What's up? Joey here at School of Motion bringing you
Day 15 of the 30 Days of After Effects. Today, I'm going to talk about precomps. Now, if you've used After Effects for more
than a week, you probably know about precomposing, but in this lesson, I wanna reinforce the
power of precomps, and a good way of doing that, I've found, is to show just how quickly
you can build very, very complex animations that really don't take that much work and
don't have very many key frames, But actually, look really cool and complicated. I'm hoping that along the way, you're gonna
pick up some tricks about working with precomps. Now, don't forget to sign up for a free student
account so you can grab the project files from this lesson as well as assets from any
other lesson on School of Motion. Now, let's hop in and make something cool. So let's talk about precomps, and one thing
I wanted to say about precomps is that when I was starting out with After Effects, they
sort of freaked me out, because you know, you do all this work and then you precomp
it, and all of a sudden you can't see your work anymore, and it feels like you're hiding
key frames from yourself, and God forbid you wanna go in and tweak something. Now it's kind of hidden and it's kind of... It makes it trickier, and you have to manage
it. This is actually something After Effects artists
have been complaining about for years, is the fact that you can't sort of see your key
frames while they're in a precomp. Very easily, anyway. So, what I wanna show you is some of the really,
really, really, cool things you can do with precomps. This is a little bit more of a beginner tutorial,
but I'm just gonna keep pushing and pushing and pushing the precomps until you get something
that looks really, really complicated like this, and hopefully what I'll show you guys
is that this is actually really easy to make. It's shockingly easy. So, alright. So let's just hop in and get started, and
let's talk about precomps. So I'm gonna make a comp. A 1920 by 1080. Alright, and I'm just gonna call this Square,
okay? Alright, so first thing I wanna do is just
animate something really simple, alright? I'm gonna turn on my guides here by hitting
the apostrophe, so I kind of make sure I have things in the center where they need to be,
and I'm just gonna make a square. So, an easy way to make a square and make
sure it's in the middle of your comp is go to your Shape Layer tool here, grab a Rectangle
tool, and just double-click that button. And what that'll do is it'll make a shape
layer that's right in the middle of your comp, and then you could come into the Shape Layer
settings here and twirl open the rectangle and the rectangle path, and then you can unlock
the size property so the width and the height aren't linked anymore, and just make the width
and the height the same, and then you can scale that down, and now you have a perfect
square right in the middle of your comp. You could do the same thing with a circle,
too. It's pretty useful to make sure that if you
rotate this thing or you do anything to it, it's right in the middle. And what I wanna do, let me rename this Square. And I don't want a fill on it. I do want a stroke, so what I'm gonna do is
maybe have like a two-pixel stroke, and I think I had some nice kind of pink color in
there, so let's get rid of the fill. A quick way to do that is you can click on
the word Fill, if you have this selected. It brings up this little box, and then you
can just hit this guy, and now it gets rid of the fill. It's kind of a neat little shortcut. Okay, so now we have our square, and let's
just do a simple little animation with it, okay? So, you know, here's a simple thing. We'll have it start scaled at zero, and then
we'll go forward a second and we'll have it go up to 100, okay? And of course, we can't just leave it like
that. We have to Easy Ease the key frames, go into
the Curves Editor and kind of give it some character, and what I did in the demo, this
is something that I'm not sure I've shown you guys before, but it's a pretty cool key
framing technique. You know, if I really want this thing to shoot
up and then slow down at the end, this is the shape of the curve you wanna create, but
if I really want that to be accentuated, then what you can do is kind of go to the halfway
mark, hold the Command button on a Mac. On a PC, it's gonna be Control or Alt. I haven't used a PC in a long time, so I'm
sorry, I don't actually know what button you push. But you push that button, whatever it is,
and you click here on the curve, and now you have an extra key frame and you can not do
that. You can just kinda pull it up like this, okay? And you still want it to be below this key
frame, but what you're doing is you're really giving yourself an extra handle on that curve
