Welcome to the how to Animate
in After Effects course. My name is Dave Bode for Envato. And in this course, you will learn how
to put together several useful text animations using a variety of techniques. The main part of this course focuses on
three animations based on work created by a designer. A burger logo treatment using
a great looking font and burger art that has
a chalkboard sketch look. An outer space/heads up display logo
treatment that uses some really simple animations and a bit of flash
to make a great looking animation. And a boutique style logo treatment
that uses a write-on effect and a bunch of leaf elements that has
a really organic movement to it. All of the assets in this course,
such as fonts, graphics, and backgrounds, came from Envato Elements. And the great thing is,
with a subscription, I can try them all. Envato Elements is perfect for
video creators and producers, with unlimited downloads of video
templates, stock footage, fonts, music, sound effects, and so much more. Before you dive into those great
looking design animations, you'll start by learning
about key frame animation. Then you will learn how to reveal
text with masks and shape layers. From there, the rest of the course
teaches you very practical examples, putting together great
looking animations with text, including those three animations that
have art created by a graphic designer, using assets from Envato Elements. In those lessons, you will learn how to
prep the art for use in After Effects and then animate all of the elements. These lessons will use a combination of
key frame animation, text reveals, and After Effects expressions to create
some complex and subtle movement. You'll also learn about some
third-party effects and scripts to help you with animating. None of those third-party effects and
scripts are required, but it's good to know that there are tools
out there to help you with really tedious animations when you need them. This course assumes that you have
some basic After Effects knowledge. Perhaps you've already watched
the After Effects for Beginners course. Now, with that in mind, I'm going to
explain everything that I'm doing so that you can follow along. But I am going to move pretty quickly. Now, don't let this deter you. Most of the lessons are right
around ten minutes in length. So you can watch the lesson to
get an idea of where it's going, and then go back to the beginning and
follow along, and pause the video wherever
you need to to catch up. At the end of the course, you will have learned how to create
several great looking animations. Even better, you will have learned the techniques
that are used to put them together. And you can use that knowledge,
along with your own creativity, for countless animations. To get started, check out the next lesson, where you will learn
about key frame basics. [MUSIC] [MUSIC] In this lesson, you're gonna
learn about Keyframe Animation. [MUSIC] Now keyframe animation in After Effects
is the primary way that you do animations of anything. It doesn't matter if you're
animating text, animating puppets, animating properties on effect,
on a video, or masks or shapes. Most of that stuff is done, I would say
98% of the time is done with keyframes. Now if you've watched the After Effects
for beginner's course, you will have already learned a little
bit about keyframe animation. But for those of you who have not,
this is just gonna be a quick overview. So the best way I think to show you
how keyframe animation works is just to show you. So, if you've got this composition open,
go ahead and follow along. Let's say for example, I want to animate
the position of my text layer here. Now, you'll notice that this is not
a text layer, it's actually a precomp. That's because I have inside this precomp
a text layer and then a paper texture, and the text is actually acting as
a track map, more on that later. So if I wanna animate the position I need
to bring up the Position property and I can do that by pressing
P on the keyboard. And then if I click this
stopwatch right here, this will toggle the ability of
this property to change over time. And when I did that,
you can see in the timeline here, it inserted this diamond shaped keyframe. And what that keyframe is doing,
if we double-click on it, is it's recording
the position of my layer. Now if I scrub or play my composition
here, nothing is going to happen. And that's because we
need another keyframe for some animation to get moving here. So if I go back to the beginning of my
comp and I take my layer, and I just drag it down, and while I'm dragging it down,
I'm just gonna hold shift and that'll constrain the movement
here to the vertical axis only so I can get a nice straight up and
down move. Or you can just come over here
to the Position property and just click and drag in the Y. So this is X which is the horizontal and
this is Y, which is up and down,
it's vertical movement here. You can see that as soon
as you change the position, After Effects inserted another keyframe,
which is right here. And so between these two keyframes,
we get animation. We have one position keyframe here
which is recording this value. And then we have another
position keyframe, which is recording a different value. Now in the X property of the position,
it's not changing, but it is changing and
you can see that right over here it is changing the Y
value of the position over time. And so this is what our
keyframe animation looks like. If we wanna go down the timeline further,
let's say we wanna go to maybe 3 seconds, and we want at 3 seconds
to maybe 4 seconds. We want to move this again. What I'm gonna do is
come right over here and I'm going to add a keyframe
at the current time. And then I'm gonna go to 4 seconds, and
I might just push this off to the right, and I did that by holding shift again
right after I clicked on my layer to constrain that to just to
move it in the horizontal. And now my animation looks like this,
text comes up, it holds for two seconds, and then it flies off to the right. And in fact I'll just trim my composition
here to make that a little shorter, there we go. Very cool. Now these types of keyframes,
you can see the diamond shape here, these are linear keyframes. Linear keyframes apply a uniform sort
of interpolation to the movement, meaning that it all kind
of moves at the same speed. And a really easy way to see exactly
what's happening is if we jump into the Graph Editor and you can do that
by clicking on this button right here. And if you select the Position
if it wasn't already selected, that'll bring up this graph here,
which right now is representing the speed. Now if yours looks like this, that's because you haven't
set to the Value Graph. So, go ahead and click over to the Speed
Graph because I think for a lot of things this is more useful, especially when we're
talking about the speed of the animation. And you can see that
these linear keyframes, they don't do any kind of acceleration or
deceleration. So this graph is representing
pixels per second. At the start of the animation, we're zooming right along here
at 696.3 pixels per second. And it continues at that speed
until this frame rate here at 1 second where it goes to 0 instantly. And then right down here
at just before 3 seconds, we go from 0 pixels per second and
we fly right up to 1521.7 pixels per second and
then it flies off the screen. These types of linear keyframes or linear
interpolation, work for a lot of things. But, it may not be the smoothest and we can make this a lot smoother
by selecting our keyframes, and you can just draw a rectangular marquee
around the keyframes to select them. And you can see they turn blue
when they're selected, or you can just click on the Position
property over here and that will select all of
your position keyframes. And then if you right click
on one of your keyframes, you can go to Keyframe Assistant and
it's just off screen here. Let me drag that up Keyframe Assistant and
we can choose something like Easy Ease. And you'll see the shape of the keyframes
now changes to an hourglass, and if we play the animation, you're going to hopefully see that
this is a little bit smoother. Now it is subtle, but the speed is
no longer remaining and a constant. And if we look at the Graph Editor again,
check this out. Now our animation starts with a speed
of 0 slowly accelerates until right in the middle of the animation and
then starts to decelerate again. So we're getting a much smoother kind
of curve here and it does look visually smoother when you're actually
seeing what's happening on screen. Now with the Graph Editor, you can
actually modify this curve by selecting one of the keyframes and then pulling
out this handle here to make a smoother curve at the end part of the animation or
the beginning of the animation. And, check out what this looks like. It's got a totally different look. I mean, it's essentially moving
from the same two spots. We didn't change the position and we
didn't change the timing of the animation. It's still starting at 0 and ending
at 1 second, but it looks different. It looks kinda smoother,
maybe a little bit more realistic. And you can modify this even further,
like that. And then we can do the same thing
to the outgoing animation here. We can make a very drastic curve
like that or we can reverse this, pull that in tight and
pull this second handle all the way out. And have it look like it's being kind
of shot into some viscous liquid or something like that. This kind of process of
creating the keyframes and then modifying the interpolation
between the two keyframes is a lot of what
keyframe animation is all about. One part of it is,
what do you want the thing to do? Which is move from point A to B and
then from B to C, and then it's how do you want it to look? In the look part has a lot to do with,
how it moves. And a big thing that determines how
it moves is the speed at which it starts moving and stops moving. And you can adjust that
in a number of ways. One of those is with
the Graph Editor here. And like I said, we can create all
kinds of different interesting variations on this curve here
to make it come in like that and fly out like that,
lots of different options. And there are other ways to modify that
without clicking and dragging the handles, you can also double-click on
one of these keyframes and you can modify the incoming
velocity's influence. That's pretty tedious. And then there are some third party tools
which I'm gonna show you in an upcoming lesson to do a very similar thing
to working in the Graph Editor, but it makes it a lot more consistent and
a lot easier, especially when you're working
on multiple properties. So, let me show you one thing here. Because I wanna kind of expand this idea. I'm just gonna modify this by
pulling up the position of this. And now, what I'm gonna do is I'm
gonna grab the Rectangle Tool and with no layer selected, I'm just
gonna drag a little square here by holding shift as I click and drag,
then I'm gonna hit Ctrl+Alt+Home. That's gonna put the anchor point right
in the center of my shape layer here, and then Ctrl+Home will center this up. I'm gonna grab the Selection Tool and
reselect my layer and just pull this down to about here,
maybe scale that down a little bit and finally, change the color to
something really gross like green. Actually, I think that looks pretty cool. What I wanna show you here is the idea
of animating multiple layers and multiple keyframes. So, what I'm gonna animate with this
layer is the position by pressing P and then after I hold Shift+R, I can also
bring up the rotation right here. And you can get to all of the transform
controls by just clicking down this little twirl down arrow here and then under
Transform you can get to all of them. But if you know which properties
you want to work with, you can just bring them up with
their keyboard shortcuts, so P for position and
then Shift+R will also add the rotation. And I can just click and drag and
pull down to enable animation and insert this keyframe here, and then
I'll go down here and I will pull down this square to about here and then change
the rotation to, I don't know 180. So let's check out,
if I just play it right now. Let's look at what's happening here. Okay, so I have an animation with two different
layers across multiple properties. And even though they're starting and
ending at the same time, you can see these keyframes
are all on 1 second. It doesn't look like it's starting and
ending at the same time. It looks different, like somehow the animate is
getting there faster, and it is. This is one of the things that can be
really tricky when you're animating. Because a lot of times you're
not just animating one property, you're animating multiple properties. So the best way to deal with this is to
kind of modify the speed of all of these properties at the same time. So because these are kind of a bezier
shape here with this hourglass and they've been Easy Ease and then I've messed with
the curves here and these are linear. If I just select all of these and
then press F9, they'll instantly all be
set back to Easy Ease. You can see that the curves
all have about the same shape. They don't all have the same amplitude, if
you're thinking about this shape kind of as a wave, but they do have the same kind
of incoming and outgoing influence here. And if I play this, you'll see that now
the animations look like they start and they stop at the same time. And if I wanted to modify these by giving
them a little bit more of that kind of curvy look to them. What I would do is select all of
these keyframes right down here, make a little bit more room here so you
can kind of see what's going on, right. So I'd click and drag and
make a rectangular marquee and select all of these, and
then maybe pull out this handle here. And now what you'll see is I get that
nice curve where they kind of slide into position a little bit slower, or it kind of decelerates a lot faster,
kind of like that. But the animations,
both of these two layers and the multiple properties they all look
like they're moving at the same speed. Now sometimes you want this and sometimes
you don't, so you may just select maybe one of these properties and make
a different curve or something like this. Maybe you want that to look,
I don't know, like this. And you're doing it intentionally,
and that's totally fine. But when you wanna get things to move at
the same time, if I select all three of these properties and go into
the Graph Editor again, that's gonna be kind of a trick now because they're not
all gonna wanna move at the same time. So you can either pull the handle
all the way to the left and reselect it and then move it back. Or you can just select all the keyframes
here, hit F9 to reset them to Easy Ease, and then select these and kind of
move them from that Easy Ease point. Now, I know that was a lot to cover. And if it didn't make 100% sense,
don't worry. In the next few lessons, you're gonna
see the same idea used over and over. And so it's really gonna make sense
when you see it used in real world applications. So coming up in the next lesson, we're
gonna look at something that you're gonna be using throughout
the rest of this course. And that is, ideas on how to reveal text. In the rest of the course we're gonna
be looking at multiple ways to do text animations and do text treatments. And one of those is,
how do you reveal text. We're doing one in this lesson where it's
just kind of flying in from the bottom of the screen, but that doesn't work for
every text animation, so coming up in the next lesson
you're gonna look at the different couple of ways that you can reveal text. So check them up coming up next. [MUSIC] In this lesson, you are gonna learn how
to do some really simple text reveals, which is gonna come in really handy for the rest of your After Effects
journey working with text. [MUSIC] Now, if I didn't mention it before, all of the assets including the fonts
have come from Envato Elements. If you didn't know that Envato Elements
had fonts, check this out. If you go to Envato Elements and
you click on the fonts right here, you'll see tons of great looking fonts. I mean, these are really fantastic
looking fonts, and you can sort by sarif, sans serif, hand written or
script, decorative. And you can even sort by different
spacing types normal, monospace, condensed expanded, and more. This particular font is called devant
horgen or maybe it's devant horgen. I don't know exactly how it's pronounced, pronunciation is not one of my
is not one of my skill sets. But you can search it
up on Envato Elements. All right, let us talk about
some masks and track mattes, because really that's primarily
I think how you are going to be doing a lot of different text
reveals in After Effects. This is kind of the bread and butter
of doing really basic text animations. If I wanna put a mask on
this text layer here, I just select my text layer over here and
I can come up to Layer > Mask > New Mask. I can also use the keyboard
shortcut Ctrl+Shift+N. Sometimes what you'll find with masks, depending on the font is that you'll
have maybe a curvy font like an S, C and O, or maybe even an r that
has a little bit of aliasing, or a few pixels that go above
basically the top of the text layer. And the mask will actually chop
it off a little bit sometimes. It's very subtle and you have to be
really detail oriented to even notice. This particular font does not do that, but I just wanna show you what I do whenever
I apply a mask to a text layer, is I will double-click it and that
brings up these transform handles here. I'll grab this center kind of
bottom one here, I'll click and then hold CTRL and just drag it down
a tiny little bit to give myself a little bit of padding on the top and the bottom
and I'll do the same to the right and the left here just a little bit. Now, some of you know a little
bit about masks will say, what he just did there is absurd because
you can actually add something called Mask Expansion right here
underneath the Masks Properties. And yeah, I know you can do that But
I can't see the mask expansion. When you add mask expansion,
you don't really know where it ends. And so by modifying the path of the mask,
I can see exactly where it is. And that just gives me confidence that
I'm not messing up a company's corporate font by chopping it off a little bit,
because you can guarantee that someone on their staff will see it and they'll say
that looks weird and that'll be on you. So the more you know, right? So let's talk about how to animate
this mask, and do a text reveal. It's really pretty simple, to bring up the
mask properties, at least the mask path. With your layer selected,
you can just press M on the keyboard. You can see that brings up the mask and
the mask path. Right now this is set to add and I would say 99% of the time this is
how I work with a mask on a text. There's other mask modes subtract
intersect, light and darken difference, but add will work for me. The add mode means that anything inside
this rectangular shape here is opaque. Anything outside is
completely transparent, although you can modify the mask's
opacity to change that. But really simply,
this is gonna work for us. So I'm gonna press M on the keyboard, and I'm gonna drop a mask path key
frame right at one second. I'm gonna go to the beginning of my comp,
I'll double-click my mask. And I'll modify it. I'm just gonna squish it down
all the way to the right side. And now if I play this,
boom, check that out. Very nice, I get a nice little mask,
reveal here from right to left. If I further modify this by bringing
up the position dropping the position keyframe, and to make this
a little bit easier I'm going to, in my comp viewer, I'm going to
hit Ctrl+R to bring up rulers. I'm going to drag out a guide
when I reselect my layer here, press U on the keyboard and
when I go all the way to the beginning and then I'm just gonna pull over
the position here to right about there. And now look we have, check that out. We're getting a nice little text reveal
that looks like it's coming out of kind of this edge of the text. You can do that backwards and
have it come kind of left to right, or bottom to topper or top to bottom. Any number of those four
different variations or something completely different,
I don't know. If we select all the key frames and hit
F9 on the keyboard, jump into the graph editor select these key frames right
here and pull out that handle. And if you need to see that again to
figure out exactly what I did, go ahead and click and rewind, but I'm just showing
you how but what I would normally do. Now we've transformed that kind of boring
animation into something that looks really pretty nice. We can add motion blur to this,
I'll hit F4 on the keyboard and just enable motion blur. Check that out, that looks fantastic. So that's one way that you can
do a very simple text reveal. Doing that is somewhat tedious, especially if you're doing that over
multiple different text layers. But it's very basic, it's tried and
true and it works, It's ised all the time. Let me show you another method. So I'm gonna get rid of my mask here and
delete my position, keyframes. I'm also gonna get rid of my rulers and
get rid of my mask here. Another way that you can do a text reveal
is to use some kind of track matte. Now track matte works in a similar
way to a mask except it's not necessarily linked to your text layer. So what I can do is grab the rectangle
tool and I can deselect all of my layers, and then I can just over here
in my comp viewer, click and drag a rectangle that covers up my text. Now, it doesn't matter what the color
is because I can apply a track matte using the alpha which is the transparency
of the layer directly above my text layer. So if you hit F4 on the keyboard, that'll toggle between some
of these switches here. And what you're looking for is the track
matte which you can see right here. And for my text layer,
if I go over here to this drop-down and I select alpha matte, you can see that. Check that out, the layer directly
above has been turned off, the visibility switch as been
turned off and now it says alpha. Gonna switch back to my
selection tool here. And now we can see the text. But if I move the text, check that out. Anything that falls outside
of this layers alpha channel, meaning right now if I turn this back
on these pixels are 100% opaque and well there are no pixels over here. So if I move my text layer over here,
we can do all kinds of different text reveals with this track matte,
and just reset the position there. So we can do something somewhat
similar to the example I just showed. Without moving my shape layer here,
I'll just drop a position key frame, go to the beginning of the comp and
then I'll just move my text over here. Easy, ease that,
grab this handle here, bada boom. I get basically the same exact animation,
but it's using a different technique. It's using a track matte,
which is this layer right here. This affords us some different
options because there is a way to link the size of this
shape layer to the size of the rectangle generated by this
