Top 10 After Effects Expressions for Amazing Motion Design

this video is brought to you by Squarespace the best place to easily build a website portfolio an online store an all-in-one platform to give you the best design to showcase your work [Music] these are the expressions I found most useful in After Effects I'm linking them all in a Google Doc in the description number one is maintain strength with using strokes in your animations this expression is a must I first got this from Adam Plouffe who has an extensive blog post about this expression it's a really simple way to make sure that when you're lay is scaled up or scaled down the stroke width stays the same I can't stand having different stroke widths in my animation so we've got these illustrations of silly chickens and here we want to scale one of them up we scale one of these chickens up the stroke width is way bigger than the other chickens here and it looks like cheap garbage but to fix that we just need to add that expression to the stroke width property so with that layer selected I'm gonna go and search for stroke width properties in a search part over here option click and paste and then I should click this second path would put as well and paste that as well so now if we play back the stroke width maintains consistent throughout the whole animation and we can even parent that to a null or another object and scale that null object up and the stroke width maintains the same size as well number two is maintain scale while parented this expression I got from jr. connects a script spreadsheet which is linked below as well and what this does is maintain the scale of a layer even when its parent scale is changing now that might not sound super useful but it can create some really nice effects here this chicken's parent to a null in the middle and that null is just scaling up and rotating that's fine it looks like a nice Pleasant zoom in but let's see what happens when we apply that expression to the scale of this chicken so I'm gonna open up the scale of one of the chickens all to option click the stopwatch and I'm just gonna paste in that expression I'm gonna click on scale and copy it with Chelsea select all the other chickens paste and we play it back this happens all the chickens are separating from each other and it looks really nice because they're keeping the position that the scaled up parent gives them but not the scale this is great for explosion scenes as well this is how I did that burst in this animation and it's a very easy way to achieve this effect number three is time time is one thing it's always useful to have more of in any project and what time does is it adds one to the value of the property every second so on a rotation property it will increase the degrees every second not just at in time and we can see that the rotation goes up one degree every second pretty subtle here so we can add a multiplier to that by having times and then 50 so now we'll add 50 degrees every second I use this a lot when I just need something to keep increasing over time it's also really useful to add to the random seed property as well so it's removing from our rotation an easy way to remove an expression is just an alt or option click the stopwatch again and that will remove any key frames or any expressions let's turn on this rough and edges effect that we've got here toggle this down and look at our random seed and we all click that stopwatch let's type in time times 4 here if we zoom in now it's gonna keep increasing that random seed giving it a different value and now looks like this which is great for adding a nice boiling effect that mimics hand-drawn animations I use this all the time number four is plus value now when you add most expressions that removes your ability to control that value with keyframes so here we've got a square rotating with a time expression and we stop it anywhere and try to adjust the rotation or maybe add some keyframes and change the values nothing happens and we can tell because all these numbers down here at rent which is After Effects way of telling you know don't touch these but we might want to add some additional animation on top of this expression here so all we need to do is click on this expression and add plus value now it'll rotate with this expression and then let's go from 0 to 90 on these keyframes and let's easy ease those now if we play it back it's gonna increase slowly and then add some additional rotation here that our keyframes are providing so use value when you want to take back control number 5 is x minus 1 now this is a really quick way to switch a positive value to a negative value or vice versa and it comes in handy when we want to cancel out a value from that parent so here we've got a little ferris wheel rotating and if we parent all of our little cages to this main wheel that is rotating and playback they all end up turning sideways and going upside down which is not how they should react and they would certainly be a safety concerns so we can do is select these cages open up its rotation also option-click and then that brings up a little Pickwick value here which we're going to pick whip to the rotation of the wheel but it is already parented to and now when we play back we can see that it's got that additional rotation as well so it's spinning independently but it's spinning too much so to cancel that out we just need to add multiply minus 1 at the end and now when we play back this cage is parallel throughout the whole animation that's because it's following the main rotation of the ferris wheel by being parented to it but it's rotation is rotating in the opposite way which cancels it out then we could copy this rotation property and just paste it onto all the other cages and now a ferris wheel is up and operational a quick word about this video sponsor Squarespace ice to be a web designer building and maintaining websites for my clients and when I made my own portfolio website I went to Squarespace because they make it so much easier than doing it all yourself and best of all it's so easy to add new projects so you aren't dreading updating your portfolio the template designs look really professional to make your work look legit to any potential client if you're indecisive you can easily change the templates with a few clicks and you want to sell any physical or digital products they've got the e-commerce sorted with imagery management simple checkout processing and secure payments so you can start selling in no time Hennis Squarespace is calm for a free trial and when you're ready to launch you know Squarespace calm /ban Marion to save 10% off your first web site or domain number 6 is posterized time I normally like to post price timeline animations by adding an adjustment layer with control of Y adding the posterized time effect and let's say setting it to 12 frames per second and that as low as the frame rate and makes it look a bit more like traditional hand animation then let's get rid of that because I want to show you how you can post driers just a specific value so here we've got this Square and it's animating on its position and it's