How to Animate a Still Image with After Effects and Photoshop | Tutorial

let's learn how to take a static illustration and turn it into a wonderful moving motion graphics piece [Music] you can download the resources for this tutorial at my website www.tip.xyz and click on the resources page hello everybody and welcome back to tiptut today we are taking a look at this illustration we're going to break it down into moving parts just from the one image and we're going to create a nice piece of motion graphics with it we're going to make samus move we're going to have a shine on her visor there's going to be glowing particles all sorts of cool stuff like that why metroid because i'm absolutely stoked for metroid dread that's why it's the only reason you can do this with any kind of illustration that you want three stages we're going to plan out how we want it to move because that's going to inform how we dissect it we're then going to prepare it for animation by chopping it up into the different pieces and getting the layers that we need and then the third step is we're going to actually animate it so let's do step one planning so i'm in photoshop here and i have this single jpeg image that we're going to chop up and make move now obviously we don't have the information that's behind each part of this character so if we wanted the head to move for example to bob up and down then we're going to need to put something behind the head so that when it moves up there isn't just this white space now i want our whole body to kind of bob up and down okay as if she's breathing and holding in place but to do that we're going to need her arms to move so we're going to definitely need some bones or movement points like this right same for this arm although she doesn't have a hand so that's obviously only going to be a few sections here so i'm going to say this shoulder pauldron is going to have to be its own section because it's going to move independently as she lifts her elbow the shoulder pulled is going to have to move up and rotate that way okay same thing we're going to need to bend at the elbow so that's going to have to be its own section and because of that we're going to need the arm in its own section and because all this is moving we're going to need to fill in behind the arm as well so need to fill in behind the head behind the arm same thing for this shoulder here we're going to need this whole shoulder to move which means that we're going to have to extend her body out behind that shoulder as well for a little bit because as the arm moves it's going to reveal that white background essentially so similar sort of thing for the legs of course the hips might be one item but we're probably gonna need the feet to be their own thing okay and for this back section here i think i'm probably gonna chop out the foot and make that foot its own section and then the leg is going to be kind of disconnected from it really if we're telling the truth okay as a whole we're going to just have to lift samus out of the illustration just entirely and we're also going to need to recreate the shadow and recreate the reflection because essentially we want to take samus that we've got here and we're going to cut her into different pieces it's not as violent as it sounds so we remove the head remove the shoulders we remove the hands almost that we get something a little bit like a paper cut out puppet to work with and once we've done that we can then start filling in the information behind it ready for animation and we're going to leave the emmy robot in the background static for now but of course if you like this and you think this project is fun you could also have a go at animating the emmy by yourself okay we're prepped we know how we want our character to move the next step is step two prepping so i have here just as an example the finished project so you can see if i just drag out the layers palette here i have separated out all of these layers into their own sections and i have filled in all of the background parts in ways that you can see will be useful when it comes to anime you know the hips here are an absolute mess but it really doesn't matter because once you put everything on top you can see that you don't really see any of it and if i control and rotate our gun you can see that all we really need to do is make sure that when we move this gun there's a little bit of something behind it so that there's not just this white background okay and that's essentially what this entire stage is going to be so let's jump right into the flat illustration and i'm not going to do this whole process on camera because this took me about an hour to do what i am going to do is show you with our flat planning version here an example of each of the techniques i used to do this and then you can extrapolate that yourselves and take it from there okay so the first step is to lift samus out of the background entirely and put the information that's behind her back into the scene very simple thankfully for this scene so let's get started with that first things first make sure you're on path mode on the pen tool so if you're using a mouse you can use the pen tool to create really quite accurate lines by just clicking and dragging at certain points until you drag the curve of the line around the outside of your artwork that you want to remove you can then of course hold alt to adjust individual anchor points on this pen path line and clicking and dragging and then using alt every now and then allows you to create hard corners around the edges of your character to cut them out so here i'm just clicking and dragging to get the path shape that i want once i get the path shape that i want i hold alt alt allows me to change the angle of just one side of these handles which allows me to create a hard corner allowing me to cut samus out of the white background you could use object selection tool you could try and select it with channels but i find for this kind of work you want absolutely clean edged lines you don't want any kind of blurring or anti-aliasing or the selection of wrong sections etc etc and once you do finish cutting samus out you'll be left with something that looks a little bit like this so we have this complete path around samus now what we need to do is go to right click and make selection now you have a little pop-up window that says make selection here feather the radius needs to be zero but you also want to leave anti-aliased on click okay and then with your background layer selected just hit ctrl j to duplicate samus onto her own layer and now we can see we have samus cut out perfectly the only thing you need to remember to do is go in and cut out this section from the interior of her arm here using pretty much the same technique apart from there's no need to duplicate this one you can just close it for your line like so right click choose make selection and just delete that content and now we have samus isolated from the background layer but on the background layer we still have samus on the uh sort of like white smoky background that we've got here which is useless to us so as always i'm going to duplicate my background layer ctrl j so we've got an original to work from that's unedited and we're going to use a really clever tool called the patch tool to remove samus from this simple background so let's select the