Motion Graphics Basics: Morphing Using Path Animation In After Effects - Tutorial

hi welcome back to our channel and this is motion graphics basics episode four and today we will be discussing path animation in after effects and we will be using path animation to morph one object to another object and in this case we'll be animating from a clock to a bowl of noodles so the first thing that you need to do or we need to do for path animation is to analyze our illustrations and make a plan so i have created the clock illustration and the bowl of noodles using illustrator and really the first thing that we need to do is break this down into parts so basically my clock here is it's just composed of multiple circles so here this is one circle and this one is another circle so we have to break this down part by part and we have this two hands of the clock so this is my the parts that is uh in my clock illustration now let us uh dissect our noodles illustration so we have this bowl we have two chopsticks we have this circle and we have this uh other food miscellaneous eggs and some greens and meat so let's just place them away so we have the soup and we have the the noodles i'm just gonna place it there so these are the parts of my noodles illustration so let me just adjust the artboard so that it would contain the whole thing [Music] so these are the parts of of our illustration so this is the bowl of noodles illustration and this is the clock next we are going to think about um which part is going to morph into what part in the next in the next object so the main shape of the clock is this shape the biggest one right and the main shape of the bowl of noodles is this part so it is only logical to to say that uh this shape would morph into this now how about this circle what part here we could morph that into and it would be logical for this shape to morph into this and this shape to morph into the soup now we have two hands of the clock which would make sense that these two hands of the clock when we would animate them in after effects they would morph into these two chopsticks i think we're good and we're ready to animate but how about these other parts we still have the noodle we have the egg and the meat and some greens what do we do with those so we don't need to morph them anymore we don't need to morph everything we can just animate them in you can just animate the scale and have them pop up and we'll think about that later as we animate so next what we're gonna do is we're gonna open after effects and import these illustration and recreate them in after effects so now i am at after effects and i have imported the illustration files so we have here the uh noodles it has made a comp because i imported it and all the layers here are intact and here is my clock illustration and all of the layers are also here the necessary layers see everything is here now let's go back to comp one this will this is where we will animate on comp point this is our main comp so let me just rename this to main comp so i'm gonna rename this to main comp now let's recreate the clock illustration so i'm just going to drag this comp to here so we have this and i'm i'm just going to lock this so that i don't accidentally click on it and now let's recreate this using a uh the shape tool using different shapes so let's start first with the ellipse because we are going to recreate this i'm gonna eye drop to it here okay and i'm gonna set this to uh any number you want i think 33 is good for me now i'm gonna recreate the circle so now let's create the the other part so we have uh we need to create two more circle so i'm gonna change this back again to 100 and so that i could uh color i pick the the color here this is what we want i'm gonna click okay and i'm gonna turn this back again to third uh lower the opacity and i think i'm gonna bring this to the front right uh and show reveal this uh first layer i'm just gonna lock this and now let's create the second circle and we're we're good with that uh we're now gonna create the third circle so i'm just gonna bring this again uh to the front and then i'm gonna uh color i pick uh this color here and lower the opacity right because so that it would just act as a guide i'm gonna click the uh block the i'm gonna lock this layer and then create the inner circle here so now that that is done i'm gonna bring this down so basically what we just did is we just recreated uh the clock illustration the only thing lacking now is the two hands right the hand for the hour and the hand for the minute so what i'm gonna do there to recreate that is i'm just gonna use a pen tool and i'm gonna set the field to none and then set the stroke to black because the color of that is black now i'm just gonna click here and then that's gonna be our first so i'm just gonna adjust the stroke width so that it matches the illustration and the other line the other hand now for the uh for the anchor point of the this two hands of the clock i'm gonna set this to uh put this on the center why because if we're gonna place it here um i want this one to morph into place or to morph into place and i don't want the the animation of the rotation to to be like this when it goes to its position in the next frame to because this one would morph into the chopstick so what i want is it's gonna be here so that the rotation would look like this that would rotate until it reaches to the point it's gonna rotate this one is gonna this one is going to rotate like that when it reached to the next place in in the next uh state so now that we have finished the clock let us now start the morphing so we'll start first with uh the basic or the the main shape which is the this circle of the clock to transform into the uh to the bowl so in order to explain that let's uh look at here it really boils down to thinking in terms of points so if we take a look at this and look at the points this circle has four points one two three and four four points and this bowl here has one two three four five six seven eight points now i'm just gonna use a brush tool and maybe choose a different color maybe a blue so the point for the circle here is there's a point here there's a point here there's a point here and there's a point here now for the bowl uh the point is here here there's a point here here there's a point here here here and here now this one has four points and this one has eight points so they're not the same what we need to do is we need to think about uh this specific point when it morphs to the next object where will it be so the most logical one for this point is this is the this point will become this point in the next state and the most logical one for this point is