How To Animate a Waving Flag - After Effects Tutorial

in this video I'll teach you how to animate a waving flag and objects first of all I have illustrated this flag in Illustrator it's the Danish flag it's from Denmark that's also where I'm from and I've simply separated it into eco and the flag itself now we're mostly going to work on the flag as the pro will just be there to hold on to the flag but to attach the flag to the pole we actually have to start with the flag at the edge of the composition so let's just drag it out so it's roughly at the edge and then we're going to right-click pre-compose and we'll just call this pre comp flag so let's go into this pre comp and we can zoom in a bit on the flag so it's easier to work with sort of like this and now we're going to use a very basic effect that's used by most people and it's called wave walk so if we go to the effects and presets tab we can just search for wave walk click and drag it over to our flag right now this is pretty intense but don't worry we're going to fix it up so it's a sine wave which is fine but we need to adjust the height and width itself so we can just drag out the values now the height doesn't need to be that big of a number but we actually have to adjust the width so as you can see as we drag this out it starts to look more and more like a flag so maybe we are happy sort of around these values and this looks fine for now don't worry we'll get back and adjust it later on right now we actually have to look at something called pinning because if you play this animation you can see that it isn't really attached to the edge which we certainly want it to be now you can pin this by going to pinning and then selecting one of these options the reason why I've taken the flag and directed all the way to the edge and so we can pin it to the left edge if it was in the middle of the composition it wouldn't be able to pin it to anything so you can see it has changed a lot as it isn't waving at the start but it slowly starts to wave more and more towards the other side so we can try and play this back and you can see that it's now pinned so this looks alright for now but we are going to adjust some more settings the wave speed is quite good as it is I think but we're going to look a bit at the direction so right now it's pretty simple quite borrowing as it's just waving at a 90-degree angle but if we go to that 90 degree angle and perhaps change it up to something like 45 get a bit more of an interesting result now this is a bit more organic you could say and that's really what we're looking for when when animating any flak because a flag isn't that simple it doesn't wave at 90 degrees wind comes from all directions and it's sort of all over the place so this looks quite nice but we're actually going to take the wave walk effect press command or ctrl D to duplicate it and go to adjust some of these settings now this just creates another copy and this copy will make it a bit more organic so watch and learn if I as an example take the height you can see maybe we have to decrease that a bit for this copy then I can take the wave with and perhaps we also need to decrease this maybe around 70 and you can see that the animation overall becomes a bit more organic and that's because when duplicating the wave warp effect it applies it to itself and when it's in two copies it just creates a bit more of an interesting effect rather than just the standard wave war so as you can see right now maybe we find this a bit extreme but we can just go ahead and change some of these settings so maybe up here this should be a bit lower so maybe 120 and also the height should probably also be lower so as you can see right now this actually looks quite nice and I think I'm pretty happy with this so let's go back into the main composition now the flag is an alliance of the poll but we can easily do that by just clicking holding down shift and dragging it over so it approximately lines up the flag is underneath the poll so it doesn't matter if it's a bit too far underneath because it really won't show anyways so let's try and preview this and you can see that the flag is waving nicely but perhaps you want a bit more randomness a bit more turbulence in the middle of the flag because right now it's mostly the edges you can also see it a bit in the middle maybe you also just want some shading because right now it's pretty flat and you don't really get that sense of three dimensionality and you really don't get a sense of depth but that's also where you can do this this is by using an effect called turbulent noise so if we go to layer new solid we just call this turbulent noise and I just want to make it black it doesn't really matter that's sort of a habit go to the effects and presets tab and we search for the turbulent noise so drag it over and right now you can see that it's creating some noise but at the moment it's pretty vague and we want to adjust that so we'll we'll adjust some of these settings and first of all we actually want to change it from the basic to the dynamic progressive so this is a bit of a different pattern and we actually want to adjust the contrast so you have to imagine that at all of the dark spots that's going to be a shadow and at the light spots that's just going to be the ordinary flag therefore we also need to go to the transform because right now we can't really use this for the flag animation so we want to adjust this scale but we don't really want it to be uniform can uncheck this box and we can go ahead and adjust some of these settings now we want it to be taller than it is wide we sort of looking for something like this and we could just keep adjusting until we get something we like but again this is pretty random so you'll have to adjust these settings try it out on the flag and then go ahead and sort of readjust some of the settings again because you won't get it perfect the first time that would be pretty lucky at least I think so so we have gotten this turbulent noise but right now it's pretty still and we want it to be animated so the first thing we'll do is actually animate the evolution so as you can see the evolution just sort of changes up the pattern and we can do this manually by adding some keyframes or we can actually add an expression that just changes this over time so we go and all click on the stopwatch then we type in time and then we have to type in how much it