text here using an expression. But even without the expression we can
really quickly just adjust the size of this shape layer here by going into
the properties and adjusting the size. Right now,
the size is coming out from the center but that actually works pretty well because
I am using center aligned text here. So if I increased my letters in my text like I just add the word
super right in the middle. That's no problem, I can just zip. Check that out, really quickly
with like a couple of clicks I can have a resized animation here
that does the exact same thing. Now doing that same thing with a mask
would be a lot more tedious would be kind of re lining things up and
messing with the mask shape. And you could additionally
do things like well, we can animate the size of
this shape layer here and maybe at two seconds,
we just put this down to zero, And we have something
that looks like this. Check that out. Very, very cool, right? There's a number of
different things you can do. We can apply some blurring to this. So if I jump over to the effects and
presets and I grab a gauzy and blur, and I apply that to my matte
layer which I should name this. It's always good to name your mattes and
any of your layers so you they make sense to you and
I apply some blurring to this. Check this out, now I have kind of a
blurry edge to my text here which also has kind of a different look to it. So there's a ton of
different things you can do. Now, it's just a personal preference of mine to use a shape
layer as a track matte. But you can just as easily use a solid,
and many people like to use solids instead. So if I set this to alpha matte again,
now it's using this solid layer. And to get a kind of tighter matte
because right now you can see the size of my black solid here is
the same size as my composition. I can get a tighter map by just
adjusting the scale of this like that in I'll get a similar
effect that I just had before with that shape layer, or
I can apply a mask to this layer. Ctrl+Shift+N, I can double-click on my
mask and I can pull that down here. And so now, I'm using a mask
on this solid in a similar way that I was before with
the mask on my text layer, except they're no longer
kind of positionally linked. It's just another option that I wanted to
show you when you get into maybe using other After Effects templates from Envato,
or really anywhere. You may see a solid being used as a track
matte so I just wanted to show you that. Lots of different options and
as we go along in this course, you're gonna see these put to use. Coming up in the next lesson,
you are going to learn how to build one of these text treatments in this creative
titles package for Premiere Pro. I wanted to use this as an example
because it's got a lot of very simple but very, very useful text animations. Things where we're doing some very simple
kind of text reveals with boxes and lines. These are things that you see used all the
time in kinds of different projects, but you may not know how to create them. So in the next few lessons, I'm gonna break down exactly how to
create these types of animations. So check that out coming up next. [MUSIC] In this lesson, you are going to learn how
to create a very simple text animation that looks just like this. [MUSIC] Like I mentioned in the last lesson, I'm gonna be using this template
here found on Envato elements. For showing, you how to do some
very simple text animations and building them out with multiple layers and
mats and shapes and things in After Effects as well as a few
more advanced things down the line. So let's check out this first one here and
just kind of analyze what's going on. So we start with this shape box
here that starts kind of flat with a very thin strock It goes skinny,
the stroke it's bigger. So already we know that we need
probably a shape layer, and we need to animate the size and
the stroke on that shape. And then it gets wider, and we have this text kind of
sliding in from the left side. So we need some kind of way to mat out the
texts so that it's not revealed over here. And then is revealed inside
this box right here. And also if you look very closely, the
text comes in, not all at the same time. In fact, in my example comp
when I tried to recreate this, I didn't notice that right away,
but I'm seeing it right now. So I'm gonna show you how to do this
as well to get the text to come in kind of like line one, line two and
three, and it's very nice and smooth way. I'll play it one more time, so
you can see how that works there. It's very subtle, but
I think it looks really classy. All right, so
let's jump into After Effects. I'm goinna make a new composition. And then I'm just going to throw
a temporary background in my example comp. I'm using a video background
from Envato elements. But I'm just gonna throw
a black solid in here and if you don't have a black
solid in your solids folder. You can just come down here in your comp
and hit Ctrl+Y to create a new black solid or you can right-click down here,
choose New and then solid is right here. Some of my menu is going
of the screen a little bit. No worries though
multiple ways to do that. I'm just gonna hit enter here and
rename this BG for background and then I'm just going to lock it so
it doesn't get in my way. I'm also gonna change some
things here with this layout here because we got a few
things that we don't need. and I like to have my character and
my paragraph kind of easily assessable, and not in kind of,
I don't like the standard layout where it puts the paragraph down here,
that's not really what I like. So, I think the best way to go about
building these types of animations is to work backwards from the final
state of your animation. So, that's what I'm gonna do here. Now the font that I'm gonna be using is
not exactly the same one that they're using in the original. But it's another nice one that I found on
envato elements is called Mode Delica. So I'm just gonna click inside
my comp with the type tool and I'm gonna type three lines of text will
call this CREATIVE, BOXED UP, ANIMATION. Doesn't really matter what it is but
there we go. If you look I have the paragraph here and
it is aligned to the left and I'm just gonna move that right
in the middle of my comp here. In fact, even though this is aligned left,
I can go ahead and recenter this anchor point here with
the keyboard shortcut Ctrl+Alt home. And then just hit Ctrl+M to center up the
layer that's gonna help me a little bit It looks like my Caps Lock
was on when I created that. So it's given in a really weird name,
and that's gonna bug me. So I'm just gonna re do that
really quick Caps Lock off, okay? CREATIVE BOXED UP. ANIMATION, good enough There we go Right
back to where we were a second ago. All right I'm gonna deselect everything
down here in the layers so that I can grab the rectangle tool And with the rectangle
tool, I'm gonna create a shape. I'm gonna just create
a basic box around my text. I'll make sure that
the fill is set to none. And just give this a little bit of
stroke about you can change those things afterwards if you want. I also went ahead and
changed in the preferences. If you go to preferences general
there is an option to center anchor point In new shape layers. So to save me like 100 steps
by creating a shape layer and then re centering the anchor point. You can just enable that and
then every time you create a shape layer, it will center the anchor
point in that shape layer. So now with the anchor point center, I can just hit Ctrl+Home and
that will center up my box here. Now I'm just gonna make some small
adjustments to the shape layer. By going down into contents rectangle,
rectangle path. I'm going to deselect the constrain
proportions here Or disable that and just tighten up this box a little
bit in the horizontal and vertical, maybe something like that. Maybe I will make it a little bit wider,
and then move my text kind of
on just this one side. It's more similar to how
the original design was. I'm also going to rename this so
I'm going to select shape layer one, press Enter on the keyboard. Is rename it box, just whatever makes
sense to you, that makes sense to me. So this is kind of the end state
of the animation, more or less, you can tweak it to your heart's delight,
but this is gonna work for me. A couple of things we need to solve. One is we need some way to map the text,
so that, when we slide the text in from the left here, We don't see it
kind of overhanging like this, that's not gonna work and
we could do that with a mask, but I'm going to show you
a more clever way to do it. We're going to take my box layer. I'm going to duplicate it and
drag it down below this box here. I'm also going to change
the color to fuchsia. Press Enter on the keyboard. In name it text Matt. I'm gonna go down into
the contents of this layer here. I'm gonna get rid of the stroke just by
selecting it and then deleting it and I'm going to turn on the fill. Now I'm going to set my now I can
see that's getting in the way there. I'm going to set my creative boxed up
animation text here to an alpha mat. So if you don't have this track mat option
available, hit f4 on your keyboard and select alpha mat. And now if I move this outside
you can see all right, we are really getting there now. Now it's just a matter of
tweaking a few things and in animating this essentially one thing
that I wanna do is I want to link the size of the rectangle,
the rectangle path here and my text mat. I wanna link that to the size Have my
rectangle in my box because I'm going to be animating the shape of this. And I want to make sure that if I animate
that my text is not going to peek out in a weird way. So that's really easy to do. I'm just gonna take the size here and
I'm gonna use this pick whip. And I'm going to click and drag all
the way up to the size on my box layer. And that will link those properties. So now if I adjust this here you can
see 684-684 717 717 it's all linked up. We're good to go there. I'm also going to take my
entire layer here, and I'm going to parent it with
this pick whip right here. In this just makes sure that if
I move this box layer anywhere, it's going to also move the map. If I scale it, if I rotate it, it's gonna basically make this
text map follow along exactly. I'm just gonna select my box layer and
hit Ctrl+Home to center that backup with those two things
parentid or pick whipped together. That's really all I need to do. And now we can start kind
of animating this out. And that's a good place to start for
this lesson. If you've been following along really
good job keeping up I know we've gone in a lot of different directions and
looked at a lot of different things. So congratulations for following along. Now coming up in the next lesson, you're going to see how the rest of
this animation gets put together. So check that out coming up next [MUSIC] [MUSIC] In this lesson, we're gonna pick up right
where we left off in the last lesson and you're gonna see how the rest of
this animation gets put together. [MUSIC] So I'll pull down this original
animation one more time, and let's just take a look
at what that box does. Okay, so we start from kind of a small,
skinny line here. It's already kind of a little bit
wider and then it grows up in skinny. And then from that point
it grows out wider. All right, so let's try and
replicate that really quick. So I'm gonna go to about two and a half
seconds up here when a drill down in my box and
I'm going to set a key frame for size. So this is gonna be the final
kind of width of my box here. I can adjust this later, but
I think this works okay, right about here it should be good. Then I'm gonna go back to, I don't know, somewhere in this neighborhood timings
not really super important at this point. And I'm going to make
this skinny like it was. I'm gonna move back a little bit further
and I'm going to make this wide. Oops wanna make this wide again, but. I'm gonna reduce the height
a little bit and then actually, I need to see it one more time,
but forget exactly what it did. It's so it's pretty close. Okay, so we go it starts kind of wide and
then it goes from there. Okay, so it's really kind of three moves. We go from that's kind of the second move. And then right here, we're kind
of all the way skinny like this, but actually, I'm not gonna make
this zero because if you look what happens if I make the y value zero,
we lose this. Stroke on the end and if I animate that it's gonna have
this kind of bump out effect here. So I'm gonna I'm actually gonna leave
this at a value of one right here. I'll probably pull that all the way
to the beginning and then I'm also going to drill down on the stroke and
I'm going to animate the stroke with. If I'm pressing you on the keyboard,
I can just work with these key frames here in these properties because those
are the ones that I have modified. I'm gonna pull out this stroke
with the value of 22 here and at the beginning here,
I'm just gonna change the stroke to 0. So let's see what we have so far. Okay, those are kinda the bones
of the Box Animation there, and it does not look great. And that's because these
are all linear key frames. If we select,
all those key frames and hit f9, we're gonna be more in the neighborhood. Let's see it now. Okay.
So yes, we're getting there. That is looking better. However, we need to adjust the curve. Have the speed graph here. So I'm gonna select that set of keyframes
or it's just one keyframe there, and this keyframe here, and
then pull these handles out. It looks like I missed a handle here, which is sometimes an issue when
you're trying to modify these. I'm just going to grab the handle that
I missed here and kind of match it up. And I think it's probably a shape,
something like this, where we have kind of a quick move here and then it kind
of slows down into the next thing. Let's check this out. Yes, that looks,
that looks very close to the original. I'm not gonna AB them side by side,
but I'm just take my word for it. It's pretty close. Very nice.
If we wanna slow this down, maybe a little bit more,
we can drag that out like that. We can also perhaps tighten up this
bit of the animation, just like that. Very good. Okay. So I'd say we're more than halfway there
with the animation portion of this little treatment here. The next thing we need to
do is get the text in here. And like I showed you
the text does two things. It slides in from the left, but the top
line is moving then the middle line and then finally the third
line kind of slides in. You can accomplish that
a number of different ways. We can break this into three separate
layers and animate them all separately. You can do them by hand or we can use one of these animate properties
that is special to text layers. Now, text layers and after effects have a
whole bunch of extra animation properties that you can enable or disable. You can even enable per character 3D for
some really cool effects. But I think all we need to do to
accomplish this layer offset in the lines is to animate the position. This position animation can by its default
is gonna move all the characters and then we can actually offset these
to kind of do something like this, where we're moving individual characters. Or we can change the shape
to move like this. There's a ton of options here,
and if I go through all of them, we're talking about a big, long lesson. I'm just gonna show you
how it's actually done. And how has actually done is like this. If you drill down underneath
the range selector in advanced. We're gonna change the based on
parameter here, instead of characters, we're gonna select lines and that's, that means it's going to basically
move this as line 1, line 2 line 3. In fact, you can see that
if we change this to index, this is basically looking at
this layer in three lines. Very good, okay? And so really simply, we can just
do a very easy animation like this, where we're just animating
the position from here to hear. Which doesn't look like it's right, but we're gona combine that with moving
the position of the entire layer. And it's gonna look right so just
kinda follow along and when it's done, you're gonna say, okay,
now I get it [LAUGH]. So, right at about this point when the box
reaches its final size I'm gonna insert a position keyframe and again, this is
not the position of the entire layer. It's just kind of modifying the position
of each one of these lines. I'm gonna move back to this point right
here, and I'm just gonna offset them. So they make kind of this diagonal line. You can see these little Xs here represent
where all the characters are and that's really all I need to do. I'm gonna go back to this point here and
I'm going to insert a position key frame. Again, this is the position
of the entire layer. And then I'm gonna go back to this
point right here again with these two key frames. And I'm gonna push this off this way, and then if I play from this point
you gonna say, okay I see, right? It's kind of doing the same thing
as the original reference animation that we were looking at before. And so to kind of finish this
off all we need to do selected these key frames here, hit f9 and
we're gonna maybe adjust this maybe to like 90% of
this incoming influence here. And I think that should
get it really close. Yeah, look at that. Now we are looking really nice. Let's preview the whole thing here. We'll set this to fit up to 100%,
turn off the graph editor. Very nice, I think that is really good. It's just that easy. Now I know we ran into a little
bit of sort of complicated ideas with the position. But when it comes to the text animation
properties, these are something that can take a little bit of experimentation to
get them to do what you want them to do. Is really sort of impossible to understand
in one sitting but the more you use it, the more you kind of understand
how to manipulate it to get the results that you want. In fact, the first time that
I recorded this lesson, I did it a slightly different way and
it didn't have the exact right look. So I re-recorded it once I figured
out what I did wrong there. It does take a little bit of
experimentation, but if you're willing to do a little experimentation,
you can get some great looking results. The final step to this is to put
a nice looking background in here. Now I've downloaded some really cool
looking backgrounds from Envato Elements, and I've found one that was I
think it was this one, right here. So I'm gonna use this
as a background here. I'm gonna pull this in and
just put it above my black background. And this looks like it's a Ultra HD. So I'm just gonna hit
Ctrl + Alt + Shift + G. That's a keyboard shortcut
that you should memorize. That's gonna resize that to
the layer in the I believe vertical. So if we go to right click on this we go to transform Ctrl + Alt +
Shift + G fit to comp height. I always forget which one that is, but
it's a little counterintuitive because Ctrl + Alt + Shift +H fits to comp width
and you would think H has height but that's not the way it works. But those are two that are really handy
to memorize Ctrl + Alt + Shift + G, Control + Alt + Shift + H. Anyway, now that we have
the background in here, you can see that it does look pretty
cool the way it is right now. However, it's a little bit sharp for
a background. So a couple different ways we can deal
with that how I dealt with that when I was building this the first time is
I threw a blur layer on here. I used a box blur, fast box blur,
if we throw them on here and we just crank that up a little bit
we're gonna get a really nice effect, that's not going to compete with
the contrast of our text layer here, that was pretty good. Another effect that looks even
better is the camera Lens Blur. This effect looks a lot better. However, this is kind of
a beast to render and will crush the life out of your system. You can see it does have
a cooler look in fact, I'll show you how to add details here. I'll just take a picture right here. And so this is with Box Blur. This is with Camera Lens Blur. Box Blur, Camera Lens Blur. Actually, let me adjust this to make
it a little more similar in terms of the level of blur. Yeah, that's probably it, all right? So here we have Box Blur,
Camera Lens Blur. Camera Lens Blur looks cooler. It's very, similar to how
well a camera would blur it. [SOUND] But it takes forever to render. So fast Box Blur is kind of a nice
alternative and if it's too bright for you, if you find that it's
kind of competing, no worries, we can just throw a curves effect on
here good old classic curves and just. Maybe drop it down a little bit
give it a little bit of a curve. And if you wanna find this background, it's called abstract red in dark
blue geometric shapes refraction. A little bit of a mouthful, but
you can find that on Envato elements. Let's check out how
the whole thing looks here. [MUSIC] Very cool. All right, thanks for
sticking with me for this lesson. Coming up in the next lesson, I'm gonna show you how to create
this text animation right here. So check that out coming up next. [MUSIC] [MUSIC] In this lesson, I'm gonna show you how to
build another great looking text treatment that looks something like this. [MUSIC] This looks pretty simple, and this is
another idea that I was inspired to create from that template that
I showed you earlier. And what we have here are kind of two
bars that slide across the screen, that at some point start
to reveal the text. So, these are positioned above in the
layer stack, these text items here, and the text seems to kind of originate
from this point in space right here. Now there's a few different ways that you
can go about building something like this. In my mind, you can do it kind
of the quick and dirty way, which is very fast but
not as easy to modify down the line. And then, you can do it in a different
way that takes a little bit more work up front, but it's a little bit
more modular down the road. For example, let's say that I
wanted to change the text here, and I wanted to do something like. Like this. Just to make this a little bit bigger. You can see right off the bat here, well, I got some problems because now
my matte is kind of messed up, but I built this in such a way that
I can just resize my matte and almost everything works. Just have to adjust the position
of this rectangle here, and then this rectangle here. And with those changes, check this out. I got a whole new thing and
it totally fits my text. If I want this kind of ending rectangle
here to be fatter, no problem. One little change there. Super easy. So, I'm gonna show you how to
build this as quickly as I can. And to do it,
I already have a comp set up right here. 1920 by 1080, ten seconds long. I have a background solid in here that
is locked, so that I can't mess with. The first thing I want to do is
kind of lay out my text, right? I want to kind of build this out. So, I'm going to be using Modelica again, in this example, MOLLY ARTIST, and I'm going to make sure
that is right aligned. And actually, I will pull out a guide,
somewhere around there, just so I can pop that right there. I'm gonna duplicate my text and. DESIGN SUPERSTAR. Maybe, what did I put in the other one? DESIGN GURU. That works. There we go.
