Sine Wave Hair (and more!) - Adobe After Effects tutorial

hello everybody this is Evan Abrams and in this After Effects tutorial we're gonna be making some undulating waves oh yes we are making waves good for hair comma trails very artistic things and I know maybe like this example where it's a comet turns into a ghost maybe it goes too with hair I don't know just trying to show what we can do with these techniques there's actually pretty old-time techniques they predate shape layers so hopefully you enjoy this little blast from the past let's fire up After Effects and wave hello to some sine waves oh boy that's a pun so the tutorial starts now [Music] Before we jump into the tutorial if you have trouble with this thing let me know in the comments I'll try to help you through and if you want to download the project file the thing that we're gonna be making here go to ebony or miss calm follow links in the cards in the description get your hands on that so there's two things I'll say and now it's time to get into the tutorial we're looking at this weird space head guy floating around cut a sweet skullet excellent beard that's kind of a look that I'm easing myself into as I get older and all that to say is that this technique that we're gonna be using is fairly old but we're gonna update it with some shape layers and we're gonna update it using something called master properties which is new here in Adobe After Effects CC kind of at the time of recording we're in 2018 so without further ado let's get into making something so the first step first kind of thing you want to do you want to plan out what you're gonna make so that's work I've already done so let's just go through this kind of old man an example I don't really want to go into that weird ghost comment because while we use the same techniques that's more than I think you've got time for right now go ahead make a new composition and we are going to be using you know HDTV 24 frames a second none of these numbers are important but this composition I'm gonna call the assembly this is where we're going to assemble the things and I've also got my essential graphics panel open which is just taking up space right now so let me just shrink that down and let's go ahead and put a circular head out I'm just gonna double click the ellipse here and we're gonna just change the size of that ellipse down to it you know 360 circle also those numbers not important this is going to be the head let me name this and on the head we're gonna put some hair some hairs and I'm just gonna draw kind of roughly the shape that I intend for us to use so maybe it's gonna be like let's see kind of like this and then maybe you don't have like a like a curve to it I only know curve is gonna come up here like this and then you know it'll it'll close the thing off this should have a different kind of color maybe like that that's a good color for hair let me just refine this a little bit or just refine the front we're finding this is the part everyone likes to see really showing how the hot dogs get made around here alright that'll do it for now so this is the rough kind of shape of the thing so we want this to be wavy like the wind is blowing through the hair and it's totally wonderful so we could just use a distort like the wave warp we just drop a wave warp on there and be our kinda that's sort of what we would want you know the problem is that it's deforming everything in the same direction it's not exactly what we want we want a sine wave along this line we want a sine wave along this line we want a sine wave along the curve back here sine waves everywhere give me that the way I would usually make this happen is by creating a new composition that will serve as sort of our little pieces that are gonna build this hair so it looks like a little bit of work but once you understand the technique it's pretty easy I'm gonna need a piece that goes along the top it needs to be kind of fixed to the scalp and then get wavy wavy wavy as it goes out so let's make a new composition let's make it 2,400 by 240 it's a 10 to 1 just a long rectangle you can make it whatever you want that's fine but let's name it something we'll be able to find let's name it the hair unit so units giant caps I don't know why I do that but I do and so we have this big rectangle and using some effects we can go new solid make comp size sure make it white and we're going to apply the wave warp to this the first thing you notice when you apply the wave warp ears that you know it doesn't look quite right see it's getting cut off at the top and you might think well I'll just move this down no that's not the answer clearly because there's no layer information up here for the sine wave to be on so you might apply a mask that would probably do it as well that would all do is you say linear wipe and not the preset linear wipe but the regular linear wipe here and send this 250 change the angle and move it above the wave warp so there it's cutting it off right there wonderful stuff we've gotten this thing cut in half there is layer information right here along the middle then we just adjust our height width and direction there we go so that it's coming from this side and be just the speed up to to maybe get the height up to 20 you know this could be too 40s to big 120 that's good enough this is nice and nice and extreme nice and wavy and we talked about having the wave kind of stick to the scalp so we want to pin it pin it on the right edge you see exactly what happens over here it is pinned it's stuck right there on the right edge now something else you'll notice is this doesn't look great so we might increase this to a high high anti-aliasing that's usually a good move you know something to think about our wave unit here is almost completely done what we will do is also duplicate the white solid and remove the wave warp just moving it under and saying this it's like 75 so we've got this nice hard to bottom down here