You NEED to be using Null Objects in After Effects

hey it's Jake and today we're gonna talk about wine all objects are so useful in After Effects let's get started null objects are great that you can use them for all kinds of different things but if you're new to After Effects or if you've never really used them they might seem a little bit confusing you might not know why you need them what they're for what they can actually do I'll start by just making a null object by coming up to layer new null object and we get this green box I've got mine set up to be green yours may be a different color but as you can see it has a bounding box and an anchor point just like any layer I can click and drag it around if I twirl open the layer we have transform controls it has parenting blending modes all of this stuff so what exactly is a null object well on its own it's nothing you can do absolutely whatever you want to it and it's not going to affect anything in your scene and it's not even going to render if I preview my animation right now see it just disappears they're not meant to be seen they're meant to control things so if I were to maybe Center this up inside of this box that I have here I could parent the box to the null object and then move it around and now it's controlling that box still not gonna render but because my box is parented to it it's going to inherit all of the transform controls from it but why would I ever want to do this don't I have transform controls right here on my layer well sure I do and in some cases it doesn't make sense to use a null object but let me give you a scenario where it would let's say I want to animate this box flying in like it's being tossed off of a truck hits the ground and rolls a couple times well obviously this is a box so I can't just rotate it and expect it to look right like it's rolling on the ground here on my ground plane and it'd be really difficult if I were to like set rotation keyframe in a position keyframe and then rotate it and then kind of like shift it up and then have to go forward a couple frames and then drag it back down rotate it again and it's just not easy to animate like that and it's gonna take a lot of time getting it to look like it's actually staying on the ground and moving the way that it should into real-world even though this illustration is a little cartoony you still want it to behave kind of like it would in the real world obey the laws of physics and you can exaggerate them for sure but it's not gonna look or feel right if you don't get this part right so I'm gonna undo get rid of those keyframes and approach this a little bit different way first let me just get this throw in so I've separated my x and y position dimensions just by right-clicking saying separate dimensions and I just want to have this kind of tossed in and land a right around here maybe not quite so far in I'll set it right about there and I'll set X and y position keyframes and then back it up to the front and bring it up to maybe about here then go into my y-position graph editor zoom in and then modify my curve so that it's gonna make my motion path up here look like it's being tossed just gonna modify these handles until it's about where I want it nice smooth arc like that and let's play that it's a little bit slower than I want so I'll back these keyframes up and I also want it to rotate I don't want to stay flat like it is right now so we'll maybe rotate it back a little bit set a keyframe by pressing option or Alt R and then at this point where it's gonna come into contact with the ground let's put it basically 90 degrees and it's not exactly 90 degrees you can see because my boxes edges aren't perfectly right angles so I'll just level that out and then bring it up a little so this is the edge it's gonna you know land on it's got a BAM flat right on the ground there and maybe I won't have it rotate back quite as much okay there we go so we've got the box plopping in and now I need it to roll and I'm probably gonna have it roll maybe two times maybe three times and like I said if I were to just try and animate the rotation of this layer from this point maybe go forward a couple of frames rotate it I'm gonna have this issue where the box is passing through the ground so I'm gonna have to you know maybe have it end up here push it forward I've got this weird motion path happening it's gonna take some some work to get all this easing stuff sorted out just not gonna be a fun thing to do instead I'm gonna make a null object so lay your new null object I'm gonna name this rotation one what I want to do is line this anchor point up with where I want this box to rotate from which would be the bottom right corner I'm going to zoom in nice and close and just position this about where I want it on that corner that looks good now I'll parent this box to that null object and set a rotation keyframe right here right where it's kind of landed I'll trim the layer to that point and then go forward maybe five frames and rotate it until it's flat on the next edge zoom in nice and close here something about there and now we've gotten a rotation great now it's a little bit stiff but it is rotating on the right point I also might want to have it slide a little bit as it's rotating on this first one to just kind of like continue this inertia from the initial toss so I'm going to set a position keyframe separate the X&Y and get rid of the Y I don't need to worry about the Y position it's just gonna slide across and maybe land maybe about there and then I'll ease that so I'll jump into the graph editor and curve this out to a nice stop and it's hardly noticeable but you can see that the impact starts right here and then it slides a little bit to here that looks pretty good I'll leave it at that I might bring this in maybe just one frame to speed that up great okay so now that we have this here what do I do I needed to keep rotating from this bottom right corner but this is the parent it's on the bottom left corner how do I fix that well simple I'm just gonna duplicate this null object line it up right where it needs to start rotating shift it forward in time I don't need the position keyframes I don't want this one to drift so I'll get rid of those and then I just realized that anchor point again to the bottom right corner of the box so right about there and now all I have to do is parent this null object to this null object so I'll grab rotation 1 and parent it to 2 and there we go now we've got another rotation now it's going further than it needs to so I need to adjust for that holding down command to adjust this property in smaller increments there we go now my box is rolling twice so maybe I'll have it rolled to more times so that it lands on this side so I'm going to do the same process duplicate move it forward to this point in time and then shift this Anchor Point over until it lines up with the corner of the box and parent