to bend the crap out of it. And a cool little shortcut is you can now
select that key frame, and you can click this button right here, which basically makes this
bezier curve automatically try to smooth itself out. So I click that. It smooths it out a little bit. And then I can just sort of grab this handle
and pull it, you know, to shape it how I want. So you can see now, I've got this really hard
bend and then it really takes a long time to flatten out, and so this is what that looks
like, okay? And then if I want to, I could even play with
the timing of that, and have it shoot up and then... It's kind of nice, and maybe we'll just pull
this down a little bit. Cool, so you get this nice burst and then
a long ease, which is cool. On top of that, why don't we have it rotate
a little bit, so I'm gonna put a rotation key frame here. Here's a cool trick. If I wanna see where my scale key frames are,
but I wanna work on my rotation curve, so I'm just gonna click this little button just
to the left of the scale property. It looks like a little graph. If you click that, it'll keep that scale property
on the graph for you. And so now I can see the rotation and the
scale at the same time, so I can line up key frames if I want. So I want that square to end at zero degrees,
but maybe here, I want it to be rotated 90 degrees backwards that way. And then, you know, I normally don't like
to just kind of do linear moves like this. I always like to add a little character to
it, so I'm just gonna Easy Ease these key frames real quick. And I'm gonna go backwards. Let's go backwards three frames. Put a rotation key frame there, and so that
way, now, it can sort of anticipate a little bit, okay? That's what it's doing when it kind of dips
this way first. It's anticipating that it's gonna go up this
way, and of course, when it lands, I'm gonna add another key frame here. I'm holding Command and clicking. And I'm just gonna have it overshoot a little
bit. Alright, and you know, hopefully, if you guys
have watched enough tutorials, this shape is starting to become very familiar to you,
because I do it all the time. Cool, so now I've got this cool little scaling
up square, and you know, the animation's kind of nice, and maybe just so it's not, you know,
it's a little bit more random, why don't I speed up the rotation a little bit. So I'm gonna hold Option. Just scale those key frames a little bit. Remember, you gotta hold Option, grab the
last key frame. And then I'm gonna offset it a few frames. Just so it's not happening so much in sync. Alright, so that's kind of cool, and that
anticipation move is bugging me. It's a little bit stiff, so I'm just gonna
adjust that a little bit. That's better. Subtleties, people. They make a difference. So that's cool. Let's say we love that. So now, you know, what can we do with this
that maybe's a little tricky? Well, what's cool is since I animated it in
the middle, if I precomposed it, I can do a lot of cool stuff with it. Let's precomp this. So, Shift + Command + C, and I'm gonna start
numbering these, and this is gonna come in handy in a little bit, okay? So I'm gonna call this 01_SquarePC, and I'm
gonna make sure... It doesn't give me an option in this case,
but sometimes, depending on what you're doing, this option will be available to you, and
for what we're about to do, you need to make sure you're moving all the attributes of your
animated object into the new comp. So now what I wanna do is I want to actually
mask out this layer, but I want it to be masked out perfectly, sort of like, I wanna mask
it out so I basically have a quadrant of it, right? Like a quarter of it. So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna put a guide
right in the middle here, like this, vertically, and I'm gonna zoom in so I can make sure that
it's as close to perfect as possible. Okay, and then I'm gonna do the same thing
on the horizontal. Gonna grab one of these guides. If you guys don't see the ruler, Command +
R turns that on and off, and then you can grab a guide right out of there. Cool, so now I've got two guides there, and
if I go up to my View menu, you'll see I have Snap to Guides turned on. Let me turn off my Title Save here. Apostrophe key turns that off, and what I'm
gonna do is select this layer. I'm gonna grab my mask tool, and I'm just
gonna start up here, and you'll see that when I get close to these guides, it doesn't snap,
and why is it not snapping? 'Cause I don't have Snap to Guides turned
on. I thought I did, and I didn't, but now I have
it turned on, and it snapped. See, that snaps right on there. So now, that mask is perfectly lined up right
in the middle of that layer. So now I can turn the guides off, and the
