What's up? Joey here at School of Motion and welcome
to day 24 of 30 days of After Effects. In today's video, we gonna talk about breaking
down an effect into multiple layers inside of After Effects. And using a compositing mindset to achieve
a specific look that you're going for. On top of that, we're gonna learn so cool
tricks about ways to make things seem a little goopy. A quick shout out to Mt. Mograph, another
amazing tutorial site. Because one of the tricks that Matt showed
in one of his videos, I used in this video, 'cause I thought it was great. So go check out Mt. Mograph. Don't forget to sign up for a free student
account so you can grab the project files from this lesson as well as assets from any
other lesson on the site. Now, let's hop into After Effects and get
started. So, in this video, I'm gonna show you a few
tricks. And I don't normally like to just show tricks
but what I'm hoping that everyone gets out of this is that one of the things you can
do in After Effects is you can use effects in ways that are sort of, I don't know, they're
not really intended to be used, and if you think more like a compositer, you can get
so much control over the way your image looks, okay. So specifically what I'm going to talk about
is how to get this kind of cartoon-y look but have complete and total control over it. After Effects is designed to try and almost
prevent you from using it the way I like to use it sometimes because it tries to hide
complexity from you by making things simple. There's a cartoon effect that you can use,
but if you really want to dial in a look and be very specific then a lot of times it's
to just roll you own stuff. So we're gonna start out, I'm gonna show you
how I did this kind of gooey popping thing. And I have to first just say that this effect
is not something I figured out how to do on my own. I sort of, I learned the basic trick a long
time ago and then I saw a Mt. Mograph video which did this cool little trick that I stole
where you can get these holes in there. So let's hop in, lemme show you how this thing
is all put together. So let's make a new comp. We'll just do 1920 by 1080. Alright, so here's what we're gonna do, I'm
gonna start by making a circle and the way I usually do it, I just double click the ellipse
tool, makes a giant ellipse. And then I tap U twice to bring up my size
property, and let's just make this like 100 pixel, or maybe 200 pixel. And I don't want to stroke on it, so I'm gonna
turn the stroke to zero. And turn the fill on. So there we go, we have a white ball, right
there. Alright, and I'm gonna name this ball O one. So what I wanna do, is I wanna have this thing
split, right, like a cell or something like that. This is pretty easy, so I'm gonna duplicate
it, so there's two of them. I'm gonna hit P and I'm gonna separate the
dimensions. And I'm gonna put a key frame on X position
for both of these. So then, I'm gonna jump for, let's say we
want this to take a second, so let's go forward second, right. By the way, the way I move around so fast
is page down and page up, move forward and backwards frames. And if you hold shift, it does ten frames. So if I want to move forward a second, it's
shift, page down, page down, and then one, two, three, four. That's 24 frames. Really quickly, keyboard shortcuts are important. So let's move these and let's move them an
equal distance. So for this ball, why don't we add 300 pixels
to it, okay, and this is a cool thing you can do in After Effects is just select a value
and type in minus 300 or plus 300, and this is a way you can be very, very precise with
your values. Okay, so this is what's happening. Wonderful, we're done, perfect. So what I want is I want it to feel like at
the beginning these things are joined together and they're pulling and pulling and pulling
and pulling and they can't quite make it, and then they pop. So what we need to do, is we need to adjust
our animation curves. And I'm actually gonna do this a little bit
differently than I did for my demo and see if I can get even more of a cool kind of popping
feel to it. So, why don't we go to the halfway mark here. And at the halfway mark, I actually want them
to still be connected, I want it to really have a slow build, so why don't we say, this
frame here, I'm gonna put key frames here, and I'm gonna move those key frames to the
middle. So now if we look at our animation curves. Let's make this a little bigger. Okay, so you can see that we are easing into
this value then it accelerates at the end. And I want it to take even longer to accelerate. So I'm gonna pull these bezier handles out
like this. There we go. So now when we play this, you can see that
it's really slow at the beginning. And I want it to be even slower, and so what
I'm gonna do is pull the initial bezier handle out on both of these key frames. Okay, and now when it actually pops out, I
want that to happen really quickly. So let me move this much closer. Let's take a look at this. There we go. You'll notice every single thing I do, I sort
of go through this process because if you're just animating without thinking about why,
like why should this animate this way, then you're just animating randomly and your animation's
not gonna, it's not gonna be very good if you don't at least take the time to think
it through. Alright, so it hits here, I want it to overshoot
a little bit, so what I'm gonna do is, I'm just gonna go forward maybe three frames and
