Style like a PRO with this hidden technique.

this simple technique can completely transform your animation and most people don't even know about it and that technique is layer Styles and we're going to use them to take our animation from this to this but before we Dive Right into After Effects I want to talk about some pre-production steps because if we just jump in and start adding lay Styles in a wild frenzy everybody get we could spend hours adding removing and tweaking before we get something we like so best practice is to start by designing a style from frame and to get some quality references to inform that style frame but if you're anything like me you've been in a toxic relationship with references when I was trying and struggling to get better I used to think that I shouldn't need references using references was cheating I should be good enough to create my own Styles and awesome shapes without any Source material and I thought that Pros didn't use references well that was all and if you think the same way I'm here to be your motion design therapist to help you resolve your deep-seated issues with references and in fact when I started using references for everything I did my work started improving faster and I was less frustrated with the process so there's a massive tip for you before we've even got to the meat of the tutorial um phrasing so here are a few references I found that had some of the features I was looking for I wanted something that felt a bit more 3D with gradients and a shinier almost bubble like feel but definitely not a bubble because the character was animated to feel more like rubber and that's an important consideration so here is the original and to drop in a Shameless plug the anim is actually something I created when testing out my program the motion practice Quest but more on that later for the new version I decided to go with a dark blue background I rounded The Stroke of the character and added some radial gradients to the floor I added a gradient to the stroke and changed the two colors to a slightly less saturated orange and purple because the original colors weren't working for me on the darker background I also wanted to create a reference for the lighting of the character so I decided to play around with the 3D functionality that illustrator has recently added so with a duplicate of the character u-shape I went up to effect 3D in materials and dropped in an inflate effect I then bumped up the metallic and roughness settings to get something that feels a bit more like rubber then in the lighting tab I changed the rotation of the light and I dropped the ambient light intensity so that it wasn't washing out the shadow so much I added a similar effect to the bottom circle now we're going to get inside after effects to finish off the sty frame cing boom I've gone ahead and set this up already so for starters let's duplicate our main shape twice and hide these for now now on our main shape you'll see we have a gradient applied already however it's being applied across the whole layer and I would prefer if it was applied along the path of the shape this may be fine in most cases but deciding not to settle for mediocrity allows us to learn a bit more about layer Styles so let's start by right clicking our layer going to layer Styles and dropping in a gradient overlay now let's twirl down to layer Styles and open up our gradient overlay options firstly we're going to change the style to angle and if we adjust the angle you'll see something kind of weird to show you what's happening a bit better here is a circle and I'm going to apply the same gradient overlay and change it to Angle now you can get a better sense of what's going on and what changing the angle does and you can do some pretty cool stuff animating this as well have a look at this professional animation for example getting back to our shape let's change the angle to zero edit our gradient by bringing the black side in about halfway so that when we offset the Y value of our gradient like this our gradient looks like it's being applied across the path of the stroke and this is what that would look like on our Circle in case you're a bit confused now we just need to change our colors and we have what we're looking for now there is a downside to this technique so you'll see if I move the layer the gradient moves as well which is great but if we rotate it the gradient does not follow that movement which is not so great and yes I'm aware that there are better ways to do this they don't have this problem but damn it this is a tutorial about L Styles and we're going to do everything using layer Styles so get over moving on let's also add the layer style bevel and emboss and in the settings let's drop the Highlight opacity to zero increase the size to 80 and change the angle to zero now let's change the shadow color to our original purple and a quick little illustration trick here if you change your Shadow Hue to something slightly different to your base color you often get a much more interesting and dynamic result now let's bring our second duplicate back on right click and add the layer style in a glow it's change the color to something like this change the size to about 145 the source to Center the range to about 30 and the blend mode to Overlay now let's twir down the blending options above the Inner Glow and twir down Advanced blending let's solo this layer and now if we change our full opacity to zero you'll see that we've removed everything except for the layer style we can now unsolo and we can also nudge it down and right slightly to align with our reference and light source now let's unhide our third duplicate and once again we're going to add the layer style bevel and emboss then let's drop our shadow opacity to zero because we're going to create a highlight let's increase our size to 80 and increase our angle to a point where the Highlight looks like it's opposite the shadow just over 300 or so should be fine now if we increase the altitude we start to get a bit closer to what we're looking for it can also be helpful to play around with the ratio between the depth and the altitude so if the altitude is a bit lower when we increase the depth there is a bit more blur now we need to go into advanced blending again and reduce the full opacity to zero and then for the right aesthetic let's change the Highlight blending mode to soft light and increase the opacity to 100 now one thing I don't like is that the Highlight is going a bit too high on the right side to be realistic and fit in with the lighting we're referencing so a quick fix is to just delete our top right path point and I just want to show you a really awesome component of the bevel and emboss layer style so if we solo our highlight and start rotating it you'll see that the Highlight maintains the correct lighting direction and this works for the shadow as well and many of the other layer Styles work in the same way how dope is that moving on to our Circle let's just copy and paste our highlights layer style onto it with contrl z and contrl v and then in the advanced blending options we need to bring our full opacity back up to 100 now in the bevel and emboss options let's bring the shadow opacity back up to 80 and then let's apply the same Shadow technique from before starting by changing the shadow to our base purple and let's make it a lot darker this time now we just need to drag our Color Picker over a bit to adjust the Hue and that looks much better finally I think it'll be awesome if the bottom Circle felt a bit more reflective and metallic so a nice way to do that is to make it look like the light is bouncing off the shape above and landing on the bottom Circle so to achieve that we can add a gradient overlay and then edit the gradient colors to match the shape above using using the same orange and purple now we can just change the Y offset to move the gradient up to get what we're after quick and easy and that's our style frame done and I think you know what time it is we've reached the point where I usually ask something of you if you've gotten any value from this video and I often like to apply a joke that fits in with the theme of my previous Jokes which in this case was phrasing so go ahead and smash that like button you dirty dirty dog and we can move on to applying our style to our animation so here is our made comp and here it is with an updated background color and floor gradients and now we can start adding our styling the way I ended up animating this required me to separate the main shape into four different layers all labeled in pink to add our styling let's start by duplicating this first character layer twice now in our previous comp we can select our pink layers and search for layer to open up our layer Styles now let's select and copy the first shapes layer styles with contrl + C and then paste it onto the first layer in our new comp with contrl + V Let's repeat this with the next two layers and voila we have magically styled our character shape the same process would then be repeated for the other pink layers we can also repeat this process with the ball so let's copy and paste the layer Styles the same way like this and now we just need to animate the offset of the gradient overlay so that it comes on when the main shape lands on it and disappears when the main shape falls off like this and this this is the final animation with a few extra bits and buls added for visual appeal I hope you've seen how valuable layer Styles can be and can start experimenting with them yourself because they have so much to offer if you're interested in the project files for this full animation it's available as part of the motion practice quest which is kind of like a motion design workout plan designed to increase your skills and confidence by making practicing easier and more effective so check it out below and of course subscribe for more motion [Music] XP

Channel: MotionXP

Views: 47,006

Keywords: after effects layer style, after effects styling, after effects style, after effects style tutorial, after effects, motion design, motion design tutorial, how to after effects, after effects tutorial, after effects tips, motion design tips, animation tips, animation tips and tricks, mograph, motionXP

Id: Ygr-p8231rM

Length: 9min 13sec (553 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 24 2023