hotkey for that is Command + Semicolon. I know it's a weird one. Or you can just go View and hit this. Show Guides turns it on and off. Now, why did I just do that? So, if you look at this... Let me scale this a little bit. If you look at this, now I've got just a quarter
of the animation I just did, and what's cool is, what I can do is I can take this layer
here and I can duplicate it. I'm gonna hit S to open the scale, and I'm
gonna flip it negative 100, just like that. And so now, you can see that it does a much
more interesting thing that actually would not be very easy to create in a different
way. It's like a little mini-kaleidoscope effect,
okay? Cool, and so now, I'm gonna take these. I'm gonna precomp them, and I'm gonna say
02_SquaresPath. Now, a quick note. The reason I'm starting to number these is
because, I think when I did the demo, I ended up with 12 layers of these things, and you
know, once you've got it built out, what's fun is going back into the earlier layers
and tweaking things and if you don't label these things in a way where it's easy to figure
out what order things were created in, it's gonna be very hard to know where to dive into. Alright, so now that I've duplicated that,
or sorry, precomped that, I'm gonna duplicate it. Hit S, and now I'm gonna do negative 100 scale
on the horizontal, so now I get this, okay? So what's awesome is I've got this really
neat looking kind of animation here, right? And what's cool is, because I've got this
nested setup, I could just go back into this very first precomp here, and let's say I just
wanted to duplicate that square. So just grab it, duplicate it. There we go. And maybe scale this one down a little bit,
so I don't wanna use the scale property, 'cause I've got key frames on that, so what I'm gonna
do is hit U twice. Double tap U, and that will bring up all the
properties that changed, and so now I can just actually shrink the rectangle down. The benefit of doing it this way is it doesn't
shrink the stroke. The stroke is still the same thickness. Maybe we make the stroke a different color. Maybe we kind of make it like a teal color,
cool? And then, let's offset that a couple frames. Maybe four frames. Okay, so now you get something like this,
and then, if we look at the... Oh, that's my final. If we look at the, you know, sort of the end
result of what we've made, now you get something like this, alright? And it's starting to get kind of cool. Now, what happens if I take these and I precomp
them? Right, so now this is 03_Squares, and you
don't really have to be too creative. As long as you have a number on there, you
know, squares again. As long as you have a number on there and
you can sort of look here and say, oh, I know this is the first one, then that's all that's
important. So now, I can duplicate this, and what if
I rotated this, 45 degrees, right? So now you get like this kind of crazy, bouncy,
sacred geometry-looking thing, right? And now I'm thinking, you know what? The middle of this looks a little bit empty,
so maybe what I do is we go back into the initial square here, and we need to just fill
in this middle section a little bit, okay? Now, what are some cool ways we could do that? What if we did this, alright? So, what if we take a square, right? Let me just double-tap this real quick, just
so I can make sure, and I'm gonna name this little square. Double-tap it to make sure that I get a shape
layer with the anchor point right in the middle. I don't want a stroke on this one, so I'm
gonna set the stroke to zero, but I do want a fill, so I'm gonna click the Fill button
and click this solid color, and I don't want that color. Maybe I want like kind of a grayish color. I'm gonna double-tap U to bring up the rectangle
path properties and make that into a perfect square, and then I'm gonna scale that square
way down like this. There we go, okay. And I'm gonna try and do this a little differently
than the demo for you guys, just so it's not exactly the same. So I'm gonna make a little square here, and
what I'm gonna do... So, here's what I wanna point out to you guys
before I go any further. What I wanna do is, I wanna kind of remind
myself which piece of this comp that I'm working in actually gets used, okay? So, a cool little keyboard thing you can do,
if you're in a precomp and you know that this comp is used somewhere else, but you can't
remember which comp, you can hit the Tab key, and it's Tab key in Creative Cloud 13 and
14. It's a different key, I forget which key. I think it's the Shift key if you're in Adobe
CS 6, so they actually changed that key. But, in an Adobe CC, it's Tab. It shows you the current comp, SquarePC, and
then it shows you the next comp that this is being used in. And if it's being used in more than one comp,
it'll show you more than one option here. So now I can just click this and it will take