patch tool if you don't see that you probably see the spot healing brush or healing brush just long click on that and choose patch tool now with the patch tool selected the way this works is really clever you can just select a section of image and then drag by clicking and dragging until that section is off and it will take information from the new section you've dragged to and apply it to information in the section that you've cut out or it patches it pressing ctrl d you can see you get a nice smooth soft background removal from that make sure you don't accidentally hit the edge of your canvas or you will get these hard lines like so so it's best to do this just in little chunks and you can kind of fix things as you go now you will get a blurry background but that doesn't matter too much because as you can see all we're doing is just removing samus and leaving like a vague white background in there and don't worry we're going to do this for the whole thing we're going to remove the me2 okay so we get left with this vague white kind of clean cloudy background for our entire canvas or since we are now left with a completely blank background which we can pop samus on top of once again but what we're also going to do is come down here to the bottom of our layers palette and click the mask icon and then with a big round soft brush something absolutely massive we're just going to mask backhand our emmy so we'll have our normal background turned on and we'll mask this back out make it a bit smaller because we don't want to accidentally remask in samus from the original image we want her completely removed and what this does is it allows us to use the nice soft edges of the patch tool to get uh the background completely removed behind samus we still get the nice crisp clouds of the background from the original layer here with samus on her own layer so that's the first technique the patch tool to separate samus and remove her from her background the second technique is quite similar to the patch technique apart from you do it with a lot more control what we're going to do is lift samus's head from her body because remember on our planning stage we wanted to make sure that her head could bob up and down we're going to lift that from her body and we're going to have to fill in the information that's behind it we are going to select our samus layer like so and using the lasso tool again i've got a graphics tablet so i'm carefully drawing around this but of course if you don't have a graphics tablet you can just use the pen tool technique that we used earlier but this is much quicker for me i can just draw a nice clean line around the edge of samus's head i'm going to press ctrl j to duplicate that layer and now we are left with just samus's head which we will rename of course to head okay always label your layers just like ben mariot tells you but now on the layer underneath of course we've still got samus head so it looks like we haven't done anything what we need to do now is separate out her torso section so that we can fill in the information behind the head so i've hidden the head layer and back on our full samus layer what i'm going to do is i'm actually just going to guestimate where i think this will extend to so let's say around here we're going to go under her shoulder pauldron we don't want to collect any of the blue veiny kind of stuff here because that's going to be on the arm layer i'm going to select that portion of her um body here we're gonna assume the chest continues down like this it's gonna come up roughly around there and boom now all we care about here is that we need to fill in this information behind the head and the head's going to pop up and down later on we're going to move the arm yeah it's going to rotate a little bit so we're going to need just a little bit of extra information around here perhaps you know let's just round that off to make life easier on ourselves and again we're going to hit ctrl j and we are left with just the torso section but it's got the head on it as well we don't want the head on it we want to remove that so i'm going to control click the head layer so that i get this selection of the head and we're going to remove that from the torso and now we know exactly what we're working with okay we need to fill in this background section here and we we need to fill in something behind here just so you don't get a little bit of um sort of anti-aliasing issues so what we're going to do is just come over to this bit we don't really care about this bit at all we're going to add a new layer underneath our torso layer we're going to select the eyedropper tool just a nice dark black i'm just going to fill that in just so we've got a nice hard edge to what we're working with okay the only thing we care about here is the head we'll do the rest of it with a separate layer now as you can see if the head bob's up and down at the moment we have a section missing from her collar here so what we're going to do is we're going to grab our torso layer the layer with the torso on it and with the lasso tool we're just going to nab this side of her collar from over here ctrl j duplicates that layer we can then flip that by edit transform flip horizontal and place it over with the ctrl t transform tool place over the existing one on this side like so now obviously the lighting's a little bit off there so we're actually going to do once we've positioned it the way we like is create a mask on this layer and with the soft brush tool again we're actually just going to mask out the bits that we don't need so we're going to come in and we just need to fill in that little section just like that and then just trim off that bit there so as you can see we've now got a clean collar so that if we turn the head on we can bob that head up a little bit and it will reveal the collar behind it so that's okay we now just need to make sure that we've got some information for the rest of this as well all i'm going to do for this one is i'm going to take a lasso behind my head like so we're going to go below the torso layer again so we've got a layer below that already let's just make sure yep we're on that same layer as our kind of background black layer like this okay and i'm just going to take the black again and i'm just going to fill in some of the top here now this might seem cheaty and cheap but don't worry we're going to blend it just a little bit better we're going to eyedropper a dark red from the edge of the armor and we're just going to go to a very dark red here and we're just going to paint in the edges so that it blends just a little bit better okay now we've got like a basic um bright or so darkish red all the way down to black in the background but we want the glow from this armor section here to extend a little bit further again not too much because all the head's actually going to be doing is probably bobbing down that much and then bobbing up this much as you can see if we bob up just a little bit we get this kind of like halo section here where it doesn't really work so all we need to do is let's control click that head hide the layer go back to our darkness layer here and then press ctrl shift i so that we can basically paint everywhere that isn't on the torso layer now on our actual layer with the torso we've now got the ability to clone stamp uh certain sections of our