this is our wave unit this is the piece of the hair that we're going to put and create the entire hair piece out of this how does that work well it's a good question that's where we're going next so here in the assembly space let's bring out some of these hair units so I'm going to bring those hair units out I'm gonna move the anchor point of this thing using the Pan behind tool over here snapping it right there and we're going to assemble this sort of along the along the scalp area here so maybe we just shrink this down to like 50% that's good so that's lining up kind of where we want it I might use a mask here to just kind of define out you know I only want this much of it and then I'll probably duplicate this and as you can see my adaptive resolution is being very helpful so let me just turn that off and so I've duplicated I got the hair unit I'm gonna layer transform you know flip vertically you know move it like so neat so it's gonna go like right around here all right and I'm just gonna adjust the shape a little bit I like a nice you know a nice firm 45 degree I don't think we need to look at the head anymore we're only concerned about the hair perfect wonderful say I think that's looking good and you might need to trim up this a little bit you never know what you'll have to do specifically to make it work for you but this is looking pretty good so I'm just gonna adjust this a little bit kind of like that all right duck this down and move this down I'm holding alt so I can sweep this below and you can already do the same kind of thing over here Boop just gonna pull this like so and we'll touch up we will touch up to this these curves a little in a little bit don't worry we'll get to it we will get to it so we'll do that right now just kind of make sure that this is lining up B PPP boo boo boo right there and so don't need a look at the head anymore so we've got these two parts here it doesn't look like much yet don't worry we're getting there but maybe we want to just extend this down just a little bit this is more of a circular thing perfect so we've got the this top line that looks correct the bottom line that looks correct let's bring out another hair unit here hair unit and we're gonna scale that down kind of scale it into place again 50% scale on this and move it roughly where we wanted to be now the trouble is it's not curved we need to curve this thing so what I would like to do is use a as a warp and just apply that to this thing so we got a wave warp and now we're busy a warping things getting real warped out here and rather than adding the way I've done with these two I'm going to subtract this unit so I'm going to do is I'm going to rotate it around this away so the solid part is over here and I'm gonna set it to be a silhouette alpha so it's gonna it's gonna cut a hole in this thing so let's just have a look at it while we do what we want to do we want to kind of bend it into position so we are bending it using these handles look at me go bending bending bending so good and Bend Bend it's bending very nicely I think I'm happy with that great it's not perfect but what are you gonna do it is close enough and now we just kind of line that up grab that thing and we go mode so what alpha and cut chunk takes a big bite makes a big bite out of this thing awesome and just move it into place you might need to massage it around a little bit and again you can adjust your masks here so that nothing untoward is poking out if you don't want it to you might need to adjust this shape here so that it's filling in the gap fully and where's that other one here we go just get that pinched in a little bit here we go perfect and you'll probably want to play it back just to make sure nothing weird and wavy is poking out and that is pretty much it we've created this hair or something else that I'll say while we're in this comp you know how we talked about master properties a little bit well here's where that comes into play let's say we want this back hair unit to go faster slower have a greater frequency greater amplitude well we can go into the hair unit we can set the master and set the master of our own come on grab me that window there we go we set the master of the essential graphics to be the hair unit that thing that we're working in and then if we solo the supported properties we could grab on here the wave height wave with and speed and throw those all into the essential graphics okay now with that done now out here on the individual hair units we can see the master properties are out here we can change the wave height to be 40 and it updates we can change the width to be you know way less it could be like 80 hmm look at that so we can change all these things and they only update the one we're changing pretty good right also out here we might say well you know looking at the master properties I really think the wave height needs to be 25 or something then you can push that change to the master comp and it updates the other ones maybe you're like oh I think I should be ten you know then you can push that up or you might update this and then you might say no no I need to revert it back to the originally hit the revert here and you're back so that is how you can push these changes you notice this hair unit the the back part of the hair didn't update because we had typed in our own little custom update to the height so it won't change so that's that's how master properties is helping us make little customizable blocks that we can use out here I will say things are gonna get a little bit weird if you go ahead and turn on collapse transformations in here so just maybe don't do that and you can get along just fine what we've got here are our hair or hair is looking very good so what I think we should do is pre compose the hair now we're gonna precompose it for a couple of reasons one I want to collect all the hair of this hair piece together and the other reason is that I don't want my circle