me there. And what I can do is I can click one of these
and I can see, okay. It's using the top right kind of portion of
that comp. So, what I could do is, I could take that
little square and maybe, let me just nudge it up five and over five. I was holding Shift and using the arrow keys
there. Let me do like three more. Okay, so it's kind of in the corner of the
cube like that, and what I wanna do is I'm gonna put a position key frame here, and then
I'm gonna jump back 10 frames, and I'm gonna move this. So it actually moves back through the origin
like this. And the reason I'm doing that is because,
if you remember, the precomp, this comp here, we're only actually gonna end up seeing the
top right piece of it, 'cause we masked it, so when this cube is here, it's actually gonna
be hidden in the final result, and what it's gonna do is it's gonna look like it kind of
comes out of the middle. And let me just add a little bit of overshoot
to this, too. So, what I need to do first, to make this
easier, is Control + Click Opposition and Separate Dimensions, and then let me go forward
maybe three frames. Put key frames here, go back here, and then
this is gonna be a little bit trickier, 'cause this is a diagonal move. But I'm sort of moving it past its end point,
and then we will just grab these. We'll go into Graph Editor. I'm still seeing my scale key frames here,
so I need to make sure I turn off that little graph button on the scale of these two so
I don't see it anymore, and now I can select both of these properties. Select all the key frames, hit F9, Easy Ease
them. I'm gonna hit the plus key to zoom in here. The plus and minus key on the top row of your
keyboard, the number pad, that zooms in and out on your animation curve editor, and so
now I can do what I always like to do and just sort of stretch out the curves here. Make this a little bit funkier, right? There we go. Okay, and that is awful. That should be moving a lot faster, and I
don't like the timing. I hate this, you guys. I hate it. So, these things rotate up, and maybe right
about there, that's where this thing starts to shoot out, and I want it to happen fast,
so maybe like five frames? Yeah, let's see what that one feels like. There we go. Cool, alright. So now, if I hit that Tab key and we go up
to SquaresHalf, and I hit Tab again, I go up to this one. I hit Tab again, you see how I can keep following
it sort of down the line to the end, right? And now, this is what we have, okay? And what would be cool, too, is if I offset
maybe this top copy, right? So it's like a little bit, you know, there's
like a little bit of a springiness to it. And what's amazing, and I'm gonna keep harping
on this, 'cause this is why I think precomps are so cool and so useful and fun to play
with and you shouldn't be afraid of them, is look, there's not a lot going on here. That's really it. Those are our key frames, right? But if you look at the end result... Let me close this so I quit opening in Assets. Now, if you look at that, look how complicated
that looks. It didn't really take that much. Alright, so now, let's just keep going, okay? So now, I'm gonna precomp that 04, and this
is gonna be called SacredGeo, because sacred geometry is so hot right now. So let's duplicate that, and let's shrink
a copy of it down like that, and maybe, I don't know, maybe rotate that copy 45 degrees,
and let's see what that looks like. It's pretty interesting. And we're gonna offcourse, offset that inner
copy a few frames so you get this crazy looking thing like that. That is pretty neat. Okay, cool. And then, why don't we go back to the very
first precomp here, and why don't we actually allow this inner square to get filled in by
the end of this animation. So what I did to do that on the demo is... So, here's my inner square. Let me rename this InnerSquare. And what I'm gonna do is, let's see, right
about there I want it to sort of start flashing and filling in. So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna duplicate
the inner square, but I'm gonna call this -Fill. InnerSquare-Fill. Oops, -Fill. I'm gonna hit U. I'm gonna get rid of all the key frames on
it, and I'm just gonna parent it to this one in case I change this one. This one will still move with it, and what
I'm gonna do is go up here, set the stroke to zero, turn the fill on to a solid color,
and let's pick like kind of in that teal zone, but then we'll make it not 100%. We'll make it maybe 20%, okay? And what we'll do is we'll figure out where
do we want that to start showing up. Maybe here? Cool? And I'm gonna put a key frame on the opacity. I'm gonna hold Option and Command and click
the key frame, so now it's a whole key frame. Go forward a couple frames and set that to
zero. And so then what I'll do is I'll just sort
