The Easiest Way to Animate a Map in After Effects 2023 (NO PLUGINS)

[Music] foreign I'm going to break this down step by step and for the first step we need to find a high resolution map now I like to get maps over here at davidromsey.com they have a huge collection and if you want to follow along with this tutorial and use the same map that I'm using I'll share a link to this map down in the video description and if you actually want to download my project files you can get those over on my patreon page Link in the video description as well once you come over here click on the export button and you can get a really high resolution version right here now when you're working with map animations obviously the higher the resolution the further in you'll be able to zoom in on your map and retain the quality of the image so I brought my map into a new After Effects project here and I'm going to create a new composition by clicking on this little button down here and I'm going to use the 1920x1080 24 frames per second HD preset with a duration of six seconds and I'll call it map animation and now I can grab the map and bring it down here into the composition now to resize this really quickly I like to right click and then go to transform fit to comp with and that's going to shrink get down here I'll hit s for scale and just scale it up ever so slightly and now I can drag it down and get it positioned to where I want it to be okay now this is a very simple rig really the meat of it consists of three layers you have your map and we're going to have a camera and an animation controller which is essentially a null object now the reason we're going to use an animation controller null object is so we can pivot we could do like pitch and bearing moves from the null object as compared to animating by moving the anchor point of this layer it's just a better workflow I found so I'm going to go over here to layer select new null object right click and then rename it Call It Animation controller and now I will go to layer new camera and I like to make sure you have type set to two node and then for preset I like to use 50 millimeter make sure you have both enable depth of field and lock to zoom selected click OK and now it's going to give you this warning here that says camera and lights do not affect 2D layers so select a layer and choose layer 3D layer from the menu but if you go to this column here you can actually toggle 3D on for both of these right here if you can't see this simply toggle switches and modes and if you can't see this you can click the buttons down here for the animation controller to get this rigged up properly we want this to be placed over the area we want to focus on so as you saw in the sample animation we're doing this flying zoom in move to This Little Critter over here so I want that to be my focal point so I'm going to position I'm going to zoom in on my composition here just by scroll wheeling up and I want to position this right over this Critter here now the Anchor Point of my null object is right here you can see it with this widget and once I get that in place what I can do is parent my map to my animation controller now that means as I move this around it's going to move the map around now it's really important and it makes life easier that I do everything in this order if we do some of these things out of order it can really make it a little little bit more difficult and sometimes you might need to disconnect the parent or the link and then move things again so just be aware of that now I'm not going to be moving the map too much after this so what I'll do is I'll go ahead and lock this off in fact if you want to rename it just so it's a bit easier to see what's going on here you can okay and that really is the rig here all we need to do now is animate it and the only other layers you're going to add is if you want to stylize something so we'll throw an adjustment layer over it a little bit later and we can start to throw effects on it and give it a different a little bit of a different look now for the animation I want to have a four second fly in to This Little Critter here this is going to be my starting point so I can go ahead and add keyframes to the parameters I want to change right here right at the I have my playhead at the beginning so now I just need to figure out what parameters I want to animate so I'm going to open up the animation controller and I'll open up the transformation properties now I like to use just four basic parameters I like to animate the position we're also going to be animating the scale which will be our Zoom for rotation you could mess with orientation and to do that you can simply drag the move the widget around but I like to have tighter control over this because you notice this is all linked together you have X Y and Z I don't like to play with those all with the widget while it is nice to do the widget you can find a workflow like that I find that it's much easier just to use x and z rotation so X rotation if you move this you're going to see this is basically the pitch of your map Z rotation is going to be the bearing change so if you're zoomed way in it's a little bit easier to just play with those two parameters so I'm going to keyframe both of those now I'll grab the layer I'm going to hit the U key now we have these parameters isolated here and they're keyframed for their initial position now it's as simple as going to the four second Mark and grab the animation controller and simply move it over here and start to scale it up so I can do this by grabbing the null right here so we'll scale this way up here and now I can start to change the pivot and change the bearing as well so you can mess with all of the parameters right here or you can use a combination of this null control here now you can also use guides if you want to snap this to guides and make sure it's perfectly centered up right here or you can simply type in the parameters I know it's 960 by 540 I think and now just find the final position you want it to be in here we'll do something like negative 55. once we find this we can make adjustments to the camera alright so now we actually have an animation here flies in but it is quite linear so I'm going to go grab all the keyframes I'll go to animation keyframe assistant and I'll turn on easy ease and now I can grab this here the graph editor grab all the keyframes and then just make a quick speed graph change if your graph looks different click down here and select edit speed graph and I'll turn this back off and this will give you a little bit of a smoother animation and you can even grab the x and z rotation and offset those a little bit if you don't want everything to be very uniform and happening at the same time so this will happen a little bit later in the animation and now we want to make some camera adjustments we turned on depth of field but it's not looking very strong if you look down here at the edge this is all still very much in sharp Focus so to blur this out a little bit I'm going to go double click on the camera and then down here to give it a more shallow depth of field you play with the f-stop so bring the f-stop to something like one and you can see it's adding a little bit here but it's very hard to tell so what you can do is you can make sure you have this preview selected and then grab the blur level and just crank this up that was first going to show you where your field of view is your your depth of field your focal basically this is your focus distance so we'll bring the blur level to maybe 150 something like that so you can you know play with this to get it exactly how you want it alright so the animation is pretty much complete now it's just a matter of adding an adjustment layer I can go to layer new adjustment layer and add any effects I want right here to this adjustment layer so let's say we want to add a vignette I'm going to go to window effects and presets and I can click here and I can add whatever effects I want to I'm going to add a noisy vignette right here to give it a little bit more fall off and if you want to change the frame rate you can add a posterize time here and then crank this down if you want and as a final step I'm going to turn on motion blur and now this thing is ready to render out I'll go to composition add to render queue and then in the render queue output module I'm going to grab h.264 right here and then I'm going to select a location and then we're ready to rock and roll big shout out to my tier 3 patrons Tyson the keymaster Mike and Sandra over on YouTube at flimmy plus one Ryan Josh and Alex thank you all so much for making this video possible

Channel: Boone Loves Video

Views: 21,675

Keywords: boone loves video, boone, adobe after effects tutorial, map animation, how to animate a map in adobe after effects 2023, map animation after effects, easiest way to animate a map in after effects, after effects no plugins, map animation after effects no plugins

Id: qlu3BeJ7CRg

Length: 8min 0sec (480 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 12 2023