And then I'm gonna change this
to maybe regular or light. Looks great. Then the next thing that I wanna do is
I wanna build out those rectangles, and I want to make them nice and long. And I want to find maybe the spot that's
right in between these two layers. I'm just gonna eyeball it,
something like that. I'm gonna deselect my layers here,
grab the rectangle tool, and I'm just gonna draw a rectangle. I do not need a stroke on this, and I'm thinking I may actually need
a longer rectangle, but not to worry. I'm just going to jump into
the shape properties here and just adjust this to get it
down to where I need it to be. As long as I have this guide here, this
will more or less kind of snap for me. I'm just kind of positioning this, I just wanted to get kind of an equal
padding on the top and the bottom. It's a little bit fiddly to do here,
maybe like probably 97 will work. And I think I can pull this down
just a hair, that feels about right. Okay, very good. So, I'm gonna slide this over here. I'm gonna set another guide maybe
right here to just this kind of give me some spacing here. And then, I'll name this Rec_1,
and I'll duplicate this, set this right down here,
and that's pretty much it. That should work perfectly. Okay.
The next step is I need to design a matte that will kind of do what I need it to do. I need it to matte on this side,
I need it to mat on this side, so that it kind of blocks the text and
it cuts off my little rectangles here. So, to do that,
I'm going to use a shape layer. And I think I'll just create
one kind of like this, and then I'm just gonna slide
this over on this side, that'll give me a little
wiggle room over here, and I'm going to duplicate this and
put it over here, and I'll align this to
be right about there. Very good. Now, in order to change the shape of these
layers, what I Ideally would like is for some kind of control where I can make
it scale from this point right here, so that I can push it in without
kind of losing the mat on this side. And then the same thing for
over here, I want it to kind of push in from this side without
losing my matte over on this side. I probably don't need to
stick out quite that far. But to do that the easiest way I
think is to grab the pan behind our anchor point tool, and then grab
the anchor point of this shape, so not the layer and just kind of eyeball
that and put it right over here. It doesn't have to be exact, but
If you put it right on the line there, it'll be plenty good enough. I would do the same thing
to this shape over here. I don't think I need it quite that big,
but it doesn't really matter. I'm just gonna grab the pan behind
tool and put that anchor point. There we go. And get it right over there. Now if I dive down into. The properties here, rectangle number one, I'm just gonna delete
the stroke rectangle. Actually, I'm gonna delete
the stroke on rectangle one and two. I don't need those. And I also want to put an effect on here,
if I go over to my effect and preset, I'm just gonna
put a slider control. And if you haven't used this before,
don't worry. I'm gonna call this Right Side, and then I'm gonna
duplicate this Left Side. This is all gonna make total
sense in just a minute. I'm gonna set both of these to 100. And then what I'm gonna do is I'm
going to come down here to the scale. And this is the scale,
again, of my rectangles. So, it's not the scale
of the entire layer, it's just the scale of these shapes. And what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna
use a little bit of an expression. I'm gonna create an expression that
looks like this, x =, and then I'm gonna use this pick whip here, and I'm going
to pick whip this right side up here. Then I'm gonna put a semicolon, hit enter, y equals, and then I'm just gonna
pick whip the value right here, and that's just gonna lock it to 100%. Then I'm gonna hit semicolon, I'm gonna
hit enter, begin bracket, and because this newer version of after effects
kind of, it's a little bit smarter, it's gonna create the end bracket for
me, and all I have to do is hit x, y. So, if that doesn't make sense,
essentially, what I am doing, and I'll click away here,
you'll see nothing has changed. But this expression basically says that
I wanna set the x parameter to whatever the slider control is, and that way
I'll be able to modify it without having to jump down into the layer properties and
go right to the scale every time. So, it's saying x equals this,
and y equals whatever this is, and I'm not going to modify it. So, I'm just gonna leave it to 100. Everything is going to work out perfectly. So, I'm gonna do the same thing. In fact, I can just copy this. I'm gonna do the same thing to
the transform controls of this rectangle right here. When I alt click on scale and
just paste this, and then I just need to modify a few things. I need to change the name here to left. And then, right down here, I need to change the rectangle because
I don't want it to be Rectangle 2, I want it to be Rectangle 1 because
this rectangle here is Rectangle 1. And this will allow me to
be able to modify all of my matte in this composition with
this one matte control layer. Check that out, very cool. So, I'm going to change the color of
this to fuchsia by clicking right here. And then I'm gonna duplicate it. And I'm gonna call this Rec Matte_1. I'm gonna use this for
my rectangle number one. In fact, I'm gonna pull Rectangle 2
down here, so that they are in order. Before I go any further though,
I want to link a few of these properties, so that when I make adjustments to my
master matte control, everything is reflected because right now, if you
look at what's happening on Rec Matte_1, I also have controls on rec matte number
one here, and I don't want those. So, I'm going to delete those, it's
gonna come up with an error, no worries. I'm also gonna make this full screen here,
and I'm gonna click down in my comp timeline and then press the tilde
key, so that I can see what I'm doing. So, let's select Rec Matt_1 here,
press U, U on the keyboard, we can just scroll down, and then you can click in here where this
expression is, and just delete it. And then all we need to do is very simple. Rec number two here, rectangle number two, you wanna go down to the scale right here,
pick whip that all the way up to the scale of rectangle number
two on the matte control layer. Okay, now those two are linked. I'm going to do the same thing
here to rectangle number one. Take the scale, pick whip that
to rectangle number one's scale. That's it. We got a little bit into the widths
there with the expressions, but really, it was pretty simple. And now, I'm gonna disable
the visibility on this switch, take rec number one here and
make that alpha inverted. And check this out. Now, when I adjust this matte,
its also adjusting this matte down here. If I take this and I duplicate it, I'm
gonna pull this down above rec number two, set this to alpha matte inverted,
I don't have to change anything on that layer because it's duplicated
from this first rec matte layer, and so now this also linked. So, if I make an adjustment here,
check that out, it's also adjusting these two mattes. I'm going to duplicate this one more time,
and reorder these text layers. So, Molly's on top, design's on bottom,
and I'll call this Text Matte_1. I'm gonna change this to alpha inverted,
duplicate this, Text Matte_2, pull that above design guru
here, change that to alpha matte inverted. Finally, to make sure that none of
these matte here move or scale or do anything weird, I'm going to link
them all to my matte control layer, and then I'm going to lock them, so that the only one that I can actually
move is this layer up here and because it's not visible,
it's going to be pretty tricky to move. So, this kind of takes a lot of
the variability out of the equation, and it prevents you from kind of moving
anything around in an undesirable way. So, I'm gonna get rid of my guides here,
I'm just gonna turn those off. Also turn off the rulers,
set this back to fit up to 100%. So, now it's time to do the animation, and we're gonna jump into that
coming up in the next lesson. [MUSIC] In this lesson, we're gonna pick up right
where we left off in the last lesson. And we're gonna do some animation, and
make it look like the text is revealing behind these rectangles,
and it's gonna look great. All right, so we built this
entire kind of monstrosity here. I know it was maybe a little bit intense
if you're newer to after effects, but thanks for sticking with me. Now, we have this really cool composition
that's gonna be really flexible for text that is different size text that has
a number of different characters in it. And we can do a lot of things very
quickly to modify this in a number of different ways. So this is really cool. The next part of this is
to do some animation. So I need to animate my rectangle
number one in my rectangle number two. And I'm gonna slide this from left to
right, maybe in a second and a half or so. So I'm gonna bring a position
in insert a key frame. I'm gonna come to the beginning
of the composition, and I'm just gonna click and drag here in
the X and just pull them over here. Once they get to this point here where
they're being covered up by the mat, I don't need to really
pull it any further. When you're clicking and dragging,
you can also hold down Shift, and that'll make the movement 10
times what it normally is. So you can get it to move
across a little bit faster. So now we have this sort of thing,
very cool. To get that sort of offset effect, first
thing I'm gonna do is select my Keyframe, easy ease them, you guessed it,
I'm gonna jump in here and I'm gonna change this curve just
a little bit, something like that. Okay, I think that's a little
bit too long, actually. Make this like two seconds, and then
all I need to do is to take this second rectangle and just pull it down
the timeline a little bit. That's it [LAUGH]. It's that simple to get that kind of
really cool offset sort of effect. The next part of this is I'm
gonna animate the text and I need to start that at
two different times. So the text actually doesn't need to
show up until right about here maybe. And I'm going to animate the end position. So I'll go to maybe three and
a half seconds. And this time I'm gonna use
the keyboard shortcut, Alt+Shift+P, that's gonna insert a position Keyframe
that I'm going to go to right here. And I'm going to slide the text over,
but this time, I don't need it to start way over here. I'm going to have it start
just behind my rectangle here. And I think the same thing for
this layer right here. I'll just scrub down,
maybe I'll have a start right here. So I'm just gonna slide
the position over to right here. Have it come out, kind of like that
maybe tighten this up a little bit. Let's just look at what we have so
far, yeah. That's coming out really,
really slow, but not to worry. Now I did mention before that
there are some third-party tools to help you and
make modifying the Keyframes easier. I wanna show you one of those right now. This is an extension called motion three. It's just off the screen I went
to window and then extension. This tool is made by Mount Mograph and you can find that at mtmograph.com/motion. This is a third party tool,
it is 65 United States dollars. But it's really really cool that
I wanted to show you that there are some really cool tools here
to help you to really quickly adjust your Keyframe speed and influence. So with this tool here, all I need
to do is drag these sliders out. And it will give me kind of a visual
representation of the speed curve that I want to have. And so, actually for this animation
with this text kind of flying out here, what I'd like is actually I'd
like it to come out really, really fast at the start [SOUND]. And then slowly come to a stop. And so I want this really drastic curve. And so instead of changing these
from linear to bezzie, a and then going into the graph editor,
I can basically do that all in one step. There we go, all right,
see what we got now. Very cool, like I showed you a second ago. You can adjust the key frames
here with the sliders. You can even input values here if you know
specifically what you're looking for, or you can just click and drag in here to
create the shape that you are looking for. So I think I want something like that. So when I do that, if I look over in
the graph editor, check that out, created that exact same shape,
but it's a lot faster to do. And that's the exact
emotion that I wanted. I want it to start really fast and
just kind of slide and come to a nice slow stop. So, just like that,
I have a nice looking animation. Let's look at the whole thing here,
perfect. And like I said before,
if you need to adjust this, and we need to add another word here,
like Ella or something and design senior or something. This is super easy to modify. You can see that the mat is cutting those
off, but all I need to do is just extend this out over here, and then make
a few modifications to the key frames. So that needs to go there and
then this needs to go there, and then I'll just adjust
the position of that and the position of this rectangle. Oops, this rectangle right here,
just like that. Within just a couple of seconds, I have a new animation that
fits this new text here. I mean, if I didn't screw up
a few of those clicks there, that would have taken probably under,
I don't know, 10 seconds to do. And this is a nice technique to be
able to get this sorta look here and have it be quite modular. Now if this text wasn't positioned
exactly where you wanted it to be, that is also not a problem. We could just take all of
these layers here, and just pair them to your mat layer,
bring up the position of your mat layer. And because I made those
mats a little bit fatter, so they're sticking off
the screen there a little bit. We can reposition this,
if we move it over too far here, I think the rectangles are gonna
bleed off that one side. So you may have to go back in and
make some other modifications for example, I think what you could do is
you could just take this mat here and just add another mat right there and
do the same thing down here. And then everything else should work fine. And now we can take the position
of this and we can move it pretty much anywhere because everything
else is being kind of mad at out. So we can put this down kind of
as a lower third right here. Just that easy, thanks for
sticking with me for this lesson. We learned how to kind of build
something in a modular way. And I wanted to show you this
motion three extension here. It is a third party tool and
it's not free, but it's gonna ton of great features, I definitely recommend
going to mountmograph.com and check out the guide and check out all the cool
things that you can do with it coming up. The next several lessons, you're gonna
learn how to take artwork that was created by a designer in something
like Photoshop or Adobe illustrator, prep it for use in after effects, and
then animate that design in various. Ways you're gonna learn a few different
techniques including some write on, some more expressions with inertial
bounce and overshoot, and more. A lot of great stuff coming up in
the next few lessons, so don't miss it. [MUSIC] In this lesson you will learn how to
take a design made by a designer and prep it for work in After Effects. So at some point in your
After Effects/ animation journey. You're gonna be given a sets or full-on designs from a designer or
some other third-party and these will not always be ready
to animate the way they are. Sometimes they need a little bit of
massaging in either Adobe Illustrator or Photoshop to be able to get them ready
to work with an After Effects and that's the case here. So this design was provided for me. And all of these assets
came from Envato elements. But if I were to import this illustrator
file, which is what this is, into After Effects the way it is now,
it would import as a flat layer, so I wouldn't have access to all of these
individual elements, the text, the little burger bits here, the speed lines,
the background, everything would be flat. And so there's not a whole lot I could
do with it to make it very interesting. So you're gonna learn how to take this
from illustrator and kind of prep it for After Effects. And this is a very useful sort of thing. It's the kind of thing that you do a lot
when you're working with larger teams. So the first thing that I would do
is in Illustrator if you don't have the Layers panel pulled up,
come over here to window and make sure you pull up the Layers panel. And then if you select
your top layer here, what you can do is you can
click on this fly over here. And for whatever reason,
it's off the screen. So I'm gonna pull it over like this. And you're gonna choose
Release to Layers Sequence. What that's gonna do is that's going to
essentially take all of those elements that are built into this layer and
put them on their own layer. And then we can just pull them down so
that they're on their own individual layers, you can see that
the colors changed. And now if I were to import this into
After Effects, just like it is right now, we'd have access to all
the individual layers. That's basically what you need to do. But let's go a little bit further and
make this a little bit better. I'm just gonna save this really quick so
I have a separate file here. Just gonna put underscore one on it. And then what I like to do is go through
the layers and name them now because when I import them into After Effects,
I can rename the layers. However, if I move the Illustrator file
and I need to relink it in After Effects, naming the layers in the file
is going to be a big help. So I just turn on and
off the eyeball here and figure out what is on which layer and
then I'm just gonna label them. If you double click on the name here,
you can just rename that. So I'm just gonna call this lines and
that's the top bun right there. And this is the bottom stuff. And then we have this overlay layer. And we have the background sometimes if
you if you double click just to the right of the name,
it'll bring up the layer options. You can also use that change
the layer color as well. So that's very good, I can save this. Next I wanna import those assets. So I'm just gonna double click
in the Project panel here, bring up the import window, and I'm going
to navigate to where that Illustrator file is the underscore one is the one
that I have renamed, the layers and I'll click Import to bring that in. And then I'll get a dialog box here and
I have a couple of options. I wanna make sure that I choose
composition instead of footage. Footage of bringing in a flat file,
compositional, I'll bring in all of the layers and
then underneath footage dimensions, I like to have layer size as
opposed to document size. Layer size makes the bounding box of the
individual layers fit around the layers instead of being the entire
size of the document. And I'll click OK and we'll bring that in. I'll double click to
open up that composition. And I'll just give this a second to
preview, all right, so there we go. We have it in After Effects, and
things are looking pretty good. I have access to all of
the individual layers, very nice. And I can start animating this. Now I'm gonna give this a little bit of
a treatment similar to a project that I worked on for
a US company called smashburger. Smashburger is an American fast food
casual hamburger restaurant chain. They have 370 locations in 37 states and
nine countries. I ended up working on one of the pitch
videos and they won the account. So they are the agency of record. So I think what I'm gonna do is,
I'm gonna get this text here to kind of fly in from
behind the viewers perspective. And kind of smash in here and
then have these lines kind of animate out. Have the burger maybe fly apart. So let's get to work on animating this. I'm gonna select the text here. And I have a couple of options for
working with the text. I can work on it just like it
is with this text layer here or I can go back over to Illustrator. And I can select the text, grab the text
tool here and just select the text. Copy it jump over to After Effects,
hit Ctrl T, bring up the text tool and
then just paste it. And then even though I wasn't
selected on the right font or the right font size or any Anything
like that, it's actually going to be pretty much exactly what I need
to be able to place in here for whatever reason the spacing
on this is not quite right. So I'm going to hold Alt and then use the left arrow to bring
this over to line it up, right. So if there's anything kind of Interesting
or clever that I wanted to do with the text animator in After Effects, that's
how I could get the text to come over and be the exact same size and more or less
the same placement very, very quickly. But I think for simplicity's sake, I'm going just
work with the vector layer here. Now like I mentioned before, this font
original burger came from Envato elements, and you can find it right here. It's a great looking font. But I'm gonna get rid
of the text layer and I'm just going to work with
the vectorized text layer right here. So I'm going to create a mask around this. I'm going to hit Q to bring
up the rectangle tool and just draw a rectangular
mask around the word BEST. And it'll just kind of size that up. Sometimes if the masks aren't
centered around the layers, it just gives me anxiety. And I'm gonna rename
the layer to best text. And then I'm gonna duplicate it CTRL+D, hit ENTER on the keyboard and
rename this Burger Text. And then on the Burger Text layer,
we're just gonna double click My Mask. Grab the top of the transform handle here,
and just pull it down for
the burger part right here, and then just kinda resize that for
this word right down here. I'll click away and
that mask looks fantastic. If I select both of these layers and
then do Ctrl Alt Home, that will recenter the anchor points in the middle of
the layers, and that looks great. So what I wanna do for the animation
portion of this, I wanna have these fly in .So you may be thinking a scale
animation would work and indeed, it will. So with my best text layer selected,
I'm going to hit s to bring up the scale. I'm going to click The Stopwatch to enter
Insert a key frame on maybe eight frames. And by the way, let's just check
the composition settings here. I actually didn't even look to see what
the resolution was of the project, but it is looking good. It's 1920 by 1080 and it came in and
we're working at 29.97. That's something good to kind of work out
before you get too far down the road here. I think actually, we can make this
just a five second animation. We'll make this pretty quick. So I have my scale key
frame here at frame eight. I'm gonna go back to the beginning,
and I'm just gonna scale this up just an absurd amount like that,
so I can't see it. And if I play this, let's see what's
gonna happen, okay, all right. So it looks like it kind of starts slow,
and then it gets like, whoa. It goes from here to there. In one frame, and if you're wondering
why it gets kind of janky looking here, that's because we need to turn on the
continuously rasterize button right here. And we can probably do that for
all of these layers. In fact while I'm at it I'm gonna
take these two layers right here, and I'm just gonna lock them to
prevent me from messing with them. You can see once I toggled on
that continuously rasterized but in there now, this looks nice and
smooth, but the motion is kind of weird. I wanna make some more room here so
that you can see. I'm gonna select my keyframes,
right click on them, go to keyframe assistant and
then choose exponential scale. what that'll do is that will make the
scale if we look at the graph editor here, check this out. Now our scale has this kind
of exponential curve to it. And if we play it back,
now it's looking a little bit nicer. It's coming in. I think more like More how you
would expect it to kind of fly in. And we can adjust this
to make it longer or shorter by selecting all of these key
frames, and then holding down alt, grabbing the last key frame and
pulling and dragging. And what this will do is basically
compress all of those key frames to make this animation shorter or faster. So that's one way that you can do it
another way, which is somewhat similar, is we can add a 3D kind of
virtual camera in here. So I'm going to right click and
go to New camera. I'm gonna make this 35 millimeters. I don't need depth of field on and
just click OK. It's gonna tell me, hey,
you don't have anything 3D in here and I'm just gonna click OK. That's totally fine, because I'm
gonna make my two text layers 3D, and I'm gonna show you a slightly
different method to get the same kind of motion
with less key frames. So instead of animating the scale, what
I'm gonna do is animate the position So at about the same spot, frame eight,
I'm gonna drop a position key frame, when it come back to the beginning and then I'm just gonna fly my text out in
the z axis here, or in the z direction. You can see it kind of looks like it's
going a little bit off to the left there. So I'm just gonna bring that down and
maybe even pull it down in the y axis. As well. Let's see what that looks like. Very cool. Let's just make it shorter. I like that. Just keep it linear. We'll keep it We'll keep it cool and
linear for now, I want to do the same
thing with my burger text. I'm gonna come right here and I'll use the keyboard shortcut
to drop a position keyframe. I'll come back to the beginning and
fly my text out towards the camera and maybe kind of centered
up a little bit more. And then what I want to do is I'm actually
going to pull my burgers layer down below my best text layer. And then push it down the timeline,
just a hair like that. Maybe I'll, enable motion blur here. That looks pretty cool. Very cool. Maybe offset at one more frame and
then push this one out just a little more. So we don't see it on the first frame. Cool.