of go forward a couple frames, copy both of these, and then I'll just sort of randomly
spread them out like this, and what I'm doing is, by kind of randomizing the time of these,
I'm kind of creating a little flicker, and then at the end, I wanna make sure that it
does go back to 20%. So now if we play that, see, you get like
a little kind of flashing flicker. And maybe that could start a little bit sooner,
and maybe these don't need to be so far apart, and you can sort of play with the timing of
that. Cool. Okay, and now, let's go to our end result
and see what we got. And look how much more complicated that made
it look, and there's like this crazy flickering and flashing going on and there's really nothing
to it. That was pretty easy. Another trick I like to do, because I've got
these precomped this way, so this top copy here, and I'm not doing a good job of naming
these things, but this is the InnerCopy, right? And that is on the top, and so we're gonna
kinda see that over this one, which is gonna be helpful, 'cause what I wanna do is go to
the Color Correction effects, add a hue and saturation effect, and I can just kind of
roll the hue around. If I want, I could just make it 180 degrees
and now it's sort of the complete opposite. You can see now I've got all this color variation
happening, too, which is cool. Awesome. Alright, well, why don't we just keep going? So let's precomp these, as you do. So now we're at 05. We'll call this CrazyGeo. Now what I wanna do is I wanna scale this
down a little bit, and I wanna have some copies of it, so what I'm gonna do... Let's think about this for a minute. Let's turn on our guides. So I'm gonna hit apostrophe, and I'm gonna
duplicate, and I'm just gonna move one over, duplicate, move one over maybe one more. Okay, so we got three copies on this side,
and then I'm just gonna go back to this middle one here, and I'm gonna duplicate it again. Duplicate it again. You can see I'm being very imprecise here,
but that's okay. So then, what I wanna do is I wanna look at
these two. This copy and this copy. Let me zoom in here. And what I wanna do... By the way, period and comma zoom in and out
of your comp. Very handy. I'm gonna line up this little point here with
Title Safe. Then, I'm gonna go over to this side and I'm
gonna grab this one and I'm gonna line that point up with... And sorry, that's Action Safe. That's not Title Safe. If you guys don't know about Action Safe and
Title Safe, maybe that's another topic for another day, but all I'm doing is I'm using
this outer line, which is Action Safe, just as a guide to make sure that the beginning
and the end of this chain are sort of in exactly the same spot onscreen, just on the opposite
side. The reason I'm doing that is so now I can
select them all. I have my Align menu open here. If you don't see that, I go up to Window and
pick Align, and I'm gonna distribute the layers with their vertical axis like this, and so
now I've got everything... I still have a perfectly centered composition,
but these are all distributed evenly, right? And so if I play this, you now get this crazy
thing like this, and what I like to do whenever I have things that look the same but they're
all in a row like this is I like to offset them. Now, I kind of did this a silly way, and so
it's not gonna be as easy. It would be easier if I knew that the left-most
layer was the top one and the right-most layer was this one, but I didn't set it up that
way. So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna click this
layer. I know that this is the left-most layer. So that's gonna be... Let's think about this. Why don't we have the middle one open up and
then it will expand outwards. Okay, so where's the middle one? If I'm not sure, what I'm gonna do is just
select any layer. I'm gonna hold Command and use the up and
down arrow keys, and you can see that it selects the layer above and below whichever one I
have selected, and so all I gotta do is find the middle one, right? Let's see, there it is. There's the middle one, so that's gonna be
the first one to animate on. Now, let's go forward two frames. Actually, let's go to the end here so we can
actually see these things. What I wanna do is offset each of these two
frames, so now I need to figure out which layer is this one and this one. Alright, so there's one. So I'm gonna move that forward two frames,
which is Option Page Down twice. See, just nudges that layer two frames forward,
and then I can find on the other side, it's that one. Let's nudge that two frames forward. Now I need the next one in the line, so let's
find that one. There it is on the right side. That one's gonna be four frames forward. So, one, two, three, four. And then on this side. There it is. One, two, three, four. And then, the last ones in line, right? One, two, three, four, five, six, and let's
