Motion 3 (Plug-In) After Effects Tutorial - Mt Mograph

the motion 3 plug-in by mount mograph has honestly changed so much of my workflow and so i just had to create a video about it i'm going to run through each feature of the plugin one by one the project for this tutorial will be available for downloading in the description let's jump in so the animo feature allows you to group your animations together so for example here we have these shapes which are moving like this and if we wanted to control that animation as like one single animation we can group it together by selecting all the keyframes that we've animated and we can click animo and then we can call it something let's call it shapes and then press animal and now we've got one null layer with two keyframes going from zero to a hundred percent and that kind of controls the animation so we could shorten the animation by dragging this keyframe back and then all of the layers move more quickly we can also change the easing of these so if we go back to the easing presets window on motion three and click like an extreme easing like this see that looks way cooler now i think that's so cool okay and then if you go to the effects panel for that null you can see under loop you can enable loop and now that's going to loop your animation like this so it's basically the equivalent of loop out expression except it's for all of your layers and it's just neater you can even change it to ping pong down here and that's really cool so it's going to play it once in the right direction and then it's going to play in reverse afterwards i think that's so cool as well blend allows you to smooth out your animations so if you see this animation here with the ball that's moving in a kind of s shape we can smooth that animation out by clicking on the ball click position and you click blend and you can see this white line that i've traced the movement with is now sort of averaging out a bit the movement so if we press e and we open up the blend effect and we increase the smoothness to like eight you can see it's averaging out even more now so it's almost a straight line break allows you to break apart layers which have multiple groups so for instance this shape layer in here if you open it up it has four groups in it so if you click this layer and you click break it hides the original layer and it just adds four separate layers now and you can do the same with illustrator files so if this this layer here is an illustrator layer if i click break it's going to break that one into multiple parts as well multiple different shape layers the way you used to do that is to right click layer and you would click create create shapes from vector layer it saves you a few clicks oh that's some nice coffee so the burst modifier allows you to create some cool bursts like this to start you can simply click the burst tool and then you get the burst here so you can tweak the number of little cylinders within the burst you can tweak the distance from center you can tweak various like offset properties you can link the height and the width so you can create sort of circular bursts instead of cylindrical ones you can use this sequence modifier to create some cool effects so for instance you can sort of make it look like it's a 3d spiral using that and then you can change the color of the fill and stroke in here the clone tool allows you to easily copy and paste keyframes in a way that you wouldn't be able to do before so for instance here if i wanted to keyframe these squares to move to the right and then also move back to the left i would want to highlight these keyframes control c move my playhead to the end and control v but what that does is it just pastes all four layers instead so as far as i know there's not really any way to do this in default after effects aside from just individually grabbing this keyframe control v grabbing this keyframe control v it's really tedious so if you highlight all of those keyframes and you click clone boom it adds all of those keyframes to the end and now we've got that nice looping animation the cloth tool allows you to create some cool cloth like animations so we're going to add a cape to this character here his name is billy so here we've got a really basic looking cave it doesn't really even look like a cape so we're going to add some life to it so if we click on the cape and we add some default puppet pins to this cape so let's add two up here and maybe a few down here the more you add the more fluid it will look but the more you add it will also increase the processing time so now that we've got some puppet pins in there if we click cloth and then we click here so we can see here it's added a new layer here and this is going to hold all of the properties for the cloth so if we open up global in fact let's open them up up here in the event controls panel so to make the cloth move we need to add some dynamics which is basically adding a kind of wiggle to each of the pins so if we open up the position effect here and we open up advanced and then dynamics and then we enable dynamics you can see now that it is kind of moving around quite realistically but the problem is it's not being fixed to the character so we need to fix part of the cloth to the character so to do that if we unshy all the pins here and we want to sort of make sure that these two top pins stay where they are and the rest of them can move as they want so if we open up the effects for both of those pins and we go to position and we go to magnetism and we press enable and we press mirrored and we do the same for the other one magnetism enable mirrored those two pins will stay where they are and the rest of them will fly about in the wind and there you go buddy's got a nice lovely cape let's start out with a simple animation like this and we want to delay the animations so if we pull up the position keyframes for all three of those squares and we highlight them and we click delay and then we click delay here and now they are quite nicely delayed there and if we want to make them look a bit smoother we can add some easing we can add some more extreme easing and there we go so dynamics is literally just uh the wiggle expression except you don't have to write expressions anymore so if we click these layers and we add dynamics to them and we have to select their position property first and then we select dynamics now they're going to all sort of wiggle around like that but they're all wiggling in the same way which is not what we want so if we open up the effects panel for these and we just change the seed to something else but if you change that they'll all animate differently sort of the rng generator for each of them so now they're all wiggling around nicely but let's say we don't want them to wiggle that much we can turn down the amount to say 50 for the square and now the square is not wiggling as much and let's turn down the frequency for the circle for instance or maybe turn it up to four now the circle is going to be a lot more quick echo allows you to create a trail effect for your animations so for example if we have this circle moving across the screen if we click echo and let's choose to put all of