Kinetic Cylinder Text | Mograph Tutorial

so today we're going to look at creating a cylinder sort of they call it kinetic uh type um like moving posters um motion graphics and then using expressions to make some of the sort of part you know the animation plans a bit easier when you've got lots of layers so i'm gonna go ahead and start sharing my screen so you can do uh you can do this with cc cylinder a lot of things a lot of things in after effects there's more than one way to skin a cat and but the the reason for doing it this way um using these all the individual layers if we turn off shine here um is uh you can you can sort of create this on animation here uh which would be a little bit tricky to do with uh with cc cylinder and it's a good way to basic expression so what i'll do is first go through this with the basic setup how he creates it a little bit tedious and then i'll show you how by applying a few expressions at uh at the very beginning um you can just duplicate that same layer and you can have uh here we've got a control null um i realized going into expressions is obviously this is just a taster you know when we do the course um i teach after effects by the way um the the expressions we won't get to it's a little bit later and it's something we can sort of you know spend a little time on um but i realize that some students have already done tutorials you may have a little experience with with motion graphics uh be looking to level up freshmen you know um and sort of improve your skills so uh expressions they're you know i i use them quite a bit and they're they're worth knowing so okay so the fun part of like creating the cool you know the cool animation uh it's pretty new comp um what i might do quickly is so i realize my screen resolution may not be working for everyone let's see if i can quickly uh come on display [Music] brain is not working the display settings okay well if you've got any problems seeing text on on these layers uh put it in the q a um but uh it's not like a step by step tutorial so it's not the end of the world if you if you're not uh okay all right so create new text layer uh shift control alt and p uh a big fan of shortcuts uh helps you work quicker um but you can always right click and go new to new text layer and if you've got um you've got an adobe subscription you get adobe fonts with it which is quite handy uh so you can activate certain fonts and they have font hats and all right why have i got microsoft beans my products i never use a microsoft edge that's fine okay so i haven't installed this uh i love sans spongebob so we've got a nice uh bold uh sarah oh my god i'm so fragile [Music] uh actually i only learned the difference between uh fox and smack face yesterday and that was on the you know the makimo um and some mayo podcast which is kind of pretty embarrassing given that i've worked in motion design for many years but uh a tight face would be in this case it's my name once so we've got termina and then font would be setona blank so you've got uh different weights that's the font that fight faces is terrible um but you didn't come here for typeface tracks so onwards uh did i delete my sounds okay here we go so insects layer type in cylinder and uh oh god uh sorry my puppy just got his fine in the background because not only if i let her out one of them for optimistically like a walk and liver alone but now i've just run upstairs uh to leave right away for another round anyway so uh yeah let's go ahead and find terminal because it just looks looks better um okay so [Music] uh first thing we want to do is make it a 3d layer because we're going to where we're going to create the cylinder is basically take the um anchor points which is where you rotate the text around and we're going to set it back in zed space and then we're going to duplicate them so they they create silver so so actually each each face it's not quite a perfect cylinder because each face will be sort of test but it'll give you a certain defense like i say cc cylinder gives you a perfect perfect cylinder but when you have these individual layers you can animate them on um with a bit more sort of with more options so uh so first thing is make it 3d layer so that is this this new box icon here and then when we check this we activate it to make it 3d layer uh so if we press p for position so these are our master controls here and so we've got transform controls and if we check and uncheck this 3d box you can see our position goes from x and y so x y and then if we check the box we have we now have a z position um it's a bit difficult to see it when you're when you're flat on like that so when we're setting up 3d things in after effects sometimes handy to have two views horizontal so we can see um we can see the left or in this case we've got if we click here we've got custom view so custom view is just looking uh looking down and onto an angle and then if we duplicate that text and leave it in zen space you can see where we've now got uh a bit of paramounts and if we and then but that's why we can see in this view here on the right a bit difficult to make things out um and but parallax is when you have a you know if you have a camera called bolt c for camera and then if you move that camera to the left and right power axes that looks as if you're sort of in a train and all the you know all the bushes on the train track person whizzing past you can't see them and then you've got the fields rolling past and then you've got the you know the sky barely moving so that's that's parallax um now if we move this on the uh that's the y and then the x you can see you can see parallax effects effects here and it's sort of more pronounced if you you know we'll block that all the way back uh yeah so um you'll need the layers to be 3d because we want the anchor points controls um the end point which is um let's fly the anchor point tool up here and press a for the anchor point shortcut and we zoom in here like here now points is we've got these fancy new controls which are slightly dominating me because uh uh let me introduce them in a recent update i haven't really i'm going to use them it's good for if you haven't got the anchor point ball selected we just have the normal tool which is the normal move tool uh it does make rotating you know moving things around handy i you know my my habit is compressing you know the shortcuts doing it this way but you know if you're just starting out this is this is handy