find that last one on the right side. There it it. One, two, three, four, five, six. So now, if we play this, you see how it's
sort of like this nice kind of bursting open thing. And now I could even sort of line these up
like this so that it's a little bit easier to see which ones go together, 'cause I feel
like the offset's nice, but it's not really as much as I'd like, so I'm gonna offset it
another two frames each. So I'm gonna grab these two and go two frames
forward. Four frames forward. Six frames forward. Cool, now you get this crazy... Look at that. It's great. What are we gonna do with this? We're gonna precomp this. Let's precomp it. So now, look, we're up to 06 already. So this is 06. We'll call it GeoCascade. Sure, why not. Cool, so now, why don't we... Why don't we have this whole thing move, right,
so it animates on and then why don't we have the whole thing rotate, so I'm gonna have
it anticipate, and then let's go 10 frames forward. Shift Page Down jumps forward 10 frame, and
let's have it rotate, and what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna have it rotate to 45 degrees,
so I'm gonna have it overshoot a little bit and then four frames, fall back to 45 degrees. Cool? I'll Easy Ease those, hop into the Graph Editor,
do a quick little yanky here. Just yank it. A yanky. That doesn't sound right. Don't use that term. Don't use that term, everybody. Cool. Alright, and I like the way that's working,
but I want that rotation to happen a little faster and I want it to start earlier, too. So it's sort of like as this thing's about
to finish opening, it's starting to rotate. There we go. Cool. Alright, and now, what do you think we're
gonna do? We are going to grab this and we're gonna
precomp it and this is gonna be 07_GeoRotate. And then, you can just duplicate it, and on
this copy, just rotate it 45 degrees. Or sorry, 90 degrees. Or 45 degrees, whatever you want, right? But maybe this one is offset a couple of frames
so you get a little bit of that lag to it. That's pretty cool. I like that. Alright, now you've seen, you're getting a
little bit of cut-off edge here. If you see that. And so, let's think about how we might be
able to fix that. Let's see what we could do. What if... Well, first, I'm gonna grab both of these
and I'm gonna precomp them. So this will be 08, we'll call this GeoCross. And let me fit this, and so maybe what I'll
do is I'll just scoot this whole thing over like this. And then I'll duplicate it. And I'll scoot this whole thing over, and
what I'm gonna try to do is line these up with each other, like this. Now, I want this to be kind of in the middle,
'cause it's really just kind of in this weird spot right now. So I'm gonna grab both of these and what I'm
gonna do is I'm gonna hit Command + Semicolon. If you remember, this square comp that we've
been in, we've been in this comp the whole time, so our guides are still there. Let me turn off the Title Safe. And so what I can do is, with those guides
on, I can kind of zoom in here and grab both of these, and I can make sure that I line
up the center point with the guide. Turn those guides off, and let's see what
that looks like now. So, it looks cool except where it overlaps
in the middle there, and so let me see if I can sort of maybe help that a little bit,
'cause I don't really like the overlap as much. But it is kind of interesting, what it's doing. Look at that. And then it ends up lining up with itself,
which is cool. You know what, actually, it doesn't bother
me too much. There's so much going on that it's just sort
of... I'm okay kind of letting it go. Alright, so now we've got this crazy, crazy
looking thing, and so far, I don't know, we maybe have a dozen key frames in total. There's just not a lot going on, but with
precomping, look how quickly it gets crazy. Let's precomp this. Let's call this 09_GeoMerge. I dunno, I'm just making stuff up now, and
let's try this, too. There's a neat little trick, and sometimes
it works, sometimes it doesn't, but let's try it. I'm not sure how well it's gonna work in this
case, but I'm gonna scale this down, and actually, I'm not gonna scale it down. I'm gonna make it a 3D layer. And I'm gonna just push it back in Z space,
like this. And then, I'm gonna put an effect on it. Stylize, it's called Repetile. CC Repetile, there it is. This comes with After Effects, and what it
does is it basically repeats your image for you, but there's a lot of different ways you
can do it. By default, it repeats, so it literally just
sort of, it takes the left side of this and it starts over. You can switch the tiling to Unfold, and then
what it does is it actually mirrors the image on the right side, and then I can also do
