Intro to Motion Graphics 2021 [1/5] | After Effects Tutorial

welcome to intro to motion graphics 2021 in this series you'll learn everything you need to know to get started in the world of motion design let's do it [Music] hello everybody welcome back to tiptop and welcome to intro to motion graphics 2021 i'm really excited about this series um it's an update to an old one that i did and uh it's on in my opinion much better already just based on the example that we'll be creating so we'll be making something similar to this that you're seeing on the screen right now it's going to cover all of the basic techniques that you need as a complete beginner to after effects and motion graphics from everything from working with text and graphics to adjustment layers and expressions and things like that and masks and all these important things that you will then be able to apply to any different project so hopefully this will be a really good starting point for a lot of you people now we encourage creativity here at tiptop but if you'd like you can download a reference image from the website and recreate this exactly or you can do the same thing and recreate it with different words and text and colors and things like that so with that in mind there's a few resources i'm going to take you through before we get started so i've just opened up a blank copy of after effects here um and the few things that you will need are the reference image if you're going down that route so if you go to tiptut.xyz and the link is in the description and click on the resources page the uh there'll be a link which says intro to motion graphics 2021 if you click that image it will take you to a google drive where you can download the reference image um to be used in your project once you do that you just drag it into after effects but also if you're wondering about the colors that we're going to use i have been using a brilliant website called coolers dot co again the link is in the description you can click this start the generator button and it will give you a five color color palette every time that you press the space bar so you can come across with some really great color palettes straight away without any design theory knowledge um you can hover over things you click the copy hex and that'll get you the hex code i've already created one on my account here um intro to motion graphics and this is the one that i'm going to be using throughout this project okay so let's jump right into the actual motion graphics then i'm going to go to my file explorer and i'm going to find my reference image which i've downloaded here as you can see now this is um just a jpeg or a png rather that we are going to drag directly over the project window in after effects now before we get too into it i'm going to say that if at any point during this um tutorial i use a window that you cannot see and you can go up to the window box here on your toolbar and it will be somewhere in this list and you can just click that for example brushes and it will bring up that panel somewhere in your interface so don't panic if i've got a window that you can't see so this is for complete beginners so we're going to take this very much from scratch the project window is where all your assets are going to be collected and when you want to work with these assets and create something you need to create something called a composition so i'm just going to click this big new composition button and we're going to make this for um social media instagram so we're going to make it square i want it to be 1920 by 1920 pixels and a frame rate of 30 frames per second which basically means 30 different pictures per second of footage a duration of 10 seconds is going to be fine for this and the background color of black is also fine but i am going to rename this composition to be main the rest of these settings you'll learn as you go now we are a creative tutorial channel here so i'm not going to take you through all of the individual tools and do a boring series like that what we're going to do is learn how to use after effects using this project so um we're not just gonna go this is the brush tool this is the square tool we're gonna use them in context so just try and follow along and by the time you finish the series you'll be able to build and take these theories away to make your own projects so we have our reference image and now we have a blank composition so we need to add stuff to that composition now and to do that i'm just going to drag my reference image down here into the timeline window and release and that's just going to drop my image onto my timeline here and you can see that i have reference.png with a little bar and also if i select this image in our composition window i can drag these corners around to scale it up or down and holding shift i can scale it in aspect ratio control z will undo whatever you've done but you'll notice that as a reference image is not very good at the moment because our background is the wrong color so what i'm going to do is create a solid box that's just going to sit behind that and i'm going to hit ctrl y to do that or you can go to layer new and solid to do the same thing white solid is fine but we're going to call it background it's automatically created the same size and we're just going to hit ok that has popped it on top of our reference image where we want it behind so i'm just going to drag this background layer below our reference image layer like so and you'll notice our reference image has got a little bit of a gradient on it going from white to dark grey but don't worry about it we'll be building all of this piece