- [Evan] Hello everyone,
this is Evan Abrams and in this After Effects tutorial I'll be showing you how to
make grids of repeated shapes in Adobe After Effects. There are many ways to do this, but I'm interested in using the repeater inside of shape layers. Certainly, there are effects
that can help us make grids, maybe this one called
Grid or particle systems, like Trapcode Form or Plexus, maybe Motiontile or Repetile. Many, many scripts, plug ins etc, etc., they all have their place,
depending on the project at hand, but I wanna use the flexibility and cleanliness of shape layers. They're part of vanilla, just out the box After effects already and there's
a lot we can do with them. We'll make some grids
in made on and made off, change size, density, aspect ratio and then we'll do some wacky stuff too. So, if any of those aspects sound like a thing you wanna
learn, keep on watching. If you get stuck, the file we
create during this tutorial is gonna be available
using the link in the cards or in the description and please, ask any question
you have in the comments and I'll try to get you through. I'm Evan Abrams and this is how to create repeater
grids in Adobe After Effects. (upbeat music) We've got After Effects open, let's make a grid of shapes and then we'll move on
to make a grid of lines, like some graph paper. Start by making whatever
shapes you're going to make into this array. I'm just gonna use circles. So, I'm double clicking on
the ellipse tool up here with nothing selected,
which creates a shape layer and layers have a transform. You got anchor point
position, all the stuff and then, for shape
layers, you have contents and then within the
contents we now have a group and in that it has it's own transform and then we've got the ellipse path, which is the information
about that ellipse, which I've gotta use to make
this quite a bit smaller. It has a stroke which we don't need, so I'm gonna delete it and we have a fill, which I do want so that we can actually
see something here. So, in order to repeat this, we need to add a repeater. Now, we've covered repeating
a repeater a long time ago, so I'm sure no one remembers that, but all you have to do is type in the number of copies you want and then, if you want
to, offset those copies and then, this is the
important, vital part of the repeater, how is each new instance different? By default, each one Is
just moved by 100 pixels to the right, okay? That's all right, that's
getting us close to the grid, but you can also do things like scaling, which, as you can see, each neighbor is being
scaled again and again, just like each is neighbor is being pushed on their position again and again. So, you end up with this
cascade of transformations going through all of
these repeated elements and repeaters are always
repeating whatever is above them. So, that's important to remember as well. So, we've got our first repeater, let's go ahead and duplicate
it, giving us repeater two and then we go to the
transform of repeater two, set the position to 0,100. So, our first repeater
is taking our original and making a line of dots and then the second repeater
is taking that line of dots and repeating it again
and again and again, until we end up with a grid. Pretty easy stuff, I think. It's important to remember,
that all these instances are now referencing this original. So, if we were to animate
anything about this original or if we were to put in
groups of more things above the repeaters, that
would just be repeated again and again and again,
all the way down the line and this is wonderful for
creating an array of dots, but how would we go about
creating, say, some graph paper? Well, we would start with a line instead and here we have this line and it is in the middle
center of it's groups and we are gonna go in here,
we're gonna go into that shape and we're gonna add a repeater to this. So, let's make a vertical
array, so, maybe, twelve copies and this needs to be
zero comma, I don't know, maybe 60, perhaps? So, now we have this arrangement of lines. Now, to make graph paper,
we don't need this array to go horizontally and vertically 'cause we've just drawn a line. I wanna array this
thing that I've created, this bank of lines, I want that to rotate around. So, I'm going to add a different repeater, a new repeater and I'm
gonna say four copies 'cause I need one copy for
down and left and up and right. Now, we're gonna transform that and we'll be transforming
that, not by it's position, but instead by it's rotation,
90 degrees each time and would you look at that? We've got this grid. Now, you see we can kinda dial back, so you can see what's going on. Oh, you can make a grid
with triangles that's fun, but now we have this grid and remember, the originals, the original
things being repeated around, are an array that starts in the middle and goes in one direction. That'll be important when
we start animating it, but if you just need to make some interesting grid backgrounds, you've already nailed it. So, here's an example where
we're animating on, using scale. We're costing this
lovely kind of, cascade, out from the middle. How do we set this kind of thing up? Well, we've already created a grid, just like we did in the previous example and now we're animating
some of it's properties and we've changed it around a little bit. We've placed our path
inside it's own group and, like we said, repeaters always repeat everything above them. So, even though this path is in a group and we're using that
groups scale transformation to make this one line
get larger and smaller, that is all still being repeated by the repeater that is below it. So, if we weren't also
animating something about this first repeater,
this scale and position, which I'll remove now, it would just look like this. This very boring, bland, unpleasant, but, when we animate the
