How to Create Troop Cluster Visualizations

so last month i got a great opportunity to create a handful of map animations for johnny harris's ukraine russia documentary and i've seen a number of questions pop up regarding the troop clusters those russian troop visualizations that we created people were wondering how we put those together and it's kind of an interesting story so a lot of people don't understand that in a workflow like this johnny harris is super meticulous about his maps he creates beautiful maps and in fact he had already worked for probably a long time designing this particular map before it was even handed off to me to create the animations he had already worked with another animator to create the design and look you know the colors as well as the blend modes meticulously designing the borders and the stroke width and he had actually already gone in and animated in a bunch of those troops and you can see in the intro sequence he includes it in the video at the beginning he's creating these ellipse shape elements and then he's duplicating them hundreds of times so by the time the project files were handed over to me i have like something over 200 russian troop layers they were all animated individually like positions we were working on kind of a deadline i was worried that if you wanted any changes that i would be dealing with hundreds of layers so i pitched the idea of creating these russian troop clusters with one individual shape layer using a ton of repeaters so he was afraid that there wouldn't be enough variation he was afraid that if we're animating one individual ellipse with a repeater it was going to look too uniform so he he really stressed that we needed variation in the movement of the animations we needed variation in the size and we needed variation in the opacity so we wanted a really dynamic look so today i'm going to go over the repeater method and show you how we put that together and the cool thing is i created some animation presets here and that's another beautiful workflow option is that you can just drop these on change a couple parameters and then you get you can really get some dynamic variation quickly if you'd like to download the project file for this particular tutorial that's available over at my patreon page i'm going to throw in some animation presets as well so be sure to go check it out link in the video description speaking of patreon big shout out to my tier 3 patrons joseph culligan mike and sandra over on youtube at flumiplos one samir madi and tyson the key master thanks again folks for making this video possible okay so i'm here inside of adobe after effects and i've set up this comp this is ultra hd 4k has a duration of 10 seconds 24 frames per second now what i'm going to do is i'm going to go grab the shape tool and i'm going to select ellipse and i have this kind of muted red color here and i've turned the stroke off i'm going to hold the shift key and double click on the ellipse that will give me this perfectly symmetrical ellipse that kind of fits to the height of my comp to change the size here i'm going to open up ellipse path and here i have size and i'm going to bring this all the way down to like 50 pixels to make it real small i'm gonna zoom in here so we can see what's going on and now i'll just rename this troop cluster one now the key here is repeaters not only repeaters the real secret is to repeat the repeaters and we're going to repeat we're going to add like somewhere between probably four to six repeaters until i get a look what i want what i really stress here is it's a lot of trial and error sometimes you're gonna you're gonna tinker around and you're going to not get the look that you want this is the problem with repeaters it's a little more random and hard to control than like if you're manually animating things however you can get some good variation quickly so to add a repeater you just go click on this add button and then now i've got my repeater here so all the adjustments that i'm going to be making here to parameters are pretty much almost 95 of the parameters in the repeater here i'm going to open up this at the top you see copies and offset so there's three copies right now i'll just offset this by negative one so that it's now centered up and right here you see there's some transformation parameters for the repeater this is where you make all of your adjustments we have anchor point position scale rotation start and end opacity so this is all the stuff we want to create variations for so again we want variation in opacity variation in scale and variation in position first up here for x and y position as i move these you can see i'll spread these out if i move it on the y axis kind of moves these here offsets them one really cool thing is start and end opacity so if i bring down end opacity you can see this kind of fades off here which just gives us pretty cool look i can change the scale as well now i'm going to grab the repeater hold ctrl and hit d and now that simply duplicated that and let's go down here now that i have a second repeater i can tweak the rotation so i'm going to mess with this rotation here and i'm just going to adjust some of the parameters between x and y to give it a slightly different look maybe even bring the scale down to like 90 and change the start and end opacity now let's duplicate this again and now you can see since i changed the rotation every time i duplicate the repeater now it's going to rotate it again which is going to immediately i mean we've already got a little bit of a troop cluster here that works but i'm just going to keep on adding to it so now i can push these out a little let's rotate it back this way you know i'm just changing a few options here set the scale to maybe 110 okay let's duplicate it again and again it's all about variation you know just tweak it play with it until you get something that looks good to you and the cool thing is we're keeping this kind of centered here which is what i want see and if you're not too careful look i'd rotate a little bit this is looking way too symmetrical look all the lines are going this way so you want to mess that up you want to spin these around and really give it a different look here okay so i've got something here now so let me show you what johnny was afraid of he was afraid i was going to do something like this i was going to go and now i can grab the master position of this layer and let's say we want to move it we want to have it slowly you know moving across a border here so if i just grab the position and i keyframe it you know from left to right look at what this looks like it looks terrible because it's just like a block like moving so we need to keyframe some of the other parameters to really make them we want to look like all these little ellipses are moving at different speeds so to really start to add some movement i'm going to go to the repeater here let's go to the first repeater open up the transformation properties and position is really where you're going to see a lot of movement here so if i just grab this x check this out look how each one's moving kind of in different directions here so all i need to do is quickly go through the position parameter of each repeater and add some subtle movements and that's going to give you some real you know some real nice variation