copy these three frames here. And then I can just go into the curve for
each one and just pull this curve up a little bit, right? So now I get a little bit of an overshoot,
like this. And I'll do the same thing on this one. The great thing is once you really understand
animation curves and After Effects, you can just look at this visually and make sure it's
doing what you want. And so now you get that nice little overshoot,
it bounces back and it feels like like it's sticking. Cool, alright, so now that we've got this,
how do we get that nice gooey look. Now this trick, I don't know who first came
up with it, but it's at least a decade old. Someone on Mograph.net, or Creative Cow posted
it, and I learned it from them and I don't know who it was. But I will give credit, Mt. Mograph had this
awesome, awesome idea for how to get these kind of holes in the middle of it. First, let's get a nice gooey looking thing. And the way you do this, I just do it with
an adjustment layer. And I'll just call this goo. Alright. And what you do is you blur these. And what you do is you're blurring them because
then the contours of them mush together. That's what a blur does, right? But obviously you don't want a blurry ball. So the next step is you add a levels effect,
and you change the levels effect to affect the alpha channel. Okay, now, alpha channel means transparency,
and because we blurred this, you can see that rather than having a nice hard edge where
there's absolute transparency and no transparency, the blur sort of creates a gradient, right? And so that's why you've got this range of
values in the alpha channel going from black to white. And basically what we wanna do is get rid
of all the gray values. We either want the alpha channel to be white
or black, we don't want much gray, that's what's creating the blur. So what we can do, is we can take this arrow,
this black input and this arrow, which is the white input. And if we compress them, bring them closer
together, and we can see visually what it's doing when I move this one it gets rid of
black, when I move this one it creates more white, and you don't want to do it too hard,
you get those crunchy edges. But something like that. Right, you get them pretty close together
and now, this is what you get. You see, it mushes them together. It's pretty cool. And if you turn this off, you can see that
if you keep these arrows in the middle, it'll even pretty much maintain the same size as
the layers that you started with. Fantastic, alright. And so now, if we wanted to, I might look
at these curves one more time. It might be cool to stretch this out even
more like this, so that we get a little bit more time in the middle here where they're
connected. There we go. Cool. Alright, so now we've got that. Now let's add those holes in the middle. Alright, and this is a really simple trick. So what you do is you figure out where you
want the holes to sort of start happening, like maybe right in there. What I'm gonna do, is I'm gonna make an ellipse,
and I'm gonna draw it like this and I'm gonna make it a gray color or something. I'm gonna make it like that okay. So I've got one ellipse here. Alright, so this will be ellipse, and move
the anchor points so it's in the middle. Alright, and now I'm gonna duplicate it. And this ellipse we can make a little thinner,
like this maybe, we'll duplicate that. And then I'll have another one down here and
maybe this will be a little one. And I'll duplicate it, and maybe have anther
kinda stretchy one like this. And you just want them to feel like they're
varied, right. You don't wanna notice a pattern in it. So something like that, okay. And then, let's go back a frame. So I don't want those to appear until maybe
this frame. So I'm gonna hit the left bracket so now that's
the first frame they exist. And I'm just gonna animate the scale of each
one. So I'm gonna put a key frame on scale and
I'm gonna unlink all of the scale properties. So that way, what I wanna do is I want them
to start kinda thin like this. And then, by the time we get to here I want
them to be really thin. And I'm also gonna have to move them, so I'm
also gonna put a position key frame on each of these. Aright, so now let's go forward. This is gonna be the last frame where these
things actually exist. Because after that we now have separate objects. So let's go to this last frame and let's just
adjust these. Okay, and them I'm gonna scale them, I'm gonna
make them a lot wider, alright. And because they're getting wider, they might
get a little thinner too. Alright, and this is what it's gonna do. And you can see, I might wanna actually ease
the position key frames on each of these. I probably wanna ease the position and the
scale on each of these. Because the position of those two balls is
easing and you kind of see already what it's doing. I remember I saw this tutorial and I thought
it was so clever. I couldn't wait to steal, well not steal,
but give credit. Alright so you get this. And this should be the last frame that we
see these. Okay, there we go. And just like that, you get these nice little
goop. Awesome. Now what I'm gonna do, is I'm gonna pre-compose
all four of these. And we'll call these holes. And I thought it was helpful to put a turbulent
displace effect on it with a low, with a little bit of a lower size and not a very big amount. Just to make them not so perfect. Okay and then set the transfer load of this