this one would become this point in the next state and this one would become this and the most logical one for this one is to become this so this point here would become this this point here would become this point and this point here would become this point and this point here would become this point so uh let me just undo all of this make it more clear right so this one we have a place for for them in the next state but now we don't we still lack four points this one two three and four the most logical one so that we would have a smooth transition right because we don't have extra points here the the extra points is here below so what we need to do is we need to add points or circle so we have need to add two points here and two points here now with that it's easier now to visualize how this shape would morph into this so now let's do that in after effects so we can now delete this clock this one we don't need that anymore so we just have this and i'm just gonna uh i'm just gonna drag this noodles comp right this contains the uh the the bowl of noodles uh illustration so i'm just gonna drag this to the top most layer here and then lower the opacity because this now will be our guide so i'm just gonna change the the position of this right so it would morph into this here it's gonna morph like that so i'm just gonna lock this okay i'm just gonna lock so we don't accidentally uh click on that and i'm going to hide all of the other layers here i'm just going to hide them right so we could only focus on one shape at the time so now let's start our path animation now to also don't forget that when you create the circle so if you create this uh recreate this circle make sure that this busy path is checked right because if that is unchecked you can't edit the path so if you can't edit the path you can't do a path animation so when you recreate this illustration make sure that this one is checked okay so now uh with this if we expand this and go to contents and click the ellipse there's a path because i have created this uh with busy path check now let's uh expand this and keyframe the path and first we need to add points to this so uh let's click the pen tool and add two points add two points also to the other side now we have our points uh intact and now let's just move forward in time so i'm gonna zoom this in i'm just gonna move forward in time so somewhere here and then let's start editing our points i'm i'm gonna edit this so this point would be here this one would be here so in order to to also uh edit this busy part path see it's uh when we move this the other side is would also be uh would move alongside with it in order to have this changed in direction all you need to do is to hold the command and option key on a mac or control and alt on windows and now it would have this icon and then we can change the direction of this of our bizet [Music] so let's just edit this so this point here would go here this one would be here this one would be here [Music] and i'm just gonna adjust that also this [Music] this path would be somewhere here and now let's adjust the bizet this one this would be somewhere here and we're almost done with with our morph now let's just clean this up and the color since it's still orange we're just gonna uh animate the color later on and i'll show you right so now we have a smooth transition so now let's check that out let's hide the let's hide this noodles comp and let's see so now we have a smooth morph transition of that now let's just easy ease this select this and click f9 on your keyboard so it's gonna look like that now let's proceed to the other part of the clock so the other part is this okay that would be the other part now let's again keyframe the path and now let's turn on the noodle comp again as a guide it would be this uh ellipse here so uh now let's do that so we have this and let's just adjust the path of this [Music] because the next state is also an ellipse it's much easier to do the we don't need to add the points anymore so we just need to clean this up clean up the bizet path that it would be the same shape as the next state it would transform into select the keyframes and click f9 easy ease and let's have a look so that one's really that's pretty good now let's proceed again to the next let's do the soup now right so the third circle of the clock this circle is this one would become the soup let's change the color after we finish this okay let's animate the color after we finish this so i'm going to keyframe the path and go to the uh the next keyframe and then let's adjust the path that it's gonna form the same shape as the soup [Music] yeah so i i think that's pretty good i'm just gonna select the keyframes click f9 so that's easy ease let's hide the uh noodle comp and let's have a look so it's gonna look like that from a clock to a bowl uh it's we you could still clean this up a bit uh i'm not liking this uh see that so we can clean that up a bit or you could use alpha matte if you'd like so now let's try and change the color of this so in order to change the color if you if this is now a shape layer so let's now go back to our uh the biggest circle here if you go back to our shape layer i'm just going to make this a bit bigger so you'll see there's a feel attribute here that you could expand and then you could keyframe the color so let's do that let's keyframe the color okay and then let's move forward in time specifically to this keyframe to that spot in the timeline and now let's reveal our noodles because i'm just gonna use the the eyedropper tool and let's turn this to 100 let's unlock this first and turn to 100 okay now for this i'm gonna change the color of this to this color and for this the second one it's going to be this right so let's change the field color of this from that to this one i think it's just the same now for the last one uh the last circle uh the soup we're just gonna change the color so i'm gonna keyframe this okay from its original color it's going to be like this but this one i have created the illustration for this so let's go back to our uh let's go into the the noodle soup and i actually have changed the opacity of that so that we could see the noodles uh below it so uh so it's not really if we eye drop that we're not really getting the accurate colors i'm just gonna turn this to 100 percent okay and we're now gonna get the color of this now let's go back to our main comp right and uh this part here i'm just gonna eye drop it to uh this now that's the color of the soup and since uh the original illustration has a 65 opacity so i'm just going to change this to 65 i'm going to animate the the opacity now let's uh i'm just going to hide this and let's