here I don't want the circle to sort of be affected or anything else to be affected by this this silhouette that's going on here so I'm just gonna pre compose these and call this the hair piece because this is you know the hair piece the wig that's what's going on there's something else I want to update I want to fix about this hair piece I don't like how jagged how pointy things are here so what I can do is I could apply a Gaussian or Gaussian however you pronounce that word blur to this thing and then clamp down on its alpha but I don't want to do this universe to the whole thing so let me show you what that means so I would do a Gaussian blur here we go kick that up to like 40 and then I would use a curves these curves out here and then apply that to the Alpha so that the Alpha is going like whoa what's going like this and now it's nice and sharp alpha but then you know ultimately I'm gonna use sort of a fill on this so that I can get the color I want or the ramp that I want or whatever and now it looks all good so these just got rounded up and maybe we round it even more 50 and keep round and keep rounding but this front part here is also now rounded and that's not what I was looking for I don't want to do the whole thing now we could use a series of masks if we want to so we could use a mask and we just say all right this is the part maybe this is the part that we apply these Gaussian Gaussian blurs and curves to so we go in here we can go to the compositing options we can add little compositing options for those so it's only applying it back here but I will say that we do end up with this kind of hard line there's a little whoopsy line that goes in here which is not super good we could feather that out but it still has a little dent in it all right so that's not exactly why I'm into so let me just shut those off and pretend that didn't happen what I'm gonna do is go into this layer again this is the hair piece I'm gonna make a new adjustment layer you might call this the smoothing layer and we're gonna use this layer to do the same thing so again it's a curves we need to curves it there we need gosh and blur out there and we just do the same thing so you know again it was 50 then we go into the Alpha and we crunch this up I know it's hard to see cuz this is a black line on a black background and that's not super good but we do that and an adjustment layer is like a lens that you put over things so what I can do thanks to this wonderful lens is then use the pen tool to just kind of select the area that I want it to apply to it is now applied there you still have this kind of hard line but you can feather that out you can just feather this out maybe 20 pixels or something and then you know you don't notice it as much this hard line also helps you to kind of refine your curves here a little bit you know if you need to get this a little bit tighter to make the to make the two sides kind of match a little bit more in the way they look and I don't know if you don't want to use curves if you want something a little more precise but less curvy you can use a levels you drop a levels out there and then again you go to the Alpha and who is pretty insane input white but then you would just crunch these things together near the middle point exactly just like so I prefer curves it's just a little bit easier to use curves and quite frankly this little bump you won't even notice it if you're putting textures on and all that stuff so it's tough to get rid of a bump but it can be done as well you could also be applying things like you could be applying your your fills in here and gradient ramps all that stuff you could be applying it in here as well so we've got this hairpiece hairpieces is over the over the layer here I think that's pretty nice you might want to do things like kind of smoothing out this situation here wonderful and you just got to be this gotta be a little bit careful but now we have this wonderful red thing going on this this hairpiece it's wavy its undulating its performing the way we said it would on the tin and the rest of it is kind of up to you but again if you want to have these things expand contract if you want the waves to become more severe less severe all of that is in here on the master properties of each of these things and all of these are animatable you put keyframes on the height on the width on the speed all changeable all wonderful so hopefully that kind of gets you where you want to go and you make interesting undulating waves out of this stuff I'd love to see what you make so you know post it up when you've got it regulations you've completed the tutorial good for you if you ran into trouble in the tutorial please let me know in the comments I will try to get you through as best I can if you want get your hands on the project file like we said earlier in the tutorial then available at heaven Agency comm links to that in the cards in the description all the good stuff if you like learning about motion graphics After Effects if you like hearing the sound of my voice subscribe to this channel I hit the subscribe button turn on notifications and if you do all that stuff then when I upload new content you will find it which is that's what we both want right I guess anyway thank you so much for watching like I said if you have troubles reach out to me at ICI Abrams on Twitter hit me up in the comments subscribe to the channel and I will see you around the Internet thank you so much for watching and have a nice day [Music]

Channel: ECAbrams

Views: 217,406

Keywords: adobe after effects, after effects, adobe, after, effects, fx, mograph, motion graphics, motion, graphics, vfx, visual effects, instruction, tutorial, tut, how to, how, to, help, tips, tricks, after effects tutorial, motion graphics tutorial, vfx tutorial, master properties, cc2018, sine wave, wave warp, wavey, wave, hair, cosine

Id: E-d1qj3ed2s

Length: 18min 29sec (1109 seconds)

Published: Sat May 26 2018