- Hello again! Joey here at School of Motion.
Welcome to day nine of 30 days of After Effects. What we're gonna talk about today, it's not
the sexiest thing. But it's reality. What I'm gonna show you how to do is to morph the
letter A into the letter B into the letter C. It may sound simple. But in order to really
control it and to make it feel good and animated exactly the way you wanted, it actually takes
a lot of manual labor. That's something I find a lot of new motion designers kind of
shy away from. Everyone's looking for the plug-in. Everyone's looking for the trick.
Sometimes there's no trick. You just have to do it. In order to do that, you have to
understand animation principles. And you have to really understand After Effects. We're
gonna dive in and I'm gonna show you some strategies, some ways to think about it. Slowly
but surely we're gonna beat this animation into submission until it feels good. If you
really want to take your animation skills to the next level, please be sure and check
out our animation bootcamp coach, which will pound these lessons into your skull over the
course of several weeks in a fun way though. Let's hop into After Effects and get started.
There's a little bit of a trick to this. Learning that part is actually the easy part. What's
a little bit more difficult and what really sells this type of morph is understanding
some animation principles. And using those to make the motion feel a little bit better.
First why don't I show you the basic idea of how to do one of these letter morphs. Let's
make a new comp. We'll just do 1920 by 1080. The first thing you're gonna want to do is
just type out a letter. This doesn't have to a letter. This can be any shape you created
in Illustrator or After Effects, it doesn't really matter as long as it's a vector shape.
You've got an A. We'll want to turn that into a B. Let's also type out a B. Then we'll want
to turn that into a C. Those will be our three letters that we want to morph between. First
thing you need to do is right now this is just a type layer. What we want to do is turn
that into a vector shape. 'Cause then we can use After Effects's builtin tweening so that
we can morph between shapes. Let's select all of these. Go to layer and just hit...
I gotta do one at a time, nevermind. Layer, here it is: create shapes from text. You gotta
do it one layer at a time apparently. That's A. Let's turn these off for a minute. Look
at this. All this is is a shape layer. If you look in here, if I open up the contents
of that shape layer, you can see that there are two pads. If I select them you can see
this path is this little inner hole here. In this path is the outer main shape, the
A. Below that there is a merge paths, modifier, from this add menu. That is merging those
two paths together. It's knocking out the hole in the A. That's the A. Let's do the
same thing with the B and the C. I'm gonna say create shapes from text. There's the B.
You can see that the B has three holes, or three paths. The main path, then it's got
two holes. Then we'll do the same thing with the C. C create shapes from text. There you
go. Cool. The reason we did that is because we're gonna want to copy the path from each
letter. In some cases multiple paths. And copy that keyframe and put it onto a new shape
layer. That way we're gonna be able to morph between the letters. Let's start by doing
A to B. What I'm gonna do is make new empty shape layer. I'll just call this A-B-C. Right
now this shape layer has nothing in it. If I come in there's nothing in the contents.
There's no paths or anything. The first thing we need to do is add a path. Then I'm gonna
open up this A outlines. Remember that there's two paths for this A outlines. This path,
this first one here is the inner hole. This one is the main shape. I'm gonna start with
that one. The way you copy a path from one shape to another is you set a keyframe, copy
that keyframe, and then come up here and just paste that keyframe. You can see that it's
much smaller than this, because I've probably scaled this up. This is scaled to 209.3. Let
me scale this to 209.3 just so it matches. Alright make it easier to line things up.
Cool. If we turn off our reference shapes here, we're still not seeing anything because
in addition to having a path in your shape layer, you also need to have a fill or a stroke
otherwise you won't see anything. Let's add a fill. There's our fill. The default color's
red. Just make it white. All we have right now is one path in our shape layer and obviously
to make an A we need two paths. What I'm gonna do is I'm gonna duplicate path one. Now we
have two paths that are inside the shape layer. I'm gonna copy. By the way the way that I'm
revealing these properties here is I'm double-tapping U. A lot of you may know if you hit U it's
gonna reveal any keyframed properties. If you double-tap U it shows you any properties
that have been changed from their default, or anything you've added. That's why I can
now just quickly see the paths. I know that I've already copied over the main path. Now
I need to copy over the second path. I'm gonna hit the stopwatch to set a keyframe. I'm gonna
copy that keyframe, just command C. I'm gonna come up here to my shape layer and on the
second path I'm gonna paste that. Now I've got two paths. That's really all there is
to it. Now I've created my A again. I don't have a merge paths in here. It seems to still
be working. I like to put a merge paths in there just in case and make sure that as I
make letters that may have more than one hole in it, it's gonna make sure everything works
right. The default mode of merge paths is add. All that does is it adds the two shapes
together. If you change that to merge, what it will do is any path that's inside another
path will be a hole. If it goes outside that path it becomes another shape. That's pretty
useful. That's actually the default way when you create a shape outline from a type layer
that's actually what it's gonna give you if I open up the contents of this. Look in here.
