Use Shape Layers & Easing to Create a Complex Wave Animation | Intro to Animation & After Effects

you may have heard that school of motion acquired mograph Mentor earlier this year you're going to see some of this previously behind a paywall Content be released and accessible on schoolofmotion.com so keep checking back here for more thanks [Music] let's talk about action and reaction our job as motion designers is really to bring a series of images or scenes or shapes to Life by making it feel connected and like things are flowing together so I'm just going to create a new composition here and call this action and reaction go ahead and hit ok now let's start building out these elements and we're going to come back to using gradients because I just feel like you know gradients and shape layers and blending modes are kind of a match made in heaven here in After Effects so let's keep playing in that space let's go to our shape layer panel I'm going to choose to turn on title and action safe and again come into the middle and just create a kind of small first element this is going to be our hero element that's going to drive this action and reaction and I'm gonna just change this fill to just some kind of Base color here I'll just choose kind of a red now I want to duplicate this and do as we did before and I want to create a mask so again we need to come back and toggle tool creates mask or else I'll just be creating another shape layer and just go ahead and put a mask and then I want to come back to the actual shape layer level and change this color to something like a blue now if you don't see your shape layer hit M on the keyboard and that will reveal the mask if we toggle this mask open we see that we can feather it so let's go ahead and feather this shape here I'm going to go ahead and duplicate and change this mask here and then we also just want to change this color on this third layer so let's say something like a yellow and this is again going to end up with a shape that has a couple of shapes within it so we can do a little bit of interesting scaling work there I just like to be able to to do that I will go ahead and call this base layer base blue and base yellow and then I'm going to parent the blue layer to the base and then the yellow to the blue so that if I select all these and I hit s to bring up the scale property I'm going to start to get a little bit of that exponential scaling where you know it's starting to scale up the chain so I just feel like that's a nice easy rig that gives us a good foundation take that back to 100 now I'm going to turn these layers off and I want to start working on this really nice kind of wave reaction and we're going to do an approach here in After Effects that is pretty useful and it's the idea of being able to create kind of a single tile and then duplicate that and rotate that and flip it uh for the final animation so if we go back to the original example and we look at these this kind of wave animation you'll see that I have all these compositions so let's actually look at the pre-comp here and see that this is actually the element we want to build here and we're going to use our understanding of Animation principles what we know about shape layers and we're actually going to custom animate this shape layer path and when I say create a tile this is what I mean you can see that we want to create this right down the middle of the the frame so that we can mirror it and duplicate it over and I want to show this example because it's really common in After Effects to just try to build one element and then pre-compose it duplicate it change it offset it just build a base element so that's what we want to work on here and we'll see that you know the animation that we want to achieve is you know this thing almost falling into water right when we have this main ball element come down and land into place and bring that velocity almost to smashing into animation as we talked about we're going to want to see this thing immediately Ripple so for our purposes here that's almost like a jump right where you're fast out of the first pose and then you ease out into the end so again we're going to smash into and then it's almost a jump where you know it's going to be really quick and then Ease on the back end then we're going to make sure that we can get from a first pose to a second pose so a little bit more complexity but let's go ahead and actually create a new composition and I'll call this wave O2 you could call it wave01 and let's make sure that we're working in the very center of this composition by coming to the title In Action safe and making sure that I can see the crosshairs in the center and once I'm actually hovering within my composition window if I hit command R I can see the the measurement actually here in the user interface and so if I bring my cursor into these measuring UI panel is I can actually pull out a guide and I can bring this guide right into the center maybe I need to zoom all the way in and the guide stays live so I can just keep zooming in there all right I've got it right in the center that's very helpful now if I hit command r that is going to go away and if I hit command semicolon that is the show guide versus hide guide keyboard shortcut so I want to choose to see my guide so I can use it here and basically I just want to take a rectangle here and I want to build a tile that sort of perfectly matches the the horizontal line on the center of the composition which I'll be able to see on the title safe and then the very center so I'm going to zoom in here and this is another fun Quirk of being a motion designer and after effects users making sure that you're like Pixel Perfect When you go to do things like this so I'm going to really get in there and make sure that I can't zoom in anymore I'm at sixteen hundred percent that looks perfectly centered there and I'll come over to these crosshairs here just a couple of pixels there to be uh perfectly horizontal across the composition there now the anchor points in the center that's fine I'm not going to mess with that now by default when we create a rectangle shape layer and let's go ahead and take a look at this rectangle we don't see what we would normally see on other shapes where it says path it actually says rectangle path and basically what that means is it gives me you know a set of parameters to be able to manipulate it but I can't grab individual points and we're going to want to be able to manipulate the points of this so we actually need to convert this rectangle path into a bezier path that we can use so if we control click we'll see a sub menu that says convert to bezier path and now here in the contents under rectangle one it says path one now we're going to see it also changed over here where now we can make individual selections of the point so that's what we need now we don't have enough points on this shape to be able to create the wave pose that we want to create so we're going to need to add some points so let's come up here to the top menu and come to the pen tool and I need to we don't need to add a ton but we do need to be able to create this kind of wave and have enough points to really be able to manipulate this and get it into the the shapes that we need so I'm going to create a point here which will help me kind of bring this side down then I'm going to create another point right around here and this will act as kind of the top of my wave that I'll pull up and then I'm just going to add one more kind of control Point here so that I can make sure I can control the back side of the shape of this Wave by having a point there so let's hope that that's enough points for now we can hit V to go back to the selection tool and see that now we can manipulate these points but now we we want to be able to create a smooth bezier path not this linear kind of path that it's giving us here so on these three Center points we're going to