How to Animate | Using Adobe Illustrator & After Effects

hello people of YouTube slightly different sort of setup today than normal but it is for a good cause because today I'm gonna be showing you how I animate stuff with Adobe Illustrator and Adobe After Effects a few days ago my sister and they asked me if I could send her a little screencast sort of tutorial kind of thing showing her how I animate my things and I was like that is quite a good idea for a video as a whole so instead of just making a full screen recording for her I'm gonna do a slightly larger tutorial showing the whole thing okay let's let's dive right in to Adobe Illustrator first right so I have opened Adobe Illustrator I'm using Adobe CC 2017 so at the point I'm recording this is the very latest version of Adobe Illustrator this tutorial kind of assumes that you are already quite familiar with Adobe Illustrator but less so with Adobe After Effects because it's more about the animating part then about the making the figure you will be animating parts so in this tutorial we are gonna be making a very simple sort of waving stick figure that's that's my idea just so I can blaze through the illustrator section a little bit fast and then be a little bit more elaborate on the dhobi After Effects section so I have already opened Adobe Illustrator you can see some projects and stuff I've been working on recently if I click create new I should already have a preset open this is the wrong way around this is orientated oriented English this is yeah there we go oriented horizontally this preset just assumes that I'm gonna be animating for a 1080p sequence if you're interested these are the complete settings of the thing let's call this stickman tutorial create document and we're in very nice not that can go away for the time being okay so like I said this assumes that you already know a little bit about illustrator so I'm just gonna quickly make a sort of stickman shape and after I'm done with that I will continue with how to animate [Music] [Applause] something like that I guess that's a stick figure type of thing what I'm gonna do now is make all of these lines because I drew this in lines in two shapes there we go outline stroke and then what's very important and this is the first actual sort of step in this tutorial after you've well you should actually do this sort of before you start drawing you should start thinking about what parts of your illustration you want to have animated so in this case all we're gonna do is animate his arm so it does a bit of this sort of movement all of the parts that need to be animated need to be in a separate layer in Illustrator already so that's what we're gonna do right now I'm gonna make two new layers one for his upper arm and one for his lower arm and we're just gonna select that so I can see in the layers which one that is drag that one up to layer two and then which one is that's that one is this shape drag that up there so now we have separate layers for his body and the rest of his arm basically we have a layer for his upper arm and we have a layer for his lower arm now just for the sake of knowing what the hell is going on in After Effects later on I'm gonna name these layers so I'm gonna call this one how does this work again it's always a sign of confidence when you are watching a tutorial and the tutorial list asks how the hell does this work so now we have our very basic stick figure let's save this yes I did indeed call this folder how to animate a stickman tutorial file name I think that's a decent file name so let's save it basic illustrator settings are fine I think so save that let's shut down illustrator clear clipboard that is perfectly fine and then we are going to start up Adobe After Effects while that's starting up very important okay so After Effects has started up I'm just gonna click new project which makes that first dialog screen disappear and just opens After Effects and I'm gonna import my illustrator project by double clicking in the project panel which opened yeah that opens up this import dialog screen and I'm gonna click on video projects how to animate and then stickman tutorial the illustrator file we have made before now this is very important you go to this drop down menu which has import as and then you can select composition or composition retain layer sizes I'm just gonna go for retain layer sizes that's gonna sort of keep everything into the 1080p aspect ratio size thing that I made my illustrator file in as well so that has as you can see imported all of the separate layers in this stickman tutorial let's make it a little bit bigger stickman tutorial layers folder so you have the body the lower arm and the upper arm and then it's also made a sequence for you now if you double click that sequence you get this which is a little bit useless because the background is the same color as the stickman so to fix that for the time being we are gonna right click on our sequence I'm calling in a sequence it's not cool to sequence it's a composition so we right click on our composition then we click composition settings set the background color to white because that is very nice and easy to do and then what you also want to do is if you are gonna mix this animation with another video I always set my framerate of my composition to the same frame rate as my video footages so right now I am recording video footage and I'm recording this screencast at 29.97 so almost 30 frames per second and that is just so that everything matches and your editing software doesn't start doing weird things with overlapping frames and that sort of thing a duration of eight seconds for this little waving animation is more than enough I think so we click OK and that has applied everything we just said to this composition so we have our little stickman here we have his three separate bits his body is pretty much gonna stay where it is but we are gonna give the upper arm and the lower arm some movement and to start giving him some movement I'm first gonna zoom in a little bit press H to get the the hand tool so you can drag your composition around this doesn't actually move any items in the composition it just moves the whole composition H and and then we're gonna press Y to just the location of the anchor point and this is first the anchor point of the lower arm which needs to be at the joint of where you want to move the lower arm basically and then we go to the upper arm and we do the same thing but we move it to the shoulder now the stick figure doesn't have actual shoulders but for the sake of this tutorial we're gonna call his little stick body his shoulder so we have his two joints joined up by the Anchor Point right there and what we're gonna do next is parent the layers to each other which basically means that you actually connect the movement of one layer to the movement of another layer so the upper arm in this case needs to be connected to the movement of the body so what I'm gonna do is click this this is called a pick whip I think don't quote me on that and I'm gonna click and drag it to the body layer and I'm gonna do the same thing for the lower arm but I'm gonna pick with that and put it on the upper arm so now all of the movement is connected so what happens now is if we select the body layer and we press P for position and we start moving this around everything is still connected now if everything wasn't connected say that is not connected that is not connected then the little arms stay in their own place while the body is moving upside down and this just looks really strange so we are gonna undo that ctrl Z ctrl Z is undoing it and connecting everything back up which means that if we now move it around the whole stick figure moves around that we're gonna put this nicely in the middle of the conversation there we go what we're now