and it might be something i get used to um but i'm old and new things scare me so um so a franco point and if we now remove that output back it's one of these annoying uh annoying well that's not not annoying i suppose it sort of makes sense but uh you move the anchor point and the text the text moves because the anchor point is um z point now let's say 500 pixels in z space behind the text okay but we haven't changed the position so the position of the text relative to that is still 500 in front so if you wanted that text to say where it was we put the minus 500 all right yep 500. that's exited now back where it was before but now the anchor points okay for anchor point is 500 so uh now when we rotate it uh instead of it rotating again let me show you where it would have been solo is uh this little dots hit like the other layers and then so so at the moment the anchor point is right at the flush at the bottom of the peg let's put in there so if we scale the pipe up that point stays there and then when we rotate it on the x and flipping whereas this one because we'll set the end point back rotate it on the x we've got this rotating uh which as you can see this is kind of more what we would need to create you know and the illusion of a of a cylinder attack excuse me myself smaller so so we've got one of those uh and obviously we need we need quite a few um i'm going to do it the i'm going to do the tortuously slow way first and then i'm going to sort of show you expressions to sort of you know as to how it could be a time saver if you if you cut them off so uh we could have them uh if we wanted them all static we could have them uh controlled by a null out it's for knob uh so yeah let's listen that way now i'm going to put um delete this rogue one auto have auto tape enabled folks i'll give you one tip to take away i've had students who have um said uh the dog ate my homework or you know where's the lamb face um preferences it's not projects i'd say this question says [Music] forefoot says my cranium is not working and it gets referencings save every 20 minutes and i'm guaranteeing it to get a little bit uh don't what you're on about after experts it's fine so um what do we do okay so eight points down at the back uh we have let's just let's just say we have twenty you know twenty layers what we've got here we've got twenty but we might lose frantic it's gonna take too long so we'll do ten but i'm gonna do i'm gonna what i'm gonna do is the cylinder uh because that's the layer name comma oh one now uh that's gonna make no difference for what we're doing at the moment but that's gonna come in supermanly for me uh user's reference if that will need it for music instructions uh let's go back to one what's happened uh okay so we could have uh um for now if we if we're happy we're happy with how this first one's set up we can duplicate it uh but we're not completely happy because this point being right in the middle it's a little bit annoying now um i i i'm gonna put a shout out to um a script that i use when are you this and so i've got a reposition point which you can find on uh tickets on e-scripts uh might be free if it's not free it doesn't cost much and it's pretty handy so at the moment the end point is that we kind of we want it in there we want in the center so uh we can just we've got positioning because otherwise we've got this sort of fun game of uh like moving by pressing y moving up the anchor point um actually if you if you press shift it's not i said it's not that hard it would it should snap it yeah so shift and control together uh but there are there are occasions uh um so maybe that either it wasn't maybe i'm making something different but uh definitely i've definitely found it easier just to click clip and have that centered uh okay so uh anchor point is oh did it send something interesting do you think center the endpoint in z as well let's press r find out yeah my gun okay we can just well actually one thing could be you know you can add a very simple expression um so the same position is because we want the output to be set back so like that and then where what we're hoping to do is compensate by adjusting the deposition okay now there's there should be an expression for that may not this may not work but let's give it a try so uh so the set position let's say we want the z position anchor point to be the same as the z yeah okay so now we've got it's enabled uh and let's just check that it works because that's okay all right so now what it's doing is basically instead of us manually compensating and adjusting it you can go okay so how how far back into space do we want that point and the good thing is it's not moving in the position of text down so if we wanted it a thousand points gonna be too big for the uh for this cylinder that we've got here um but we're not having to you know we're not fat for england it's just we've got this expression looking at that so there are some expressions where you we type out loads of stuff you have to get your head you know you have to do some fiber maths there's some expressions which are just super basic and you've got these pick whip tools which are a bit like parent tools and you're just kind of going hey you know look at you know look at this and whatever that value is you know that's the leaf that i need yeah and if you want to disable expression you know enable if you have over this equals you'll disable it if you want and then you've got your z position zero and you're going to be so 500 and this text here is where something that's 500 and now we duplicate it and then make the this rotation now uh if we want it to be a perfect um cylinder we're going to want all the layers to go around 360 degrees so what i might do is go minus 36 that's not going to be enough so 36 divided by 2 is 18. okay that's better and then you know and this this is doing manually so obviously a bit of a fun and we can duplicate them and do that this is a little bit of time savers we find the one that's so this one's 36 the next one's going to be the 36 18 brain 46 54 so but 54 okay uh i swear yeah it's been for fun for somebody uh so maybe i realized i'll kind of skip in the bit where i'm doing it manually and i'm going straight to expressions because it's already it's already coming forward uh it's really painful so um yeah let's just let's just skip the expressions a bit because because also it's half it's helpful i've already got like 10 15 more minutes so um let's