I think that looks fantastic. So the text is looking
pretty good right now. And it's time to move on to
some of these other elements. And I'm gonna show you how to do
that coming up in the next lesson. [MUSIC] In this lesson, we're gonna pick up
where we left off in the last lesson, talking about how to animate
this best burger design. [MUSIC] Continuing on,
we have the text kind of ironed out here. The text is flying in,
it's looking pretty cool, I like the way that's coming in here. What I'd like to have happen is,
when the best burger hits, I want these lines to kind of fly out, and maybe even do kind of an animated wiggle,
so let's look at how to do that. First, what I wanna do is I am going
to right-click on the Lines layer, come up to Create, and
then Create Shapes From Vector Layer. And then I'll just take this and
move it down, I'll maybe put the shy switch on and
then lock it, and then hide it. That way, it doesn't get in the way. So by converting this to a shape layer, I now have access to
the individual paths here. So there's a few things that
I could do with that, and I can do some clever things. But actually, all I really want to
do is come down to Contents, and then right across from there,
I want to add a Wiggle Paths. And if you don't have any of these shapes
selected, or any of the groups selected, it's going to put that
Wiggle Paths on the bottom. If it didn't, just find wherever
it put the Wiggle Paths, then pull it down to
the bottom of the stack. And what that's going to do is it's going
to wiggle all of the lines in here. If we just hit play here,
you can see what that's going to do. And I'm sure you're thinking,
that does not look very good. And you are correct, [LAUGH] that does
not look very good, but we can tweak it. What I want to have it look like is the
kind of hand-drawn animation thing where it looks like you sort of drew a thing,
and then you drew it again, and you drew it again on three different
sorts of piece of paper, if you will. And then it sort of animates between them,
and it has this really cool animation effect. That's probably not
a great way to explain it. But once you see how we're gonna
modify it, it's gonna all make sense. I'm gonna switch the points
from Corner to Smooth. I'm gonna bring down the detail here,
maybe to something really low like, I don't know, 1.5, and then I'll bring
down the size to, I don't know, 3. And then I'm going to push up
the wiggles per second to 15. And now when I play this, you see,
that's what I was talking about. I want this kind of wiggly,
kind of animated look here. Might be able to increase the detail,
maybe to two or something. If we push it up too much, we're gonna
get some weird blobby stuff in here, and that's not gonna look so hot. So I think 1 or 2 will probably work fine,
that's looking cool. And then next, I wanna animate these
lines coming from kind of the center out. So I'm just gonna solo up the lines here. That'll make things
a little bit more snappy. And I think the easiest way to do
that is just with a matte layer. They're gonna come out pretty quick, or
I'd like them to come out pretty quick, so I can get away with using just
kind of a shape layer here. And so
I'm just gonna draw one with the pen tool. So I'm just gonna click and
drag with no other layer selected, and that's gonna create a new shape layer. And I'll just make a kind
of crude shape here. Because I want it to start very close
to the inside edge of these lines, kind of like this, without touching them. I can probably get away with making that
linear, and then something like this. And then what I'm gonna do is,
I am going to dive down into the contents, into the shape, into the path, and
put a path keyframe right here. I'm gonna move this keyframe, I'll just
move it in the beginning of the layer for now, cuz this is where we're gonna start. And then I'll come maybe,
I don't know, let's go eight frames, it'll probably change. And if I double-click on my path here,
what I wanna do is just scale it up. And if I hold Ctrl and Shift,
I can constrain the proportions, and kinda move everything in a uniform
way around the center anchor point. So now it's just gonna go from here bloop,
t/o there, it's gonna get nice and fat. And then I probably wanna easy-ease
these and then jump in here and modify this curve such that
it flies out like this. So pull this handle all
the way to the left, pull this one all the way
to the left like that. Cool, I'm gonna select the layer,
name it Lines Matte, very good. Pull it down above my Lines Outline layer, hit F4 on the keyboard to switch or
toggle the modes. And then take my Lines Outline and
set it to alpha map. And now, my lines should draw on bloop,
just like that, very cool. And we'll go frame by frame here,
I just wanna see what's happening. Okay, looks like maybe, Maybe they're coming on a little strong. And I think if we modify
this path a little bit, so I'm gonna select the pen tool again. I'll just Ctrl-click so
I don't have anything selected, and then I'm just gonna bring
these points around. Because I think what I'd like is,
I'd like a tighter shape in here. And that way, it'll look like
things are drawing on I think a little bit more uniformly. You're just gonna have to take my word on
that until you see what this is going to look like. So I'm just gonna try and keep this matte
as tight as I can around these lines. And let's see how that looks. I like that, that's cool,
all right, very good. So I'm gonna unsolo my Lines Outline. And I wanna line this up for
right when the burger sort of hits. The best burger, so somewhere in here, I want it to start flying out,
right about there. And I can also turn motion blur on,
like this. So let's see what this
looks like at this point. Very cool, not too bad. The other thing that I'd like to
have happen is I'd like this burger to start kinda from a closed,
well, not exploded position, and then kind of explode up just
before the text gets there. So to do that, I'm actually going to just
change the color of this text here so that I can keep track of it and then move all of this down
the timeline just a little bit. And then I'm gonna take
my burger buns here, and right about here,
I'm gonna drop a position keyframe. All right, and then I'll go back to
the beginning here, and I think what I'd like is, I'm gonna move this burger
bun down, and move this burger bun up. And we have a little bit of a problem,
because you may have not realized it before this point, but this illustrator
graphic is just basically outlines. So there is no kind of background
fill in each one of these elements. That's something that we can fix,
so definitely stay tuned for that. But I think for
the amount of frames this is gonna be on, it's not a big deal at this point in time. I'm gonna have it start here and
kinda fly out like this, and make room for this burger to fly in. I'm just gonna hit F9
on the keyframes here. Hit this button here,
which will fit all graphs to view, so I can just see these a little bit bigger. And then I'll just give these a little
bit of a curve here like that. I think that looks good. The timing is not perfect,
like I said before, so I think I'm gonna slide
this stuff forward. Perfect, yeah, just like that. I want it just sliding out of the way,
boom, just like that. Now I think the effect that I would
like to see is I'd like the top bun and the bottom kind of burger stuff here
to continue to basically expand. So to do that, what I'm gonna do is
I'm going to create a new null object. And I prefer to have the anchor points
in the center of my null layer. So I did the Ctrl+Alt+Home and then Ctrl+Home to kind of
recenter that up there. And so what I'm gonna do is,
I'm going to drag this up here. And then I'll hold Ctrl, and if I'm close to the anchor point on that
top bun, it should snap right there. And I'm just gonna name this null
right down here, I'm gonna hit Enter on the keyboard and name this Top Bun
Cont, is my abbreviation for controller. I'm gonna bring that down here,
put it right above the top bun. I may even select both of these and
change them to fuchsia so I can keep track of the layers. And then I'm gonna take
the top bun layer and parent that to this top bun controller. That way, after this initial move, I can really easily create some secondary
motion by just animating this null. So I'm gonna use the keyboard
shortcut Alt+Shift+P and Alt+Shift+R to drop in a position and
a rotation keyframe. And then I will go to
the end of the timeline, move this up a little bit, and
maybe rotate it a little bit like that. Now I'm going to go to my solids here and
just drag down another null. I don't necessarily have
to make another one. It's kind of a pet peeve of mine to
keep my projects as tight as possible. I like to just keep using
the same null over and over. So I'm just gonna make this
null an adjustment layer, and that will essentially make it transparent. And then, I'm going to come right
down here and hold Ctrl again, and just snap the anchor point
to my Bottom Stuff layer. I'll rename this to Bottom Stuff Cont for
controller, and then parent my Bottom Stuff
layer to my null here. And then I'm gonna do
the same thing to this null. I'm gonna hold Alt+Shift, and then hit P,
and then R to drop a position and a rotation keyframe. I'll go to the end of the timeline, and
this time, I'm gonna push the burger down. And then I'm just gonna rotate it
maybe opposite of what I had before. Okay, so
let's look at what I have right now. I'm just gonna fit to view,
maybe make this a little bit bigger. All right, let's check this out. I love it, I think it looks so cool. That's a good place to stop for
this lesson. Make sure to check out the next lesson, where you're gonna learn how to put
some final touches on this animation. [MUSIC] [MUSIC] In this lesson, you're gonna learn how to
put some final touches on this animation including using an Inertial
bounce expression. [MUSIC] Final touches on this
little animation here. What I'm gonna do is
drag down another null. Yes I do like using null layers,
and I'm going to call this shaker. Gonna make this an adjustment
layer just to make it invisible. The effect that I wanna go for here is, I wanna make the text look
like it has some weight to it. So when the text kind of hits,
so right about here, boom, I want all of these elements
to push back in space. And look like they're kind of shaking,
kind of like a meteor impact, if you will. It comes down really hard and we get this
little after shake, sort of deal going on, even though I have some 3D elements,
it really doesn't matter. Because all you need to
do is select my burger text the best text, the line, outline. In fact,
I can also select the line's map here, the top bun controller,
the bottom bun controller. And then I'm gonna take all of those and
parent that to this shaker layer. And now what I'm gonna do
with the shaker layer is, I'm gonna hit s on the keyboard and
bring up scale. And then I'm gonna take my
best text here and press u and then I'll reveal any Keyframes that
I have placed on the timeline. And right about when the best word hits or maybe a frame after,
that maybe right here. I'll go one frame ahead of there and I will put a scale
Keyframe on my shaker now. And then I'll go maybe two frames
down the timeline and I'll set this to something like 92 something, and
then I'll go two frames forward, boom. Now at this point in time, if I hit
u on my burger text, that has hit. And so
I will return my scale back to 100%. Okay, let's just look at what we have so
far, boom. Okay, that looks sort of gross. [LAUGH] I admit that was not
very fantastic at all, but I'm gonna show you an expression,
hat's gonna make that look really cool. And that expression is
called Inertial bounce. Inertial bounce is kind of a way to
create a really sort of lifelike motion to your animations and
in this particular case, I'm going to give that scale animation,
some Inertial bounce. Essentially what it does is it calculates,
I think some velocity and then it draws a sine wave and
then decays it over time. If all that sounds like neird business,
don't worry, just go to Google and
type in Inertial bounce after effects. I can almost guarantee you the top result
will be Top Five AE Expressions from graymachine.com. All of these are really good expressions. And you should definitely
check some of them out, but the one we're concerned with the most is
the first one right here Inertial bounce. Just copy this text right here. Just gonna copy that there. And then over an after effects, I'm going
to alt click the scale stopwatch and then in this space down here,
I'm going to paste that expression. And just by doing that,
check out what I have now. Wow, okay,
I gonna roll back to the beginning. So what the Inertial
bound expressions did, is I'm gonna bring up the graph editor and
then down here under scale, I'm going to click this
show post expression graph. It's sort of calculating the motion right
here and then it creates a sine wave based on a specific frequency, and
then that sine wave decays over time. This very much mimics, essentially
what all motion does to some extent. Now it's not super smooth right now,
and I'm gonna change a few things, but I just wanted to show you what that
expression is doing behind the scenes. Now we can change this. If we go into the expression,
just gonna make some room here. And I know this is a bunch
of techno mumbo jumbo, but the only things we really need to
look at are the top three lines. Amp which stands for amplitude,
frequency or freq which stands for frequency and decay. What I usually like to
do with this expression, is change the frequency from 2 to 1.5. Because I think 2 is just too much, I like these sort of Inertial bounce
movements to be a little bit slower. Then I'm gonna turn up the decay, which
is going to make it stop moving faster. So I'm gonna turn it up
from 2 to let's try 5. You don't need to put 5.0, just 5 is fine. And then let's see the difference
in what that's going to do. Okay, and if we look at the graph
editor again, you can see that, now what's happening is we have
kind of an overshoot, if you will. Where it goes past 100% and
then it dips back down to negative scale. And then it comes back up and
then it goes back down and then it just kind of settled. So we're getting a little bit less of
that, before we were waving way down the timeline here and
now it's just kind of boom. And then it just kind of settles out,
but let's just watch. What I like about this is
it just makes it feel like, that text has some really
nice weight to it. Now we can smooth this out a little
further by taking this middle Keyframe and easy easing it and
now if we look at the expression. You can see that this top part of the
expression is just a little bit smoother. And I think that might
look a little bit better. It's really gonna be pretty subtle,
but let's check it out, boom. Let's watch that one more time. And we can adjust the intensity of
that by moving around these Keyframes. So if we want it to be more intense, we're gonna make the last
part of this expression. We're just gonna nudge this to
basically make it one frame apart, and that's gonna make it just
a little bit more impactful. However, that means it's still gonna
have the same amount of decay. So making a bigger wave up front, but it's still gonna have the same
kind of decay on the back end. And, yeah,
if we want it to be even a little less, we can just change this percentage,
this scale keyframe here from 92 maybe 95. And that'll just be
a little bit more subtle. So Let's check that out. But I think the effect is pretty cool,
because it looks like boom, the text comes in and then it just
looks like it's kinda exploding there, which I think is pretty cool. If you want even more decay,
we'll just turn this up to like seven. Now let's check it out. And now it's just really dampened
the expression or the movement. This to me feels like it's
in a really good place. If at the beginning this sort of thing
bothered you, where we're seeing this layer bleed through the bottom,
really easy thing that we can do. By going over to illustrator and
if we can find our top bun layer here, we can grab the group selection tool. And we'll just gonna
zoom in to the edge here. And if you just click the path, that's
closest to the edge, that'll select that. Here, well, let me de-select and
then I'll just click that path. You see all that path right there
on the outside is selected. I'm gonna copy that,
I'lll come back over to after effects. And I'll just create a new shape layer,
so new shape layer. And then if I come down here and I just
add a path, I should be able to select the path and then just paste that
path from Illustrator, right in here. And now,
I have that exact shape right here, and to give it some fill, what I would do,
is just add a fill right here. And then I can change that color to,
kind of this darker color here. And then I'm gonna take this and
just kind of align it with the bun layer. Like that, I'm gonna select the layer,
hit enter, rename it to top bun fill, and
I'm gonna put it below my top bun. Let's see if I can nudge it over and
get it right there. I like to try and align those as close
as I can, but you may find depending on what you're filling the back with that,
that can be a little bit tricky. One thing you can do is just get it
close and then come down here and then add an offset paths. And if that is below your paths, what you
can do is just set this to minus one. And that's just going to, if I solo, this
that's just gonna shrink it up a tiny bit. If I do minus two, you can see it
shrinks it up a little bit more. So that way, it's going to live basically
between the edge of this path here and this white area here, so
I won't have any bleed over. However, I don't think it's
really gonna matter for this. And if I wanted to fill this with
the background, that's no problem. What I would do is take my
background layers right here. And I would pre compose them. So I'm going to hit Ctrl Shift C, and
I'll call this BG for background. And I'm gonna duplicate these. Bring them up,
just underneath my top bun fill layer, and then hopefully you know
where I'm going now. But if not, I'm going to hit F4 on the keyboard
to bring up the track Matte options. And I'm gonna set it to, Alpha Matte. And essentially what that is going to do,
if we solo this, it's just gonna paint the background
in wherever that bun fill layer is. And in order to get this bun fill layer,
to follow where my top bun is, I'm going to parent it to my top bun. And so now I have a really nice
way to block out all of this junk from my bun layer. So check that out. Everything else is exactly the same, we're just sort of painting out
that little kind of overlap. And this is something that we just
needed to deal with because the art wasn't exactly what we needed it to be for
this animation. But everything else I think
is looking pretty nice. [MUSIC] Coming up in the next lesson,
you will learn some more great looking techniques for animating some
pre-made designs in After Effects. [MUSIC] [MUSIC] In this lesson, you're gonna learn how to animate another
premade design from Adobe Illustrator. We're gonna be looking at some 2.5D
with an After Effects camera and some interesting techniques to get this
to look really fun with some lens flares. All right so,
just like in some previous lessons, I'm in Adobe Illustrator and
I need to release this to layer. So I'm gonna come over here to the Layers
panel in the little fly out menu and choose Release to Layers. Then I'm gonna pull these out of this
layer stack here, delete the top layer, and then just rename these. So I'll call this Text. This is Overlay. And this is background, perfect. That was simple, wasn't it? Then I'm going to just save this and
I'm gonna take the original file name, just do an _1, press Enter,
and then click OK. Then I'm gonna jump over
to the After Effects. Now before I get too far in After Effects, let me just save this,
Always a good thing to do. Then I'll double click and
import my Illustrator file. I'm going to import it
as a composition and I'm gonna leave the footage
dimension to layer size, perfect. Then I'm gonna double click this
composition in the project panel to open it up. So this is what we're looking at here. It's not terribly exciting. It would be pretty cool if I had
access to this what I would guess is an After Effects file with all these
really cool kind of HUD technology looking stuff. And I could do some fun animation although
that would be really complicated. What I have to work with
is just a flat image. So to make this look interesting,
what I think we'll work is to do some kind of 2.5D,
which is the After Effects version of 3D. After Effects can do some
more 3D rendering stuff. But when we're dealing with flat
planes that have no depth to them, it's really kind of a 2.5D sort of effect,
and let me show you how that works. I'm going to take my text layer, and