has to change every single second so we actually quite a high value for this as the low values will change it so little that you won't really notice it so maybe this should be 250 go ahead and try and preview this and as you can see this should work fine for now so maybe we just want to adjust the contrast a bit get a bit more contrast and now we actually also want this layer to move in X space but if you do that by dragging the layer as you can see then it sort of shows the background and we don't really want that the reason why we wanted to move in X space is so the shadows move along with the flag so it looks like it's actual shading on the flag itself now we can move it along by actually going to the offset turbulence you see that if we also the exposition here it will move it along now for this one it's actually easier to just add some keyframes instead of going ahead and doing expressions so go to the star add a keyframe for the offset turbulence and if we zoom out a bit we can go to the end and we can just drag this along so we we have to take a look if this is fine for the speed so this is good for now we might want to change it later but let's just go with this now we don't really want the shadows to have very sharp edges and we're also going to use this effect to do some displacement on the flag itself so actually wants to add some Gaussian blur so just search for caution blur edits of the layer and then we can go for perhaps 20 or maybe 30 so that looks fine and now with to try and use this in our actual flag animation now before using any sort of displacement effect we want to pre compose the tubular nose otherwise it will just look at a black solid and that won't change anything so right-click pre-compose just call this the turbulent noise and we have to move all attributes into the new composition otherwise these effects will stay in this composition click OK and now we can hide this layer and we want to create some displacement on the flag so go to the effects and presets we just search for displacement and we'll use the displacement map director answer the flag and now we want to zoom in so right now it looks pretty weird but that's because we haven't really chosen any settings yet so if we choose the displacement map layer as circular noise you can see that it already changes and then we have to look at the luminance this means that it will displace every time it's showing something white and it will not displace when it's showing black so if we enable the luminance for both and we just enabled its open noise again you can see that in the white spots it will displace in the black it won't so go out and you can see if we enable and disable you can see that there are some minor adjustments in the middle compartment and we can actually just turn this up if we want more and if we try and play this back you can see that it's pretty damn extreme so we don't really want that much but it's just to sort of show you the effect so we'll just put it back to 5 and maybe the edges a bit too rough we can always fix that by going through the circular noise and just adding some more portion blur so go back into the flat composition sort of the main composition and we can try and play it back again so as you can see this looks quite organic and I actually quite like it as it is and now we're going to try and add some shadows to see if they complement the flag so create the shadows will actually take the circular noise layer we'll drag it underneath the pole so it's right above the flag then we will duplicate the flag composition and we will just toggle the switches / modes then we'll go and we will select the track map now the track map initially decides whether something is shown or not and you can either select the alpha or the luma so we are going to select the luma this means that it will decide whether I'd shown or not based on the light or dark values so that would be white is 100% shown and black is 0% visible so if we select the luma matte right now you won't really be able to see anything but that's because the two flag layers are identical which means that if we disable this one you can actually see that it's not showing some of the values which is what we want now we can enable this again and we just need to add some curves to this flag layer so go into the effects and presets search for curves and drag it onto the flag now in the curves you can either adjust the highlights shadows we just want to darken it so take the top point here drag it all the way down and you can see that it gets darkened right now it's pretty extreme but we'll just go to the flag layer first ESM opacity maybe go 30 45 percent that you do the job we can try and preview this so as you can see we have implemented the shadows and it really looks like the flag is actually having some sort of depth now maybe we want to go to the turbulent nose just click on the layer and press u two times and that shows all of the keyframes and also the expressions that we have used maybe want this time expression to change a bit faster maybe not double but we can go for 400 go back into the main composition and just try and preview now this looks quite nice it sort of changes these shadows their shape a bit faster and you have to remember that this is a very organic animation which also means that we might be getting completely different results which is all fine and maybe you're getting something better something worse just have to alter the settings and there's really a million different combinations and ways of doing this but this is just my tank and my way of doing it and I hope that you have some key takeaways from this and you can use in your work it's really all for this tutorial as for now if you enjoyed the video make sure to leave a like post a comment and tell me what you might be able to use in future projects if you create something from this tutorial be sure to share it with me an Instagram at Lu valve and off let's say link in the description and make sure to subscribe to the channel turn on the notifications if you want to get notified when I upload future videos that's all for now till next time

Channel: Oliver Randorff

Views: 105,161

Keywords: motion design, mograph, motion graphics, animation, 2d animation, 3d animation, animated, after effects, adobe after effects

Id: KJ2tfZRoA5w

Length: 14min 7sec (847 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 24 2020