holes layer to silhouette alpha. And what that's gonna do is it's gonna knock
out anything where there's an alpha channel. Okay, so now I've created transparency there. Cool, alright, so now here's where we get
into the meat of this tutorial. So we've got this neat thing, right, but there's
no depth to it, there's no color and what's cool is, you can treat After Effects a little
bit more like a compositing program, right. Like when you're starting out, what you're
tempted to do is try and just, let's make this shape the color we want. And let's make this shape the color we want. And then if we want to drop shadow, we'll
put a drop shadow effect on this. And if we want a stroke, we'll add a stroke
to this. And you can do it that way, but if you really
wanna have total, total control, treat After Effects like a compositing program. So here's what I mean, and by the way, I haven't
organized this very well at all. So let me just quickly take all of these pre-comps
and stick them in here. Take our comp, and we'll call this goop. Alright, so now I'm gonna take my goop comp. And this is where we're gonna composite. First thing, let's pick some nice colors. And we're gonna use the trick that I showed
in my color hack video. We're gonna use Adobe color, which is one
of my favorite tools now. And let's just try and find some interesting,
this is a pretty cool color palette, so let's use that. So first, I'm gonna make a background, we'll
use that blue color, that's fine. Alright, now, for the goop, I want to try
and get, I want this kind of faux three D but cartoony feel. Okay, that's what I want. So how can we get that? Well, I did it by building it up in layers. So first, let's figure out what's the base
color of this thing? Base color. I wanna pick a base color for this. So I'm gonna rename this comp base color. I'm gonna add a generate fill effect to it. And let's pick one of these colors. Okay, that's cool. I like that color, that's nice. Okay. There we go. So now, let's start adding layers to this
okay. If I wanted a nice little stroke around it
how might I do that? Well I could try to do it on this same layer,
but there's no need I can just duplicate it. And we'll call this stroke. Now what color should the stroke be? Let's not worry about that yet. Let's figure out how can we make a stroke
from this? So, there's a bunch of different ways you
can sort of get an outline effect for in After Effects. One way is you could actually add a layer
style to it that will do it. That does create some issues layer styles
can act funny with motion blur and things like that. So I actually use a more compositing type
of way to do it. And they way you do it is this. You add an effect called a simple choker. And what this does is it expands or contracts
the alpha channel of an object. And so if you expand, basically this is what
I'm gonna do. If duplicated my stroke, like this, on the
bottom copy if I expanded my matte out, and then I said alpha inverted matte of the original. So basically I expanded my layer and then
I'm using the original version of that layer as a matte. And it creates a stroke like this, okay. Pretty clever. So we're gonna do that. Now the simple choker isn't gonna give us,
it doesn't let you pull it out that far. It doesn't let you pull that off channel out
as far as I'd like. So what I'm gonna use is actually a different
effect in the channel menu called mini max. And mini max kinda does a similar thing. It does it in a different way. But it'll work well for what we're gonna do. So what I wanna do is first set the channel
to color, alpha and color, okay. 'Cause I wanna expand the alpha channel. And the default setting for this is maximum
and if I expand the radius, you'll see what it does. It sort of expands out all the pixels. So if I expand this out a little bit, now
if I can get, if I can basically knock out the original footprint of this layer, I will
have an outline, which will be great. So one way you can do this while only using
one layer is to use one of my favorite effects, which is channel CC composite. And then you can say composite the original
as a silhouette alpha. So this basically takes the original layer
before you used mini max on it and it composites it on top of the result of the mini max in
a silhouette alpha composite mode which knocks out a layer where ever there's an alpha. So now you've got this nice stroke, and you
even get a little stroke where there's goop there. And you can control the thickness of the stroke
by adjusting the mini max number. So you really quickly get this interactive
stroke. And what's cool is this is actually real stroke. This is transparent everywhere except where
you see a line. So then if I bring my fill effect down here
and turn it back on, I can easily colorize that fill too. Alright, so, let's pick a darker color for
that fill. Let's see what happens if I use a lighter
color like yellow. It's kinda hard to see that so why don't we
just make a nice dark, let's do a nice dark purplish color. There we go. Alright, cool, so already you got this sort
of cartoony, cel-shaded looking thing because you got a nice stroke and you have total control
over the stroke. Because it's on it own layer. And if you wanna then just play with the opacity
of it, you know, make it less or more. It's really easy to do that. Alright, so now let's try to get some three