it on the top, and on the left, and on the bottom, and depending on what you have, look
at that. That's nuts. Depending on what you have, you can get away
with kind of just cloning essentially your comp, and making it bigger really easily. So that's cool. So the reason I pushed that back in Z space
was so that I could duplicate it and have a closer copy of it. So, we got this. Cool? Let's hit the transparency down a little bit,
and then we'll duplicate it. Turn the transparency all the way back up,
and let's lose the Repetile now. We don't need it, and let's leave it as a
3D layer, but put the Z value back at zero. And let's have the background, which is, remember,
this is the background layer? I'm actually gonna name it for myself. This background layer, let's have this start
maybe 10 frames before the foreground does. And we can up the opacity, 'cause it's pretty
hard to see. There we go. Cool, it's pretty interesting. Alright, and now I feel like the middle of
this is just screaming for something, right? So, what would be cool is if one of these
cool sacred geometry things could be really big right there in the middle. Why don't we do this? What I can do is I can just double-click these
precomps and kinda keep diving lower and lower and lower into it until I find 05_CrazyGeo
is the comp that has that in it, okay? So now I can hop back here and I can just
grab 05_CrazyGeo, and look at that. Right, and we can offset that, so maybe we'll
just sort of offset these layers a little bit. Maybe that could start a little bit later. There we go. Cool. Alright, so let's preview this. And I think as far as making crazy, repetitive
layers goes, I think I've shown you guys enough. If you look here, we've got nine precomp layers,
so we're 10 layers deep of just sort of tweaking and, you know, just offsetting things, and
scaling and copying layers, and really everything, remember, is based on this. This little thing, when you go through the
trouble to precomp everything and just tweak a few things, now you get this insane looking
kaleidoscope thing. And because, you know, this whole thing is
now just three layers in this kind of main comp, it's really easy to add hue saturation
effects. Offset the saturation of this one, or sorry,
offset the hue of this one a little bit. Get a warmer color like that, so now you can
sort of start working on your comp a little bit. And then, the next layer of craziness as you
precomp all this, and now, we're up to 10, and we're gonna call this... I dunno, that was GeoMerge. Why don't we call this Composite, 'cause now
we'll actually start compositing it. And what you could do is you could duplicate
it. You could add a fast blur to it. That's kind of my go-to thing. Add a fast blur, set this to Add mode. Play with the opacity a little bit. And now you've got a nice glow on it. But now, because this is all precomped, you
can sort of decide, okay, what other things do I want here, right? And in the demo, one of the things I did was
I went into, you know... I'm sort of just kind of walking through these
here. Look at that. Okay, that's cool. So, what if, in this precomp here, I add like
a little glitch, right? And the way I did that... Let me make a new layer here. I'm gonna make it the comp size. I'm gonna make it an adjustment layer and
we'll just call this Glitch. There are a million ways to make glitches
in After Effects. I'm just gonna do this kind of a quirky way
that I like to do it. I'm gonna use the Distort Magnify effect,
and what you could do is you can crank the size of the magnification effect up, like
this, okay, so now you can actually see the whole layer, and if I move this point around
you can kind of see that it acts almost like a magnifying glass. Kind of shifts things around. And this edge, it's making like a round edge,
which I don't want, so I'm gonna change the shape to square. And I'll change the blending mode to Add,
and maybe the opacity, I'll turn down a little bit, like this. And so now what I'm gonna do, I'm gonna make
this adjustment layer start right here. A good hotkey for that. The left and right bracket, they actually
move the endpoint and the outpoint. Or sorry, they actually move the layer, so
that the endpoint is where your play head is, or the outpoint, depending on which bracket
you hit, and what I'm gonna do is, I'm gonna put a key frame on this center property, so
let's hit U to bring that up. I'm gonna make that a whole key frame, so
Command + Option, click it. Go forward two frames, and then I'm just gonna
move it. Somewhere else. I'm gonna go forward two frames. I'm gonna move it somewhere else. Maybe like there, okay? Then I'm gonna go forward one frame and I'm
gonna hit Option + right bracket, and all that's gonna do is it's gonna trim that layer
for me. And so now, we get this little thing like