artwork now clone stamping basically you can hold alt to select a portion of your image and then you can paint that portion of the image somewhere else on your canvas so all we're going to do is clone stamp some of this dark gray greenish gunk here and we're just going to paint some of it in so that shows us where our limit is which is good but i don't actually need it so i'm going to do is just keep holding alt keep re-sampling just so we can basically move some of this green upwards a bit so that when the head does lift away from the armor you don't just get presented with this heavy um sort of reddish black what you actually get presented with is a continuation i mean a poor continuation but a continuation of the armor that you've previously seen okay so quite subtle you know and quite quick and dirty because obviously i'm showing an example but now as you can see what we can do is we can lift up and down this head and it just looks like it's the edge of the armor now if you wanted to take this a step further you could absolutely go back onto your torso layer here add a new layer on top and if you're feeling brave you could just sample some of these edge highlight colors and with a nice hardish brush very small oops excuse me i just collapsed the window there with a nice hard brush very small you could come in and just paint in some of these highlights again sampling the nearby colors to create kind of like a harder edge so let's sample maybe this darker red here get that in like so and then try changing the blending mode of this to something like hard light and reducing the fill just a little bit and what that does is it gives us a nice crunchy edge so that when we have the head in like so and we have it lifting up and down it just seems like there's a harder edge to that metal okay so now you can see we have the head separated from the body we have some approximation of information behind it so that when we come to bob the head later on you can kind of see the edges of the uh like the context surrounding the head basically okay so that's the main technique that you can use to do the rest of this image as well so let's take a look at some of the other things we need to do but first of all let's take all of this torso information and we're not going to cut we're not going to merge it just yet we're going to group it and we're going to call that group torso and then when we know we're absolutely happy with it and we've done you know some bits with the shoulders and things like that we can merge that into a single layer now obviously when we turn all this other information back on it's going to look quite ugly because we haven't finished cutting this apart yet but what we will need to do now for example is take this uh right arm or her left arm here and chop that up into the same different bits and then place it above our torso layer so let's do one more example and then um we'll move on from that because the rest of it is just the same stuff just you know per context of what it is you know this is the arm this is the leg so the first bit that we need to separate it out into is of course the shoulder pauldron which we're actually going to lift away from this kind of membraney stuff underneath okay so ctrl j for that and we'll call it shoulder now we have the shoulder on a separate layer then we need what is essentially the arm so we're going to take the full arm just by copying this information here cutting it out from there uh let's go just into the shoulder podging a bit doesn't matter because that's going to be on top so that's going to show probably the amount of space that we actually need underneath it as well so let's lift that section and let's also lift the forearm as well let's carefully cut that out i'm not going to bother the hand because as you can see from the example file the hand is actually attached to the other arm because we want it to stick to the cannon but we are going to lift the entire arm from here so now we have the arm by itself we want it to bend at the elbow if you remember our planning section so we're going to cut it along the elbow here and this is the beauty of working with um we'll just cut this one ctrl x new layer ctrl shift v to paste it in place this is the beauty of working with the character that's wearing armor is that you have these lovely hard crisp lines to cut these things away from so we have the shoulder now okay all by itself we have the upper arm and we have the lower arm and that's all in the sections that we need in the right layers so we'll call that upper arm and we'll call this one lower arm when it comes to the other sections um we're going to need to rotate this so if we have our lower arm and we can kind of do an example approximation of where it's going to rotate you can see that we need a bit more information behind that other arm section here but you can also see that we have this kind of black underlining section so this is actually going to be really easy to fix for us so on our upper arm layer we're just going to draw ourselves a nice clean round end to the edge of the arm okay and what we could do is we could try sampling this and then painting it you know thin sliver by thin sliver and you may choose to do that what i'm actually going to do is i'm just going to extend this white section out a little bit by just painting that in so holding alt with the clone stamp tool here and just painting this section in a little bit again doesn't have to be perfect it just has to be a rough approximation of that information here then i'm just going to select our dark black color here with the normal brush tool um that's a bit larger we're just going to paint this in we've now got that nice hard line and shape like so okay and i'm actually going to lift this information from another portion of our image so you can see here that we have um this kind of uh black section down here that's very dark we have these blue vein sections what i'm actually going to do is i'm going to lift from our full samus layer i'm going to lift this piece of blue vein ctrl j to duplicate that onto its own layer okay we'll pop that above upper arm and we'll just rotate that stick it in place here okay now let's take our transform tool edit transform warp and we're just going to pull this so that it bends in the right direction now it's just got a little bit of a curve to it a little bit more of a natural curve and then we'll go to image adjustments hue saturation we're going to colorize this as a very dark slightly blue so let's just take some of that purple out section of vein there and now that black looks pretty much like black that was there in the beginning let's control click the upper arm layer ctrl shift click our new vein layer and then uh ctrl shift i to invert that and delete everything that's outside of the section that we need essentially then let's just blend this in a little bit better by creating a mask and then with the brush tool we can just mask out these sections to make it perfectly neat okay now when we turn back on our lower arm you can barely see the changes that we've made and we can rotate and we have some information behind that okay now obviously i'm doing this very quickly you would take a lot of time but once you have finished doing that for all the different sections that you need and it doesn't have to be perfect you'll end up with