D depth to this. So again, you can try and do it all on one
layer by stacking a bunch of effects. But I like separating it out and being able
to easily mix and composite between them. So let's duplicate the base color again. And we'll call this, why don't we just call
this depth. Alright, so what I wanna do, this is the strategy,
I'm gonna use an effect in the perspective group. It's called a bevel alpha, right, and if I
crank up the edge thickness, what it does, it's the same as the bevel tool in Photoshop. It sort of takes the contour of the image
and it makes one side dark and one side light. You can control the light angle, you can control
the thickness and you can control the intensity. But it just looks hard, it looks like, I don't
know, there's this hard edge to it, it doesn't look soft. So that's not gonna work all that well unless
I can treat it. So what I wanna do, is first I wanna create
this depth in a way that I can composite it on top of my base color. So what I'm gonna do, is I'm gonna fill that
layer with a perfectly gray color. So I'm gonna set the brightness to 50, I'm
gonna set the saturation to zero. And now I've got perfectly gray color with
the bevel alpha effect on it. And I can turn the light intensity up with
this. And now what I'm gonna do, is I'm gonna add
a blur effect. So I'm gonna fast blur this. And you can see that now, it's just sort of
mushing all that together. And I may wanna pull the light intensity down
just a little bit. Awesome, and now I've got this nice shading,
but it's all blurry and crummy. So I could do the same trick that I did on
the stroke, right? I can grab that CC composite effect, and I
can say composite the original as a stencil alpha instead of silhouette alpha. Stencil alpha means it's gonna knock out that
layer anywhere that there is no alpha. So it takes the original unblurred, unbeveled
thing and it just uses it as a matte. And now it's all one layer. Now the reason I made this gray is because
now I can go into my mode and I can use some of these different modes here like hard light. And hard light is gonna brighten the bright
pixels and darken the dark pixels. And let me just kinda step through what I
did here. I have my bevel alpha, right, which looks
like garbage. But then I fast blurred that to make it a
little bit softer and more spherical looking. And then I used the CC composite to get rid
of all the blurry parts I didn't want. What's cool is this is working on a layer
that's moving. So you can see even here you get some nice
little shading to it. That's just fantastic. Alright, and then the last thing I did, let
me duplicate base color one more time. We'll call this shiny. I wanted like a nice, kind of light specular
hint to this whole thing. So what I'm gonna do, I'm gonna do the same
trick I did with depth, I'm gonna fill, I'm just gonna copy the fill effect here. Fill my layer with gray. And I'm gonna use an effect, I've actually
never used it before, and it's called CC plastic. It's a really interesting effect. And it basically kinda does the same thing
as bevel alpha except it does it in a way that makes things look very shiny. And After Effects is filled with a lot of
these CC effects that really the only way to get the hang of them is to just try each
one. Like I have no idea, I really couldn't tell
you what Mr. Smoothie does, but I'm sure there's some useful purpose for it. But plastic seemed to do exactly what I wanted
in this case which is to give me a nice specular. And so what I wanted to do was instead of
using the luminance of my layer, right, so it takes layer and it uses some property of
that layer to create sort of a fake three D version of it. So instead of luminance, I'm gonna use alpha. And I'm gonna soften it a little bit so I
get a little bit more of a nice, little specular hit there. And I'm gonna adjust the height so we get
something like that. And then I'm just going to do down to shading
and mess with these settings. So I can turn the roughness up, so I can see
more, or if you turn it down you see less, becomes a little big higher of a specular. Metal kind of makes that specular spread out
a little bit more and I kind of wanted that nice, hard specular. Now because I did this on a gray layer, and
actually maybe the thing to do is do it on a black layer. So now I can set the transfer mode of this
to add. Right, and so now I'm just gonna get a nice
glow there. And because it's working on this pre-comp
which has all this motion to it, it even sort of follows the contours of the dots as they're
ripping apart. So now we've got all of these layers to this
image but they're all built up from different copies of the same comp, and this makes it
really easy if for some reason I want that specular highlight to be a different color. Well, that'd be really easy now. I can use a tint effect and I could tint that
white to be maybe that yellow color and get a little bit of, let's try that orange one. And get like a different kind of feel to it. And then you can also do stuff like, and this
is another thing I do. If I wanted these to cast a shadow, instead
of using an effect to make that shadow, I might just duplicate a layer, call it shadow
and maybe fill it with, let's pick a nice dark color here. So why don't we use this for the basis of
our shadow but darken it even more. And then I'll just use a fast blur. And I'm just gonna move this layer down and