by piece so i'm just going to grab my reference layer and at the moment it's a little bit too visible i want to reduce the opacity because we're only going to be using it as a reference so i'm going to select my layer in the timeline and i'm going to press the shortcut t and that's going to bring up our opacity which is see-through-ness and i'm going to say instead of 100 let's take it down to 10 and that's going to make it very see-through using that we're just going to lock this layer by clicking the little lock box underneath the lock icon which means that we can't now select this layer you can see that i'm trying to click it but i'm actually moving the background the solid that we've just made so i'm going to lock both of those off and now i can't grab or touch anything which is great so okay let's get to work we're going to create this word intro first which you saw in the beginning of the animation sort of whipped into screen squashing and stretching and everything like that so i'm going to press uh the t the horizontal type tool in my toolbar up the top here and i'm just going to type out the word with caps lock on intro okay and that's going to give us a piece of text that as you can see if you leave cap locks on you'll get this refresh disabled to to fix that you just press caps lock again and turn it off you can increase this size holding shift and just position it until it's roughly the same size as the reference image okay now you'll notice that um if i press r for example to bring up the rotation tool i can rotate this to my heart's content however it rotates from this little circle in the bottom right here so what we want to do is position that little circle in the middle so it rotates in the middle and to do that you can just press ctrl alt and home if you don't have a home key button on your keyboard because it's a small one you can choose this pan behind tool which is the shortcut y and you can move it like that okay but ctrl alt home great way just to snap it into the middle go back to your selection tool and open up your character window and you'll notice that we have a fill so the text is filled in but there is no stroke which is this white box with a red line through it if we press this little swap arrow next to it it's going to swap from fill to stroke which basically just either fills the shape or adds a line around the edge of the shape okay now that stroke is a little bit thin but you'll also notice that when we select this um it's still editable type which is great but we don't actually want it to be editable type we want it to be shapes so that we can manipulate and squash and stretch those shapes however we like okay so to do that i'm going to right click on my intro layer i'm going to go to create and then choose shapes from text look like not much has happened apart from we now have a duplicated layer called intro outlines and our original layer intro is now invisible so on intro outlines you can see that we can now no longer edit this text but what we can do is change things like the thickness on the stroke i'm going to just put up to two pixels because that looks good to me okay now we want to be able to edit these letters individually so we can do things like change their color and other properties so i'm going to go to my line window and i'm going to pop it right in the middle of my screen like so okay and then we're going to grab both of these intro and outlines just so it's not distracting we're going to right click them so i just uh clicked and then shift clicked it there to select both layers right click them and just choose pre-compose now all this does is it's going to take those two layers it's going to pop them inside their own composition so we're going to call this intro and make sure that the second option move all attributes is selected now we can double click on that intro layer and we are popped inside a composition with just our intro we know it's about the right the same size so it's fine we can work on it individually now if we twirl down our intro layer you can see that we have a contents box and we can twirl that down and we have each individual letter now i don't want these on the same layer because it's quite difficult to work with we're going to separate them out to their own layers do that we're just going to duplicate it a few times with ctrl d until we have five layers that was one too many so i'll just delete that and we can just twirl down all of these again and open up the contents on each of them on this last one we just want the o and then the one before we just want the r then just the t just the n just the i so they will not separate layers do that i'm just going to rename them quickly by pressing enter call that one o and i'm going to select everything apart from the o and just hit delete this one we just want the r so i'm going to rename that one r and i'm going to delete everything except for the r this one will do the t and this one will do the uh n there may be a faster way to do this but without plugins i haven't um figured it out yet and i don't really want to introduce plugins in this basic series but now we have five layers i n t r o all on their same layer and uh we want to put the right colors on them so i'm just gonna go back to my main composition which you can see in the timeline here and you can see it goes blue red yellow green blue so back in our intro layer we're gonna go blue and then we need red for the n uh i don't think i deleted the i on the n which i didn't so we'll just do that on the end we need red so i'm going to go to my color palette i'm just going to click red and with the layer selected i'm