something like this and as you can see if i turn this on layer by layer this can be very ugly you can see i've got the hips here where i've just copy pasted these sections i've got the back foot which i've actually just copied this foot and flipped it over because i prefer the way it look you can see on the torso that's our finished torso so you can see how if we go back to our planning section that we've done together we have this head and torso section if we turn off the other arms like so you can kind of see how we got from that stage to that stage i just extended with the clone stamp tool these kind of blue backgrounds can be ugly as sin it doesn't matter because once you put all these things back on top you can start to see how you build the puppet that you need and once you've got that puppet ready to build you're ready to move on to this third step the final step which is animating it the fun bit step three animation okay so here we are inside after effects and i'm definitely not recording this for the second time because i accidentally left tip cam over all of the keyframes so that's fine um but we're now going to take a look at animating this sucker so you can see right here this is the kind of thing we're going to be going for uh cutting up samus into all the different puppet parts allowed us to animate her sort of pulsing in this kind of you know squatting movement and we're going to add some nice particle effects and a kind of glowing effect to the end of her barrel and if you zoom in as well you can see that we have a nice reflection sometimes it comes across her visor revealing a little bit of the face inside so we're going to take this in stages and the first stage obviously is to get our stuff into after effects so let's crack on with that the way to do that is very simple we're just going to grab our metroid red puppet.psd and we're just going to drop it over our project window the only important thing you need to worry about is that the import kind is set to composition retain layer sizes for this particular one editable layer styles doesn't really matter so just hit ok and what that retain layer sizes allows us to do is it's when we open up our composition all of our layers are still separate but also more importantly our layers are cropped to the content of each layer if you don't select retain layer sizes it will make each layer the size of the canvas which is obviously way too big so step one then is to make sure that we uh puppet our character properly so we need to pin all of these sections together so that when the chest moves the arms and stuff move with it so we'll do that first so when puppeting i like to color code my layers so for example if we were to take the hips here what i like to do is make those red so that i know this is the start of our puppet and we're going to grab our pan behind tool the shortcut which is y and we're just going to move the anchor point to the point where the hips should actually be rotating or repositioning themselves from okay so that's going to be somewhere like here in the middle of the hips now connected to those hips are going to have to be obviously this top thigh as well so i might like to make those things that are connected to the main anchor point orange so that means at a glance i can see that anything on that layer is connected directly to the hub of the puppet or the core of the puppet now to actually link these we just need to grab our pick whip tool here which if you don't see you can click the toggle switches modes um oops i mean they're on both so it doesn't matter and you can just pick whip that to the hips and what this means is if we were to rotate the hips we press r to bring up the rotation then that will rotate to along with it okay so we're just gonna go through and do all of that for example here the back leg calf is gonna have to be attached to the back leg not to the hips so what i do is i make those yellow so you can see we just go through red down through to yellow and then pick whip that to the top of the calf which means i can rotate that individually i can rotate the leg individually and i can attach it to the hips individually okay so we're just going to go through and do all of that it should be fairly common sense how they attach so we'll just fast forward through this section okay so now as you can see we have all of our layers connected in the right way and if we select all those layers and press r to bring up our rotational keyframes for all of them we can see how that affects our puppet for example if i were to rotate the torso everything attached to the torso would rotate but all of the things that are below the hierarchy and the torso would not and this allows us to basically control our puppet so that's the first thing we're going to do we're going to take a look at animating the basic sort of positioning puppet of our character here so let's jump into that first thing to do take this one step at a time don't try and animate everything at once go back and do it in stages so we're going to start off with the torso animation okay so we want the general torso to kind of bob up and down a little bit as if she's breathing heavily and from running away from the scary emmy robot so we'll start off with that let's grab our torso layer press p shift r to bring up position and rotation keyframes and i'm just going to keyframe both of those by clicking the stopwatches let's go over to say two seconds and keyframe it again and that's gonna be the start and end position which we want to loop so obviously they're gonna be exactly the same and then let's say at one position at one second let's just keyframe position for now take it one step at a time and i'm just going to drag her body down a little bit we don't need to be too much something like that and there you go we've started to animate it looks a little bit robotic because it's all linear though so what we're going to do is just press f9 for easy using that middle keyframe we're not going to ease these two at the end because i'll show you what happens if we do now if we do ease this it looks okay okay but then we want this to loop so we're going to add a loop to this by alt clicking so holding alt and clicking the stopwatch next position that brings up our transform controls and we can just type the words loop out and that's loop with the lowercase l and an uppercase o then do open and close brackets semicolon and that short piece of code is basically going to take any keyframes on that layer and just loop them continuously now for position you might want to leave these easing you might want to leave these last two not eased it depends on what happens when you adjust the rotation and obviously on what your model is now at the moment if you don't use them you get that kind of snapping motion which might be what you want might not be let's leave the ease on for position but for rotation let's do something a little bit different i'm going to go to say half a second and then move over a few frames and put a rotational keyframing let's go for one and a half seconds back a few frames and put another one in there so we've kind of got it in thirds a little bit further than thirds okay and then let's just push a little bit of rotation in there so let's give this keyframe here two percent rotation and let's give this keyframe here negative two percent rotation