the echoes into a pre-comp and we're going to generate 11 echoes and we'll call them trail and then we click echo now you can see we've got a bunch of extra ones following it and we can modify the settings for that if we go to the effects panel and we can change the delay to what we want so if we wanted it to be more like this you can more clearly see each circle whereas if we wanted to be like 10 maybe shorter trail but less division between each circle you can change the color which will add a cool tint for each of the colors following and then you can change the seed of that to kind of tweak the colors it's very very cool excite allows you to add some inertia to your animations and by inertia i kind of mean a little bounce so if we take this animation of a square or it's just moving from one point to another and we select its position property and we click excite now we play the animation you can see now it kind of bounces at the end of its movement and you can tweak the strength of that so if we wanted it to bounce a lot more we could up the bounce property to 80 let's say which increases the sort of frequency of the bounce if we wanted to overshoot more to move past the point more there you go and if we wanted the wanted to be not too extreme let's up the friction maybe set the bounce back to what it was before same with the overshoot and now you should get a much more subtle bounce like that now fall off is really interesting so fall off allows you to trigger certain animations when you hover over them with the falloff controller so you can see here these circles are expanding as i drag my fall off over them let's say we want to recreate this so we want to make these circles scale up as we drag the falloff controller over them so to do that we select one of them and we click scale and then we select the rest of them and then we click falloff and that adds a controller here now currently when i drag the falloff controller over them nothing happens that's because we need to change the properties in the controller so here it's added a falloff scale property and that's because when we created the falloff modifier we had scale selected so we can change now the scale here if we up at 210 10 10 maybe something more extreme because that's quite subtle let's try 50. so now when we drag our controller over them they scale up nicely now the flip horizontal tool sounds very simple and in effect it is it just flips the layer horizontally but what it also does is it flips the whole animation horizontally so for example this animation where i have this ball that is moving across the screen if we click flip horizontal here it's going to flip all of the keyframes at the point at which your play head is so let's just control z that a second so if i click flip horizontal here you can see here it's flipped all of the keyframes if i reverse that and i click flip horizontal here you see it reverses it in a different place and that's actually quite powerful it's quite simple but also quite powerful and i can imagine a lot of things that you could do with that and save you a lot of tedious tasks flip vertical is the same principle so if we click this uh circle again and we click flip vertical you can see there it's flipping the animation on the vertical axis instead so with this one example i'm going to run through a lot of these smaller features so for example rename if you want to rename a whole group of layers manually it can be quite pain so the rename feature allows you to do that quite easily so if we select all of our layers here and we click rename we can choose a name like boxes or box what it's going to do is it's going to call them like box 1 box 2 box 3. so we can choose the prefix and the suffix i'm just going to leave them as a dash we can choose the separator here which is what it has after the name and before the number so let's maybe use a plus and we're going to put it after and we're going to press rename and there you go box plus one box plus two blocks plus three it makes that super super easy now currently our animation is not doing anything maybe let's add some movement to it let's add a spin to one of these boxes so if we select this bottom left box and we press spin the spin tool allows you to simply just spin around a layer which saves you a couple of clicks in manually animating it and there's no keyframes involved which makes it a lot nicer it's just an expression that it adds to the rotation property the reverse tool allows you to reverse the order of all of your layers so if we wanted the box plus one to be at the top and box plus nine to be at the bottom instead press reverse you can see that's what it does the null feature allows you to automatically add a null parent to whichever layers you have selected so say we want to control the middle row of boxes by itself if we select the middle row here and we press null now we have a null control which simply controls those three and then if we wanted to do the same with this row we press null and now we have another control of this three if we now wanted to have a null which controls the top two rows we can select both the nulls that we already have press null and now we've got a null that controls those nulls so i can move this here then move that there so the orbit feature allows you to get one object to rotate around another so for instance i have a circle here and i have many circles behind it one of them is going to be the sun and one of them is and all the rest of them are going to be the planets rotating around the sun so if we if we select the planet layers here and we press orbit you can see now it's automatically got a circle that's moving around there's actually six planets all moving around underneath this one so we kind of want to offset them so it's added a effect called position to each of these planets and within properties you can change the calibration which is going to offset where it is in the orbit like this so if i just do that for the rest of them [Music] and we can change the distance that they are from the sun by tweaking this distance property we can also change the speed using the speed property so that one's going to rotate a lot slower than the others let's move one of them a bit further out and slow it down a bit more like this you can also reverse the orbit by clicking reverse so if you were wanting to create an animation like this this saves you so much time the parent tool allows you to pair in one layer to another i think it saves you one click basically um without you know having to use the pick whip or click this button here so if we wanted to parent this white cube to the circle we click the white cube and we click the circle and we click parent and now they move around together so the pin plus tool allows you to parent nulls to your papa pins and that gives you a much higher degree of control over your puppeting animations so for example in this animation we have a flailing cylinder and if we wanted to parent this circle to the end of the cylinder so it kind of moves around with it i don't really know any way of doing that because you cannot parent things to individual puppet pins as far as i am concerned maybe with expressions