just going to go up to stroke here and hit paste you can work with your color libraries if you know what that is um but it's a little bit buggy in after effects so i choose not to uh t i believe was yellow and once we have these colors in here somewhere we can just sample them from the project so we don't need to keep tabbing out and now that you've seen the process i'm actually going to drag this window off onto my other screen which you can't see just that i don't have to keep tabbing towards it just makes my life a little bit easier when it comes to clicking these colors and things like that so make that one green and the last one again is blue now we need to start working on these shapes but as you can see where we split them up the anchor points are all the way in the wrong places so i'm just going to select all of these layers by dragging a box ctrl alt home as it does before and that's going to pop our anchor points right in the middle of each of these which is great okay so the next step is to animate these characters so uh we want to animate the position of these um points on these paths and so they can whip onto screen like so now to do that we're just gonna twirl down the eye icon here hold down the contents until we get to this icon here where it says path and there's a stopwatch next to it clicking this stopwatch will add a keyframe which is basically saying at this point in the animation we want something to change okay so we're gonna do that on frame one and we zoom in with this little handle here like so and i'm gonna move over to frame 10 by just pressing ctrl shift and right so doing that with right and left will move you ten frames doing that without shift so just control left or right we'll move you one frame and move over to frame 10 and we're going to keyframe again so this will be its ending position okay so we now have a start keyframe and an end keyframe i want a keyframe somewhere in the middle i'm going to put it at frame four like so okay so now we have three points where we want our key positions for our shape to be i'll go back to my first frame then i can just click and drag to select all parts of my path now this is important that we're editing the path at the moment if i select my layer and i get this bounding box with the anchor point in the middle and the nine dots around it that's wrong for this point we want to select this particular keyframe to give us the path elements so that when we move it we are moving the path and not the shape itself now i'm just going to hold shift and drag this guy up off screen like so and then i'm just going to select just the two top pieces here and holding shift i'm going to squish him down into a little rectangle so now we have a little rectangle that as we scrub through is growing into a big rectangle okay but we want this to stretch as if it is like whipping very fast so we're just going to select just these top two keyframes again but this time on our fourth frame and holding shift we're just going to drag them off screen so now we have a very long very thin eye so we've got a whipping into position like that boom boom which looks pretty good apart from it looks pretty like static and not very interesting at the moment because all of our keyframes are linear which means there's an equal amount of movement between each frame which just doesn't look good that's not how things move in the real world so to fix that we're going to add some easing to our keyframes i'm going to select all of these keyframes here and i'm going to press f9 which is just basically a very simple way of adding easing you can do the same thing by clicking right click keyframe assistant easy ease now what this does is it will just make it start and end a little bit slower and you probably won't be able to see much of a difference at this point if you select these keyframes again and press control whilst clicking them they'll go back to their original form and i'll show you this original form so that we can understand how it changes when we add easing if you click your graph editor here like so it's going to take you to the same keyframes but just with a graph view as opposed to a keyframe view and it should look like a flat line if you're on the value graph for this it'll look the same but sometimes it might look different so you want to make sure you're on the speed graph okay and we've got a flat line because like we mentioned there is an equal amount of movement between each frames if we select these and press f9 and go back to the same view it looks like an m now because we've changed how much it moves during each frame more vertical this line is the faster the movement the more horizontal this line is the slower the movement so we can see now that it starts off with not a lot goes into a lot of movement and then settles in to slow movement towards the end but it still doesn't look terribly realistic okay we want this to whip really fast into position squash and hold its position when it hits the ground and then speed up again as it bounces out of it and you can edit that really simply by just dragging over the points of this graph here this middle graph and using these handles to pull your lines now if vertical means fast it's going to whip in really fast now you can see the difference between that and that way loads more difference yeah so controls there to redo that so whipping into position if we wanted to sort of slow down here we can pull this handle the other way until we get this weird wide looking m and now really whips into position itch looks good yeah really nice but there's a lot of energy hitting the ground here and we kind of want