in movement a quick way to do this is to go up here and type position and that's going to bring up all these position parameters of all the repeaters real quickly and now i can just go here and i can keyframe these all at the start and then i'll go to the end and just start to add some you know like subtle stuff here it doesn't have to be anything huge okay now right away it it this is very subtle but you can see that they're all moving slightly different here so that looks a little better we can spice it up even more let's add a little bit more movement here maybe make one a little more dramatic and fast there we go now we got some more dynamic movement you can also do this to rotation so i'm going to search keyword rotation and let's see what happens if i start to spin around it's not going to do anything for the first repeater because you just have that one ellipse so it's not going to do much so here if i start to adjust rotation here on any of these additional repeaters you're going to see some some changes pretty quickly and i think you want to be more subtle with these so okay so now it looks like pretty much every individual ellipse is moving at different rates and different directions they're all kind of moving in the same direction in general but they're all you know moving in their own specific direction so now we've got some good variation i could duplicate this repeater again and check out what happens if i animate this so i can animate the anchor point and that kind of moves these so if i say so let's say i want like a section to arrive you know like i want a big portion of these two like you know be a little offset what i can do is i can animate the anchor point and let's move this back a little bit and then have it offset like this and now a huge group of these are going to be moving at different rates here and let's let's give these a really different look so let's maybe i can even rotate these as well and you can come up back to the ellipse path and you can change the size and it's going to give you some you know let's say that these are just a little too big we can bring these down and then you can add some effects to it so let's say i'm going to add my favorite effect of all time deep glow this is a premium plugin if you want to get it i'll put an affiliate link down in the video description you can also go check out sabre that's a free alternative let's turn the radius down and the exposure maybe down like 0.6 and you can change the blend mode here i could change it to add to give it some kind of crazy look i'm pretty sure we did not do this for johnny's video now check this out i've got some real variation and it's all in one layer this still might be a little difficult to work with to make it look like if you're no you know animating in and out and if you want to stagger it even more what you can do is now simply duplicate this and now you can go to like you can go like to the master rotation and rotate it offset it a little bit and then you can come in here to the contents and you can start to just turn some of the repeaters off so that you get a totally different variation and then let's just open up the position parameters here and now we can just offset one uh you know by a little bit you can stagger the keyframes you can stagger the layers however you want to do it so now all i have are these two layers here and that's amazing i have all these crazy you know what is this like 100 200 i don't know so to make it even more dynamic i could add another five layers of individual just single ellipses that i animate like johnny animated and then i have a total of seven layers but i've got like hundreds of ellipses here that look dynamic so let's look at this one here let's just look at this troop cluster so we have this troop cluster here now what i could do with this one we could just grab all of this here and then i'm going to go save animation preset and i've already got some troop clusters here let's call this troop cluster 2. i'll just create a new comp here and i'm going to delete both of these and now i'll go back to effects and presets animation preset user presets and right here i've got troop cluster 2. you can see i've already created some other ones now if i double click this now voila i've immediately got this and if i hit you you can see all the keyframes that were saved here now be aware that those keyframes are going to paste wherever your playhead is so that can be a little annoying you could design these in a way where they're all using expressions if i had more time that's what i would do i would use the time argument to somehow drive a lot of these animations so that no matter where you paste it you know it's going at the same speed but this is a great way to work and this is in fact how i did work on one of these animations at the end he's just like more troops more troops more troops so i created these animation presets and it was real fast um just adding this which is kind of stupid because if i'm paid hourly i'm making less money oh one other thing if you're creating animation presets you probably don't want this master position animation on there you just want all the other keyframes so you just want this movement so that when you apply the preset it'll create a new shape layer and then you can animate the position wherever you want it to go so that would be something that you would apply later then you can pre-comp it and go crazy with it in fact if you really want to rig this up if you're really serious about this you would use essential graphics the essential graphics panel and you could add a lot of the position and rotation parameters of each individual repeater and then you could go crazy with the customization of it i mean if you're doing um visualizations like that that's what i would suggest but again if i had if i showed you how to do that this tutorial would be like four hours so yeah if you haven't seen that video go check it out i'm sure you have seen it because it's got i think it's got like over seven million views so you've probably already seen it okay so there you have it that's how i use repeaters to repeat the repeaters to create these russian troop clusters again the project file for this particular tutorial is available on my patreon page as well as some of the animation presets so if you want to check those out follow the link down in the video description and as always if you enjoyed the video be sure to hit the thumbs up button if you want to watch more content like this be sure to check out my monday maps playlist and you can subscribe to the channel and hit that notification bell and if you really love this type of content be sure to head over to my patreon for the tier 2 patrons i have some exclusive tutorials that i release each month it's a lot of fun so go check it out

Channel: Boone Loves Video

Views: 20,691

Keywords: boone loves video, boone, adobe after effects tutorial, map labels, map icons, adobe after effects map animation, map ae, adobe ae map, animated map ae, after effects animated map, how to animate map after effects, map symbology, map design after effects, map animation, motion design, battle map, invasion map, russia ukraine map, how to create troop cluster visualization

Id: LEu-16PYRNI

Length: 13min 17sec (797 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 25 2022