you could but but not easily so the best way to do this is to use pin plus so if you select this rectangle for example and we add some pins now if we select all those pins and we click pin a plus see it's added a bunch of nulls each of these represents one of the pumping pins so you see if we move it around it moves the object around and now we can parent this shape layer to the pin and now when we move this pin it moves with it so let's add some dynamics to this pin let's click dynamics now if we press play it moves around with it so the stair feature basically means get this object to look at this other object no matter where the other object moves to so for example if we want to get this rectangle to always look at this null let's uh select this rectangle and select this null actually let's just select the rectangle and press stair now if we open up the effects panel for that rectangle we click rotation we select the target as the null and let's set the calibration so that the calibration will just offset it let's set it so the point the pointy part of the rectangle is looking at the null here and now if we move this null around you can see that the cube also moves so the text break tool allows you to split your text layers into multiple layers for each letter so for example we have a text layer here that says break me and if we click text break and we click break there it's added one layer for each of the letters and then we can move them around separately let's undo that let's click on the second one and let's change the mode down here to break words now you see that's actually broken the text into individual words for each shape rather than individual letters so there's only two layers that it's created from that now the next tool we're going to be talking about is texture i love this tool it's often a bit of a faff to apply texture to layers you kind of have to import the texture you have to overlay it you have to mat it to your object you know mask it so it only appears where the object is you end up with a bunch of layers it's it's a real faff but this tool simplifies it so much so let's select this circle and click texture and here there's a bunch of preset textures you may be able to even add your own i'm not sure i could not find the information about that but for now there are a load of presets that we can choose so let's choose something that's quite obvious so that we can see it let's choose this one maybe and now it's added that texture to your object let's add a few to the others you can see above each shape layer it's created a texture layer and it's locked it automatically you can press e on the layer and you have a texture effect which you can toggle down and there are a bunch of properties that you can tweak in here you can tweak the scale you can tweak the rotation of the texture and the position you can add a delay which means that when the object moves the texture will take a little while to catch up and you can also this is very cool you can turn on dynamics which basically wiggles the texture so if i press play you can see the texture is moving about like that you can actually get a repeating texture look if you switch it to hold here and this is a technique that a lot of people actually use in animation it looks quite good to have a little looping animation texture like this and this is such an easy quick way of doing it it's great trace allows you to draw a line behind a shape you probably remember this composition that i showed you earlier for the blend feature and we're just going to add the tracer to it so if we simply click the circle and we click trace it now draws a line and if you don't want the line to be affected by gravity you can go into this tracer pre-comp that it's created you can tweak the effects here under tracer there's loads of options here so for example if we turn off gravity and we go back to our composition and now you can see it's not affected by gravity and you can tweak things like the color the width all of it it's really very very useful now because for example um this plugin when you click one of these features it usually adds a bunch of complicated expressions to your layers it can be quite fast to remove them so this is what the trash feature does so for example here under position we can see we have an expression which is the blend expression and if we wanted to get rid of that rather than having to manually go in and delete the expression and all this stuff we can click position and we can click trash and you can see it's gotten rid of the expression the object has gone back to moving it's moving its original trajectory the non-blended trajectory trim simply saves you a few clicks normally if you wanted to add a trim paths you would have to twirl down the layer click add click trim paths and then you could in here tweak the trim by using the trim feature you can simply click the layer and click trim and that does the same thing vector allows you to draw lines between your layers so if we select all of these circles here and we click vector we have a bunch of choices here we can either draw a line through each one of our layers but not more than once we can do one that is slightly different but very very close this will simply just connect the final one to the start again so it's a continuous loop this tool here will connect every object to every other object we won't use this here because we have so many objects that it would take ages let's try this middle one and you can see there it's drawing a line between each layer it's created a layer called vectors and under effects we have all the controls that we need to change the color so let's change the color to one of the brand colors like this one let's change the width of the stroke and we can change the start and end taper for our lines by enabling variation and then tweaking the starting and ending properties the vignette tool is very simple all it does is add a vignette to your layer so if you click vignette you can see it's now added a sort of dark oval shaped vignette to the layer and you can tweak all the properties in here the warp tool allows you to create some liquidy effects between your layers when they touch each other or come close to each other so for example we have this animation here with some circles moving around sometimes they touch each other sometimes they don't so if we click this shape layer with all our groups within it and we click warp you can see it sort of created a liquidy effect here it works better when the layers are the same color like these two white but you can still get a cool effect when they are different colors guys if you want this plugin you can download it using my affiliate code in the description you get 10 off and i get a small commission so you'd also be helping me out i hope you can see now why you should be using motion 3. to me the current price is totally worth it for the amount of time and frustration it saves me it's one of those plugins which just makes you think why aren't these features in standard after effects i hope you found this tutorial useful and as always subscribe for more and hit that bell to be updated when i release a new video have a good one guys