the p to move and react to that energy so i'm going to press this graph button again to go back i'm going to select my layer and hit u just to collapse it down and then i'm going to twirl down my eye layer contents and press p and that's going to bring up my position keyframes okay and this is going to move the position of the entire object as you can see because we've got our bounding box back so i'm going to go to frame one i'm going to keyframe the position i'm going to press u to bring up my other frames as well just to see what's going on we're going to move all the way over here we're going to wait until it hits on frame four we're gonna give it another keyframe and i'm gonna go up to say frame 15 to give it a little bit of extra bounce and we'll keyframe again there okay so as it hits here we want it to sort of punch down into the earth so we probably don't actually need a keyframe on our first frame so i'm going to delete that when we move over to frame 10 say we're going to keyframe here i'm just going to push this guy down just a little bit not a lot just by pressing shift and down and now we have some keyframes that whip into position it hits the floor it overshoots just a little bit and then rebounds back into position so looks a little bit nicer we need to add some easing to this select all of those and hit f9 and go to your graph view and we kind of want it to really rock it in with the same speed so we'll do the same the same shape m see what that looks like nice however there's this little bit of slow down which doesn't look good it kind of like hesitates before it hits so we're going to grab this first frame here i'm just going to drag that all the way out so that it's coming in with full speed yeah boom nice and we'll just see if we can't get this keyframe to do the same thing it's whipping in bosch is hitting the ground it's going full speed already which is great and then it whips back into position let's do that very nice wicked okey dokey i don't like it going that way though so let's grab these keyframes and see if we can't push it the other way see what that looks like that looks a bit nicer down and settling back in nice that looks pretty good to me so now we have our animated eye whipping into position i could tweak here all day um but i will try not to so now we have our animated eye and essentially it's the same thing for the rest of the letters um so i'm gonna let you do the n and the t and the o by yourself but we're going to use the r because the r and the o have a unique feature in that the they both have two shapes per layer so on the eye layer here if we check at this we have one path no matter if we press u and expand everything under contents there is just the one path i i path yeah but on the r and the o we actually have two paths if we twelve these down contents are we have two paths with r one for the outside and one for the inside and to stretch these we're going to need to animate both of them so we're going to go back to the beginning here and if that's coming from the top we'll have that from the left this from the bottom we'll have this one from the top as well okay now if i just grab some of these points and start stretching it might look okay but you can see there's like a weird little slant on the line here and there'd be the same thing here that much more pronounced look which doesn't look grey okay so we actually need to add some points to this path and that's really easy we're going to grab um the one path so let's start with the out outer path here and i'm just going to change this from from blue uh guidelines by clicking this little square next to the layer and we'll change it to something really easy to see like uh red bit easier to see the outline points there now for example so we're going to select this path and i'm going to go up to my pen tool and click it and that allows me if i hover over the edges of my path you'll see there's a little plus icon that allows me to add points to this path and we want to add points where we're going to stretch it so i'm going to zoom in real real far and just above the curve on this r i'm going to add a second point there i'm going to do the same thing on the inside of this d and on the other side as well so now if we go to our selection tool click our path we can grab these points and again you can zoom in and shift click to grab individual points we can grab these individual points and stretch up in a much more pleasing look okay so we're going to do the same thing here we're going to keyframe both of these paths press u to collapse everything down go to frame 4 keyframe them again go to frame 10 keyframe them again okay now we know that at frame one we want the whole shape to be off-screen at keyframe four we want our stretch so we'll just select excuse me we will just select our um relative points shift clicking them and i'm holding space to just pan around there and holding shift to drag these elements off screen so i've got a super stretch r as well whipping in hitting the ground shrinking down to normal now we've got um both of these parts we need to select all these keyframes here f9 go to our graph editor and in the middle we need to adjust to get our own shape and very nice so you can see how just that little extra bit of position there i think adds a lot more realism and movement so we'll do the same thing we'll grab our r we'll hit shift p and that brings up position in addition to our current keyframes we'll keyframe at 4 at 10 and at 15 and we will adjust their position so frame 4 nothing at frame 10 we wanted to jump down a little bit and let's try and line it up roughly with the amount