gonna do for the little wave motion that's gonna happen is we're gonna select these I already did it there because I'm thinking in advance but we selected these and I pressed R for rotation because basically a simple rotating movement is all that is needed for a wave now as you can start seeing when I start moving the upper arm the lower arm starts rotating with him as well now this by itself does not make a waving animation this just looks a bit Limpy a little bit weird so what I'm gonna do is set this back at zero degrees and start keyframing the thing keyframing basically means that with every point you put on the timeline you set a certain value for in this case the rotation so for this keyframe I'm gonna click the stopwatch the rotation point is zero and I'm gonna move forward to about 15 frames and then I'm gonna drag this not that way this way drag this downwards because the rotation is going backwards to say minus 70 or something along those lines and then if I hit play you can see his little arm going up there all by itself without me actually touching the mouse so by making keyframes he does his own movements if you will so now we have put that one in his bat position which means that if we now turn his arm around and start doing this it's pretty much a wave I'd say so that's gone up I'm gonna go slightly back towards like eight ish frames and start making keyframes for the lower arm as well so we click the stopwatch again and then we go forward on the timeline a little bit and then we also start doing the lower arms rotation and as you can see right there that is definitely a sort of waving motion so what we can do now is put it there in a sort of starting position then move let's say four or five eight frames forward and then put it there and then copy this keyframe which is the starting position again move a few frames forward and then copy those two move another few frames forward and then as we go all the way back that is definitely very janky admittedly sort of waving motion what we can now do is refine this a little bit so what I always like to do is selecting all of my keyframes pressing f9 which gives them a smooth sort of motion still a bit janky but it looks a little bit more like he accelerates and then stops accelerates and then stops instead of just harsh motion if you will so we're gonna keep copying that for a little bit few frames forward another few frames forward that definitely looks like a bit of a wave and then to end it off again we can go a few frames forward we select these from the upper arm copy them with ctrl C and then paste them again with ctrl V and then we go to time reverse keyframes which obviously inverses the keyframe so that means that his lower arm or his upper arm is going to go back to its original position and that is almost a waving motion the only very last thing that needs to happen is that his lower arm goes back to its original position as well which I've done by copying the first keyframe and pasting it as the last keyframe so that is definitely a bit of a waving motion I'd say and then to top it off the very last thing that I would suggest you do is turn on motion blur which I am slightly too big a fan of you do that by going there you have the three little circles that is the icon for motion blur and you select motion blur for each layer now the body one doesn't necessarily need it because it's not really moving around but might as well and then you turn on motion blur for the whole composition so click motion blur and that's gonna give it a nice sort of natural looking blur to it so the motion looks completely smooth and I think if we crop down the timeline a little bit and trim come to work area we go back to the beginning and we press play I think that is a very smooth little waving motion it looks a bit silly as a little stick man but I quite like that I like that a lot now of course you can do this with all sorts of different motion as well so if you want to have him jumping up and down while waving you can press you can select the body press P for position and start keyframing that as well jumping motions are a bit difficult because they start from a very hard point of acceleration basically and then slow often then fall down again quite hard so what you do is you set a non smooth keyframe then you go forward a few frames you drag your little stick man up you go forward again a few frames and you copy and paste the first keyframe then you select the middle keyframe press f9 to smooth it out that's definitely a bit of a jump and of course if you had put the legs in separate layers as well you could have also animated the legs so he actually did a jumping motion that is complete with leg movement but for now this suffices I would say so if we want him to do a few more jumps we select all of the keyframes go a little bit forward give him another jump go a bit further forward give him another jump and I think that looks pretty good I'd say that is definitely a jumping waving stick man right there um and that is pretty much how I do animating with Adobe Illustrator and Adobe After Effects and of course you can make the illustrations and animations as complex as you want them to be this is a very very basic example so when you are done animating you are gonna have to export your animation to either use it separately as a video file or to take it into your favorite video editor and mix it with camera footage and audio that sort of thing so what you do is when your in your compass you press control em which brings up the render queue and then you have your cute composition here now I have a few presets that are applied automatically but if you just start using Adobe After Effects then this is probably gonna say best settings like it does with mine and then below that it's gonna say something else now if you click on that you get to select the format and the format options that you want to export with so what I personally recommend and what I always do when I want to export an animation that doesn't necessarily need a transparent background that is the thing you can do you select the format QuickTime and then RGB and then in format options you I don't know I usually select 95 which gives you a slightly smaller file size then you would get with a hundred but doesn't compromise on quality that much and then you select the order your output if you have any audio I just leave it on auto so it automatically selects if I have audio it's gonna export that into the file as well if I don't have audio at AU it's gonna deliver a video file without any audio track which is quite handy dandy and if you have all of this set to whatever kind of settings you require you press ok and then you're gonna select your name and your file location right there in output - and then when you're done you're gonna click render that's gonna walk through the whole animation including the the motion blur and all of the movements you have put in and when that's done you're gonna hear a little bit of a clunk sound as a heads-up saying like way Oh mr. animator or mrs. animator I am done rendering and you can now use me in whatever project you would like and I think that is pretty much it for this tutorial so I hope I taught you something if this is something that wanted to learn if you have any questions whatsoever left then leave them down in the comments below or tweet me at Tom n Singh and I will answer your questions as good as I can thank you very much for watching for now and I will see you next time ciao you

Channel: WandelLander

Views: 52,589

Keywords: TomKnowsWhatsUp, Tom, Ensing, Adobe, After Effects, Illustrator, Animating, Animation, Stick Figure, Tutorial, Instruction, Instructions, Editing, How To, Key Frames

Id: Mb20Qye_Hp8

Length: 20min 25sec (1225 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 06 2017