My Favorite Plugin (Motion-3 Overview)

people always ask me they say Nick what are your favorite plugins and well I got a lot that I like to use and I got a video on my favorite free ones there's one in particular that I think stands out above all the rest in terms of value features and the developers behind it and that is motion 3 by mount mograph so let's take a look at what makes this tool so great come on before we dive into the video please know that this is not an ADD or paid for by mountain mograph I wanted to make this video because I've been using motion for several years and it's a wonderful tool that I wanted to share in fact I bought a lifetime license when it was motion too so I've been getting free updates for years now as you can probably guess though I reached out to Matt from mount mograph when I was making this video and he was generous enough to hook us up with a discount code nick for 15% off all mount mograph tools and it is also an affiliate link so if you use the link to buy a plug-in then you save money and I get money and that's just how business works baby we all win but enough chitchat let's take a look at motion 3 so technically motion is an extension which you can find mentor window extensions and what's great about that is they can push updates to you automatically and there's a lot of updates which is great so this is the kind of default interface that you'll see when you open it up and right off the bat we have all these easing sliders so we can do you know ease out you can use both keyframes we can ease in there's hold keyframes we can get crazy with this kind of graph editor thing and if you have key if you have easing that you really like you can save them as presets and you can build your own library of if you use them a lot there is anchor point tools so you can move anchor points around there you can easily rename layers here you can rename your composition to be whatever you want there are all these presets so you can change around your composition size the frames per second the durations and you're gonna save these as presets to you could even resize the comp duration like this which I don't know why you'd want to do that that way but you can so there's so much functionality on this one little page here and if this is you know too crowded for you you can go into this interface menu and you can turn off stuff so let's say you don't want to have the curve graph there you can just uncheck that and when you go back and it's a little bit more cleaned up and then up here we have what's called focus so let's open up my focus comp and take a look at what this is so focus is especially good if you have really crazy compositions and you need to isolate so let's say I have these shapes to animate on and it's text and I want to just focus on these dots so I'm gonna grab these dots and I'm gonna select say focus and now I'm just looking at these and it didn't make a pre-comp or anything and maybe I'll say I want to make these into you know I want to make these into a focus group I'll call these shapes now I have these as a group here and I can turn these on and off I can lock these layers shai them whatever I'm gonna go back to to my bring everything back and I can also do the same thing with these text focus these I'm gonna make these into a group to to call this text it's not have to two groups and I can kind of have this control with them I can turn the text on and off I can turn the shapes on enough I can easily choose to lock either one of these groups or shy them I can grab all those layers etc so this can be a really super handy tool if you of really complicated compositions and you want kind of to isolate specific groups of layers that you designate so have you been using After Effects for a long time you know how annoying managing color can be well if you click this little color icon there is an amazing color manager so you can import color palettes you can create color palettes and let's take a look at this so I have a color palette as in here and you can easily change color of things your a bunch of items you can change their their Hughes and saturations and blah blah blah and their transparencies you can change the background colors easily you can color pick things you can grab a whole bunch of items and change them together and this to me once again alone could be its own paid plugin but it's not it's just another little bonus item now it's time to get into the real meat of functionality in motion you can see here I have a bunch of my favorite tools here but this is just a glimpse at it here's all the tools so let's take a look at these we're gonna go in alphabetical order here starting with animo so animo is very hard to wrap your head around one we're going to use a very basic example I have all these this really basic animation like this I'm gonna select all these properties click animo let's do shapes click go and it's gonna create this little animo system here so basically what it did is it kind of has this retime a bowl controller now that controls everything so I could retime everything all these properties and maybe you know ease them together so now everything is easing and I have controls here like I can just choose to loop these and maybe ping-pong it right so I'm having now global control over all those properties but they're not pre comped so I could go in here and I could change stuff in these properties yet somehow this is still controlling all of those together I have no idea how this is working but you can start to do the most insane stuff because you can re time these in the in the craziest way and start to have the most mind-bending animations so it's really hard to kind of wrap your head around maybe this is a really bad example so let me know if this does not make sense and we can dive deeper into this onto the next one so blend basically smoothes out keyframes so this is my original animation I'm going to add blend to it and then if you see I enable it and then crank up the smoothness the smoothness it's going to basically kind of interpolate between that I'm gonna really crank it up so you can really see and it'll basically just make a smooth line between them yeah there you go break is pretty straightforward you can break apart shapes from illustrator into