that the eye dips to because it's moving at the same speed and position i accidentally had all keyframes selected there though so it's actually um changed all of them if you can see all three have changed there so i'm just going to make sure i've just got the one keyframe selected and i'll reposition this guy with just the arrow keys and then i'll copy that keyframe with ctrl c and i'll paste it at the end and then we've got it ducking down let's grab both of these we'll check by selecting these keyframes what our speed was so it was fully in and then um fast or slow so we'll hit f9 to give us something to work with go to the graph editor juice this guy down and this guy down and then pull this guy all the way over so we've got a nice dunk exact same movement as the eye very nice okay so uh the rest of these letters are exactly the same process but we're going to do it coming in from different angles so let's start with the n and i'm going to i think i'll fast forward through these because they're exactly the same um but if you watch you'll still be able to follow what i'm doing and uh it also will then help you to understand the process without just copying what i'm doing which is very important so we're going to jump into time lapse mode and we'll finish off the rest of these letters [Music] [Applause] [Music] so [Applause] [Music] okay so there are all five of our letters animated and whipping in to the beginning of the uh to the middle of the screen there uh but they're all coming in at the same time which doesn't look great we want them to come in sequentially so to do that we're going to use something called a sequence sequencer and we want to trim our layers so that they sequenced the amount of time that we've trimmed them if you don't know what that means and don't worry we're about to find out so for example if i want these to take uh say five frames to pop in we're to go to frame 4 select all our layers with shift click and press alt close square bracket or right square bracket and that will trim our layer at frame 5 which means that all our beautiful animation just disappears but don't worry we'll get there select i first and then shift click o and then right click that and choose um keyframe assistant sequence layers with no overlap just hit ok and now basically place them one after the other at the point where our layer stopped and if we zoom out again we can drag the end of our layer to bring back our shapes all the way to the end of our composition and now they start one after another and pop in and look much cooler very nice okay now the last bit is um the uh the t that spins in and flicks the intro word up so we're going to do that now before the t actually comes in and then we'll use that as a way to sync things up next episode but we now want to control all five letters at once and adding a load of keyframes for position rotation etcetera etcetera uh to each individual layer is very cumbersome and very difficult to change later on so we're going to introduce something very important called a null object and we're going to use this null object to control all of our letters ctrl shift alt and y will add a new null object or you can go to layer new null and you can select this null object and what it is is an invisible layer an invisible controller that you can use to control other things so i'm going to reposition it to the top left of my eye like so and just to help with issues of scale and reference and things like that we're going to stretch this until it covers our layers it doesn't have to be super accurate like that okay now we've got a box surrounding all of our layers just for us that when we come to rotate and maybe scale things later on we get a relative scale so i'm now going to grab all of my layers and i'm going to collapse them down to make it easy to see but you'll notice next to each of these layers we have a little thing that looks like a spiral and this is like it's called a pick whip and it's like a piece of string and we're going to tie one of our layers to our null object layer and what this means is wherever our null object moves those other layers will follow and this concept is called parent and child the null object is your parent the other layers are your children and the children follow the parent so with all those layers selected we're just going to grab this little pick whip tool and drop it over the name null one and you'll notice all these parents and links now go to null one which means if i select my null name and move it everything else moves with it too which is great okay so i'm then going to hit p and r p shift r to bring up position and rotation keyframes and at the point where our o stops moving which is a one second and five frames i'm going to keyframe both of those okay we want to rotate from the middle of our shape and our anchor point is in the top left so on our null object we're going to hit control alt and home which is going to position it in the middle i'm going to go over say maybe 10 frames for now but we can edit it doesn't matter i'm going to keyframe again and we'll go over another 10 frames and we'll keyframe again on both of those uh on the middle set of keyframes i'm just going to shift it up a little bit maybe that much and we're going to rotate it to say three or four degrees not a lot just a little okay and what this basically looks like is our shapes come in it's going to leap up as a team and then slam back down into the earth but as you can see linear keyframes look rubbish as you know by now so we're going to select all of these hit f9 we can do both of them position and rotation so you can see we get two paths