You'll see that the merge paths that it creates is set to merge mode. I'm gonna leave it like
that. Cool. Now we've got the A. How are we gonna transition from A to B? One problem
we're gonna have to figure out is how we're gonna get the shapes to morph. Another thing
is B has two holes in it. There's actually three paths that make up the B. It's only
two in A. We need to figure out what we're gonna do to deal with that. First, why don't
we open up the Bs so we can see the three paths that make up that letter. I'll put keyframes
on all three just so I can grab those and copy and paste. Let's come up here. Let's
hide the B. Let's reveal our layer. You've got path one and path two. I know I'm also
gonna need a path three. I'm gonna duplicate path two. 'Cause the B has three paths. I'm
gonna need three paths. Let's go forward one second. Let's grab one by one. The first part
of the B which is the main outline, copy that. All I'm gonna do is paste it on path one.
You can see that it morphs from the A to the B. It does a terrible job of it. But we'll
fix that in a minute. That's essentially what we're doing Hopefully you all just went aha!
I get it! We're just copying the path of one letter and having it morph automatically into
another letter. I'll show you how to control it better in a second. Then we're gonna copy
the second hole. This hole right here. Paste it there. Then we're going to copy the third
path. This hole here and paste it on path three. Now here's the B and here's the A.
We've got a couple of problems. One the morph is kinda happening in this weird way. Also
our hole in the A is gone. That's because we've basically got this third path here on
the A which we don't actually need is sort of filling the hole back in. Let's start by
turning off path two and three. I'm gonna turn off the visibility of those. Let's just
deal with the first part of this morph, the basic shape. What's happening is After Effects
looks at each mask or each shape, and it interpolates between this shape and this shape. What I
want you to notice is one of these points on this shape looks a little different. It's
this one here. I don't know how well you guys can see that. There's a little circle around
this shape. Let me see if I can make this an easier color to see. That's a little bit
better. You can see there's a little circle around this. What that means is that that
is the first point of that path. If you're counting these points it would be one, two,
three, four. Now if we go the B, now the first point is over here. If you watch, that first
point corresponds between each shape. This point is going to move way over here. That
doesn't make a lot of sense. What would make more sense, because the first point of the
B is in the bottom left-hand corner it'd be great if the first point of the A was also
in the bottom-left corner. What I'm gonna do is I'm gonna select path one. I'm gonna
select that point. Then I'm gonna control click it. I'm gonna go up to mask and shape
path and say set first vortex. You can see now that this point has changed and this is
now the first vortex. When it morphs it's gonna morph a lot more naturally. Get a much
better result. We're still getting some criss-cross here. But I'll show you how to deal with in
a minute. Then the next thing is how do we deal with these paths? Path two if we look
at that, the first vortex is the bottom-left corner. Then on this shape it's the bottom-left
corner. That first vortex we don't really need to change. That's actually working fairly
well. Now this third one is a problem. Because on the B, that's where that hole's supposed
to be, but there is this no hole on the A. There shouldn't be two holes on the A. What
do we want to do with this shape when it's time to look at the A? What I did was I just
selected that keyframe. It selects basically all the points in that mask. Then I just double-clicked
it, and I just scaled it way down like this okay. Actually maybe a better thing to do
would be to copy the shape of it when it's sort of already in the right shape for a B.