have a look so it's going to have that look now how about the uh we're now going to animate the chopsticks so again let's lower the opacity of this and i'm gonna lock that so we're now gonna animate uh let's use this hand first okay so first uh we're gonna animate the rotation so we're gonna keyframe the rotation we're also gonna animate the position and also the path so go to contents shape then this path so i'm just gonna click u so it's just gonna show the uh the keyframes right and now i'm gonna move forward in time to this spot here and we need also to decide which of the chopstick this hand would turn into so i decided that this one would be the outer chopstick let's move forward in time and rotate this it's gonna be here [Music] so it's gonna have that animation and now we're also gonna animate the path of this making this longer now let me just hide this illustration see the our the head is too thick right you want to make it uh thinner so in order to do that we need to animate the stroke width so let's expand this and if you look into the stroke here is stroke one we can actually animate the stroke width so currently it's 39 so i'm just gonna click you again so it will only show the keyframes right and let's reveal the noodles right there and let's have a look let's make this one thinner so i'm just going to zoom this in or maybe lower the opacity uh more so we could see the the current frame yeah i think it's like that doesn't have to be exact so as long as you can make the the uh closest uh thickness right that's that's already okay so let's hide this and let's have a look so that's one is that one's good now let's do the uh the animation for the other hand right here so again uh let's the anchor point is here i don't want the rotation to go like that let's change the anchor point to the center right here so what we're gonna animate is the position the rotation and the path and also the stroke width so i'm just gonna click you and then you again so what we're gonna do is it's gonna have uh one like that and it's gonna change the it's gonna change the position right here so let me reveal the this comp as our guide lock that and it's going to be here i'm going to adjust the rotation and then let's adjust the path so the path is uh going to be there also here and then let's adjust the stroke width making it thinner or you know what we could just copy the stroke width of this it's 12. so let's make this 12. select all the keyframes f9 easy ease and let's hide this and let's have a look at our animation so let's add a background to that i actually created a different background color so i have this i'm just going to copy this i'm going to put this on the main comp put this at the bottom layer bottommost layer here and now for the noodles i also have a different color for the background so let's locate that i'm just gonna copy this [Music] and paste this on top so what i'm gonna do is as this transition you know the animation would be the up uh its opacity from 0 to 100 so it's gonna be like that now let's have a look how about the other parts right the noodles and the the other parts of the uh the other parts here so uh let's remove the the chopsticks and this so let's remove that and let's remove this to and this one and the soup okay let's i'm gonna remove the soup so we only have this i'm just gonna select them all and i'm go just going to copy this and paste them in the main comp and i'm going to paste them uh we could now we could still use this as a guide so i'm going to paste them right here on top of this the last layer we have created paste them here so we have all these uh of the ingredients uh so now let's reveal again the guide so our guide so that's our guide right uh i'm just gonna change the position of this that it matches our guide it's gonna be here right so now it's on place we can now remove this comp all right and focus our attention on the animation of this uh we need to find the noodles uh i'm sorry i didn't change the the layers of this i got lazy when i created the illustrations it's just layer one but it's always best if you have a project to name your layers so now i can't uh oh so so here this is the noodles so let's put this below our soup so where's our soup our soup is with this 65 opacity so uh so it's now below the soup so what we're gonna do is as this one morphs we want this to pop just a simple pop so i'm just going to animate the scale so from 0 to 100 and then just easy ease so it's just going to be like that and for the other we're also just going to do a simple pop for everything else and i'm just going to animate the this egg first okay so at fixed scale so we're gonna start with zero and now i'm gonna let's add a bit of overshoot right so it's not zero to one hundred so let's overshoot it a bit before we go back to its original scale which is 100 so i'm going to overshoot it by 5 right so it's going to be 105 and then and then it's going to go back to 100 right so it's going to overshoot and before it goes back to its uh original scale and now i'm just gonna easy ease this and let's have a look uh what it looks like well it's not perfect uh there's uh but that already works we could now copy the animation of this and paste them to everything else so there you go and we could like add a bit of offset to this uh somehow like randomizing this one and it's going to have that animation so i'm going to post the project file of this on patreon in case you want to check it out i will leave the link in the description below but i hope that i made this tutorial easy enough to follow that you don't need the project file anymore but just in case you just want to check it out uh that it is there in the description below and for our patreon page if you support us on patreon for five dollars a month not only you get access to this project file but also to all of the other project files that we post on patreon monthly and i think that's it if you like this video if this video helped you i would appreciate it if you give us a thumbs up i believe that it would help with the algorithm to get this video to other people who might benefit from this and if you want to watch more videos like this in the future please subscribe and i hope to see you on the next video

Channel: Plainly Simple

Views: 11,729

Keywords: motion graphics, path animation, path animation after effects, after effects tutorial, motion graphics tutorial, morphing after effects, tutorial, motion design, morphing paths in after effects, motion graphics basics, after effects, after effects animation, motion graphics after effects

Id: QjLCeA-8Sy0

Length: 29min 35sec (1775 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 15 2021