Intro to Essential Graphics - The BASICS (After Effects)

here's a brief intro on how to use essential properties in after effects essential properties can save you hours or days of time reducing the amount of duplication of assets and future proofing your projects for easy changes or revisions say you're animating a scene with a bunch of cars in it you could create a car composition and animate it duplicate that customize it to look like a different car different colors and then have 15 different comps that you then drag into your scene with essential properties you can create one primary comp for your car and then duplicate that throughout your scene customizing it without affecting the original comp that way any change you make to the original can be added to all of these instances without having to go back and forth and changing 15 unique compositions now that sounds a little confusing but i think it'll make sense once we dive into a project so over in after effects i've created this simple primary composition just some text and a background layer so we're going to be setting this comp up with essential properties first thing we'll do is drag this into our main comp without essential properties if we wanted to create two different versions of this maybe one with a yellow background we'd have to duplicate this move it over and then go duplicate the original comp change the color in here we'll have to name this something like yellow go back to our main comp and then replace one of these comps with the new comp that's fine for this scenario but if this was any more complicated or we had 15 different versions of this if we needed to go in and then change the border size on this we'll have to go through and do that for every single composition it becomes a very inefficient process instead with essential properties we can do all of this with one composition we're going to delete what we just did we're going to go back to the primary comp and we're going to set this up with essential properties if we go to window essential graphics we'll select our composition the primary composition and we're just going to call this primary comp now we can start to add properties to this essential graphics panel that we can then change in our main composition so if we wanted to recreate this background color thing all we have to do ctrl f and search for color we'll find this background color we're going to right click add property to essential graphics now we have the bg color here and if we go back to our main comp you can see this new property here called essential properties if we twirl this down you can see our background color is now editable so if we update it here you can go back to the original and see that nothing has changed so this is how essential properties work so you create a primary composition you add any properties that you want to change into the essential graphics channel once those are added there you can then change them after you nest that primary comp into another composition so here we have background color and we can change the background color once you make a change it'll convert this to a unique instance of the original composition which means your changes won't affect the original if you need to make a change to the original animation you can do that in the root comp or the primary comp and the changes will propagate throughout the instances so back to this example if we go over here we can also add our stroke color add property to essential graphics and we can go in here and add our source text [Music] as well so now we have text background color and stroke color if we go back to our main comp you can see that all three of those properties are now available to edit and we can adjust as we please we can duplicate this and edit the properties again without affecting the original comp or this first version of it we can do this as many times as we want and change as many things as we want super powerful what happens if we want to make a change to the original so as you can see my full comp here is like 10 seconds and these are only five seconds long if we had duplicated this the old way we would have to go through every one of these comps and change them all to match that duration now all we have to do is go into this primary comp go into the composition settings set this to 10 seconds we'll extend these layers out and we can go back into our main and as you can see both of these were updated this will also work if we come in here and we adjust one of these properties say the stroke width we're going to make that skinnier we'll come back out here it's adjusted both so now as you can see neither one of our compositions matches our original comp what happens if we want to change it so that it matches the original we can go to any of these properties and see these two buttons this pull button will grab whatever the original value of the property was and update it from the primary comp so we'll click it here on the background color boom we reset it same thing will work for the stroke and the text if we just want to reset all of them at one time you can come up here to where it says essential properties and pull all the properties from the primary comp the other thing we can do is we can push these properties onto the original comp so if we select background color we can push to primary comp then if we go back to our original you can see it has that same purple we can click this button up here and it'll push all of the settings together so here's what confused me when i first started using essential graphics the essential graphics panel is only for setting up the controls and making changes to the original composition you only use the essential graphics panel to set up what properties you want to be able to change and what the default value of those properties are so as you can see we have background color stroke color text and if we make a change in here say we change this to pink it will affect our primary composition and then it will affect our composition in here why did it not affect the second comp here that's because this value has already been overridden you can see that on these properties background color and text are bold this means you've already set a value here which will override the original value now if these properties have not been changed if it's grayed out or not bold then any change you make to the primary composition in here or up in the essential graphics panel will affect this version of that composition if if this is confusing that is okay just mess around with it a little bit and it'll start to make sense just remember if you make a change to an instance it'll override the values set by the primary composition unless you tell it otherwise it won't change those values but will override them hopefully that brief intro made sense instead of diving deep into a further explanation on how this works i'm going to run through a list of some examples and ideas on how you can use essential properties in your projects you can set up a rig where your lower thirds are driven by the name of the composition so you don't even have to open it to change the values you can create a fun lip sync rig for easier facial animation you could do a logo animation and have one composition that has the light and dark version of that animation you can create your own library of little accent animations with adjustable colors i built a pretty cool chat rig setup it allows me to do these texting animations with a very minimal amount of work if you have a lot of icons in your project you could create one original composition that has all of the icons and set up a slider to switch between them throughout your project this is a pretty new feature but you can also swap footage with essential graphics so if you wanted to set up a composition that you swapped out different pictures in you can do that without having to create 100 duplicates of that same animation there's this really incredible short film by seth worley in the behind the scenes he shows how he used master properties to set up these dinosaur rigs that allowed him to have only one master rig that he used throughout this entire very complex short film i know this was a brief intro and there's a ton of more stuff we could go into if you want to learn more i'm going to put some links in the description for further learning resources as always thank you for watching if you have comments or suggestions leave them down below or hit me up on twitter catch you next time peace

Channel: Chris Zachary

Views: 7,449

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Id: Ku9LCNAV2pg

Length: 7min 56sec (476 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 23 2021