that. And what's cool is because it's on an adjustment
layer, I can just move it wherever I want it, right? And then, maybe have it happen again. I'll just duplicate the layer and have it
start here. And so now you get two little kind of glitches
happening. And it's really easy to move them around wherever
you want. Let's scoot this one back a little bit to
maybe there. Cool, that was easy. And then, let's go all the way to our final
comp and let's see what the effect of that was, and you can see, it just kind of, it
adds like a little, just crazy, jittery, computery thing to it. Now, there's a lot of... There's some issues with the composition here
in terms of where my eye is going and stuff like that, and the good thing is, that's all
pretty easy to fix now, because I have set this up with precomps, right? I don't have 50 layers I have to deal with
at the same time. I only have three. One problem I'm having is that this layer
here, if I solo it, right? This layer? It's drawing attention away from this big
middle one. So what I might do is just, I'm gonna grab
my Ellipse Tool, and I'm just gonna put a mask on it like this, and I'm gonna feather
that mask, so you do see the edges, and then I'll just turn the opacity down a little bit,
too. And actually, I'm not gonna turn the opacity
down. What I'm gonna do, I have this hue saturation
effect on there, and I'm just gonna turn the lightness down a little bit, just like that. And then this background one, I'm actually
gonna... Oopsie daisy. Let's go back here. On the background, I'm gonna turn the opacity
down a little bit more. There we go. And then we'll go to the end here, and now
we can see. There we go. That's a little bit better. A little bit easier to look at. Cool. The other thing, you know, I did some other
stuff in the demo. I added like a little camera move to it. That's why I pushed the background back in
Z space, so I could actually add a camera, and let's just do a simple little move here. Put a key frame on position. Put a key frame on zero rotation. We'll go to the end here and we'll kind of
zoom in a little bit, and you can see that one problem is this main piece here is not
a 3D layer, so let's fix that, and then we'll also have this rotate a little bit. Cool. And why don't we, since this is now a 3D layer,
why don't we actually bring this forward, closer to the camera. But then, shrink it down so it's the right
size. And so now, you've got this cool, kind of
3D feel to it, and if we go back to the final comp, you've got your glow and all this stuff,
and we haven't even color corrected it yet. Of course, another thing that I kind of just
do a lot, probably I overdo it, is I'll add an adjustment layer, like this. And I like, I love, actually, the Optics Compensation
effect. Reverse lens distortion, just crank that up
a little bit, and it just gives you a little bit of that, you know, the edges kind of warping
a little bit. It kind of helps it feel a little bit more
3D, which is kind of nice. I mean, gosh, I haven't even put a vignette
on this thing yet, but you know, the point I was trying to make this tutorial is look
at the final comp. It's three layers, and it looks like there's
just a ton of stuff going on, but key frame-wise, there's not. There's really not that many key frames to
this thing, and it's just all precomping and duplicating layers and creating these neat,
unique patterns. So, I hope you guys like this tutorial, and
I hope that if you're a beginner, I hope maybe some of the things you learned here will help
you navigate precomps a little bit better. Using the Tab key and kind of naming your
precomps so it's easy to find out where you came from, and for those of you that are a
little bit more advanced, it's not that often in a paying job that you actually get asked
to do something like this, and so, I don't know, I find that a lot of artists actually
haven't done something like this before, so if you haven't, just do it. Just try it. I mean, it's pretty amazing. This looks super busy. It's crazy how busy this looks with such a
little, such a tiny little seed we planted to make all that stuff. So, anyway, I hope this was helpful. I hope you guys dug it, and thank you guys
so much. I really appreciate it, and I'll see you guys
next time. Thank you so much for hanging around and watching
this video. I hope you learned something new about how
powerful precomps can be, and we would love to hear from you if you use this technique
on a project, so give us a shout on Twitter, @SchoolOfMotion, and show us your work. Also, if you learned something valuable from
this video, please share it around. It really helps us spread the word about School
of Motion, and we really appreciate it. So, thank you for taking the time to hang
out, and I will see you on Day 16.