Let me copy this keyframe. Come over here and paste it. Then I can just double-click
so I can transform this whole shape. I'm gonna move it here. I'm gonna try to scale it down
so it's so small you don't actually see it. Really small. There we go. All I've done is
I've scaled that path down so small so that you don't actually notice it. Then it will
kind of grow as the B forms. I'm gonna slide to all these keyframes I'm gonna easy ease
them. We'll just do run preview. You can see that already it's not bad. It's a decent morph
from an A to a B. If you wanted it to be really kind of linear and feel very synthetic and
not too playful, then this is kind of how you do it. I wanted to try and sell it a little
bit more, make it feel a little bit cooler and funkier and more organic. There's that
word that your clients probably like to use: organic. What I did was just tried to apply
some animation principles to it. The first thing I did was I looked at what is the general
direction that everything's moving for this transition? To me, it feels like this piece
of the A kind of swings up here. Then this part kind of pushes left to right. I felt
like in general there's kind of a counter clockwise movement happening. I wanted to
reinforce that. I'm gonna move the anchor point of this layer to this corner here. To
the bottom-left corner. That way I can just rotate the whole shape like this. What I wanna
do is have an anticipation move. Let me stop the morph from happening for a second. I'm
gonna first have the A lean the opposite direction that it's gonna move while it's morphing.
I'm gonna go forward maybe four frames. I'm just gonna have it lean a little bit. It's
gonna hang there just for a split second. Then it's gonna swing back over maybe 12 frames.
It's gonna swing way back this way, okay? When it's swinging way back this way, that's
when I want this morph to be happening. I want to feel like it leans and then the momentum
of this piece of the A pulling up is kind of throwing it backwards. Then I want it to
rotate back but overshoot just a little bit, and then land at zero. Let me make all of
my rotation keyframes easy ease. Go into the graph, let's take a look at this to make sure
on the value graph. What I want is for this to gently lower and I want it to hang there.
I'm gonna pull this busy handle out, so that it takes a longer time for it to lean back.
Then it's gonna whip back and hang there for a minute. Then it's gonna come back down and
ease into the final position. Again if you're not comfortable reading animation curves yet,
go back and watch intro to animation curves. Now if you look at that, it's working a lot
better. It feels like that it's pulling, it's kind of whipping that layer up. It's not,
it doesn't quite work perfectly yet. Now what I want to do, is actually tweak the shape
that's being created. I'm anticipating the move by rotating the A forward. But then I
could also anticipate using the shape of the egg. What I could do is I'm gonna come here
and I'm gonna copy this keyframe on the main shape and paste it. Then what I can do is
I can go forward. Now on this keyframe, I'm gonna actually come in here and I'm gonna
change the shape of this A a little bit. Now it's leaning forward. What I want it to do
is overextend a little bit. Like it's kind of getting ready. It's just a subtle thing.
It's gonna extend down a little bit. Then it's gonna whip up like that. When it whips
up like this, about the time it gets to the middle, I would kind of like this piece to
act like a rope and be curling up a little bit. I'm gonna actually pull this bezier handle
and pull this up a little bit. I'm just gonna help it kind of swing. I'm gonna using the
normal mask tools, I'm gonna create this swing. This keyframe here it's automatically set
to easy ease. I don't want that. Because then it's gonna make this shape stop when it gets
here. I'm gonna control click it and say rove across time. Because of the mask keyframe
I can't do that. I'm actually gonna hit command and click it twice. It's gonna turn into an
auto bezier curve. If you have it as an easy ease, if you hit F9 on this, it's gonna have
a little stick in the middle of that move. I can show you what that looks like real quick.
If I turn off rove across time and easy ease that. It's not too bad. But you can see how
it kind of sticks there. That's not what I want. If I turn on auto bezier then it's a
little bit smoother. Then what's cool is I could actually pull this back a little bit.
And play with the timing so that it feels like it's actually got a lot more momentum
to it. Leans in and sucks up. You can do this for as many little intermediate pieces as
you want. What you may want is, as this pulls away, as the A rotates backwards, this leg
immediate follows. It would probably be delayed by a couple of frames. Let's actually go forward
a few frames. Maybe three frames. Actually let me come back to this frame here. I'm gonna
hit command R to bring up my rulers. I'm gonna put a guide here right where that bottom of
the A is. So I can remember where it is. I'm gonna change my background color here to black
just so I can see this a little bit better. There we go. I'm giving myself a reference.
Now I can go forward three frames. I can keep that A on that line for two more frames. I'm
just gonna command double-click this. It's an auto bezier keyframe now. Turn off my guides.
