How to Loop Animations & Compositions | After Effects CC Tutorial

[Music] hey guys this is Spencer from pixel & bracket and in this tutorial I'm going to show you how to loop compositions and pre compositions in Adobe After Effects so I have a project file open and currently this project file if I play it it has a lot of looping animations happening over time within it now I have another animation which is a lumberjack chopping down a tree you can see him play right here just chop that tree down and I want to insert him into this composition and have him continuously looped forever but I don't want to have to copy-paste him over and over again so this tutorial is about how to loop that animation in another composition so that might as well be like looping a pre composition or a composition whatever they're all the same thing but without having to copy/paste him over and over or redo the animation over and over now it's kind of a silly complicated process but I'm gonna walk you through it step by step and if you do it exactly the way that I do it you're not gonna have any blank frames of animation at the end of it and you're gonna be able to loop something and extend it out for as long as you want now this lumberjack is just made up of three frames of animation and each frame is just showing and hiding so one frame shows then the next it hides the next one shows it hides and the next one shows that's it pretty simple pretty basic so the way that I can do this and there's a bunch of blank space at the end of my composition right now it's ten seconds long I need to trim my composition to my animation size so to do that I'll scroll to the end of my animation and I'll press the in key and that's gonna bring my work area back to where my cursor is and or where my playhead is and now if I play it the RAM preview will actually loop this animation like I want it to be but that's not gonna work when I put it into another composition that's literally just previewing the animation over and over again so what I need to do is trim this composition to be the size of my animation so I'm gonna right click on the work area and do trim comp to work area so that will it seems like it extended it out but what it did was it trimmed my composition from 10 seconds to 3 seconds so now my entire composition is only this guy chopping the tree down over and over again good I'm done with composition so I'm gonna go back to my for one and this could be if you just wanted to loop that composition out you could just duplicate it and put him in a new composition with the same settings same size same frame rate and do the same process but for me I'm putting him into another composition and we're gonna loop him inside of this one so I'm gonna grab him from my project panel over here drag him in and we're gonna find him he's actually doesn't exist because he's only three seconds long so I need to drag my playhead back there he is and I'm gonna move him up a little bit alright so right now if I play this everything else loops but this guy just plays once through and then he goes away so I want him to loop out for as long as I need him to loop out so here's all the important steps I need to do right here first I need to right-click on this and go to time and enable time remapping now that adds two keyframes I need to navigate to this last keyframe so I'm going to go backwards also J and K will go backwards and forwards through keyframes so I know I'm on top of this one if I hold ctrl or command and press the left arrow and I'll zoom in so you guys can see what happens here I'm holding command on a Mac control on a PC press to the left arrow to go back one keyframe I'm going to add a keyframe here by clicking on the diamond over here now I have a new one now I'm going to double click on the last keyframe and it brings up the time remap properties panel I'm just gonna type in 0 and hit OK now I'm gonna click off and then click back on that last keyframe and I'm gonna hit the Delete key to delete it seems super weird I know but just follow along next I'm gonna hold alt or option and click on the stopwatch of the time remap property and that's going to drop down the expression we're adding an expression I'm gonna click the little arrow and it's gonna pop open a menu in which I can find property and then loop out click that that inserts that in here and now I can click off and it's attached to this time remap and for now it doesn't do anything it does the same thing because right now it doesn't exist but I can actually drag this out as far as I want and we can zoom out a little bit so I'm going to drag it out and extend it to well beyond my work area and now if I play through this animation my little lumberjack guy is going to loop through his animation as long as I have this extended out and I have the work area extended out so that is how you loop an animation or a composition or pre-comp in After Effects now the cool thing is I can actually use these two keyframes to speed up or slow down that animation so if I want right now the first keyframe the last keyframe is the beginning and end of the animation if I wanted him to chop down that tree super fast I can actually drag this back to here and now he's gonna be chopping down that tree over and over and over and over again really fast same thing works if I wanted to extend it out I could extend it out further and it's gonna chop it down way away slower but that's kind of fun way to adjust your animations afterwards to make sure they're timed up just the way you want them anyway if you guys liked this video like this video don't forget to subscribe for more tips and tutorials and I'll see you next time [Music]

Channel: Pixel & Bracket

Views: 447,450

Keywords: pixel and bracket, after effects tutorial, after effects tutorial for beginners, after effects cc tutorial, how to loop in after effects, looping tutorial after effects, how to loop compositions in after effects, how to loop precomps in after effects, loop precomp tutorial after effects, loop composition after effects tutorial, how to loop comps in after effects, after effects how to loop tutorial, looping in after effects, how to loop animations after effects, loop animation

Id: NAwZr4L56p0

Length: 6min 9sec (369 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 21 2017