I'm gonna take my background layer, and I'm going to make those 3D by clicking
the 3D layer switch right here. If you don't see those,
you can press F4 on the keyboard, whoops, I actually pressed F3 so F4 will toggle
those layer switches for you there. And then I'm gonna right click here,
choose New > Camera, and I'm gonna do a 35 millimeter. I don't need depth of field on, perfect. I'll click OK. Now, if you press C on the keyboard
that'll bring up the camera tool. And if you click and
drag, that will orbit and you're gonna think well that doesn't
look very 3D at all and you are correct. And that's because these layers
are in the same 3D position. If we hit P and
we bring up the position with the text and the background layer selected,
you can see that their z position, so we have x, y, and z, is exactly the same. But if we take the background layer and
we come over to the z position and we just push it back in z space by a fair
amount like that, whatever that might be, and then we scale this back up,
it's gonna look exactly the same. But when we go back to our camera tool,
and we orbit again, okay, now it's looking a little bit more 3D. We're getting this kind of perspective
shift here or a parallax effect. And that's what we're gonna be going for,
that's gonna sell this sort of 3D look. Now on top of that, I'm gonna take my
background layer here and I'm going to add a CC Lens which I already have pulled
up in my Effects and Presets panel. So I'm gonna drag that
over to my background, and that's not what I'm going for. So I'm gonna come over here to the
Effects Controls and increase the size. Now, you may notice that when you
increase the size, you're gonna say, wow, that's pretty cool looking. And you can use cc lens for some really
trippy sort of effects and transitions. In fact, one of the most popular sort of
warp transition packs that's been out for a while uses this CC Lens affect to great,
well, effect [LAUGH] to create some really
cool looking warp-style transitions. It's really cool. So I'm gonna increase the size here. And then I'm going to
animate the center to give it this sort of warp looking effect. And that's really gonna sell
this sort of 3D parallax effect. In fact, we don't even really
have to move the camera or I suppose move anything in 3D. Because if we animate the position
of this, so let me undo that and I'll just drop a position keyframe here,
pull that out to three seconds. And then I'll just move this over here. And then I'll come over
to my background layer. I'll reset the center,
drop a keyframe right here, and then just push this maybe like this. If I just do that, it's kind of
has a parallax sort of effect. It may work better actually if I
move this over to the other side. Let's try that. Yeah, look at that. Your brain is telling you that you
are looking at something that has a 3D sort of aspect to it, a 3D perspective,
if you will, when it's not at all. I could make these 2D layers and
it will essentially look exactly the same. Check this out. I'll just reset the scale and, [LAUGH] It has a 3D sort of
effect to it but it's not. It's not in 3D space and it was not
using the After Effects camera at all. But we're gonna make it look even more 3D. So I'm just going to reset this here and
I'll reset the center. Yeah, okay, great, that's reset. And to this animation,
I'm going to add a null object. And I'm gonna make my null 3D, and I think I'm just gonna parent
the camera to my null. I enter and name this Cam Control. And then if I pull up the rotation here,
I can do some rotation for this and that will essentially
orbit the camera around the center. And that's gonna give us
a really nice sort of 3D look. It's gonna be a little bit more
than what I was doing a second ago. So I think I'm gonna come
to about five seconds. And then drop a keyframe on the Y
Rotation, come back to the beginning, and maybe do, I don't know, I don't wanna do something too drastic,
but maybe ten degrees. And I'm just gonna animate
from here to there. All right, so five seconds, I'm also gonna
come down to the background layer here, and drop a keyframe on this
CC Lens effect for center. And then I'm gonna push this
maybe over in this direction. Now, it doesn't look exactly right. But let me see if the motion is right now. Okay, I think that was the wrong way. I think I need to go this way. There we go. I think that's right. I think this has the right look to it. Essentially, the camera is going to do
that parallax effect, but in this case, I just wanna use the CC Lens effect to give
it a little bit more warping in the edges. So let me see,
I will change the view to fit up to 100%. And you'll see that the edges
kind of have this warp effect, almost like the background is bent,
the way it's kind of pulling out here. And if we adjust the scale or the size
rather, that'll become more drastic, although we do wanna fill it a little bit. So you can adjust the size to fill it or you can just scale up the layer
if you want to either way. So if I increase the scale of the layer,
then I can pull the size down. And that should make this effect
a little bit more drastic. Right now, it is pretty subtle. Let's see if that looks any better. It's definitely doing a pretty
good amount of warping over here. You can see it particularly
in the corners. It's doing a nice warp there. All right,
I think that's pretty good so far. So I'm gonna select these keyframes. And I think actually, I'll just take the
end keyframes and just ease into them or pressing F9 on the keyboard. Let me just preview what
this looks like here. Okay, pretty good, I think also I
might want to do a position animation here on this null and
I think I'd probably wanna push in on this And then pull back, which will be
just a little bit more dynamic. It's not incredibly fancy. And I'm just gonna trim up
the composition to the work area there. But I think it works and this is
a good place to stop for this lesson. Coming up in the next lesson, we're
gonna really punch up this title here with some cool text effects, so
check that out coming up next. [MUSIC] [MUSIC] In this lesson, we're gonna punch up
this text with some cool text effects, and give it a really cool
kind of electronicy look. All right, I'm gonna jump over
to my project panel here. I'm gonna select my text layer in the
outer space scene, underscore one layers. These are the illustrator layers. So I'm gonna select my text here,
and then replace with pre-comp. Then I'm gonna double
click that to open it. And actually, if we look at this
comp right here, you can see that, that layer has been replaced
with the text pre-composition. If you double click this,
that's gonna open up the same comp here. So what I wanna do in this comp here is
animate the text to do something a little bit more interesting. And I wanna get access to
the text characters here. So to do that, I'm gonna double click
on the text, and I'm gonna copy it from Adobe Illustrator, and then in After
Effects, I'm gonna grab the Type tool. Just drop it in anywhere,
and then paste, and then press Enter on the numeric keyboard. And now, I have that text exactly as
it appeared in Adobe Illustrator. Any kind of weird formatting that
might have been done in Illustrator, transfers over to After Effects,
it's very handy that way. Now, what I'd like to do is
convert this text to shape layers. Now, you may be wondering, why I just
didn't take the text layer here, and choose create shapes
from vector layer. And that's because for whatever reason,
it doesn't work with some text layers, so I'll just paste the text from
illustrator, and that works totally fine. So on my text layer now, I'm going
to right click, choose Create, and then create shapes from text. Now if I didn't mention this before,
this GEMPIRE font is from Envato elements, tons of great fonts there,
and this is one of them. So let's look at this shape
layer that I just created. I'm gonna drill down,
it looks exactly like the text, but what I wanna do is give it
kind of a stroke effect. And I wanna animate the strokes
around the text, and then have the fill kind of flash in. And I'm gonna do that on
a few separate layers here. So the first thing that I wanna do is, I'm
going to expand all of these layers here. In fact, I'll just hit the tilde key,
so I can see what I'm doing. And I'm gonna grab all the fills and
strokes and delete them. Now you could just turn them off up here,
but that's gonna get a little
bit confusing down the road. So I'm just gonna delete them. Then I'm gonna come over here, and with
the content selected, I'm gonna choose Add and then stroke, and that's gonna put
a stroke down at the bottom of this stack. And that way, I can control one stroke for
the entire layer, all the shapes will have this stroke,
and it just makes it easier to animate. So let me hit the tilde key again, and
let's look at what is going on here. So that's too much stroke, I can tell. I'm also going to have the stroke
match the color of the text. So I'll just use the eyedropper
tool there, perfect. Then what I would like to do is,
I would like to add a trim paths. So I'll just select contents and then Trim
path, which is just off the screen there, let me just pull this up so
you can see, trim paths. Okay, and that put the trim paths at
the bottom of all of these groups, which means that the trim paths will essentially
affect everything that's above it. And if I just pulled down the end,
I can kind of see what I want it to do. So there's two things that
I wanna animate here, and I'll just animate them right now. I'm gonna come back to
the beginning of the comp here, I'll drop a key frame on end and offset,
then I'll go to about three seconds. I'll put the end at 100%, and
I'll put the offset to one, which will do essentially one full
revolution or rotation of the offset. And then when I play this,
you can see what it's gonna do. It's got this really cool
kind of wrapping line effect. Now, if you pay attention to what's
happening in the O right here, something strange is going on. It looks like the line sort of stops right
here, and then it draws the middle line. It completes the middle line, and
then it goes back to the outer line, and then it starts taking away some from
the middle, and then putting some back. It's very sort of busy and
I don't like it. And what I discovered is that,
the reason it's doing this is because, the O is made up of two groups here. So we have a path on this group, and
a path or two separate paths rather. And each one of these paths then
has a merge path applied to it, and the merge path is basically to subtract
this middle bit from the outer bit here. So that when it's filled,
it doesn't look like just one oval. Well, it's got a hole in the middle, but
you see, I don't actually need the fill. So what I'm going to do is
get rid of this merge path here in the O, the R and then the other O. And now when this plays, you're gonna see
that the lines do what they should do, and that's continually
move without stopping. Which I think you will agree it looks
a lot better especially for the O. Now, would you actually be able to notice
that it's doing this weird thing with the O and the R, and the O? I don't know, maybe, I don't like it, so
I'm gonna get rid of those merge paths. Finally, I'm going to select
to the key frames here, and just apply some easy Es with the F9 key,
let's see what we have. Okay, not bad,
I also might like to change the line cap here from the, well,
this butt cap to a round cap. So I'm just gonna select the layer here,
and then I'm gonna use the butt capper script which is free
to change all of the caps, super easy. Now, if you don't like the 90 degree or hard kind of corner here,
you can also change the line, join style to round by alt clicking using
this, and that has a nice look as well. [SOUND] Okay, so right at three seconds,
what I would like is for the fill on this layer to come in,
I love fill, he's a great guy. And then on my stroke layer here,
I'm going to animate the stroke with, from whatever it is down to 0, like this. So it's gonna come in like this. It's gonna wrap around about a boom,
and then it's gonna go down to 0. Now, I think that was probably too slow,
and this could probably go more
like two seconds I think. I think that'll look good, but
we'll look at it in a second. So make some small adjustments there,
just on timing. Let's jump back to the scene and
check out what I have so far. Yes, that feels right I think,
that looks right. Now, it doesn't have quite
the right look to it at the moment, I want it to have kind of
a glow sense about it, something that indicates that
it's maybe giving off some light. So a couple different ways
that we can do that one, I can set this to additive blend mode,
and that will give it, well, sort of,
this kind of light type properties to it. I can also add a glow,
I'm gonna set that back to normal. So with my effects console here,
I'm just going to add a glow, that's the same as just coming
over here to the effects and presets, and typing in glow,
it's just a little bit faster. The FX console is a free plugin from video
copilot, and if you use After Effects, you should definitely check it out. So I'm gonna jack up this glow here, and I'm gonna turn up the glow radius and
maybe, the threshold, I wanted to kind of almost be
looking like it's going to white, and the glow is more bluish,
I don't know, something like that, maybe. Sometimes it takes multiple glows, so
you may have to kind of stack this, and then you might shrink this down. This one might be like this,
and then you might adjust the intensity of the glow to
get it to look how you want. I think that actually looks
pretty good just like that. There are some third-party glows that
are pretty cool looking as well, I'm gonna show you that in this comp here,
in fact, I will make this comp
much bigger like that. And I'm gonna show you a third
party glow called Deep Glow, which I now see is not going to work,
cuz I need to apply it on this layer, and deep glow looks really, really cool. It's got a different way
of applying the glow, and it has this look to it
that I think is fantastic. Now if I wanted to get this to work,
right? I would have to increase the height here,
maybe lose some of the width, there we go. And I think that just
looks really fantastic. And that's just in its kind
of stock iteration here. If I copy that to my lines,
that would look even crazier. It might just pull down the radius there, I think that has a really
great look to it. But this is a third party effect,
it does cost, I believe, $50. You can find it on aescripts.com. I think it looks a fair bit
better than the stock glow, but let's just stick with the stock glow for
now. And I think this is looking pretty good so
far, I like this. Now, one thing that I wanna make sure is
happening is that, this stroke layer here, which I pulled down to the bottom
is gonna be completely off. So actually, when it goes down to zero,
I'm just gonna trim it up, so that I know that it's out and
it's not gonna be having any stuff or junk hanging over, and
messing with the overall width of my text. So this is looking cool. We can also turn on the motion blur,
not the 3 switch, the motion blur for this stroke. I'm not sure that'll translate
a tremendous amount, Yeah, then I know. I might also be able to
punch up this section here. What we might be able to do is,
kind of fake some more intense glowing by duplicating
this outline layer here. I'll hit U, and I'll go to where
the stroke is being animated right here. And I wanted to start a little smaller,
in fact, I want this to be almost white like this. And so I want this to just kind of
be kind of a white inner part here. In fact, I can probably go about them,
maybe a stroke with a four, and then I'm gonna come to my effects console,
and I'm gonna do a Ghazi and blur. And I'm gonna blur this out a little bit,
and I think that should work. Maybe we'll bump this up a little
bit more, something like that. I think that looks pretty good. And I may be able to set this to like,
additive mode. Yeah, that I think looks cool. In that case,
I'll pull that back down, and then increase the blur a little bit more. And now, it really kind of has a little
bit more of a neon sort of effect to it. The other thing that I wanna make sure is
that, it completely disappears here, yeah, okay, cool. So now, let's check out how
that looks in the mix here. And I think it may be just
a little bit too much, so I might pull it down just a hair,
because this glow right now, I think is a little bit too intense. And I may want to adjust or
animate the glow intensity, and maybe punch it up right here, and then I'll pull it down
just a little bit here Maybe I will just go one frame before
then, and then punch it in like this. Yes, I like that. Now overall, I think this has
a pretty good look to it, but I think we can punch it up a little
bit more with some lens flares. And you're gonna see that
coming up in the next lesson. [MUSIC] In this lesson, we're going to pick up
where we left off in the last lesson working on this animation here. We're going to be checking
out some lens flares. [MUSIC] I don't know how you feel
about lens flares, but if someone were to ask me, I would say
I love lens flares and I really do. They're just the right thing when
you need a little bit of flash and pizzazz to stuff like this. This kind of has almost a kind
of retro future vibe here. And I really wanna make this
punch of the text here, when we go from just the stroke and
the fill comes in And I'm just gonna drop a marker here with the Asterix so
I can figure out where that is but when that Phil punches in,
I want some lens flares. I want to have this whole thing
light up nice and bright. I think the effect that it will have is
that the text is much brighter than it actually is. So to accomplish this, I'm going to use a
third party effect called optical flares. This is by video co-pilot. It's probably one of the best
lens flare plugins out there. So to apply optical flares,
I'm going to create a solid. I'm just gonna name this OF for
optical flares, and then I will add. Optical [SOUND] flares to that. It's gonna load in here. I'm gonna set this to screen for now. Then I'm going to jump into the options
and I'm gonna customize my flare. Now, optical flares comes
with some default flares and then it has kind of a pro presets and It's got a bunch of different
preset packages that it comes with. I have all of them and
I think I want to use one that looks like either this Illuminati or
something very long and stretchy. Ooh subzero. Yeah, this is I like this one. This will be a good lens flare. Now I like everything about the look of
this except for this jazz right here, this angley stuff. And thankfully I can
come right down here and just hide any of the bits
that I don't like. I like that, I like that,
I don't like this blue thing here. Just let me find where that is,
there we go, that's it. And then, I think that and
that have to go as well. So this is really gonna be
a simple sort of lens flare, cool. I'm also going to change
the positioning mode to 3D, which will help it track, I think,
a little better with the camera. And then I'm going to position it just
on the edge of the frame here when this hits and I will also trim up the beginning
of the layer here with begin bracket so that lens flares start right here and
I'm going to animate the position. So when we come to rest here, we're
basically what I'm going to do is just move this over and
probably down just a little bit like that. And then I'm also going to animate
the scale and the brightness and I'm going to jack the scale way up,
and the brightness way up. And that's going to just look Wow,
it's gonna look awesome. Maybe too much scale there. Maybe a little more brightness. There we go. That's what I'm looking for. I'll probably see you on the keyboard
to bring up those key frames. And maybe I'll go like two there and I'll
reset the brightness, reset the scale. Maybe turn the brightness down
a little more Like that cool. Let's see what that looks like. Yeah, I like that. I think I'd probably take these easy
ease them jump into the graph editor and let's look at the speed graph. And then give it kind of
a shape like this where it. I wanted to hit income
an exponential curve. I want to fit this to the view here. There we go fit all graphs to view. I want this to really hit and then bam. See if I go to value graph,
what does that do? There we go. That's looking all right. It's gonna really look
like a flash essentially, if the curve is that
exponential sort of shape, bam. Now optical flares also has
a flicker section down here and I'm gonna change the type to sharp. I'm going to turn up the speed and the amount because I like
flickery lens flares. I like that. That may be a little bit too much. Maybe let's try smooth, and then I'll
turn this down a little bit, the amount. I do like sharp. But maybe let's just turn
down the speed a little bit. Let's try that. Very cool. Whoo.