Now it kind of feels like it's sticking to the ground there. This actually might work
better as an easy ease keyframe. Now what that means is it'll sort of accelerate as
it whips this shape up. Now I kind of want it to be a little longer. It feels like there's
a little bit more momentum to it. It's kind of, there we go. It's whipping it up. It may
even want to come out a little bit more and kind of curl. Maybe it wants to come up like
this and kind of curl like that. If you're not happy with any of the shapes just change
them. Let's see. Let's see what that looks like. There we go. See how it whips that shape
up then sucks it into the B? It sucks it into the B but I would kind of like it to be sucked
in a little faster. What I'm gonna do is go where I want that to already be pretty much
like it's gonna end up. Then I'm just gonna manually pop in here. I'm gonna try to shape
this a little bit closer. Not all the way finished, but a little bit closer to its final
shape. Almost like it's springy. Then I'm gonna come in, double-click this so it's auto
bezier. Yeah that's feeling pretty good, right? I like that. The other thing is as this B
as this bottom part of the B pops out, I want it to overshoot a little bit. It kind of springs
back. I'm gonna go a couple of frames before it ends. I'm gonna grab these two mask points.
I'm gonna nudge them out a little bit like that. And adjust this a tiny bit. I'll leave
that as an easy ease keyframe. Because I think for timing that may actually work pretty well.
That's not bad. See how it shoots out a little bit? It's a little bit fast. I'm gonna move
the ending keyframe out a little bit. Yeah there we go. The A to B transition is actually
working pretty well for me. There's a lot of personality to it. It kind of feels like
it's obeying the laws of physics. The thing is, I showed you guys the trick to get an
A to morph into a B. Really to make it feel good you have to understand animation principles.
You have to understand what makes animation feel good. I'm gonna get into that a lot on
School of Motion. To me I think the fundamentals are the hardest things to teach frankly, but
they're also the most important. If you grasp the fundamentals then you don't need a bunch
of tricks. There you go. There's A to B. Now to get from the B to the C it's exactly the
same process. The only difference is you have to get rid of the two holes in the middle.
So let's do that. Let me open up my paths here. I can see path one, path two, path three.
Let's go into our C outline layer. There's only gonna be one path in there 'cause the
C is just one shape. Let me put a keyframe there so I can copy it, and then come up here
on the main shape. First let's figure out the timing. This whole thing takes about a
second and a little bit longer. Why don't we go forward? We'll have the B hold for 10
frames. I'm gonna put keyframes on all the paths. Then I'm gonna go forward one second.
10 frames, 20 frames, 1234. That's another second. I'm gonna copy on to the main path
that C keyframe. Okay. Let's turn these pads off for a minute. Let's just focus on this
first thing that's happening. You know the first thing we had to check was where's the
first vortex point on that mask? It doesn't make sense where it is on the B in relation
to where it is on the C. Just kind of scrubbing back through this you can see it's working
pretty well. If it's not just remember you just click on a point, you select a point,
you right-click it, and you say set as the first vortex of that shape. This is working
pretty well. First let's just focus on the basic shapes. What could you do to kind of
get that same playful like it's whipping and kind of catching itself and doing something
cool like that. What could you do between the B and the C? Looking at this I can first
copy those same rotation keyframes and just paste them again. Now it can kind of whip.
That just means that I want to delay this animation a little bit too. Let's run previous
a few times, take a look at it. Leans, then it kind of throws back. What I want is I want
the momentum of that rotation almost like it's chugging a glass of water. Something
you can see like this little pinch point here gets thrown backwards. I want that pitch point
first to anticipate. What I'm gonna do is I'm gonna come back here and set a keyframe
on this path. Then on this keyframe, it's leaning in it's anticipating. I'm gonna have
the shape of the B anticipate that move. I'm gonna select these points and I'm just gonna
move them out a little bit. Alright. Maybe I can also have it, maybe I could have this
bow in a little bit like this. You know, anything you can do to make it feel like it has a little
bit more mass to it. Here we go. Okay cool. It's gonna kind of lean in. One thing, another
animation principle that helps with stuff like this is the concept follow through. Follow
through is this whole B is rotating forward and the mass of that, the inertia's gonna
carry pieces of that B forward. It's gonna change the shape but not at the same time.