over a little bit. Turn the opacity down. Right, and so now I've got a shadow that I
have total control over too. Right, so what I'm hoping you guys are seeing
is that you can try and get things to look they way you want by just trying to find the
right effect and trying to find the right settings. But a lot of times it's better if you break
your image down into separate pieces and just figure out that one piece at a time. How do I make a stroke? How do I add some depth? How do I add a nice shiny specular to it? How do I add a shadow to it? And just break it down piece by piece so you
have total, total control. One little thing too that I want to point
out. So on the little demo here, this I exactly
how I made this, the only difference is if we come in and we look at this there's one
extra little piece which is the little splatter. So let me just copy that and put that in our
comp. So when that splits, you get that nice little
splatter. This is actually an example of secondary animation. And I've used this term incorrectly in the
past, but what's happening is these two balls are ripping apart and that's causing a reaction
of sort of this burst of smaller particles in the middle. And that burst is the secondary animation,
right? The primary is the two things ripping apart
and the secondary is that burst. Another thing I didn't do in this demo yet,
let me show you because this will help a little bit too. I didn't do any squash and stretch. And that can really help. All you need to do is basically adjust and
key frame the scale of these balls. So let's go forward to this frame here and
let's just stretch both of these out a little bit. Let's make them stretch to like, 110. And when you're doing squash and stretch,
if you stretch by ten percent you need to shrink by ten percent on the other axis, right. So x goes up ten, y goes down ten. And that way you can maintain the same volume. So it's gonna stretch out, and it's gonna
probably stretch out even a little more until about here. So now let's go to 120 and 80. And then when it gets over here, it's gonna
squash a little bit. Because it's gone really fast and now it's
slowed down. So let's bring this to 95 and 105. And just notice, I'm always making sure that
those two values add up to 200. And then it's gonna go back to normal. So it's gonna go to 100, 100. Alright, and now let's take a look at our
animation curves. Alright and you can see that they are very
sharp. And so I'm just gonna sort of manually go
through and make sure that there's no hard edges here and that when things get to extremes
there's these nice eases. Right, and in general, you're just looking
for nice smooth animation curves. You don't always want that, but it's a good
rule of thumb to aim at that and then adjust if it turns out that's not what you want. Let's take a look at what we got. Yeah and you can see, and I need to do it
to the other one, but that just adds a lot of, a little bit more oomph and momentum to
it. Alright, so let's do the same thing here. And then we should be good to go. So while I'm adjusting this, I just want to
say, try this stuff out. I know that it's nice when you watch a video
and maybe you learn some new tricks. But if you don't use it, it's not actually
gonna stick in your brain. And usually for me, to be honest, it doesn't
work and stick in my brain until I use it twice. So if you actually take the time to rebuild
this whole set up. And then go through the process of experimenting
with all of these different layers and to get a three D effect that looks the way you
want, you're gonna kinda wrap your head around this better and it's gonna be more useful
to you. So that little squash and stretch did help
a lot. It makes it look a lot more sticky and goopy. So there you go. We kinda jumped all over the place in this
video. But what I really hope you got, in addition
to a neat little trick which maybe is useful, I hope you understand you can do stuff like
this with literally any layer in After Effects and then once you're done you can pre-comp
all these together and just call this goopy. Right, and so now you've got all of that work
and it's all saved. And if you wanna have three copies of this,
it's really easy to do. So think in terms of breaking effects down
and breaking them into individual components that you have total control over. And if you ever decided to learn Nuke, working
this way in After Effects is gonna be very helpful because it's gonna help your brain
work the right way. Because in Nuke, this is sorta how you have
to think. Anyway, I hope this was useful. Thank you guys so much for watching. And I will see you guys next time on 30 Days
of After Effects. Thank you so much for watching. I hope you learned some cool stuff. And I hope you rearranged some things in your
brain that will help you think a little bit more like a compositer even when you're doing
animation and design in After Effects. Because the two disciplines have a lot of
overlap. You can really become a better motion graphics
artist by working on your compositing skills. If you have any questions or thoughts about
this lesson, let us know. And don't forget to sign up for a free student
account to access project files for the lesson you just watched plus a whole bunch of other
goodies. Thank you so much for watching this. I hope you got a lot out of it. And I will see you next time.