okay now let's see what happens if we easy ease all of these um negative two on that one and then we easy ease just by pressing f9 let's see what that looks like pretty good but then we kind of get this um slowing to a stop motion because we've eased it let's turn on looping by alt clicking the stopwatch loop out looks okay but as you can see this is where those easings keyframes start to cause issues they kind of get this yes it slows to a stop but it looks very strange because it's a hard stop okay and that doesn't look great so what we're actually going to do is we want this to have continuous motion at the start and end so we're going to control click to turn the first and last rotational keyframes back to standard keyframes what this does is yes it eases into the bottom but it linearly moves through the first and last making a perfect loop for us okay so there is our hip movement which looks fine perfect let's do the arms and then i'll do the rest of this in fast forward mode because it's literally the same thing and you can just have a play and see what you think but the arms are quite important because if you remember we connected this hand to the cannon which means that we have to make sure the other hand matches up to it otherwise it's going to look a little bit strange so let's start with the arm top upper and we're going to have rotation and positional keyframes for this one too let's keyframe both of them we can click these arrows to snap to make sure that we're on the right um keyframe position and we can press them again and then we can go back to the first keyframe and we can keyframe them again like so let's have as she crouches down i think her arms would move up a little bit okay i think that's natural so let's just shift that position up a touch and let's just take the rotation of that and i think they would go out first of all so let's put that as say four degrees out okay now the arm as it goes down is going to rise up a little bit and come back into position perfect let's ease both of those alt click to bring up our controls and loop out both of them so we want that on the position and also on the rotation and as you can see if you start typing out it brings you up a little menu you can press down and then enter to select those and you can see now we've got our top arm moving as well okay perhaps that's a little bit too much positional movement so as you can see you can kind of just tweak that and maybe we want the arm to move in a touch as well so as it comes down rotating nice now let's move that top cannon uh the bottom cannon portion of that as well with position and rotation and we're going to be using position and rotation keyframes for most of this project to be honest for all of the movement so good to get used to them now by the center of this drop point we definitely want this gun to be staying upwards a bit like this so let's bring that back in and i don't think we actually want position for this one because obviously it's attached to the arms if we move the position it'll be like her joints are floating about so let's just turn position off again by clicking that stopwatch let's ease in the center again only because we want the linear animation at the end to be quite smooth and let's loop that out let's take a look that looks pretty natural i quite like that we've got a little bit of snapping at the ends there at this point you see here it kind of bounces back into it and we could always play around with the easing here if we wanted to to see if we can't fix that maybe that one does need easing it's all up to you depends how whether you like the way it looks or not let's leave these for now but you may come back and tweak that later on so now that we have that arm animated we also need to animate the other arm to compensate for it so let's jump into that section let's go to first our arm back upper so we want to do this via the shoulder but as you can see on this part if we were to start rotating this we have a bit of an issue where there's this horrible hard line here at the edge of the armor but that's why we painted in the section in the background so that we can easily fix this let's grab our pen tool and we're just going to mask out just a little bit of this joining section so we're just going to draw a mask over like this and let's twirl down that mask in our settings and change it to subtract then pressing f to bring up the mask feather we can just increase that feather a little bit and just tweak until you get something that you're happy with i'm gonna actually bring this into the edges here so we don't get any unwanted overlap like so something like that and what that allows us to do is then when we come back to rotate this layer we've got a bit of a softer thing to work with okay so that looks quite nice i'm going to bring this in a little bit again so that the edges of that are a bit softer and now as you can see when we rotate we get something that's a little bit easier to work with okay let's zero that back out again and zoom out so we can see what we're working with with the other arm and let's just start by keyframing the rotation and position of this arm here so p shift r brings up both those keyframes and let's keyframe them all here and on two seconds as well and of course on one second now we want this arm as she comes down to do the same as the other one which is to rotate out a little bit we need to be careful how far we do rotate that out because the position of the lower arm as well is affected so whilst that is rotating out let's also bring it in positionally and up just a little bit like so okay so now as she comes up she hunches her shoulders a bit which again seems quite natural to me let's ease both of those and as we learn from the other arm we need to ease the position as well on the outside with f9 but not the edges of the rotation otherwise you start to get that kind of star stop motion to it you want the rotation to be continual so there we go looking quite nice all right let's alt click both of those stopwatches so that we get our loop out availability and we'll just add that to both of these layers so that's looping the rotation and looping the position and this is probably the mistake that most people will see uh when something looks wrong is they've forgotten to add the loop out on this kind of animation so there we go that's looking quite nice now we need to compensate this pauldron that's why we separate it out because otherwise you get this gap you can see here so let's go up to the pauldron position rotation p shift r go from one second to two seconds back to one second and i want this to kind of shift into her body a bit okay so let's just grab the pauldron let's move it in and down and let's rotate it up we don't want to show too much of that background bit behind it so let's have it be here as if it's settling down and let's ease both of those let's ease all of the positions there we go and as you can see that's looking a bit nicer although i don't really like that original starting position so i'm actually going to tweak that original starting position just a little bit like so so it's quite less intense now let's copy that position and rotation keyframe with control c and paste them over the last position and rotation keyframes on two seconds so make sure we're exactly on two seconds like so so then we get