It's gonna be delayed by a couple of frames. If I just have this move happening at the
same time, you see how it doesn't really feel right? But if I just delay this a couple of
frames, then it feels like it's an action happening because of the movement. It feels
better. As it swings back, I want that hole in the seat to open up a lot faster. I'm gonna
manually. First I'm scrub through and see where these points end up. This point is gonna
end up in the middle of the C. What I'm gonna do is I'm just gonna grab it and push it here.
Then I'm gonna look at this point here. I'm gonna follow that one. That one ends up near
the top. This is actually gonna end up more like this. Where does this point end up here?
Let's follow that one. That one ends up on the bottom. I'm just gonna pull that one down
here. I'm speeding up the movement of some of these points. So that it'll feel... Let's
see if I leave that easy ease if that works better. Let's see. Cool. Alright. That actually
helps a lot. Just to see I'm gonna come in, double-click this. Turn it to an auto bezier.
And see if I like that any better. I like that better but now when it comes back down
I want it to overshoot back a little bit. So it lands here. I'm gonna scoot this keyframe
back. Go forward a couple of frames. I'm just gonna move this and this forward a little
bit. Just to make, see it's a subtle thing. It kind of makes the back of the C bend forward
as it gets thrown. Now there's some funky shapes happening at certain points in this
transition. You know you can see right here, you're kind of getting some weird stuff. It
would be really nice to clean that up. Unfortunately because of some of the limitations of key
framing masks in After Effects, if I keyframe, if I put a keyframe here just to fix one little
thing, it's actually gonna have a keyframe on every single point. You want to make sure
your animation's more or less done. Then you can go deal with those little details. Let's
see what other little things we can do. When this thing kicks back like this, first of
all I want to offset it. This is the rotation keyframe. That overshoot should be delayed
by a couple of frames. So it's follow through. I have another tutorial on the side it's called
animating follow through in After Effects. Watch that. It explains the principle pretty
simply. It's a lot harder to deal with when you're doing complicated shapes like this.
But I just want to reinforce that any way I can. Even the back of this shape can be
thrown back a little bit. Then as it shoots forward, maybe another thing we can do too
is have the C, the extensions of the C open up a little bit. Almost like the inertia's
throwing them. Let me smooth that out too. What I'm gonna do is grab all of these just
these points here, I'm gonna double-click them. I'm gonna move the anchor point down
to here and then just open this up a little bit. Then I'm gonna do the same thing here.
I'm gonna grab all of these and maybe that one and move the anchor point to maybe there.
Just open the C up a little bit. It's gonna open up its arms like that. Then it's gonna
close. On this frame here, this is the frame, sorry this frame, this is the frame where
it's gonna come down. I want this top part of the C to react to that and overshoot and
bend down a little bit. Maybe the same on this bottom part. Like that. Let's take a
look at that. Yeah you can kind of see it just gives the whole thing a feeling of mass.
Cool. That's feeling pretty good. Let's say we're happy with that and now we can just
quickly go through and we can clean up just kind of help this interpolation happen better.
You can see a little pinch point here. I'm gonna go in. Actually an easy way to do this
is hit G bring up your pen tool, hold the option key, then you can click and drag these
points and it will reset them. But it will make them, you can see that it makes them
parallel to each other. Which is gonna make your curves a whole lot smoother. This way
you can make the shapes a little bit less funky looking in the transition. Make sure
you set those points to auto bezier. There we go. Alright. Now the C looks a little weird.
Yeah here. This is drawing my eye. This point right here. I'm just gonna come to this keyframe.