this null object to that and all object then I'll adjust the second rotation keyframe go this one more time and move it forward zoom in nice and close and align this to the bottom right corner and then finally parent this null object to that null object and then I just need to adjust the second keyframe so it lands flat on its side there we go all right now if I play this back got a box that flies in and then rolls now the roll needs some easing not all of these should be spaced out the same amount but the bigger issue that I'm seeing right now is that it's landing almost off the screen I don't want it to go quite that far so how do I fix that issue well because of my original layer is parented to rotation 1 1 to 2 2 to 3 and 3 to 4 that means that I could just grab this one and move it wherever I want and everything else is going to inherit that transformation if I just play this back now you can see that my animation is still happening it's just shifted everything over to the left that's another great use for a null object is if you've made an animation and it's not exactly where you want it to be you can just make a null object temporarily parent everything to it or anything that's not parented already to it and reposition the null very very handy there alright now that I've got this box rolling let's work on the easing a little bit so I want it to obviously slow down as it goes further along I think this first roll looks good the second roll is probably good but maybe the third roll could take an extra frame so I'll move this one forward of this keyframe forward and then on this last roll I want to make this exaggerated a little bit so I want it to look like it's kind of like almost not going to tip over and then finally tip over and to do that I'm gonna add another keyframe so I'll go into my graph editor add a frame here and then make this kind of a shape like a reverse s that's gonna make it slow down in the middle and then tip over so let's play that back maybe not have it easy hard there we go and maybe what I want to do now is just have it kind of tip a little bit after it hits this last time and because I have this null rate here which is already positioned correctly and controlling that box I can just add another rotation keyframe here and then go maybe two frames forward rotate it up just a little bit and then back down two frames again copy and paste and I'll ease this one nicely give it a nice Bell shape here bring this one up and play that back there you have it so that's how you can use null objects to really take control of your motion and do something complex like rotating a box on these distorted edges that aren't even right angles and that's really how I like to think about using null objects therefore controlling parts of your animations or even parts of After Effects I mean I even like using null objects to control 3d cameras so if I just make a new composition really quick 3d camera and let's just say that I type out some text I'll make it 3d nothing complex here I just want to demonstrate how the 3d camera can be controlled by a null so I'll make a new 3d camera I'll leave it as a one-note camera and obviously I can you know rotate this using the camera controls and you can get used to these controls there's nothing wrong with them you can definitely become proficient at using these in there are times where I will just to use a 3d camera as it is but let me reset this back to where it was and instead I'll make a null object command option shift Y or ctrl alt shift Y and I'll name this camera controller and parent the camera to that camera controller making sure that that null object is 3v now that it's 3d I can click and drag it around and it's controlling the camera if I rotate this null object it's now rotating right from the origin of our 3d world which is where that text is it's where that null object was generated so that's just really convenient for having things line up perfectly I can you know move it around to go in and out I think it's just a lot easier to animate cameras with a null object this way and one last way that I like to use null objects is for global controls an example of that might be this texture on the box and the ground right now I'm using an effect called noise HLS and a couple of other effects to make it look the way that it does and I also have that same effect stack on this box right here so if I wanted to have these two grains be adjusted in any way I would have to adjust this noise you know maybe make it a little bit bigger a little bit more contrast II and then I'd have to go in and do the exact same thing to the ground so make it a little bigger add some contrast but if I were to make a null object and remember no objects don't render that's why I'm choosing this as my layer I'll name this global controls and I'll select the two effects that are making up that grain and copy them and then paste them on the global controls now again null objects aren't rendering that you don't see any change even though I put these effects on here but they are there now that I have them there I can select them again and go up to edit copy with property links and then paste that right on top of the existing effects for the ground so I'll just paste now if we look at the effects controls all these numbers are read and that means that there are now expressions applied so if I double tap e to see all of my expressions see that everything is now referencing this global controls layer that I have right here so I could do something like turn the grain size down to one and that instantly usually updates that ground layer I could change the contrast of these levels and it's affecting that layer and even though this grain is within a pre comp I can do the exact same thing I still have these copied with property links so I'll go into here select those two effects and paste and now that grain is updated I go back in to this comp and I can change this to control both instances of that effect and they're always gonna look the same so now I can very easily customize this to look however it is that I want it to look there we go I like that look maybe make it a little bit bigger nice and chunky and there you have another great use of a null object I can even turn this layer off I don't need to see it I'll just keep it at the top of my layer stack so I always have access to it so there you have it null objects are super powerful and they can make really complex things much more simple to manage just think of them like controllers for different parts of After Effects and you'll start to see the benefits pretty quickly thanks for watching and I'll see you in the next tutorial

Channel: Jake In Motion

Views: 133,599

Keywords: After Effects, Animation, Motion Graphics, Mograph, Motion Design, Tutorial, Adobe, Adobe After Effects

Id: 8ei_cj6A2Gg

Length: 14min 57sec (897 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 14 2018