shapes you can also break apart vector shapes in After Effects into multiple layers burst is really good for making stuff like this accents impacts etc you just click burst and it generates a layer that looks like this and then you have control over the position the number of copies distance from Center rotations revolutions the colors with and stuff like that nice clone allows you to clone keyframes with one click so if you highlight all your keyframes and then click the clone button it's going to duplicate the keyframes and if you alt click it or option-click it where is it where does the bun go then it reverses the keyframes very handy with cloth you can easily generate some cloth and stuff like that so with my layer selected I'm going to add some puppet pins onto this and the order you do them matters I believe so I'm gonna go from top to bottom here and then I'm going to click cloth and do it system name alright cloth and here we go so I'm just going to add on a dynamics here which is basically a wiggle we're gonna get into that later and there we go we have some kind of just cloth waving around and you know you could attach this to like a head if you wanted this to be hair and we could play around with stuff you know we could add a color to this and you can see these are affecting some kind of color system that's happening and you have all these things here you could parent this to another layer if you wanted this to like be a flag or attached to a head for hair but we're not gonna get too deep into this delay so we have this animation the shapes going back and forth and we want to change up you know stagger these but maybe we're worried our client isn't gonna like the stagger of this stuff we don't want to do too much manual work so let's just add a delay system to these which is going to give us control of this stuff without having to go in and manually move around the keyframes so let's open up our delay here if it's enabled and now we can just easily change how much delay is in all of these you know we could put it at zero and zero is normal no delay or we can really kind of crank this stuff up and have a lot of delay and the really cool part about this is we could keyframe this so have no delay for a little bit and then it animates up and has some delay and then has no delay again and do some have some weird effects like that there's stuff like drag and we can change the color of these things to also random things are happening with the color and this might take so much manual effort to do things like this but it's just a few clicks with delay dynamics is basically a really nice smart wiggle so let's put it on our position property boom now we're wiggling around the position we can change the frequency maybe we want to happen two times per second and a lot less in space I can change the seed maybe we want this to be hold keyframe so it's just bloop bloop around we can enable separation so we can say it we only want it to happen on one axis so it's only gonna happen up and down and this is gonna just be a really easy way to have a controlled wiggle echo is probably gonna be self-explanatory but we can add an echo with with a number of copies so let's say we want to add thirty-one copies to this so now when this animates you can see it's adding thirty-one repeated shapes to this but the cool thing is we have a lot of control like everything else in this we can add a delay to this we can just reduce how much we want to delay this maybe we want to change the color of these so it makes a nice rainbow we can cycle through these colors and we have more control over if we wanted to change just the position more the rotation more or maybe we want to add a dynamics aka wiggle to these so you can do some really bizarre stuff this and you can of course obviously combine echo with any of the other things moving on excite is one of my most used tools here it's just gonna really help you with overshoot and so here I just have a scale up it's no easing so if you apply this to a linear keyframe you're going to get some overshoot and I think this is a little much here that's too so we let's open up the property and maybe bring these all down there we go with much nicer overshoot both is an interesting tool that lets you interact with a bunch of layers with a controller layer so let's see what that means so let's grab all these layers and say we want to interact with their opacity so I'm gonna grab all of these opacities here grab grab grab grab and let's click fall-off and now if we bring down all of these opacities we can move around this fall-off and whenever this layer overlaps and the other layers these opacity s are gonna drop down and we could do this with any property you can think of pretty much gonna make their scales get bigger they could rotate anything and this controller layer could be parented to something else like a cursor or whatever flip flips things horizontally and vertically I don't think I really have to go into much more detail than that grab is one of the most unexpectedly useful things so let's say I want to grab all of the same properties of a bunch of layers well well normally what you do have to do is you have to select all these layers click are like I would did before and manually click every single one and that can be really annoying with grab select them all click one layer and then click grab and now all the rotations are selected and this also works with pretty much anything you can think of this can be very useful view of hundreds of layers on something jump also something I use a ton I have this ball it's gonna hit hit an impact and I need this to bounce so I'll grab these keyframe and I'll click jump now it's gonna jump I think that's jump is way too high I don't know why it's like that right off with that but let's open up the properties and bring the stretch down a little bit the gravity can stay the same it'll bring the jumps to two and let's see what happens make it still a little bit high but you get the idea Knoll also one of my most used tools you can just make null objects with a centered anchor point I absolutely have come to hate null objects with a center point on the corner I hate them now I love null objects with the center point in the middle and also with this if you have a layer