You know what, actually, I want my lens flare to stop moving right here and
I'll probably have to easy ease that. Because if it keeps moving once the camera
stops, that's not going to look so hot. Very cool. Okay. I like that. I think the only thing that I would
do in addition to this is maybe give the background a little
bit of an RGB split. Look to it. I don't know. It might work it might not. So I'm gonna come to
the background layer here. I'm going to right click on it and
she is replaced with pre comp. And that's going to pre
comp my background layer. I'm going to double click that
go on into my background layer. Weirdly it has this strange crop here,
then that's fine. But I'm gonna apply another
third party effect, this one is from Red Giant Universe and
that's called RGB Separation. Universe is a collection
of all kinds of different, very useful effects for
after effects and premiere. And one of them that I'm very
fond of is this RGB split. Now, RGB split is this effect and
we'll kind of zoom in here so that you can see this. Let's see RGB separation. We just push it out just a little bit. It just kind of separates the red,
blue and green channels in space and it has this really cool looking
effect that I just love. I think it looks really neat. Now they actually have a couple
of different variations on this. So this is one of them. In fact, they have a preset
browser here that will open up and you can choose a bunch of different looks. So some things have
a little bit of distortion. We have heavy, I think maybe
Subtle distortion might work. Let's try that. Yeah, so this is without,
this is with Okay, I can see that I may
just pull the radius in just a touch let's see
what that looks like. Now, you could, if you wanted to take
this optical flares layer, duplicate it, jump into the position and then just move
this up here to duplicate the effect. And then of course, we're going to
have to change the end position here, maybe up here, something like that. Let's see what this looks like. Yes, oftentimes I like to have
somewhat symmetrical lens flares. There's one on the bottom. I think one on the top kind of works but
it's up to you. That looks pretty cool. And if this is just a little bit too
washed out, because I think, yeah, I think that's adding just
a little bit too much. Kind of wash there. You could. Add a curves effect to this. And maybe just tighten
that up a little bit. [SOUND] It's up to you. Or you can just turn down the brightness
or the scale, probably the scale would need to come down a little bit more,
yeah, something like that. [MUSIC] Coming up in the next lesson you're gonna
learn about a pro tip that will really help these lens flares and these fine
gradations look great when you export. [MUSIC] [MUSIC] In this lesson, you're gonna learn about
a pro-tip that will help your lens flares and gradations look
fantastic when you export. [MUSIC] Now, here's a bit of a pro-tip, all right? We've been looking at this for a while. Right now, my project is in 16
bits per channel color depth. Now, the default in After Effects
is 8 bits per channel and you're thinking, okay and
what's your point? I'm following you, but why does it matter? Well, it matters because of banding. Anytime that you have gradients,
and in particular lens flares, we just solo up these flares for
a second here. Well, you will see and
this is going to be subtle, because of the compression that
will be done to this video, but you can see hopefully there is
some banding going on in here. There we go. We're seeing it stronger here as
the gradient gets less bright. And that is because in 8 bit per
channel color mode, the red, the blue, the green, and the alpha channel
only have 256 values to work with. And if this were a full kind
of black to white gradient, we could come up with a pretty smooth
gradient over the distance of the corner to maybe the center of
the screen something like that. We could get a pretty good gradient there. However, as the gradient gets
smaller in terms of its contrast, so instead of going from black in
the middle to white at the edge. If we go from more of a light gray to
more of a just slightly brighter gray, then we have a lot less colors in
between these two to work with. And the result is banding which
is what you are seeing right now. The banding is not inherent in
the plugin for optical flares, it's just the reality of working
in 8 bit per channel color mode. Now, if you alt click on this and
you jump up to 16 bits per channel, well you'll see as this gets better, but still there is some banding if
we go to 32 bits per channel. You may also see a little bit
of banding it should be better, particularly against the background. However, 32 bits per channel is gonna
really screw up anything with glows on it. So let's go back to 16 bits per channel,
and we'll zoom way in here and see if we can detect any banding. Sometimes, you can't detect it
with your eye but when you go and compress this you will see more banding. Because some of the color compression,
when you export your project, is going to average the colors out. It's gonna say, well, I know this is a
gradient, but when you save space here, so we got to throw away some
of this color information. And so, the banding comes back in,
because ultimately you'll probably be delivering this in
an 8 bit codec of some sort. So, I can see some banding
right up here in the corner. I don't think you will be able to,
after this gets compressed, even in 16 bit per channel color depth. So the way to fix this and
I do this with almost all of my After Effects projects and
this is like super secret, top secret pro information,
[SOUND] is with noise. [SOUND] It sounds crazy because
in the world of cameras we think of noise as being bad, right? You want a camera with less noise. However, noise is a magical thing. If you think about what's happening here
with this gradation between the lights and the darks, and
we'll go back to 8 bit mode, so that you can hopefully see some of
these banding artifacts even more. Is if I take this adjustment
layer that I just added and I drop a noise effect on it, and
then I turn up the noise at some point, That banding is going to go away. Now, that's too much noise for sure. But on top of all of the other layers, it may be enough to kill
some of that banding. Plus, what we can do is we can kind
of stack this noise effect by. So instead of just adding it to the
adjustment layer, I'm gonna copy this and I'm gonna add it to this layer right here. And I'm gonna turn it way down. Maybe 1%, and I'll copy this and
I'll add it to this other optical frame. Oops, that's down here. So now, I have two little tiny grains,
and you can see it. If I can zoom way in,
you should be able to see it. There's definitely noise there, right? If I click off one of these,
you're gonna see it reduce. However, if we're looking at 100%,
you can just barely make it out. And by the time this gets compressed,
you're not really going to see it. And then, we add the top layer of grain on
top of this and I may add just like 2%. It's very, very small. And then,
here's the magic in After Effects, we're gonna go from 8 bit to16 bit
per channel and check this out. There's no banding,
like even if we zoom way in, you can't see any banding, is just gone. Now, there may be just the very
slightest bit of banding there. And I'm being honest with you,
I don't see it. However, when this gets compressed,
you may be seeing some banding but in real life, it's not there. We're thinking yeah,
but this looks grainy. Well, look at it context of everything,
first of all the noise I think looks cool. So there is that,
I think it adds a nice grit and a sort of overall just blend to this,
which I think looks really nice. Secondly, when this gets compressed
especially for the web, a lot of that noise will get sort of compressed
out, all this little detail here. The H3264 won't really handle that,
especially if this is going to YouTube or something. This kind of individual,
every pixel is different. Sort of look,
a lot of detail gets thrown away. And so,
adding noise can really help things. You could also add grain to this as well. So instead of noise,
which is a very, very fine effect, so the noise is a very fine effect and I'm going to turn it off,
these two layers here. You don't have to stack it
either because you can see that, the banding is mostly gone with
just this top level noise here. Sometimes, I find it helpful to put just
a tiny bit of noise on the optical flares layer, but you can see that
it's pretty much gone here. I'm not seeing any banding right now,
but another effect that can give it a nice overall
look is the Add Grain effect. So, right over here,
we'll just pop in Add Grain. Now, if you think your computer is fast,
go ahead and set this to final output. Then, you may wanna turn down
the intensity to something like 0.5. Yeah, just 0.5 for intensity,
which is a nice effect, maybe even 0.3 or something like that. This is applying a nice grain effect and
you can see the noise is off right now, but it is adding a little
bit of something. In fact, I'm gonna jack this up to 0.6, so
that you can see it more once this gets compressed, but watch how long this
takes to render just one frame, okay? It looks like it's going
actually pretty fast. Let me put this at a 100%. You're saying well, yes,
it's kind of it gets going. But consider that the machine
that I'm running this on is a 16 core AMD Ryzen
3950X 128GHz of RAM. This is not a slouch computer, but if you're trying to use add grain
on any slower computer, maybe, a laptop, it's going to put
a real hurt on your laptop. So if you like the look
of this add grain effect, a better way and a faster way to use
it is actually to pre-render it. And I wanna show you that right now,
I'm gonna create a new composition. I'm going to name it Grain. I'm gonna make it 1920 by 1080,
29.97 frames per second, 5 seconds long, click OK. I'm going to add a gray solid to this, and I wanna make sure that it has no hue,
no saturation. It's 50% gray, and I'm gonna click OK. And then, I'm going to add the grain
effect instead to final output. And that's it for me, I like the look of
this grain it does look a little soft. But if I want more high frequency, finer detail in the noise texture,
I can just use the noise effect. So this works fine. I'm gonna add that to the render queue,
queue that up and there it is right there. I'm gonna use the GoPro CineForm YUV
10-bit preset. One of the Apple Pro as presets would also
work, and I'm just gonna render that out. Now, I've already rendered that out. So I'm gonna double-click in my
project panel to import that. Switch back over to my
outer space scene and I'm gonna pull that down
into my composition here. Now, right away you can see that
it doesn't look the same and that's because I need to apply
a blending mode to this. The two blending modes that work really
well with grain at least for me, is overlay and linear light. Linear light looks super aggressive. However, if you just turn down
the opacity, it works pretty well. It is a little bit sort of gritty looking,
that can work. Sometimes, overlay is a nice alternative. It's a little more subtle and you're going to have to jack up
the opacity to be able to see it, but you can see even at 100% opacity,
it is pretty subtle. Final thing that you may have noticed
is that, this green clip is too short. Now, if I was using this
green clip in Premiere, what I would do is just make a sequence. And then, I just copy and
paste this like 50 or 60 or 80 or a 100 times to be as long as
I needed this grand clip. And then,
I can use that subsequence as a layer and set that to a blending
mode to work in Premiere. However, in After Effects,
there's a much easier solution. I'll just take this layer right here,
hit Ctrl+Alt+T on the keyboard or you can right-click and come up here to
time and choose enable Time Remapping. Once you've enabled time remapping, I'm
going to apply a very simple expression, I'm gonna alt click on the time remap and
type loop. And it's gonna prompt me right here. I wanna loop out. So, there we go. And then,
I'm going to put cycle in quotes. And again, if I type quotes, it's gonna
prompt me and I wanna choose cycle. So, this is the expression,
loop out, cycle in quotes. If you just click a way there,
we can extend the out point of this layer, and it's going to loop indefinitely. I'll just turn the opacity up here and
play the grain. And you can see exactly
what it's gonna do. It's just gonna loop and you can use this loop-out cycle expression
on a bunch of different properties. It's a good one to know. Pull this back down. Now, it renders and it's moving much faster than it did
before with that add grain effect. I think that looks fantastic. Coming up in the next several lessons,
we're gonna be looking at a much more complicated animation working with
another design using more expressions. Learning some new expressions like
the wiggle expression, keyframe animation, and more. [MUSIC] Coming up in the next few lessons, you're
gonna learn how to take some static art here created by a designer in Adobe
Illustrator, break it apart, prep it for animation and
create something much more dynamic. All right, so we're looking at art that
was created in Illustrator by a designer. It's not yet ready for animation. Similar to another lesson in the course
where we looked at a burger design, we're gonna have to prep this art for
animation. So the first thing that I like to do is
come over here to the Layers panel and in the little fly out menu here just
come down here to Release to Layers and that's gonna put all of the individual
elements on the own layers. So you can see if I undo that previously, you can see the layer
colors are all the same. And that means if I were to
import this into After Effects, this would be just one flat layer. Now I could rebuild it in After Effects,
but it's gonna save me a little bit of time. If I go here and Release to Layers,
oops, let me select that layer, Release to Layers. I'm gonna select all these layers,
pull them down and kind of put them in their own root
directory and delete that top layer there. And then I'm gonna name these. So I'm just going to toggle
on the layer visibility. Double click to rename and
I'll name this top one Text. And this looks like leaves and lines. And if we drill down here, well,
let's deal with that in a second. I think this bottom layer
here is just the Background. So, on this middle layer,
we have all kinds of junk. We have these individual
leaf elements here, which if you look very closely,
you can see that these are a tif. So these are a flat layer, and
that's not gonna be ideal for what we're going to do in After Effects,
but we'll deal with that in a second here. So let's see if we can isolate
some of these lines here. I think what we can do is
select this layer here, and then come down to Release Layers to
Sequence, yep, that'll work, perfect. Then we can take all of these
layers here and pull them down, or maybe pull them up above this layer,
very good. And then we'll just get rid of
this right here, that'll work. And let's figure out what
is on each of these layers. Okay, so these two are lines. So we'll call this one Line_1, maybe. And this Line_2 and that layer is nothing. It's got some kind of rectangle and
I don't think it's anything, so I'm just gonna delete it. And before we go any further, I'm actually
going to just save this as a unique name so that I don't inadvertently
mess up the original artwork. Each one of these are the leaves, so I'll just name those Leaves_1, good enough, and I will save this. Now this is pretty good to go as it is. If I were to import this in After Effects,
I'll have access to the text and the leaves and the lines in the background
and I could do something with that. However, what I would like to do is
animate the individual leaf elements here individually. I asked the designer where they got these
leaf elements and it happened to be from Envato elements, which is by the way
where this font came from as well. And so I have a collection
of Photoshop files here and in the Photoshop files
are the individual leaf elements. So, what I need to do is
open up one of these and figure out what leave elements I need and
then export those so that I can kind of rebuild just
the leaf elements in After Effects. I think that's gonna be pretty cool. So maybe I'll open up this
one that says Leaves.psd, that could be the one
that I'm looking for. And let's see here,
what are we looking at? Okay, so if I just show hide some
of these layers, okay, cool. So this right here is one of
the elements that I need. And, I think what I can do is with this
layer selected, you can see that this is a smart object, and so it is linked
to some other external graphic. And if you double click this, this will
actually open up in Illustrator, which is a double bonus because this element
is a vector file, which is very good. And so what I wanna do is find
the individual leaf layers that I need. There's the second one there. Let's see, I'll double click that and
that'll open up in Illustrator. I'll come back to Illustrator
in a second here so I can export all of those individually. There's another leaf element that I need,
very good. And how about this one right here. Cool, I think that's the fourth one. Let me just increase the opacity. Yeah, that looks right. Okay, so I think there's only
four leaf elements in here. There's one that's repeated twice, that
kind of very light looking leaf element. So, I have basically everything
that I need right now. The only thing that I need to do is maybe
just crop these in a little bit to make them easier to work with. If I save them just like this, the Artboard is gonna be quite large in
After Effects and that could be annoying. So, I'm just gonna grab the Artboard
tool here which is also the keyboard shortcut shift+O. And I'm just going to crop
in on these elements here. I may give them just a little
bit of wiggle room on the sides, something like that. And then I will save all
of these individually. So I'll switch back to
the selection tool here, and I've actually already gone ahead and
done this. So, I've named them leaf 1, 2, 3 and
4, and I've saved them right here. So I'm not going to go ahead and do that. But it's basically the same thing for
all of these other layers. I just take the Artboard and
shrink it down and then export it as an Illustrator file and
name it appropriately. All right, so,
let's just kind of review here. Taking the artwork, I have released them
to layers, try to figure out what was, what, and named all of the layers. And so now everything is on its
own layer and I saved that. And that right there is a good
place to stop for this lesson. If you've been following along,
congratulations. Now I know I went pretty fast through
a lot of those steps in Illustrator and Photoshop. So if you need another go at it, if you
need a little bit more time, go ahead and rewind the video and pause it where
you need to so that you can catch up. The next step of the process is to pull
all of these things into After Effects so we can begin the process
of animating this design. [MUSIC] In this lesson, you're gonna learn how to pull all
of these things into After Effects. So we can begin the process
of animating this design. [MUSIC] Okay, I'm over in After Effects here. First thing that I will do
is I will save this here and I believe this is my
boutique kind of artwork. All right,
now I'm gonna import my graphics here. And I'm going to import my How to Animate
in After Effects boutique scene_1. That was the one that I saved
with all the individual layers. Click Import and
I wanna import it as a composition and I'm gonna keep the footage
dimension set to layer size. All right, if I double click to
open that up, hey, check that out, it's looking fantastic. I have my lines here, my leaves, my text,
everything is looking pretty good. The only thing that I need is
those individual leaf elements. So I'm gonna double click to open up
those, jump into my leaf folder here and actually I think I can just grab this and
say Import Folder, perfect. And now I have my individual leaf layers. So now what I might do is take
these leaf layers here and just kind of lay them out and try to
match them up with what I'm seeing here. And it looks like some of these have been
flipped in one dimension or another. I'm just going to reverse the x
dimension there by putting a negative or a minus sign in front of the x scale
which will flip it in the horizontal. I can just lock those back together there. And I'll just kind of rotate it
around to figure out, yeah, okay. So that kind of goes right there. Kinda shrink that down and move that
around until it's about the same size. How exactly you wanna go with this
really depends on what you're doing. If this is client work, you're gonna
really wanna make sure that it's very, very precise but I think that'll
actually work fine for now. I'm gonna change the color
on this leaf here to red, I'm gonna duplicate it
Ctrl + D on the keyboard. And I'm gonna rotate it around and
try and align it here with this leaf. Very good, now that's close enough. All right,
let's check out this third leaf here. It's also looks like it's been no,
no, no, okay. That goes over here actually. And is that in the right orientation? It is not. So I'm gonna jump into the scale and
I'm gonna flip the scale again like that. Rotate that around, yes,
that looks correct. I'm gonna have to increase
the scale on this, no big deal. And I can just enable the continuously
rasterized button there and then I'll ensure that I can scale
this up to ridiculous proportions. And it won't lose any of that
delicious detail that is in this Illustrator file here. Now it's just a matter of
just kind of aligning this. Sometimes it can be easier to align these
if you can see where the end is here. If you hit Y and just put the anchor
point on the end of the leaf and then you can just kind of align it here. That way when you scale,
it's gonna scale right from that point. It's gonna be super easy to get that
aligned, perfect just like that. All right,
now I have this third element here and that looks like this one right here. Again, I'm just going to throw the anchor
point right on the end of the leaf just like that,
enable continuously rasterized, oops. I didn't get that exactly
where I wanted it. Very good, scale that up. It looks like all of these have
actually been flipped in one of the dimensions for
one reason or another. And we'll just kind of align that,
looks like it starts right here. Very good and just scale that up,
rotate it around, maybe push it back down a little bit. There we go, perfect. And then what is the final