that starting position change as well and now as she comes down that pauldron moves too let's push that rotation just a little bit further in the middle i don't like the fact that it goes behind her head too much that looks nice let's all click both those stopwatches and loop out last step for the arms then is to make sure that the lower arm connects up with her hand still otherwise her hand just becomes disembodied which is no good so let's make sure we're happy with the rest of that movement first of all that looks pretty good to me i'm quite happy with that so let's go to the arm back lower and again position and rotation as you can see this is why i'm going to skip the legs and the head movement because as you can see this gets quite similar but i'm doing the arms because they all connect to the torso so it's important you guys understand how to make sure that stays connected to the other hand otherwise you get this weird doubling issue here so i'm just going to hit f9 before we've even moved anything because we know that's how we want it to move and i'm going to f9 these sections as well and in the middle here i'm just going to make sure the arm moves up ever so slightly and we're just going to rotate that until it remains hidden behind the other hand and then we know that it's going to be connected there is a section here that where it starts to move away too quickly though and we start to see it so we actually want to do is come into here into our positional keyframes and toggle to our graph editor now this is because we haven't got the position really moving at all to compensate so we can push this down like so and you can see we still get that um gap because the upper arm is pulling this lower arm uh upwards okay so we actually want to do is make sure we select our rotational keyframes go to the graph editor and make sure we've got the speed graph showing and we just wanted to start a little bit quicker so we're going to pull these handles out just to touch what that's going to do is make that rotation start a little bit quicker let's do the same thing with the position here okay going to take this middle handle and we're just going to pull these handles out so they start a little bit quicker which means that when it comes to that sort of center position point which we can probably afford to push down a little bit further and let's push it out as well as well to cover up that little black lump poking out there when we come to our center point that's going to remain just a touch more hidden behind it pull that just a touch further again see how pulling that affects the timing a little bit so you can kind of tweak that positioning like so okay now one thing you can do also to compensate for that to make sure it remains hidden is of course to come into your um rotational keyframe here and let's put that maybe to a three excuse me that is the wrong arm we need to go to the rotational keyframe here and put it to just like one degree less there we go and that now remains mostly hidden so let's turn on that looping and of course if you wanted to you could also if we turn off the canon layer we could just mask out this green lamp so that it's not there at all go back into photoshop and edit that i'm not gonna do that for now because uh this is just a obviously example tutorial but that's another way to fix it so we now have the arm back lower and the position and rotation so let's go to loop out semicolon to close off the line of code and do the same thing here loop out and let's take a look at the top half of our character's animation all right looks pretty good i don't like the bouncing on the rotation of that lower arm though so we'll just take arm back lower and we will for this one ease those because this original motion is directed by the upper arm so you want to make sure that that's a bit smoother looks pretty good okay i'm going to go through now and do the legs and the head movement um one thing i will say is if i want to the hips to bob up and down so we'll do this in real time before we go back to fast forward mode obviously if i want the hips to bob up and down then everything is going to move except that back foot which i have not connected correctly to the calf so everything's going to bob up and down if i move the hips so i want the the hips to bob up and down but i want the feet to stay in the same place so the way i fix that is i take my rectangle tool doesn't matter what the color is because it's just going to be a guide and i draw myself a rectangle where the bottom of the feet touch it okay like so now i can keyframe my hips and it's just going to be a very simple two second bob okay so we'll take positional keyframes at the first and second second positional keyframe in the middle and we're just going to push him down ever so slightly push her down excuse me ever so slightly okay we're going to ease all of those so let's see if we like that first of all yes we do so let's alt click that and choose loop out but obviously at the moment all of her legs and things bob down with it but what that allows us to do is that when we come to um animate the rotation and position of these we know that at this point all we need to do is make sure that the feet end up touching the bottom of this line again and we're good to go so we'll do all of that in fast forward and i'll see you on the other side [Music] okay and there you have it so as you can see i've finished the animation now um i can delete my guide layers or at least hide them so we'll just hide them and make sure of course we've renamed them to guide and that is all of the sort of positional rotational kind of animation that we're going to need for this animation so up next we want to do something cool with samus's advisor we want to see her eyes shine through it at some point so we're actually going to do something clever called pre-composing where we're going to take the head here right click it and choose pre-compose we're going to make sure we leave all attributes in metroid dread puppet and what that does is when we turn this into a pre-composition all of our keyframes and stuff we've already done are left in here so that when we go inside that composition is just flat there's no animation there's no rotation position nothing like that which means we can very easily add something to the visor now in the resources for this uh tutorial series you'll see there's an image called samus underscore aaron.png and you can just drop that into this composition here i'm going to turn the blending mode to multiply for a moment so that i can hold shift and scale this down so we can see some of her face in the visor it might not actually match up to the head but i'm just going to tell myself that there is some kind of uh computering going on in this helmet and samsu's head probably isn't actually that big um we're just going to position that up into something that looks kind of right and then grabbing the pen tool with the layer selected we're just going to draw a mask that goes around and this works exactly the same way as the masking pen tool from photoshop that we did in the earlier section of this tutorial so we're just going to come in and we're going to draw a mask around the interior section of this visor now that looks a little bit chunky so we're going to do the same thing as earlier press f and just blur this out by a