what i do what do we generally want expressions in my project is um and i will say i think it's a good way to work is to have to have the stuff that's at the the stuff that you want to control the important stuff in your timeline window have it at the top so uh i have here there's a knot not doing anything just sat there uh it's got effects on it so i've got said distance rotation spread we're gonna do the rotating spread in a second um master rotate we've got the we've got these controls that uh if we press u for keyframes u reveal keyframes and so if we do the z distance it's going to shrink them in okay and you may already sort of have an inkling of how these expressions are working and um you know from from the from the one that we just looked at just now um but it makes it makes life a lot easier because you know you've got loads of layers in a fine line and you're fishing around but you know like where's the where are the keyframes on this um you know none of these layers actually have keyframes on because they're all you know they're all extraction driven um but so i you know tend to have expression controls and cameras lights if you've got lights in a scene uh you know complete reference will really pop the important stuff up at the top and then you know use shine as well you know just try the layers that you're going you know you don't need to see you finish with them uh shy those like them you know just make it you know make it simple as possible for uh yourself when you're working uh because you know when when you're if you slow yourself down you're gonna get less time less quickly and um and i i always sort of i'll try to imagine you know if i dropped out um you know not that i'm woody having them as foundations can't place my own mortality but just you know you may have a project on someone else and uh trying to take pride in working tidily and if i hand these products over would they be cursing me would they want to work with me again you know if you want to you know get freelance work and you want to welcome free arts work but if you don't really hated by your colleagues uh one of your pilots uh slain fighters um eat your you know have your together said the guy who uh that might want to say so yeah so one uh okay so this is this has already been a bit of a pain okay all this uh working out uh um you know the sort of the rotation blah blah blah so um i'm gonna introduce it to another question which is a bit of a um maybe a little bit of a head at first but um it's it's gonna it helps with these with these things where you have lots of lowers and you can spread them out or distribute them or whatever uh if i press ee on this um layer it's a real expression so ee for expressions use reveal keyframes uh you can see i've got this this is the magic the magic expression here uh so it's this layer dot name dot splits okay basically and we'll look at you know on the course you know obviously you're going to sign up for course i can't wait to see you all um we'll look expressions in more detail but basically this expression is saying look at the name so this layer name look at the name and then look for a comma and it's good comma and then look for the number after the comma now do you remember when i said i'm gonna gonna rename i'm going to delete these annoying i'm going to rename this cylinder and put comma 01. now one reason for doing that is you know when you duplicate it it will create an o204 which you may may not uh you're going to get that exactly if you just do a new layer type and load the text then if you duplicate it yes you'll have two three-port the first layer hasn't got a number on it um so this way we know exactly we have a layer that's one you know and o2 so um i'm gonna oh that's expression uh you can have that expression in any properties so you can put it in the position you put it in the rotation i'm gonna put it in an empty oh my god in what's called a slider control so in your uh effects windows um let's have this selected in effects we can have uh expression controls and the set of controls you can apply that you can run expressions on and so we've got slider control which basically is you know it's like a i said non-value it's not doing anything um and we're going to call this our you know the the h value basically it's going to be what it is it's going to be the number but uh we can other expressions can link to it we can link to um to that from other expressions so it's all worthwhile having comrade one here on commodore 2 but we need to feed it into an in into a description so i'm going to press alt and click on that as my expression control i'm gonna paste it and now you can see it's giving me it's feeding back a number of one which is what i want i'm going to be able to set that one and then if we take this effect next value copy and paste it onto two press e we've got two now that's probably not blowing your mind as yet but then if we take a as we create a knot control alt and y again shift ctrl o y and we'll call this uh you know i'm anal an ocd uh so i just i call it controls with the two little codons and off and then and then that always sits at the top so here controls at the top and then i'm going to add a slider to that as well so this is going to be the um the rotation spread here which if you remember why wouldn't you um we if we keyframe you know you've got them sort of rolling on like that and then sort of slowly and then slowly rotate him so uh if we look we've got um rotation's first going from north to french in 1693 to full rotation uh so it's my comp go so this rotation spread so just renaming these is just for our own benefit doesn't doesn't change anything it just means um stuff makes sense uh so rotations first and we'll keep that pretty soon today now the uh another rotation value of these so at the moment the x rotation is both zero uh we want them we want it to instead of us manually placing these as we were doing before which is a fab we want uh the expressions to do that for us so it's probably gonna be easier to see if we have three so let's have three because then we can see if we're there if they're being distributed okay um i'm just going to save saving projects you can tell i haven't been working a couple weeks as the muscle memory of control coalesce saving um it's not there so uh so we want the expression here and so let's do it with this this one here it's gonna drive three so we're gonna say look at the rotation spread and right so