjust our camera to look at the point again then you can obviously add the motion blur at the depth of field and whatnot but you already know how to do this so yeah that's it i'm out if you'd like to learn more i have a webinar it's called 10 top things you can do in after effects as a filmmaker check out the link in the description meanwhile subscribe if you aren't already and that's it hit me up with any questions you might have and i'll see you in the next one oh and also i wanted to greet my wife because she told me to see ya

Channel: Jacek Adamczyk

Views: 103,432

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Id: 6bb643LMlyI

Length: 26min 14sec (1574 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 15 2021