leaf that we have here? Okay, yes, it's this guy right here. And I don't really know
how this is oriented but let's see if we can figure this out here. Is it like this? No, it actually looks like
this is flipped as well, and I can strain those so
it doesn't get all crazy. There we go and then I will also
continuously rasterize that. Make sure that's looking good. Sometimes if you grab a handle like
the transform handles on the corner. And you try and scale it, it will
do like a weird thing once you move the mouse kind of over in this direction,
it'll flip the scale. So if you hold Shift while
you're scaling with one of these four transform handles,
it'll go a lot easier. Okay, that is great. I'm going to change the label
to red on all of these. And the final thing that I'm gonna do
is just adjust the stacking order. So it looks like one, two, three, and
then those are in the bottom orientation. And I've re-enabled those, okay,
so it's the roundy leaf, and I'll just disable these leaves so
I can see, okay. It looks like I've done it kind of
inadvertently but that was very good. I guess the final thing I
need to do is just adjust the opacity perhaps on
these layers right here. And then I'll just enable one of these
other leaves here just for reference. Let's see. [MUSIC] Cool, I think that looks
really pretty close. All right, that's about it for
this lesson. So coming up in the next lesson, we're
gonna look at how to duplicate these. And then we're gonna start to
animate them in a really fun way. So check that out, coming up next. [MUSIC] In this lesson we're gonna pick up right
where we left off in the last lesson. Continue to build out this
layout here in After Effects and start animating these leaves in a fun and
interesting way. [MUSIC] Okay, in the last lesson we sorted out
the artwork side of this animation and brought it into After Effects. And now we have these leave elements here
or these leaf elements, if you will. All broken out into Into
individual elements. And I like that a lot better because
now what I can do is animate them. And I think what I'd like to do is do
like a very subtle kind of rotation on them to make them look like they're
kind of blowing in the wind. Before I do that though, I'm gonna continue just
finishing out this layout here. And I'm going to basically
duplicate these leaves and replace the other flat leaf elements here. Before I do, I'm just gonna solo
up all of my leaf layers here and make sure that I have the anchor points
positioned where I want them for rotation. So I want the anchor
point to be right there. So when it rotates,
it does sort of that thing like that. Okay, very good. Let's look at the next leaf here and we'll
just put the anchor point about there. And how about that? That's good, that's good and
I'm pretty sure that's good as well. Fantastic, great. So the next thing that I'm gonna do is, I'm going to Right click down
in the sequence window here and I'm going to do new and
I'm going to add a null object. You can also come up to layer,
new, null object or use the keyboard shortcut
Ctrl + Alt + Shift + Y. So I'm gonna take my null, and
I'm gonna drag it over here and just kind of snap it to the corner. Now, if you don't have snapping enabled,
when you have the selection tool selected. Can enable it right here
with this checkbox, but you can also temporarily enable it or
reverse the enabling by holding Ctrl. So if it is enabled,
when you hold Ctrl, it will disable. And if it's not enabled,
when you hold Ctrl, it will enable. If that doesn't make sense, you can see
right now it's not snapping because I don't have Ctrl held, but watch when I
hold Ctrl, it's going to want to snap. So I wanna snap this to the corner. Because is you see these
other leaf elements here, are kind of positioned
relative to the corner. So what I'm gonna do, is I'm gonna name this leaf Ctrl 1, very good. And before I duplicate this, I think what
I wanna do is, I want to animate it. Because if I'm kind of thinking ahead, which is hard sometimes when
you're building out animations. I know that I'm going to duplicate
this and I'm going to move it around my composition to basically replace these
other flat leaf elements here, right? And if I do the animation first,
that'll save me some steps down the line. And I just noticed, I think I need
to increase the opacity here. I think in the last lesson when
I was adjusting the opacity, it was actually over the leaf
layer underneath them. So, back to animating. What I wanna do is, I wanna have these
kind of spring into action here or spring up, and grow. And then I wanna have them kind of wave
in the wind by animating the rotation. So there's two kind of
intermediate/advanced concepts here that I want to show you. One is,
this idea of animating with an expression. So what I wanna do is I'm
gonna hit s on the keyboard, I'm gonna bring up the scale property,
I'm gonna go maybe ten frames. So I hit Shift + Page Down, and
I just went ten frames forward, and I'm gonna drop a scale Keyframe. So this is gonna be the end scale for
this particular leaf element. And I'll just zoom up on that so
you can see, right? Then I'm gonna go back to the beginning,
and I'm gonna set this to zero. So over the first ten frames,
we're gonna go from here to there. Not very interesting at all. What I'd like to do is enhance that,
with something called Inertial bounce. This is also known as kind of overshoot,
if you will, but it's a great technique that will give this
some kind of realistic looking life to it. Now, if you're unfamiliar with this,
let's just do a quick Google search for Inertial bounce After Effects. And if you go to the, just pick the first
selection that's gonna come up. It's gonna be probably graymachine.com/top
five After Effects expressions, and you'll find this expression
all over the internet. What we wanna do is,
copy this right here under Inertial bounce version 1.2,
copy this expression right here. So we'll just copy that,
we'll jump back to After Effects. We are going to Alt
click on the stopwatch, which will allow us to paste an expression
in here and just by doing that, that little bit of copying and pasting. Now check out what we
have with our animation. This is something much more dynamic. So it's doing this kind of
overshoot calculation, if you will. I can actually show you that if I
jump into the graph editor here, and we turn on the Post Expression Graph. So this is showing you what the graph
is doing here after the expression has been applied. So we see we have this initial leaf scale
animation here and then once it ends, so once we get to this point right here, the
expression is doing kind of an overshoot. So we go past our scale and
we go up and then it swings down, and we get this sinusoidal wave
with a decay in the amplitude, which is the height of the wave here. And it has a very natural look to it,
because this is essentially a lot of things operate in the real world,
which is very cool. Now, if you don't like the exact
movement that we're getting here. We can modify some of these
parameters here and we can type in, I wouldn't mess with
the amplitude too much. But a lot of times I take the frequency,
the default frequency of 2. And I knock that down to 1.5, because I
think two is just a little too much and I don't really like it. So I prefer to see it around 1.5. If the overshoot animation or expression
is lasting too long, and I think it is, well we can do is turn up the decay, and
this will cause it to, well, decay faster. It'll cause that Post Expression
to stop more quickly. So let's just turn this up to 6, and
then hit Enter on the number pad there. And you see now we get
a little bit of overshoot. But it dies very quickly, and
if we look at the graph editor, that's going to reflect that. So we just get a little bit of overshoot,
we get a little bit of bounce back and then it settles very, very quickly
compared to where it was before. This is going a lot longer. So this is all personal preference. I think I like it somewhere around 5. But, to kind of get
a more uniform look for all of these rather than
tweaking every single leaf. What we can do is just think
ahead a little bit and I'm gonna add some slider controls
to my leaf controller layer here. So with my leaf controller selected, I'm gonna come over to the effects and
presets. Type in a slider control,
I'm gonna grab a slider. I'm going to call this freq,
for frequency. I'm gonna duplicate it, Ctrl D and
I'm gonna call this decay, I don't really need to mess with the
amplitude, these controls should be fine. So, in the expression what I'm gonna do,
is I'm going to select 1.5 and then I'm gonna grab the Pick Whip and
I'm going to Pick Whip up to frequency. And then I'm going to grab the decay. I'm just going to select that 5 there and
I'm gonna use the Pick Whip and Pick Whip up to decay. And If I run it back now,
it's not gonna to do anything because both of these values are set to zero,
and that's no good. So, I'm gonna set the first
one to 1.5 in this to 5. That way if I want to globally kind of
change that, I don't have to run back through all of these expressions,
which is gonna be quite a few. Especially when we duplicate
all five of these leaves, that's going to be 20 different layers,
we're going to have to go through. So this is going to be a lot quicker. So now what I can do,
is I can grab that scale expression. So let me bring that up, I'll hit s and I'm also going to toggle
the post expression here from the graph editor so
that I don't see that. And I'm just going to copy these,
actually, I can't do that. I was gonna copy the Keyframes but that's
not gonna work, because if I bring up the scale properties on all these layers,
all the scales are actually different. So I'm gonna do something
slightly different. I'm gonna select just these four layers. I'm gonna drop a scale
Keyframe right here. Come back to the beginning and
set all of them to zero. Then on my leaf number four here,
the second copy of this, I'm just going to right click and
choose Copy Expression Only. You can just see that on
the bottom of the screen there. I'll just bring this up, show you
one more time, Copy Expression Only. And now if I just select these
Keyframes here and I hit Paste, it's not gonna Paste the Keyframes. It's gonna Paste the expression
to the scale properties. And so now all of them should grow and do
that very nice overshoot animation there. Now if you wanna get a little
bit more life out of this, what we could do is you can change
the distance between the Keyframes. So if we shorten this, we're gonna get a,
well, it's gonna be quicker and we're gonna get a more drastic
kind of overshoot there. But we can also kind of smooth out
the beginning here by just selecting these Keyframes and hitting F9. That's also gonna give it
a slightly different look. Now having them all come out at the same
time, doesn't really look too hot. So what I would probably do, is offset these by maybe a frame or
so, like this. So that they kind of come out
in a staggered way there, which you won't really be able to
see at the start of the animation. But you'll see it at the end of
the animation when they're all kind of moving in that what seems
to be a random way. Which is not random at all, but it has
a nicer look to it, and that's great. This Inertial bounce expression can be
used in a bunch of fun in different ways. You can use it on scale, rotation,
position, in a bunch of other properties, to come up with some
really interesting looks. Now, coming up in the next lesson you're
gonna learn about the Wiggle Expression. And that's gonna help to create
this really nice subtle, leaf blowing in the wind effect. So check that out coming up next. [MUSIC] [MUSIC] In this lesson, we're gonna pick it up
right where we left off in the last lesson, and you're gonna learn about
a really useful expression called wiggle. [MUSIC] The final thing that I wanna do
with these leaves is I wanna give them some wiggle in
the rotation property here. So rather than key frame the animation,
which we could do and that would give us,
well, a ton of control, it's gonna be very tedious to do that
on many layers and get a unique look. So instead what I'm gonna do is I'm
going to insert another expression and this is not gonna have
any keyframes on it. So I'm going to alt click
on the rotation stopwatch. I'm gonna come in here and
I'm just going to type wiggle, and you can see if you're running
After Effects 2020 and I believe 2019 it does this,
it's going to prompt you. And so with the wiggle expression,
we need the word wiggle and then we need something inside parentheses. So if we start and
we put a parentheses in here, it's gonna add the end parentheses and
we need two things at the very least. We need a frequency and
we need an amplitude and these are two properties
separated by a comma. So let's just type in some numbers. So let's say,
let's do a frequency of ten and then we're gonna put a comma and
then we need an amplitude. And this is going to be the amount
that the rotation is going to move. So ten is gonna be the frequency. That's gonna be ten times a second. Which if you're thinking about that,
[LAUGH] it's gonna be way too much. But I wanna show you kind of an over
exaggeration, and then we need an amount. So let's just type in 30. And then let's press Enter
on the numeric keyboard. I'm gonna solo this layer so you can
see exactly what that's going to do. Wow, if it was blowing this much in the
wind, I'd say we have a major problem and you need to get indoors probably
in a hurricane or tornado shelter. [LAUGH] But you can see basically
what it's doing and in fact, we can jump into the post
expression graph here and look. So over time without doing any keyframes, this property is basically
animating itself. And this is what wiggle does and
it does a great job of it. However, it's doing it
[LAUGH] way too much, right? This is way too fast. So we need something much more subtle. Maybe something like point five and then I
don't know maybe five degrees of wiggle. And if we look at that,
I think that's gonna be about right. However, just like before,
what I wanna do is I wanna think ahead. So once I see this whole thing built,
if I wanna go back and adjust the wiggle on all 20 of these
layers, that's gonna be very tedious because I'm gonna have to jump
back into the rotation property. And jump into the expression and
then update these numbers and well that's not so fun. I'm gonna come up to my
leaf controller here and I'm going to put in
another slider control and I'm gonna call this a wiggle frequency,
duplicate that. And then I'll just change
this to wiggle amplitude. And then down here in
my wiggle expression, I'm going to select point five. And I'm going to pick
whip up to frequency. And I'll set this to point five. Now I'm going to select
just the five here and I'm going to pick whip
up to the amplitude. And I think that looks correct. And we hit Enter here. Okay, it's giving me an error and I'm pretty sure that's because I
need another parentheses in there. I don't know why it does something,
I had only the five selected but the expression needs to
live inside parentheses. And when you pick whip
to something over here, this last slider name is in parentheses,
and so it needs another parentheses
to basically close this out. You can see when I put
the cursor right here, it selects this ending parentheses,
is it parens? I don't know what the singular
of parentheses is. Someone can correct me. And that's fine. But you can see that the corresponding
open parentheses here to this closed parentheses is at the beginning
of all of this junk here. So it's wiggle open parentheses
that we need the frequency, which is linked to the wiggle
frequency slider here, and then we need the amplitude
which is after the comma. So boom, there's our comma and then we
have the code here, this comp.layer and then the layer name and the effect and
then .wiggle amplitude and then slider, and
we need that ending parentheses. So once we have that,
we're all good to go. And we can type five here,
and now we're good to go. Check this out. And if we want more wiggle, no problem, we
can just change this to like point seven or something, now, it'll wiggle faster. Or we can put this to 15 and
now it's gonna go more. Very, very easy to modify. The last thing that we need to do is
copy the expression on the rotation, bring up the rotation on
these other leaf layers here. Select all of them and then paste them in. All right, so now we should see,
A really nice animation. Now, I didn't turn those
values up too high. But the nice thing about the wiggle
expression, you would think, well, you pasted the same exact code here. Why are they all doing
something different? Well the wiggle expression has
some quasi random variation to it. And if you apply the same frequency and
amplitude to two different things, they're gonna have a different animation
because there's some random sort of values that are happening there. We get a nice kind of random
blowing in the wind effect here. It's very cool. So that about does it for this lesson. In the next few lessons, we're gonna
be looking at duplicating these leaves. We're gonna do a really cool write
on effect for this text, and animate all of the other elements here,
and it's gonna look great. So check those out coming up next. [MUSIC] [MUSIC] In this lesson, we're gonna pick up
where we left off in the last lesson, duplicate some layers and
relink expressions. [MUSIC] If you've been following
along in the previous lesson, we've done some really cool things. We've done an inertial bounce for
the scale, we've done a cool wiggle expression. We've linked that all to a leaf controller
here, so that when we duplicate this, it's gonna do a lot of
the animation heavy lifting for us. We don't have to do a lot
of Keyframe Animation. In fact,
it's very little Keyframe Animation. So the next step in the process here is, I want to link all of these layers
to my control leaf layer here. My leaf control layer so that,
I can move them all together. Once they are all linked, what I'm gonna
do is I'm going to select all six of these layers, and I'm going to duplicate them. And then I'm gonna hit control and bracket to bring them to
the top of the layer stack. And I'm going to change the color of all
of these so I can keep track of them. And then what I'm gonna do is, I'm going to just select my
leaf controller layer here. And I'm going to,
I think rotate that around. And that's going to go on
the bottom corner here. And I'll just turn on the other
leaf layers to just make sure. Yep, that is correct. And I'll turn those off, cool. And again, I'm gonna grab these and I'm
going to duplicate them, hit control, and bracket to bring them to
the top of the layer stack. And I'm gonna change
the color here to aqua. I'm gonna select only the leaf
controller three here. And then I'm going to,
maybe rotate them down like this. And I think to match the original, I might
need to flip the dimension on these. Let's see if I enable my leaf layers here,
yeah. So on this one right here,
I'm going to just take the x dimension. And I'm gonna flip that and then rotate
it back around and that should line up. Perfect, great. And then I'm gonna take this
layer right here, duplicate it. Again, control and bracket,
change the label here. Let's do green. And I select only the leaf controller
here, bring it down to here, snap that and
then rotate that into position. So these two here that are in the upper
right hand corner and the bottom left hand corner needed to be flipped to match
the orientation of the other leaves. You can choose to do that or
you can just leave them how they are. Now I don't need these leaf
reference layers in here anymore, so I'm gonna get rid of them. And let's check out what we have so far. Ooh, very nice. Look at this. That's looking really quite nice. Now the one final thing that we need to
check here is that everything is being linked up correctly. Sometimes when you duplicate things,
the expressions no longer link properly. And so there's just a small little thing
that we need to do here to change that. So if you look at my leaf controller
two here, we need to just go through in the expression and change
this to two for the leaf controller. Because currently is being linked
to the first leaf controller. Now, does that really matter? I don't think it does. You could have all of these
controlled with one leaf controller, kind of a master leaf
controller if you will. But if you want individual
control over all of your layers, you're just gonna have to go through and
update just a few of these here. And it should just take you just a second. So on all of these leaf layers right here,
we're just gonna have to update. If you hit u u, and it's actually easier
if you hit Tilda with your sequence selected here, and
then we'll just bring that up here. And you can just go through and
any time you see leaf control one, just change that to two. And then the same thing right here,
bring two. And then two, two and then two. .And so now if I want to make an
adjustment on the decay of these leaves, may be just trying to
download a little bit better. Or change the wiggle
parameter just a little bit, maybe I want it to be 0.55 or
something like that. I can, and I can get individual
control on all of those layers. Like I mentioned before, for
this particular Animation, I don't think relinking is 100% necessary. However, it's a good thing to know because
for some of your Animations that you will build, if you have properties that are
linked in some of the duplicated layers and they don't relink,
that's gonna present a problem. So you're going to need to know
how to resolve that issue. Thankfully, this very tedious and
annoying task can be made much easier with the use of a third party script,
like so many things in After Effects. If you go to aescript.com
you can find a script called Duplicate Layers in Update Expressions. And this will take out a lot of the work
that I just showed you how to do manually when you duplicate the layers. But it's good to know how
to do it manually as well. Now coming up in the next lesson,
you're gonna learn how to do the right on technique that's used all
over motion graphics. So check that out coming up next. [MUSIC] [MUSIC] In this lesson, you're gonna pick up right
where we left off in the last lesson, and you're gonna learn about
the write-on technique. [MUSIC] So to get started, I'm gonna jump down
here, find my text layer, it's right here, and I'm gonna pre-compose this. So I'm gonna right-click on it and
choose Pre-compose. I'm gonna leave all the attributes. You can also use the keyboard
shortcut Ctrl+Shift+C. I'm gonna double-click that text
pre-comp to open it up here. And you may have noticed that this