rotation let's say we want the rotation to be a lower frame rate but the position to stay at 24 frames per second here's how we do that we go into our rotation property he returned abated by an expression and then for that we at the expression posterized time and in the parentheses afterwards type in the frame rate that we want then add a semicolon and put that time on another line now if we play back when you see the positions moving at 24 frames per second but the post time is at 12 lower that to six so you can see it really clearly that we are you can see the rotation is really snappy and I really like this fact we but multiple frame rates happening at once number seven is loop out loop out is super useful for repeating animations without any additional keyframes so let's start with this square animation just changing its position moving to the right a little we can quickly add a loop add expression by alt clicking the stopwatch here click this arrow and selecting property loop out cycle and by clicking this arrow you can open up lots about the expressions as well if you need to so we've added loop out cycle let's see what that does to our animation and that is just gonna repeat those animations of those keyframes so it's gonna go from the start at the end and here it's gonna restart back in again at the beginning where we added our first keyframe we can change the loop out type from cycle to ping-pong and that is going to bounce back and forth and is very useful in walk cycles in particular if you want to loop out an arm or a leg swinging this comes in handy and let's have another keyframe of box moving upwards in position as well so we pinpoint that it's gonna go back through all of the keyframes but if we change the num keyframes value over here from zero to one it's only going to go back one keyframe in time and ping-pong loop between these two keyframes here let's change that back to zero and then change the loop out type to offset and this will add the values of those key frames to the current position where it ends up so we'll keep on moving forever in the same direction number eight is referencing another comp you might need to reference values from other layers in other compositions here we've got a bunch of type pre comps and we might want to make a template for someone else to come in and edit this or we might want to add a top-level controller where we're able to enemies from the top level of this cop so let's add a text box and let in the test for the moment and let's rename this one type master because we always label our layers and now let's go into this type pre comp here and we're gonna open up its properties until we find text source and we're gonna option click on the stopwatch for source text and we're gonna leave this text up source text here and at the beginning we're gonna start writing this expression we're gonna start with a comp and if you're using After Effects CC 2019 and above you get these Auto which are really handy so we want to come here with parentheses and this expression is gonna tell us which comp we want so we want to comp number eight reference other comps so let's arrow down to that and click enter and then we're gonna add afterwards don't layer because we want to select a specific layer in that comp and add in quotation marks and packmaster then add another period and now when we click off it updates to our test text that we'd written before so let's go back up into our reference other comps and now we could type anything into here and it updates automatically now if we were making a template it would be a good idea to maybe lock all of these type pre comps try them all and hide them so whoever was editing this won't be able to mess it up and then we can even hide this layer I think you just type in whatever they want you can even rename this composition and the layer name and artifacts will go through and update the expressions where it's mentioned so it doesn't break so fear not number 9 is wiggle it wouldn't be an expression video if I didn't mention wiggle once and this is most people's first expression it was certainly mine and it does kind of what it says it does it Wiggles the value of that property so adding a real expression to the rotation value we're going to type in wiggle at the frequency comma and then the amplitude that we want now what does that mean the frequency is just how many times a second that the value should change and the amplitude is the maximum that it should change and in rotation that would be degrees so with wiggle one comma 50 it would wiggle up to fifty degrees once a second let's see how that looks not bad now you can also say these values really low let's go to 0.5 and to this 1 to 8 and they would get a nice gentle to its way I use this a lot for background elements there might be swaying in the wind or just need some subtle animation number 10 is math dot round here we've got some text and let's say we want to make a counter that counts up to 10 so let's go and add a slider effect to it and let's option click on our text source open up this pick whip and dragged out to our exhaust slider and let's keep him at slider to go from 0 and all the way at the end let's change that to 10 and now it starts at 0 ends at 10 this looks like it's gonna be a good counter but if we play it it updates every frame in the middle and we've got a whole heap of decimal points so this isn't really what we want dart around and then enclose that existing expression in parentheses it will update and round down all those numbers to new decimal places and now we've got a nice clean counter animation and now we've got one bonus tip to save you time creating expressions here we've got four shapes and one has three effects applied to it what we can do is select all the effects applied to that layer go up to edit copy with relative property links select all the other shapes and paste them onto it and now all those effects are applied to those shapes but if we go and edit the effects in our original layer let's maybe change the fill it updates across all the shapes so you can remove its blurriness change the amount of displacement and it will update across all of them after effects has gone and linked them all with expressions saving us a lot of time thanks After Effects thanks a bunch I've made a short playlist or some related videos that'll think you'll enjoy if you've made it this far I'll see you in the next video and please consider subscribing if you'd like more of these videos every week [Music]

Channel: Ben Marriott

Views: 144,507

Keywords: after effects expressions, top expression after effects, adobe after effects, adobe after effects expressions, adobe ae 2020 expressions, top 10 expresssions, write expressions in after effects, save time in after effects, after effects tutorial, adobe ae expressions editor, AE expression, expression tutorial, after effects expression wiggle, after effects expression time, after effects expression animation, posterize time after effects, ben marriott, AE expression guide

Id: rsW4fwscwKI

Length: 12min 13sec (733 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 11 2019