now one for position and one for rotation uh we wanted to jump really quickly as if it's been hit by something so we're going to select both of these points and we're editing position and rotation here and we're going to drag that handle away this handle we're going to drag all the way over to the left and this one we want it to slam into position so we're going to drag that all the way over to the right and all the way over to the right as well so we get this really extreme bosh hangs in the air for ages and then slams back down okay so let's look at that looks nice but what i want to do is adjust this rotation so that it jumps in the air but it starts to tilt back down just a little bit earlier so to do that we're just going to move just this one rotation keyframe over and you'll notice it's going to start to spin just a little bit before it starts to move back down so boom just gives a little bit more realism to its movements i might add another five frames by moving these keyframes i can click and drag them or i can press alt left and right to move selected keyframes and alt shift left and right to move them ten frames in the same way that we navigate doing that five times will give us five frames a movement and that just lets it hang in the air a little bit longer and that will look uh much cooler when we've got our our two in intro two and we get the two spinning around and hitting that um also as they come down just for the hell of it let's have some of our letters the n and the r for example let's shift click both of them go to our position keyframes and if we just go over those 15 frames again let's just have them finish a little bit higher up and see what i say looks nice apart from they fall too quickly because the easing isn't correct so we're just going to select those easings and we're just going to drag them over so that they end in the same position we're at the same speed great okay that looks pretty good we may come back and add some more details this later on when we're talking about expressions but for now we're going to leave it there okay so like earlier i'm going to press tab to bring up my composition flow chart and that basically means that we are inside the intro composition which is inside the main composition so if i click main it'll take us back to main and you'll notice now that we are in our ending position like so for our um to match it up with our original so i'm just going to grab this intro comp we're going to move into position and you'll notice that this one is on a bit of a wonk so we'll bring up our rotation keyframes with r and we'll give it a rotation of three and we can zoom in and just reposition this perfectly if it's a little bit big you can just scale it down because we're using a pre-comp which means this won't affect any of the animation that we've done and we can just line that up until we're happy okay well this does mean however you'll notice is that some of our animation takes place off-screen but that's fine and some of it pops in on screen as well if that makes sense like here the edge of our composition no one will notice motion but if you want to fix that you can go inside your composition right click choose composition settings and make it way bigger let's make it 3840 by 3840 hit okay now that's given us loads more space yeah and you can go to the point where the t is broken for example press u to bring up your keyframes and on the first frame here you could then just drag oh excuse me if i select the path you could then just drag that off screen and go back to your main comp and you'll see that there it's now starting off screen when it whips into position it starts way lower uh i think that is overkill i'm going to undo all of that and we'll just reposition it okay boom i don't think it matters if you think it matters great use it however that will do for our first episode of intro to motion graphics next time we're going to look at the t that's going to swing into position and hit this intro up as well as the o that bounces down from the top of the screen but that is plenty to be getting on with today so i hope you enjoyed this tutorial i really look forward to doing the rest of this series with you and uh make sure that you've got your notification turned on and you're subscribed leave a comment if you have any questions so that you make sure you get the next video in this series when it is released thank you very much for watching everybody i really do appreciate it and i'll see you next time for another episode of tiptup absolutely massive thank yous to my level 2 and above members wn 62 motion explainer maybe sharma ian costello deshan singe lone wolf 16. dariti katma rob v jason colorado mp di mazurev volla first melem hoover rallica m tim fitzgerald two steps to chill josh colon ursula fermanska the saucier la le lule lo x andrew hammond and jenna carey you guys are super lovely if you'd like to become a member of the tip-top zone just click that join button below for exclusive perks [Music] remember to subscribe for more tips tricks and tutorials thanks for watching

Channel: TipTut

Views: 38,925

Keywords: after effects tutorial, motion graphics tutorial, tutorial, how to use after effects, motion graphics, motion design, beginners, intro to motion graphics, into to motion graphics, adobe after effects for beginners, get started with motion graphics, get started with after effects, beginner motion graphics, beginner after effects, beginer, after effects, tiptut, easy motion graphics, basic, easy, simple, tuts, tips

Id: RxLhJuL0XTM

Length: 34min 27sec (2067 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 15 2021