layer here looks a little bit different than the Illustrator
layer over here. The end of the e is just
a little bit funky. I'm not 100% sure why that is. I think that has to do with some of the
character properties that are available in Illustrator that may not be
available in After Effects. For whatever reason,
it looks just slightly different. So if you wanted to what you could do,
we could just grab this e character here, jump back into After Effects,
grab the text tool, and paste that e. And that should line up very,
very closely with this e right here. In fact, sometimes what I like to
do is just change the color to some more different color, and then align
this up with this layer, just like that. I'll change it back to
the text color here, and then make my comp just a little bit wider. I'm just gonna hit Ctrl+K on the keyboard,
over to the Advanced tab, and select the arrow so
that it grows out to the right here. And maybe add just, I don't know,
20 more pixels to this so that I get this little bit
hanging off the end here. And then, I can just put a mask
on this bottom Illustrator layer right here to just mask out
the e that I don't want. And if you hold the S key while
you're creating the mask, it will select the subtract mask mode,
which is what I want. I want it to remove the e
from the original here. And just like that now I have
that line back there, perfect. So I'm gonna actually
pre-compose these and I'm gonna call this Text Fixed,
there we go. And that's gonna very slightly change
the alignment here, but no big deal. I'll just move it back a couple of
pixels and that should be fine. So let's talk about how to do the text
write-on effect, it's actually quite easy. So I'm gonna deselect down
here in my sequence panel, and I'm gonna come up and grab the pen tool. And if I start clicking and dragging to
create a shape in my composition here, it's going to create a shape layer,
which is what I want. But before it does that, I'm just gonna
change some of the properties here. So I don't need any fill, and I'm just gonna give it
a nominal sort of stroke width. And then what I'm gonna do is,
I'm gonna start where I would start if I were to draw this cursive text out,
and I'm gonna trace this. So I'm gonna put a point right here,
and I'm gonna lick and drag down here and
just make some lines here. And the idea is,
I want my shape layer, oops, I want my shape layer to completely cover, My text layer, but only just barely. It's very easy to cover if you just
jack up the stroke to an absurd amount. But I really want it to be
just barely there covering it, because that's gonna
give me the best result. And the idea is, I essentially want to put this stroke here dead center in the text. So you could actually make
this without a stroke. I like to do it with a stroke, and then
I can kind of see how it's working here. And I'll just get it
a little bit of the way, and then I'll adjust the stroke to a value
that just barely covers the text. And I think I was actually pretty close
before, I think that ought to do it. That's pretty darn close,
we can go back and refine this. But I'm just gonna pick it up here and I'm
gonna keep going, creating my line here. Now, this is a bit of a tedious process. There isn't really
a faster way to do this. This is pretty labor intensive, but
it's not tremendously difficult. I think the key to getting a very
convincing-looking write-on effect is to draw the line how you
would go about drawing this with a pen. So you're going to move
along in the same direction that you would, and
take all of the same strokes. For instance, when we get to this t here,
you wouldn't draw this t in real life by coming up here and stopping halfway and
then doing the cross mark. No, we'd hit that at the end of the word,
which is what I'm going to do here. Now sometimes when you get a break in
the text here, what you can do is, you can create a new shape if you want to. Or you can just kind of scoot
the line up very quickly and then join it to the next letter. You wanna kinda do it at an angle,
so that it starts at the top and it doesn't kind of jump in at
the middle of the line there. And we'll just continue on
tracing just like this, There we go. I am actually going to make a second
shape here to get the cross in the t, just like that, and to get this i. So I'm gonna make a third shape,
I guess, to get the dot of the i here, just like that. And then you want to order these, if you
drill down in the layer under Contents, so that they go top to bottom,
one, two, three, or however many shape layers that you use. Because the next step of this process is, we are going to put a Trim Paths. So if you select Contents and
not any one of these individual shapes, you come over here to Add, and
we're gonna put a Trim Paths on here. And we're gonna animate the end position,
but we wanna set this not too simultaneously,
but individually. And that's gonna write them in order,
which is correct. And finally, what we wanna do is,
we want to change, and by we, I mean you, if you're following along. You're gonna wanna change the stroke
line cap and maybe the stroke line join, and you wanna change that to round cap and
round join. So that's going to put a roundy
bit here where this joins, and that's gonna make that look much nicer. So the end cap here or
the line cap is actually this end bit. So let me change that back to butt so
you can see. And I want this to actually
stroke with a round cap, which is gonna look a little bit nicer. And so now once that's done,
we can just kind of look over and make any small adjustments
that we might need. I actually might take
my whole comp here and just give it a little bit more width,
maybe, I don't know, 1040. And maybe just a little bit more height,
maybe 540. And that shouldn't really
change the alignment in the master comp where this lives. Okay, so let me see if I can
just dial this in a little bit. Okay, I think that looks good enough. So now what you wanna do is actually
go ahead and animate this on. So if you come down here to your
Trim Paths, and you go maybe, let's say somewhere around
the three second mark here, and we drop an end keyframe,
and that's set to 100%. And then we'll go back to the beginning,
and we'll set this to 0. And so now when we play this, you can see,
look at what we have here, very nice. It doesn't look great if
you're looking at the stroke. However, if you change this to
alpha matte on the Text Fixed comp, now what you'll see is, we get this
very nice write-on effect here. Now, it doesn't look perfect, there
are some kind of strange things going on. Probably the first thing that you want
to address here is the timing of this. So I'm gonna scooch this
down to two seconds, I'm gonna see what that looks like here. Okay, that looks pretty decent. I'm also gonna ease these keyframes here. And I'm gonna jump over to the motion
three script utility that I've used in some previous lessons just to give this
just a little bit more kind of easing on those keyframes. So let's check that out now, very nice. So I get this kind of,
it starts a little bit slower, it kinda rips through the middle, and
then it slows down towards the end. I like that,
I think that looks pretty good. And I like the timing of that too,
I think that works pretty well. Now, the real trick of this is that,
as this is drawing on, and it looks pretty good right now. However, what you'll see is that
part of the letters kind of get drawn on in a weird way,
which they shouldn't be. So when this top kind of first part of the
stroke comes down here, we're getting bits of the B here because this stroke width of
the original text is not a fixed value. There's no great way to
kind of emulate that. It would be far too tedious to go through
and create a bunch of different strokes at different lengths and
then link them all up, that's crazy. The easy way to do that is
to just come along here, and as it's animating on,
you just kinda follow it. And every time there's a little
bit that sticks out here, what you're gonna do is,
you're gonna take the pen tool. And with your Text Fixed layer selected,
you're gonna create a little mask. And as you're closing it up, just hit the
S key and that'll change that to subtract. And so now if you click away, and you've drawn your mask relatively
in the right spot, essentially, what you wanna do is mask out all of
the bits that you don't want to see. And we really only need to address this
mask here, when this line comes back and crosses over it, so
it's gonna be right here. So at this point,
what you would wanna do is, you jump into your masks, and
you set a keyframe for this mask. And then you go one frame forward,
you take this mask, you can just double-click it and
just move it away. And when this plays back, you won't
even see that, it just sort of appears. And so anytime you have a little
kind of weirdness in the alpha track matte here, so
this bit right here sticks out, you go to the frame right where it
is getting occluded, if you will. So this is the frame where we
want our little mask to move. We'll just go one frame before there,
grab the pen tool, select the layer. I'm gonna create that same
sort of mask shape again, I'll hold S to make that
a subtract mask there. Sometimes what I like to do
is take this point here and just smooth that out just a little bit. And then as long as you're working on
that mask, you can hit Ctrl+Shift+M and that'll drop a keyframe right there. You go one frame forward, so
that's Page Down on the keyboard, double-click this mask, and
we'll just move it up a little bit. And so now when this part plays,
I'll deselect so you can see, you won't even see that. You can't even see it moving,
and so it's a very seamless way. And this is in fact the fastest way
to do this write-on technique to have it look essentially flawless. And I'll just do the rest and I'll play
it in fast forward, you can see, and I'll be back in a second. I think that's just about perfect, cool. Now if you wanted to use something
like a motion blur for this, you will have wanted to have turned
that on before you've done those masks. Because that will kind of
alter where the masks are, because the motion blur will kind
of project ahead a little bit. I think for the most part,
most of those masks work just fine. If there are any kind
of weird little things, you're not gonna be able to see
it when it's going that fast. Let's see how that looks in
the main composition here. [MUSIC] Ooh, that's already gorgeous looking,
I really like it. I have one more lesson where we're
gonna kinda finish off this animation. We're gonna do kind of a line animation
here and kinda draw things in and bring it all together. So check that out coming up next. [MUSIC] [MUSIC] In this lesson, you're gonna learn how to
put some final touches on this animation and bring it all together [MUSIC] So let's check out one more
time what we have here. I think this is awesome looking. The way that the leaves come on and
they kind of move very subtly. That's looking great. I love the right on effect. It's just elegant looking. One thing that I'm gonna do to clean
up my composition here is I'm going to select my leaf layers and
I'm going to hit the shy switch on them. And I'm gonna hit the shy guy up here and just hide them because I don't
really need to see all of those. It's not deleting them,
it's just hiding them. You can see it kind of changes
the way the interface looks. We have kind of this thicker line
right in this region right here, and that's letting me know that there's
something hidden between these layers. If I want to bring them back, I can just
hit the shy guy again, or the shy switch, and they'll all appear but this makes
it a little bit cleaner to work in. So there are a few final
touches that I wanna add. One, is I want to anime on these lines. And right now they
are an Illustrator file in here, but I think if we right click on this and
choose Create and create shapes from vector, they'll just
be transformed into a shape layer. And what's nice about that is we can dive
into this lines to outlines layer and I'll just rename that and add a trim path,
and set a keyframe here for the end, maybe somewhere around,
I don't know. Maybe two and a half seconds,
something like that. We'll go back to
the beginning set this to 0. So I'm going to select line 1,
and I'm gonna do the same thing, right-click, choose Create >
Create shapes from vector layer, and I don't need these anymore,
so I'm gonna get rid of those. And then I can essentially just take
this trim paths and paste it over here. Let's just see where that paste it in. Great, it's right there. And I think that's fine. Just gonna rename this. It's just kind of a personal peeve
of mine that when you create a shape layer from an Illustrator file, it puts
the outlines tag on the end of the layer. And that drives me nuts. I do not like to see that. So I like to rename my layers there. You can do that or not, no big deal. I'm gonna select my two line layers here,
press U on the keyboard and I'm gonna select my key frames. I'm just gonna hit F9 on the keyboard. I'm gonna jump into
the graph entered here. I'm just going to give these a little
bit of a curve, something like that. Let's see what that looks like. In fact, let's just solo
the bottom three layers, so the two line layers in
the background layers. So we can see what this is looking like. Okay, not too bad. Not too bad. It's not great though. I don't like that they're
going in the same direction. So that's an easy fix. I'm just going to select the path. So we'll drill down here in line 1 under
Contents, under Group 1, under Path. And then we can just hit this button
to the right here which will reverse the path direction. So let me deselect everything and
play that again. Yes, much better. And I think both of these
shapes here have points. Yeah, they're kind of a squished hexagon. At least that one is,
let's look at this one. What do we have here? This is a hexagon but
a more different hexagon. And where the trim paths kind of start and finish we can control one way to
control that is to grab the pen tool. I'll just Ctrl click in here to
deselect all of the points and then just click on the point that I want
to modify, or right-click on that point. And then go down to mask and
shape path and choose set first vertex, which basically means
that this point here, this vertex is going to be
the first one in the group. And so that's the one if
we unsolo the other layer. That's the one where the animation
is going to start from. Okay, why can't I see that? [LAUGH] I see the line is so small that
actually couldn't see it, so there it is. You can see that now the animation is
starting from that point it's hard to see it because the stroke is so small there. But if I deselect,
you can see that that is happening indeed. Now the other shape layer here does not
have a point right down at the bottom. So if we wanted to start there,
we could add a point and then right click, go to masking shape and
set first vertex. And now if we solo up all of these and
play it, we're gonna get kind of a mirrored sort of animation,
which is nice, that works. The other thing that you can do, I'll
delete this vertex here and then let's see where I'm just gonna bump the stroke
up because I can't tell where it's. Okay, so
right now this is the first vertex. The other thing that you can do with trim
paths is you can just change the offset. So if you just click and
rotate the offset. We can just move this around. And right now you can't really see it. So we could do is just jack
up the height of our comps so we can see everything to find out
exactly where you want that to start. There we go. Something like that. That's another way that you could go
about doing essentially the same thing. So let me set this back to four. I'll deselect everything and
let's just play that. There we go. Let me just solo these three layers. Now maybe we don't want these to go in
opposing directions cuz now that I see it, I don't really like it. I think what I would like is them
to go in the same direction but to start at the top and
the bottom like they are now. So I just change this back to
reverse path direction off. And I think I like that better. Yes, I think that's fine. You can do kind of whatever you want. So I'm just going to play this back. We'll get a look at it. I think the final thing that I'd like to
do is to give this some dimensionality and we're going to kind of fake
a 3d sort of look here. And the way that we do that is to
essentially move things in the comp in a Kwazii 3D way to get
some parallax effect. So here's what I'm gonna do. I'm gonna take line 2,
I'm gonna pair to line 1, then I'm gonna shy line 2 because
I don't really need to see it. I'm gonna adjust the scale of line 1, I'm
just gonna do a key frame animation here. I'm gonna set a key frame at 0 and
then we'll adjust some things. I'm gonna take the text layer and
I'm also going to set a key frame here. And then maybe the leaf layers here. What I might do is jump back
up into the project panel, grab another null, drop it in the center. Set that to an adjustment layer, and
I'll call it leaf master controller. And I will parent all the other
leaf controllers to it. And then I can set a scale,
key frame on this. And so what I want to do is over time and I might make this animation
something like 10 seconds long. So I'm just going to hit
end on the keyboard. And that will put the endpoint for
the work area right at 10 seconds. And then I just right-click and
chose to trim comp to work area. So I might go to let me this point
right here and just scale these leaves up a tiny bit maybe by like,
I don't know one and a half percent. It's gonna be pretty imperceivable. And then I'm going to move,
the other layers here a bit more. Actually, maybe we'll move
those up something like, maybe 103 or something like that. Maybe a little bit more because they
are actually above the lines in the stacking order. And for the lines, I'm going to maybe make
those a little bit less, maybe 101.5. So it's gonna be very subtle I'm not even
sure you can tell that they are moving. Maybe I'll make those like,
I don't know 105 or something like that. And then maybe 109ish. Let's see how that looks. Yes, I think that is looking quite nice. And then finally,
I'm gonna take the text and I'm going to make this
move the most of all. So actually, I'm gonna start
with the text at perhaps 95 and then I'm gonna go up to maybe one 110. Let's try that. The text may look a little bit fuzzy. What we could do is collapse
the layer transformation here or continuously rasterize. And then jump in this comp here and
then collapse that. And then also we'll
continuously rasterize this. So everything's basically continuously
rasterize or the layers are all collapsed. So now it will remain essentially
sharp no matter how big you make it, and that's too big. So don't do that. So let's check this out now. Essentially I wanna make
the text look like it's in front. So I wanna have that scale the most out
of all three of these, which is why I made a scale change of 15 where my leaf
master controller is doing about 10 ish, so that's a little bit less and
then the lines are going five. So it's a difference of like, five and
then another five and then another five, which isn't drastic, but I think it's
enough over the course of this animation to give it a 3D sort of effect. It's giving it a parallax effect. And we can kind of boost that even
more by making this 90 when it starts. And that will really make it look like
it's in front of everything else because things that are closer to you or
a camera appear to be moving faster than things that are Further away, that's
kind of what the parallax effect is. So you can kind of cheat that by taking a
layer that you want to appear as though it is in front in 3D space or closer to the
viewer and scaling that up more over time. It's kind of hard to see over maybe ten
seconds if I just squish this down. You'll see it. Perhaps a little bit more. I think we could sell this
even more by just scaling down the back these lines even less, we can
just do like 103 or something like that. It would be very, very subtle. But if we get those to move, almost in
perceivably everything else I think is gonna fall into place a little bit more. Yeah, that's looking quite nice I think. Yes, very good. So that about wraps it up for
this series of lessons, checking out this boutique style
animation with this great looking text that you can find
over on Envato Elements. Here's the font that was used and all of the other assets you can find
over on Envato Elements as well. Make sure to watch the next lesson, where you're gonna learn
some final tips and tricks. [MUSIC] In this course,
you learned about several key concepts for animating in After Effects using key
frames and modifying the interpolation, expressions for wiggle,
inertial bounce and looping, masks, shapes, motion blur, 2.5 D with
the After Effects camera and more. I hope that you are able to
follow along because that is really the best way to learn. A few times in the course I used
third-party tools and effects and I just wanna mention again that none of these
are required but they sure are useful. The point of showing them to you
again is to open you up to the idea. That there are really useful tools
out there for specific jobs that will help you with annoying or
tedious tasks in After Effects. Some of the tools are free and
some of them cost a bit of money. But here's the thing, your time is
the most valuable resource that you have. So if there's a tool out there that can
help you to shave off a few hours over the course of a week or two,
it very well may be worth it. And like I mentioned before,
there are many scripts and plugins that you can get for free. For example,
video co-pilots FX console is free and you should absolutely be using it. In fact, video co-pilot has several free
effects and you should get them all. All of the assets in this course
came from Envato elements. You can get unlimited downloads of video
templates, stock video, audio tracks, and effects with Envato elements. Millions of creative digital assets
with simple commercial licensing, and you can cancel at any time. Not only is the model
elements a great place for assets, you can also get inspiration for
learning After Effects by looking at the After Effects templates
and seeing how they're put together. You can download them, open them up,
poke around at the layers, look at the keyframes and find out how a particular look or
animation actually works. Thanks so much for watching this course. I hope you're able to follow along and
learn some new techniques and ideas that you can use in your
after effects animations. I'm Dave Bode for Envato and
I'll see you around. [MUSIC]