and you click null it will automatically parent your shape to a null object with the Senate with a centered anchor point which is very nice and convenient orbit is nothing mind-blowing click orbit on your layer that you went to orbit select the target in my case is the big planet now you have a layer that's going to orbit around it and you can just change little things like the speed the distance and the calibration pin plus if you have puppet pins it will make null objects where all the puppet pins are I don't use puppet pins pretty much ever but if I did I guess this is helpful maybe you will find this helpful but I don't really use puppet pins to know if I guess this is a really good thing someone let me know it could be renamer is a little tool that can help you rename all your layers so let's say own rename everything shape with a prefix of zero zero and a little separator and that shows you pretty much how it's gonna look I can just go ahead and do that and there you go it's useful if you're have a disorganized composition and then reverse we we'll take all of your layers in an order and reverse them this is another thing that I have favorited because I often do not like the way that After Effects orders my layers natively I think it does it backwards so I like to reverse them constantly and while we're on organization there is sort which will sort all of your compositions if you have a messy composition this is extremely good too so it's gonna basically take all of your stuff and organize it according to these and then you click sort and boom cleans it up like this and this is extremely good if you maybe open up someone else's file and it's a mess and you just want to clean it up grab all the comps all the images everything like that I'm gonna undo it though because I like to my structure how it was spin you can probably guess what this does it makes stuff spin with little controls you can reverse it you can change the calibration you can change the amount of spins per second just a little nice convenient thing to do and then stare when you click it makes one item stare at another item so my triangle is going to stare at my square now if I move my square around the triangle is going to stare at it beautiful text break let's say you have a text block and you want these all to be masks text break you can break even there into words or into letters let's break this into letters now every single one of these is a shape whoo beautiful texture is one I think a lot of people are gonna find pretty awesome so I have this shape going back and forth let's apply a texture to it if there's this whole library in here let's find one that I think it's nice look at this brown paper bag that's great so I just applied this texture to here and off the bat I don't really like the way this looks it's just stationary the shapes moving through it and I want us to see baby let's say multiply it on top so let's do that and I think this should be moving with it so let's say we want to enable that with it and there's a nice little that delays with it but I don't really like the delay so let's say 0 for that now it's moving with the shape we can also do things like though we can add that nice trendy little wiggle that's happening so let's say we know that wiggle but I want it to be kind of blockier and now we have this shaky little texture that's happening on top look at that we can change the amount that this happens wants to be really fast you know I can just add maybe I want to add a tint to this or something I mean look this didn't even put any layers in here except for this one I don't know how it does it it's freaking magic trace I have this triangle blasting across the screen here let's add a little something extra to this I'm gonna click trace whoa look it adds a little trail to this that's like affected by gravity pretty cool trim is pretty basic you click it and it adds a trim paths which then just takes a step or two out of adding trim paths to your animations vector let's say we have all these shapes and we want to connect them with the line well just click vector you can create a system name I'll call this a vector and we have all these options you know you have one where they kind of loosely connect to each other they all connect on an outline or they connect each one connects to each other I'm gonna do that one because I think it's the coolest now we have these lines at all generate and we can move these shapes around and they're going to stay connected and we can actually go into the vector here and we can animate these you can animate the length you can animate them from point to point there are thicknesses their colors stuff like that let's show with a vignette pretty simple it makes a vignette but this is much easier than making a vignette yourself and then you have all these controls like the feathering the scale the intensity very nice then finally for the tools we have warp so I have this kind of lava lamp look and I want these things to be blobby err so I'm gonna select them and click warp and now we have this nice or penis to them and we can easily change their choke mat their softness etc and then finally I thought I would save my favorite one for last it's called trash and it puts your animation in the trash just kidding it just deletes the effect that you put on so if I here I went back to blend and it's where I have my animation smoothed out and if I click trash it will delete the effect off the keyframes I had already thought that motion was such a good value since I've been using it for years now but I didn't truly understand most of these tools until I sat down to make this video and I was kind of mind blown when I was going through this and learning about what all these can actually do so I guess let me know if you guys want me to kind of go through more video walkthrough tutorial slash reviews of tools like this leave a comment if you'd like this and want to see more or if you didn't like it let me know that too yeah let me know your thoughts see ya

Channel: Motion by Nick

Views: 127,097

Keywords: after effects, illustrator, photoshop, motion design, animation, tutorial, easy, project file, expression, quick, texture, plugin, motion

Id: uQN1lMGlxWQ

Length: 24min 10sec (1450 seconds)

Published: Sun May 10 2020