Fix that real quick. Just make those parallel like this so you don't get that big point
sticking out anymore. 'Cause that just really drew my eye. Even maybe in here I might want
to start rounding this out a little bit. Just so it... Yeah that helped a lot. There we
go. Cool. I'm digging how that's looking. So we're happy with that. Now we just have
to deal with the two holes in the Bs that we turned off. What I'm gonna do is let's
just figure out what do we want to do with these? We could have them just shrink and
become nothing. Or maybe as this thing rocks back they shrink but they fall up. This one
goes up into this part. This one goes down into this part of the C. Maybe kind of curve
to follow the shape of the C a little bit. Then they shrink and disappear. So what I'm
gonna do is I'm gonna line up, let's figure out when we want that move to happen. Maybe
it would happen to this. I'm gonna move the two keyframes so they line up with the first
keyframe of the main shape. This B rocks forward. I want both of these pads. I'm gonna select
them both. I'm just gonna nudge them forward a little bit. So that they kind of move a
little bit. They move forward. Then they're gonna shoot back. I would say by that point
there I want them gone. Let's select this one. Let's just zoom in here. Let's double-click
it. Let's try to move it. Instead of having this path shrink away to nothing the way we
did with the first letter transformation that we did, I'm actually gonna do a different
trick here. What I want to happen is I just want that shape to bend a little bit. Almost
like it's mimicking the curvature of the C a little bit. Something like that. I do want
it to get pretty thin. Then what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna make this a hold keyframe.
Go to the next frame, and I'm just gonna move this way out of the frame somewhere. Way up
here. If you watch that shape it looks like it's disappearing, but it's not as jarring
and I don't have to worry about hiding it. It looks like the momentum is kind of throwing
it up there. It's not happening as fast as I'd like it to. I'm gonna have that happen
quicker. Yeah like that. Maybe give it one more frame. Cool that worked pretty well for
me. Now I can do the same thing on this last path. We come here. We double-click it. We
scale it down. Move it down here. Zoom in. Then I'm just gonna, let's see here, let's
move that shape like that. Just kind of mimic the curve of the C. That's looking good. There
we go. A little smaller. Make that a whole keyframe. Go to the next frame and then just
move it completely out of comp like that. Now the two holes just go away. There's so
much going on that it just kind of makes sense. You're just tricking your eye. Cool. We've
tweaked a lot to get it to this part, but you can go even further. The way that those
two holes kind of leave, it feels a little bit, it doesn't feel extreme enough. What
I might want to do is grab these keyframes here, go into the curve editor. In the curve
editor you have to be in the speed graph to work with mask points. That's just an unfortunate
reality of After Effects. There's no way to use a value graph to change the speed that
those things animate at. You have to go into the speed graph. The way the speed graph works
visually it makes no sense to me. If you take bezier handles and you pull them out, that's
kind of accentuating the ease. I'm just gonna make these a little more extreme. All it's
doing is it's gonna make these two holes when they move, they're gonna slowly accelerate.
Then they're gonna go really fast right before they disappear. Let's look at our whole animation
now. And see what we've got. A turns to B. B turns to C. There's a ton of personality
to it. It feels good. Looking at the C I would still nitpick some things. I'd probably want
to spend another 10, 15 minutes almost going frame by frame and trying to clean up any
little weirdness that I'm seeing. Like in here it almost looks like the curve could
be worked on a little bit more. I really, it's bothering me people. I'm super anal with
stuff like this. See that's gonna make me feel better. I'll sleep much better tonight
now that I did that. There you go. That's the trick people. It takes a lot of work.
The key is to practice your animation principles. And really try to give these things some weight
and some personality. Think about some funny things that could happen. Could the holes
of these Bs blow up like balloons and then pop? There's all kinds of stuff you can do.
You can also reinforce the motion that you're seeing in other ways. What if as the first
leg of this A whips up. Maybe I animate a couple of little pieces that almost break
off and dissipate. Just to give it a little more motion. There's a whole bunch of stuff
you can do to make this cooler. Anyway I hope you guys learned some tricks. I hope that
this kind of opened your eyes to maybe a different workflow in After Effects. And actually using
After Effects as a true animation tool which a lot of times you forget that yeah you can
just put two keyframes and have a layer move from here to here. When you want to have something
feel alive and have a ton of personality, you really gotta get in there and get your
hands dirty. I hope this was useful. Thank you guys. I hope to see you guys again on
the next episode of 30 days of After Effects. Thank you so much for watching. I hope that
was eye-opening. Sometimes After Effects just can't do all the work for you. You have to
get in there. You need to really add a bunch of keyframes to make things do what you want.
Once you get to that point you're gonna have so much more control for your animation. It's
like a super power. If you have any questions or thoughts about this lesson let us know.
We'd love to hear from you if you use this technique on a project. Give us a shout on
Twitter at School of Motion and show us your work. Don't forget to sign up for a free student
account to access the project files from the lesson you just watched plus other awesome
stuff. Thank you so much I will see you next time.