few pixels now multiply probably isn't the best blending mode for this i'm going to choose something like hard light and we're going to reduce the opacity of the layer by pressing t down to about 40 percent or so now that looks okay but we don't want to have face visible all the time or you can tell that it's going to look kind of stupid so what we actually want to do is mask as if light is shining across the visor so we're going to do that with a shape layer let's grab our rectangle tool and we're just going to fill it with white just so it's very easy to see and we're going to make a very tall and thin rectangle perhaps a couple of them next to each other that can be our reflections okay let's grab our shape layer we'll rename this reflection and we'll press ctrl alt and home to move the anchor point to the center of those shapes and let's rotate them say by about 30 degrees okay now all we're going to do is bring this across the visor and we're going to use a mask to only show the face when it crosses when this reflection crosses the visor so we'll put that just outside of our mask range here press p to bring up the positional keyframes and let's go over to say about two seconds uh actually let's make it slightly longer so that the loop isn't as obvious and let's just position that on the other side then we're going to go over to say about order name somewhere around here and we'll just press position again and what that does is when we alt click this stopwatch and choose loop out it's going to loop all of the keyframes right so that's going to slide across her vision like so and then it's going to hold in that position until it hits this keyframe and then it's going to loop so essentially this is like a pause and you can move when it pauses by moving these keyframes yeah so we could shift this to be a little bit shorter you know perhaps slightly faster it would then hold position and then it would animate again and to make this um only show where the reflection shows you're just going to go to toggle switches mode to make sure that you can see this track matte option here i'm just going to choose track matte alpha map reflection and what this does is it only shows the content of the face layer when there is the reflection layer above it looks a little bit harsh to me though so i'm going to go to my reflection layer here effects and presets i'm going to type in gaussian blur drag that onto here and we'll turn up the gaussian blur to about 20 oh 20 is way too much forgot we're on a small canvas let's do 5 there we go and now as you can see we have our reflection back in our main composition by pressing tab going to metroid dread puppet we can now see that we have this reflection going across thomas's face every few seconds wait for it there it is looks pretty good awesome that adds a nice little bit of detail let's add some pulsing to her arm cannon so to add the pulsing to the arm cannon we're going to do it really simple we're just going to grab our shape tool long press until it becomes an ellipse and we're just going to grab a color that's basically white it's got a little bit of yellow in it because that's what the yellow on her gun is like in fact if you wanted to you could just eye drop her a very bright yellow from the edge of her weapon and we're going to draw a circle that's sort of roughly that size and we'll call this glow and we will press control at home to move that anchor point over the center of the glaze and then we'll pop that over the end of her gun and change the blending mode of the layer to hard light perhaps not hard light let's do instead color dodge that's going to look much more powerful okay uh now what we also want to do is grab our shape tool again with this same layer selected but we're going to change to mask mode and roughly in the center we're going to click and drag a circle whilst holding ctrl and shift and that's going to draw a mask in the direct center of that shape and we'll change that mask to subtract and now we get a ring shape at the end of our blaster here let's go to effects and presets again drag a gaussian blur onto it and pop this one up to around 50. see what that looks like nice we've got a pretty good powerful looking glow at the end of the gun we want to make sure that that follows the position of the gun so we're going to do our simple thing that we did before which is to pick whip this to the end of arm top cannon and that means as that moves so too will the glow but it looks a little bit static a little bit boring at the moment so we're going to use another expression called wiggle okay so we're going to bring up our opacity keyframe and we're going to alt click so here we're going to type wiggle open and close brackets semicolon and in here we need to give it some parameters so we're going to say 3 times a second comma we want to wiggle between two values 20 degrees opacity and 80 degrees opacity and that's going to give us this little bit of code that when we press play it's going to randomly wiggle the opacity of our um shape here okay that looks pretty good to me let's however duplicate that glow and just crank the scale up to say like 300 awesome let's remove the inner mask from that layer just by deleting the mask however we don't want this one to wiggle in its opacity so i'm just going to um i'll click that stopwatch to remove that and we'll just press t and then go down to say like 20 and that's now just got a static 20 glow let's make it a little bit stronger but let's increase the blurriness and that just gives us a nice kind of halo effect around the end of the gun as well so as we go through this we can see that we've got a nice bit of wiggling going on which is perfect final step then let's add some particles to the end of the gun coming out of the barrel to do this we're going to use an effect called cc particle world which is part of after effects already so let's go to layer new and solid up here or press control y for the shortcut and we'll just call this one particles on this layer we want to add an effect called cc particle world let's drag that onto the layer and as you can see we've already got a load of particles coming up here so obviously the default particles here aren't very good they're not what we want at all so let's twirl down our physics options here forgot the word then and we'll change it to something like um directional axes and what this does is it makes all of our particles shoot off into one direction let's change our velocity way down so that it's um a lot a lot less of a jet okay and let's change our gravity so that those particles move upwards okay something like that perhaps however we don't want this kind of weird tilt to it here so we're going to twirl down our directional axis under the physics options and we're just going to zero out all of these options here and then change axis x until it goes perfectly upwards like so okay now we've got this kind of upwards motion to our particles but there's way too many particles so i'm going to turn the birth rate way down something like 0.05 you know that gives us just a few particles to be working with which is much nicer and then we obviously want to increase the radius of these pixels something like that so they grow just a bit taller and we will also increase their longevity let's crank it all the way up to 10 so they last longer on the screen