Channel: Holmes Motion

Views: 39,172

Keywords: motion 3, plug-in, after effects, adobe, tutorial, mt mograph, motion graphics, animation, guide, motion, motion 3 after effects, motion 3 tutorial, after effects motion 3, funny animation, short animation, cartoon animation, adobe after effects, cinema 4d, motion graphics tutorial, motion graphics after effects, how to do motion graphics

Id: mP7qOdZpjDA

Length: 22min 55sec (1375 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 14 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/labrow]

Great video dude. For some reason I've always hesitated on getting Motion but this sold me

[u/RandomEffector]

On top of everything I said in the other comment though, there's a few things in this set that are solid gold. As someone usually working in C4D, I frequently am very annoyed when I return to AE and right away am missing cloners and effectors. Falloff is an example of doing some some stuff that's simply a big PITA in default AE.

[u/Seruz]

Ive had motion since its inception, but ive not used it to the fullest, mostly for the speed graph ui, but this opened my eyes! I also need to start using the color stuff more!

[u/RandomEffector]

Some very cool stuff in there. I've been doing a lot of this sort of stuff lately, simple shape animation and fun bounciness and so on.

That said, I'm still not 100% sold on the value of doing all this in a plug-in. As I've done more and more work in my career I've seen the tremendous appeal of using as few plug-ins as possible. Most of the stuff in here can be done with base AE with just another click or two, or a simple expression. And the result is your project will be more mobile (if you end up working at different shops) and much more likely to be easily openable as a reference years down the road. As someone who frequently shifts gears between very different types of projects, there's a lot of utility in that, versus learning yet another sort of arcane interface and not being able to access my own files down the road without the usual headache of installing plugins in my current version, blah blah blah.

On the other hand, if you're a one-man-band and always working from home on stuff that's all in this wheelhouse, then it definitely has obvious time and cost savings. Or, if your client is demandng your working files and you want to make sure they still need to give you a call anyway... ;)

[u/Spotred]

I’ve used Motion since I started studying Visual Communication. It has been my most used tool ever since I bought it — from student to professional. It has been really important in my work bridging identity and motion design. Cannot recommend it enough.

[u/caring_impaired]

It would be great if i could get someone at Mt. Mograph to respond to emails and messages about upgrading Motion2 to Motion3. It's supposed to be lifetime upgrades, but my account has vanished and the Update tab in the UI goes nowhere. I'm sure they are busy, but it would be nice to get some kind of response. I use it for every project.