scale of the repeater as well say, from zero, say, from zero, so, if it's at zero, then all
of the subsequent iterations are all zero percent of the original and we're animating it up to
100 percent of the original, you would end up with something like this, where each of the iterations is scaling up as the original is also scaling up and we get this interesting
kind of, starburst little look and then we can play around by easing those key frames as well or, maybe, off setting them a little bit, so we can end up with all kinds of nuance and interesting ways that can look and then, I'm just going ahead and key framing the position here and the position of this
transform colon repeater makes things appear to
zoom in and out little bit, but really, we're just
adjusting the spacing between these things. So, maybe we wanna be zooming
in while this happens. We can make that happen,
so we'll just zoom. Oh, that's very interesting and so, by combining,
animating the original and animating properties of the repeater, because they're both dealing with scale, we get this interesting kind of scale on. We could also use the scale
to make things go away. Say we've got this grid and we
want the lines to thicken up until the entire background becomes the color of those lines. Now, of course, like we talked about, we could just scale up
the individual elements, you know, that would get
us where we wanna go, they can thicken up and
fill this whole thing in, but by also altering the
scale of the repeater, they're both scaling up on the Y axes, we end up with this kind of, cascade, as, what the repeater is
doing to each instance is altering over time, we
end up with this cascade. So, that is one of the key
elements that you wanna bring in when you're trying to animate
these things on and off is, how can I use the transform
of the repeater in conjunction with something I'm
animating but the original, to cause this kind of, cascading? Finally, there's a really
lovely thing about repeaters that we are able to deal with
the start and end opacity of things they repeat, which allows us to do something like this, where we have all of the dots fade off in a way that's little bit more nuance than if we were to, say, use a mask to just mask this thing off and you can have it going
horizontally or vertically or up into the corner and this works by going up into the corner because, as we said when
we were setting this up, they all reference this first dot and so, as we alter the
starting and ending opacities in this way, that the end
opacity is going down to zero and then the starting opacity begins going down to zero as well, those two phases over lap each other and then we end up with
this nice, soft cascade, from one corner to the other and it's going from
one corner to the other 'cause we're doing this
to both the horizontal and the vertical repeaters of our grid. So, those are some simple ways that you can animate
these grids on and off. Now, I said in the intro that we would get into
some wacky stuff as well. Here is some truly strange stuff. Of course, by animating
the size of the original, we were able to create this kind of, dot that gets larger and then smaller and we're able to expand the array out, by key framing that positional offset, that transform repeater positional offset, so it's getting larger out, like so, and then, of course, the vertical, we can key frame that from
zero up to it's full grid, but then if we start messing around with things like the scale, the position of that first repeater and the scale and position rotation and start opacity of the second repeater, we start to be able to
bend and warp this array to appear to be kind of, three
dimensional a little bit, by making things smaller and
lighter in the background or, you know, twisting and
warping this stuff around. This is, sort of, the
fun that you can have with these repeater arrays, by twisting and bending their values, so you can end up with
these really interesting, almost 3D shapes. Granted, you can do this kind of thing using 3D Particle Systems
and twisting them, but this is something that's available right now, in everybody's After Effects and you don't need to download
or pay for anything else to play around with it and it can help to really open up some different creative
possibilities using repeater arrays. We could dive forever into the
manoosh of all these things. What I recommend you do
is, simply, create a grid that is horizontal and vertical and then just start
tweaking all of the values and seeing what happens slowly, as you mess with one
value just a little bit and then starting messing
with another of the values just a little bit, just
to see what happens as you tweak those values, so that you can really appreciate how they change one at a time. Going through that exercise,
I think, will really help open up what is happening
with the repeater. All right, that's it, that's all. Thank you so much for watching. If you had trouble making
any of that happen, please, get at me in the comments and if you would like to
download the project file for this thing, it's
available in the cards or in the description. If you make something
new with this knowledge, I would love to see it. Tweet your cool Gifs and
jifs at ECAbrams on Twitter or tag ECAbrams on Instagram. I don't know how that platform works, but I'm learning new things all the time. If you like learning this stuff, motion design, Visual
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of those out every week here in 2020, so don't miss them and our live show will be back
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other series and projects on this channel. I'm excited to make them and I'm excited for you to see them. Thanks again for watching and spending some time with me
here on the ECAbrams channel and I'll see you around the internet. (ambient music)
