How to Create Looping Loading Circle Animations in Adobe After Effects | Tutorial

hello everyone my name is Justin OD show and in this video we're gonna learn how to create these simple looping loading circles in Adobe After Effects to begin we're just going to create a new composition I'm gonna use a 1920 by 1080 just default widescreen for example but you can use whatever you want and I'm also gonna go to layer new solid and bring in a black background just so we have something to work against let's start with a simple animation so we can just learn about looping and some of the keyframe expressions so I'm gonna go to layer new shape layer and I'll click and drag out a circle I'll hold shift to make sure it's a perfect circle and also one thing when you're dragging out any shapes just like in Photoshop if you hold command you can drag from the center rather than the corner just another workflow tip for you and I'm gonna make my circle about this big now however your circle comes out I was working with the layer size earlier if we head up here to the fill and stroke let's set it back to a default white circle so for the fill I'm actually gonna click on the letters where it says fill and change it to a solid but this is also something to note you have the options to make it transparent solid gradients so that can be pretty cool I'm gonna make it a solid white circle and then for the stroke I'm gonna go to that same menu and make it disabled for now so we're just have a basic circle to work with and just for aesthetic purposes I'm going to go to the align section on the right hand side and Center it horizontally and vertically so we're working with it right in the middle now let's make a simple animation with the circle by making it shrink and expand in size so if you head over to the shape layer in your composition find the transform section of it and drop down that arrow here's where we'll find the scale controls and let's click that stopwatch icon to add keyframes at the beginning and right here at the very beginning I want to make it start at 0% so nothing and then let's just go to about two seconds if you want to find the exact while I'm good I got it exactly but if you ever want to type in a amounts like two or three seconds you can type it in right here so you can get to the exact section that you want and at two seconds I'm going to make you go up to a hundred and then at four seconds I'm going to make you go back to zero so if we did that right we should see three little key frame diamonds and we're gonna make this circle go expand and shrink now another quick tip that looks a little static a little linear if I highlight all these keyframes and set the keyframe assistant to easy ease you'll see the shape of those diamonds change and this will just ease in and out of the positions so it'll slightly decelerate and accelerate as it comes to the ends if you ever want to switch it back another tip is hold command and just click on the keyframes because there's actually no option to set them back to linear in this keyframe assistant section so that part's pretty simple enough but how do I make it so this one animation that I did one time can continue going on over and over without having to add 100 keyframes that's what a simple expression will come in handy so let's go back to that stopwatch icon this time hold option and click on it and it'll allow us to add an expression so we're just kind of like some code that we can tell after effects one useful thing is if you hit this little play arrow after effects already provides you with a bunch of useful expressions so you don't have to memorize them all the time or know exactly if this is a capital case sensitive thing so if we head to the property section we can find one called loop out and this will just loop out from the last keyframe everything that we've done over and over so first it'll do what we tell it to do and then it'll just keep looping that over and over so now we have this pulsating or breathing circle pretty cool and by layering things like this you can quickly start to get complex animations with simple building blocks so for example let me just take that shape layer we just made I'll command C copy it and command V paste it on top of itself and I'm just going to stagger this one to seconds so I'm going to open up the transform section and see these keyframes I want to make this one start at opposite section of that one so I'm gonna just click this blue block here and move it over so I can see now this middle keyframe is exactly at the start now it looks like it's pulsating but a cool trick is if I change this to 50% opacity let's make them both 75 actually make this 75 and 75 percent now we have this cool breathing dot that kind of turns into an optical illusion because you can't tell if it's coming or going now that's the basic building blocks but let's create another one with a little bit more colorful and some stroke circles like you saw in the beginning example and I'm gonna start over with another new shape layer so layer new shape layer create another circle and this time we will use some of those stroke options to make just a ring rather than a circle so turn the fill to none turn the stroke to a color and you can choose the size or thickness of it I will go to the Alliance section as usual Center it so this time we're gonna bring some effects in the mix I'm gonna go to the effects panel on the right hand side and search for one called radial wipe you should find it in the transition section and I'll click and drag this onto the shape layer so the first thing I'm going to do is keyframe the transition completeness so I'm going to click that stopwatch icon let's start at zero let's go to two seconds set it to a hundred percent at two seconds and then on this third keyframe I'll make it zero so we've got 100 to zero two hundred so instead of going clockwise I want it to wrap back around counterclockwise so I'm gonna have to add some keyframes on this other control for the direction of the wipe so at the beginning we want it to be clockwise and then a cool way that we can make the keyframes perfectly aligned without having to do the same timing every time is just opening up the section where you see the keyframe clicking this little arrow it'll go exactly to and from the keyframes so I can go to the middle one change it to counterclockwise at this point and very important make sure you do all three so that when we loop it things don't get messed up so I'll turn this back to clockwise at this point so here we have closing and opening but we've done a cool switch from counter to clockwise now we're gonna do the same thing that we did in the first example and hold option to add that expression on the key frame and then find our loop out expression and I'm going to add that to both the wipe and the transition completeness so property loop out and now if I play that and we did it correctly it should just continue looping in this kind of hypnotizing way that also might look a little more tricky than it is kind of like those uh kinetic you know what I'm talking about now I'm going to add one last layer of complexity to this and constantly be swirling the angle so for this one rather than looping I'm just going to add a simple time expression that we can utilize and I'm going to hold option click on that stopwatch icon and just use time and multiply it by we're gonna change it for each layer of the Ring so for this first one let's make it go somewhat fast let's make it 180 that means every one second it's gonna go 180 degrees which means that every two seconds this will have rotated one full rotation so we can see it comes to a full rotation right at the end of that other animation so all these animations are working together and we can use all the work we've done in this layer to simply layer it by just copying and pasting and changing a few things so on your duplicate layer let's drop down the transform sections and decrease the scale to wherever you want the position to be it's also changed the color of this one so you can use in multiple different colors and let's change the time of this one as well so under that start angle you want to find that expression and let's make this one go slightly slower let's make it go continually slower as it gets closer to the middle so let's say it only finishes 90 degrees half as fast on this second ring that's where we're gonna start to get some cool staggering wear this ones at the top and this ones here we're going to get some cool differences in position so if I do this a couple more times we get a really intricate looking animation that was really pretty simple to make so here's a finished result with four different rings and I think it looks pretty cool looks pretty solid you could always add more effects more blending styles and really take this whatever direction you like so if you enjoyed this video leave a like on a below let me know what your thought in the comments subscribe to my channel here on YouTube if you're not yet so you don't miss any of my new videos and go follow me on social media at Justin on G show on Instagram and Twitter if you want to best reach out to me thank you so much for watching and I'll see you in the next one

Channel: Justin Odisho

Views: 167,097

Keywords: After effects, adobe after effects, After effects circle animation, after effects loop animation, after effects tutorial, tutorial, after effects loading circle, after effects loop animation tutorial, apple watch animation, after effects ring animation, how to, motion graphics, vfx, animation, after effects animation tutorial, after effects shape animation, after effects animation, justin odisho, after effects loop expression, loading circle, loop, cc, after effects loop, apple, ring

Id: EmTlTjSEVcA

Length: 9min 40sec (580 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 31 2019