which means you can see they then go off screen all the way to the top so now you can see the particles begin to get born like this and they start to glow off the top of the screen let's increase the radius x just a little bit something like that so they're not so clustered together and increase the radius z so they've got a little bit more scale into them as well okay then let's go down to extra and let's crank up the extra bit which just basically adds in a bit of extra random motion so you can see the more that we crank that the more randomized and extreme these particles get so let's pop that up to about point one and then the extra rotation let's tweak that as well perfect okay i'm going to change the velocity it's on 0.1 i'm going to do like 0.02 okay and that's just going to make them uh move a little bit better now gravity vector as well let's go to gravity y and change that to about point two and you see that allows for a little bit more of that random motion from the extra to peak through as well perfect particles we're going to leave them online because that's the style we want we don't want the birth color to be yellow we want it to be born white which means down here near the gun it's going to be perfectly white and the death color we're going to change to be a nice hard yellow like so so as they go up the screen they get more and more yellow that looks quite good but we're going to change the composite mode to add so that just when it's over stronger colors it gets a little bit more of a glow and speaking of glow we're also going to add a nice simple glow below our particles which just makes them pop a lot more against the armor and we're going to increase the threshold of that to say about 70 now you may lose some of the colors you may want to go back and tweak the color of that but that's fine i don't mind too much final step then is i'm going to take the position of my uh producer here so you can see we can change the producer's position like so and we are going to position that over the canon so let's just take the x and move that over take the y and move that over double check that our particles still move off screen and then we're going to take the pick whip of our particles layer and we're going to pick whip it back to the cannon now as those particles move they're going to move with the cannon there might be a point where you can see you might just see it tweaking off the edge of the screen so you can just scale up that layer just a little bit as well and that my friends is all there is to it so as you can see we've got the particles starting to launch out of the gun so let's wait for that to render and take a look at what it looks like all right looks pretty good uh probably far too many particles for my liking so i'm actually going to come through and we're going to change that like to naught point naught 1. that's just going to severely reduce the amount of particles final things to do then are to add the shadow and the reflection of samus so let's do that to do that nice and simple we're just going to take all of our layers that involve samus and her particles we're going to right click them and we're going to choose pre-compose we're going to turn this into a composition called samus and we're going to move all attributes into the new composition so that it gives us a perfectly aligned comp here as you can see all of our animation is safe inside uh you may need to change some things like the glow on this gun here it's a little bit too strong now but i'll leave that up to you we're going to duplicate this layer once and pop it below and we'll rename it to shadow then we'll just scale that down horizontally vertically excuse me i'm an idiot and we'll just reposition that until it lines up with samus's knees roughly let's go to our effects and presets window and type in fill and drag and drop a fill onto that shadow layer bright red is obviously not correct what we want is black we don't want it to be fully black though we want to take some of the um colors from the background here so we'll do is we'll just go to this kind of um dark color on the emmy here and you can see that it's got a little bit of red in it so we'll just bring a little bit of red into that shadow and then our old friend gaussian blur allows us to blur out this layer until it becomes something resembling a shadow and we can drop the opacity to around 30 the reason we do that is so that any animation that is done in the samus layer you can see is reflected in the shadow layer speaking of reflections haha good segue let's duplicate samus once more pop them down below both of them and call it reflection this time i'm going to move the anchor point down to where i want the center of the reflection to be say this foot and we're just going to scale this until samus is upside down perfect let's grab our rectangle tool with that layer selected which means we'll make a mask and we can just mask out how much of samus we want to show pressing f brings up mask feather and we'll just increase that feather let's tweak the position of our mask until we're happy i'm going to double click it which allows me to use transform controls increase the feather just a bit more and let's reduce with opacity the entire opacity of the layer to say about 40 and as you can see now we've reintroduced that shadow and the reflection in the original and we are good to go let's take a look at the finished project all right and there you have the finished thing as you can see i made a few final tweaks i added a bit more motion to these particles and i did that by changing the style from directional axis to fire i just thought it worked a little bit nicer and i'll reduce the overall opacity of this outer glow here so it's not quite so powerful apart from that that's everything so thank you so much for watching everybody i really hope you enjoyed the soil this is a really fun one to do i had to do it twice because i messed up the first time so uh i got quite good at it by the time it was all over and hopefully you guys enjoyed it found something useful and you can do this with any of the kia or illustrations that you have made so thank you very much for watching everybody i really do appreciate it make sure to like comment subscribe ring the bell all that crap that youtube makes me tell you to do and i'll see you next time for another episode of tiptap thank you for watching this bumper episode of tiptoe i hope you enjoyed it if you would like to become an awesome member like these lovely people here you can click that join button below for exclusive perks and benefits such as personalized feedback and shout outs like this remember to subscribe for more tips tricks and tutorials thanks for watching

Channel: TipTut

Views: 257,465

Keywords: after effects, adobe, after, effects, fx, mograph, motion, graphics, vfx, visual effects, tutorial, how, to, help, after effects tutorial, motion graphics tutorial, animate, animated, alive, bring to live, moving photo, moving portrait, puppet pin, turbulent displace, living photo, animates photo, animated painting, painting, pupped, pin, healing brush, content aware fill, spot heal, clone stamp, key art, illustration, animated illustration, metroid dread, metroid, tiptut, animate still image

Id: t9xyIiqQQy8

Length: 56min 6sec (3366 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 27 2021