so if we change that to 289 you can see it's reading two eight nine okay now we've got a variable here which is the o3 so that's gonna that's gonna separate them so what we can do is go um rs which stands for rotation spread so that's a variable and then we're going to put equals so we're setting that variance so we're setting up you know it's like oh it's like massive scores like x equals this y equals this and then x plus y times y and whatever so we've got rotation spread equals that and then we'll do a semicolon i think which is the dot and the comma go to the next line uh go on the next line is the the big enter key uh more industry okay and on the next line we've got uh basically our x value now we need to now it's giving us an error message here that's fine because we haven't completed the extraction so if i press shift e it's going to open up about x value here so x equals that so another two variables we've got rotations photonics and semicolon and then the last part which is going to be the maths uh is rs divided by x okay so basically it's saying in expression language uh look at the rotation spread which is 360. look at the x value which is the three and then divide rotation squared by three okay uh so it gives us that so now if we copy that x rotation and paste it okay now that is doing it to uh basically there let's look at the x value of this is oh x 8 yeah that's right ah right yeah it we need what i've got to do is we need a variable for the number of layers yeah it needs to know the number of layers okay so we need another expression okay okay we can fit this in you could put this in so there is another expression which is layer count okay and that basically expression code for that is pretty complicated so again i can copy and paste these expression codes but essentially it's looking for um layers that start with text here now our layers are called text and it's giving us an output value here 19. okay so copy that and then we'll just change it to cylinder which is our one here so and that's going to delete what it needs and slider and let's just lay it now if we left that at text it would read zero so we just need to go in and let's see okay and hmm sorry so actually maths on this was less simple than i thought it was so let's do it so i'm disabling the expressions i'm going to i'll never keep one because um so i need to add another variable which is lc for that accounts and then pick whip that to this so so what's that what that is doing is saying that the rotations focus 360 divided by four okay because that's how many uh layers excellent we've got and then we want to multiply it by x which is our in this case o3 so what we need to do is put these in parenthesis so we've got these square brackets which is going to say make this calculation first so make the rotating square which is 360. divided by four which is 15 119 96 90 so which is 90 and then times so that's uh by the way the times multiply blah blah is all um uh these keys here so we've got divide the asterisk is multiplying and plus or minus so uh rs divided by lc and then times x and links crossed sorry let's uh so i'll tell you what it might be easier is just rename that 01 delete the others and i'm duplicating there we go so we'll realize that uh let's go ahead and replay anymore [Music] um so i mean if i'm thinking could you put you off do an experiment um it's basically you know there's a little bit of setup at the beginning and you know if you if you start using those questions you trade off the the set up time with what you end up here which is uh shiny this is being able to control uh a lot of these elements just with you know one or two keyframes so the layer count will then animate the rotation spread to do that you know to animate each individual layer you want to be framing each layer it's just much you know much of let's do here um so yeah once you've done that the you know the the illusion of 3d is just like a really um kind of really cheesy cheats basically so we've got our um and again i'd set up uh quickly let's let's just quickly set up another expression here so you know you know we've got the um you know the anchor point here is um sets of 500 uh so uh another expression here which is we'll just call it well you know what it's that uh is that depth maybe you know you could call it you called cinnamon's especially called this is the right gift or whatever but it said that so we'll set that to 500 and then our anchor points doesn't let us separate the mentions [Music] when you've got three you've got three values here uh you can't so you constantly simply go make it 500 uh because then they're all 500 okay so you've got 10 10. now i wonder if we put this may not work but if we put value value yeah sometimes the value uh gives you the whatever the value is set to be which is not here so you know what uh just to uh let's try one more thing [Music] values and there are other ways to do it but um uh i'm not going to get through that and then finish this webinar all the time so now we can um control it with this set there okay something video right there no no didn't like it so okay so let's duplicate like 20 of these so and then maybe pull it in to 300 yeah like that tighter oh cool okay 10 minutes left now and difficult to see isn't it here we change the background color to black and so what we want to do is hide the back now i'm just going to cheat it because we're um 3d layers so we're going to literally put a black solid in there make that a 3d layer this is where the side view only want left and then just move it there and [Music] sometimes you just gotta cheat things and let's mask it off draw the mask here let's go back to one view controls another shortcut so let's bump that up to 400 a little bit less [Music] yeah and then maybe okay and we uh we don't have a master control for rotation but uh with a bit more time we could add another control with this uh monster attacked that happening uh but yeah i think that'll do another obviously for this webinar uh thanks for joining thanks for bearing with me you

Channel: Escape Studios

Views: 309

Rating: 4.3333335 out of 5

Keywords: Escape Studios, Escape, studios, VFX, Visual Effects, CGI, Maya, Autodesk, Nuke, Foundry, I want to learn, tutorial, modelling, rendering, dynamics, texturing, animation, renderman, compositing, ncloth, motion graphics, design

Id: mhKVSL5X0_o

Length: 45min 22sec (2722 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 11 2021