need to come back to the pen tool and see that we have this convert vertex tool and if I can convert these vertexes here we'll see that it will produce some bezier handles and I'll basically keep everything perfectly flat for this first frame but now we have bezier handles so when we go to if I hit V for my selection tool once we go back to these we will be able to manipulate the shape and build this kind of wave pose that we're looking for so I'm going to command Z just to go back to to the starting point so we need to go back and look at the contents of the shape layer and here we see rectangle One path one I definitely want to lock in a keyframe here where it's just going to be this kind of perfect shape like so so that's fine now I want to create a masking animation where I actually animate this element on because I want it to go from basically zero percent in the frame to a hundred percent and so we're going to need to actually come back to the rectangle tool make sure that we select tool creates mask and I'm basically just going to get this shape ready where I can see it's going to act as a mask and that gets added to the shape layer here and so on frame zero I'm going to set a keyframe for this mask path I'm going to hit V to go back to my selection tool and shift select this side of the Mask go forward about half a second or 12 frames and then just go ahead and animate this completely on I'll quickly ease those by default and we're going to want to go ahead and take a look at this mask path here in the graph editor and I'm just going to ramp this up quite a bit so it just creates a really simple masking animation we can Define the end of the work area around one second to go ahead and check the tempo there that might even be a little fast so I might extend it ever so slightly and I'm actually going to see if I can just push that a little bit more so that's kind of step one for me here is to get this element staged in its tile form get this first uh transition going here so that's really good now before we duplicate this space shape we are going to want to do its path animation so that's actually going to be our next step here and so this thing is going to animate on then we are going to want to see this reaction animation so I'm going to pull this first path keyframe forward we don't want this wave animation to start we just want it to transition on then we're going to do this this really quick reactive wave animation so I'm going to start working on this wave post so we know that if this ball is coming down in the center then really this whole Center piece is going to kind of move down and the wave is going to start basically over on this side and for now we're going to want to see this actually start to pull down a bit and then maybe this even swells up so it's almost like the energy you know from the back side of it is being pulled towards the center here and here's where these bezier handles are going to come in handy and help us try to hopefully create a good looking shape and so we're going to want this movement to be really quick now for this piece here I actually do need to make this a bezier as well so let's go ahead and convert this and hit V to make sure we bring that Center back into alignment then with the convert vertex tool still selected I'm going to just grab the top side so I it does remain a bezier I do get two handles but I do want to break it so make sure that is staying perfectly centered and I'll zoom in and absolutely ensure I'm staying centered through the middle there and so we just want to make sure that I'm going to hit V to go back to my selection tool that this Center Point uh feels like it's curving in into the center here so we can see we we're going to go from this pose we're going to go here where the wave starts and we're going to put those keyframes really close together so one two three might only need about three keyframes we want it to be really fast now from here we want it to now fade out where the wave will start to build and move up into the left and so I'm just going to go forward a bit we'll rework the timing and start to move this wave up so that's a good start but actually on this last keyframe we just want to make sure that this thing basically runs all the way to the edge of the frame here and I'm just going to lift this up and try to get to this pose here now with these three poses that we have here we can go ahead and say easy ease we're going to want to take a look at the graph editor uh so let's remember we want to move really fast out of these first two poses and so I'm going to zoom in on the animation we have that means you know this very first frame I want the velocity to be really really high and so if we take a look we'll see It'll then kick into this pose really quickly and we also want the front end here to be moving quickly as well and then fading in to that back spot so it can look a little funny here in the speed graph but we're basically saying really fast through that first pose now we're also seeing that it's saying okay fast into the first pose into the second pose now it's it's actually slowing down to zero velocity it's laying on the very bottom and I don't want that I want this to kind of continue through at a somewhat similar velocity uh but I still want to make sure that first keyframe kicks on really quickly and so if I hit command 0 and take a look we'll see that's maybe even a little bit too fast and I need to correctly Define a work area here so we can just watch this and so we probably just want to extend that last keyframe so I'll do it right here in the graph editor and take a look and see how this animation is looking now I can see that this shape at the very end is maybe a little bit extreme and I should be allowing that wave uh to have a little bit more breathing room and not making the the shape so extreme there so let's see how those changes maybe smooth it out just a bit yeah that looks a little bit better now that's the bass wave animation and at this point I would say I'm going to go from a fill to just a linear gradient fill and we'll see those gradient handles come back on and I do just want to put a gradient here on this shape and this is where you can add a little bit of creativity any kind of color schemes you think look nice uh choosing complementary colors can be can be really nice right where you can take a cool tone and a warm tone and blend those together just try to make something uh kind of visually interesting there now let's go ahead and build out the second pose where I'm going to extend this work area and say all right it's going to get to this pose it's basically you know velocity is going to go to zero which means it's going to hold just just for a moment I'm actually just going to extend this I'm going to extend the easing out just a little bit just a little bit more actually and on the back half of this easing then I quickly want to have this come all the way back up to the center and so take a quick zoom in to make sure that gets back to the center and I just want this top point to drop all the way to here and I'm basically going to kind of invert the curve and I think that's going to look visually really nice and so that's going to happen pretty quickly and we're going to want to make sure that we're just doing a classic ease and so by default there's a little bit of ease but it's not a ton so we're going to get into the graph editor and just greatly exaggerate this and I'm going to come back out and Define a work area by adding B and N to see if it's maybe a little too fast it's a little too quick and I'm going to come back into the graph editor and ramp this up even more so it looks even more exaggerated and hit the graph editor icon to pull back out of there and so yeah so that gives me a nice second transition in terms of a base element to to that next pose I think we're ready to duplicate this base element so we can add that nice stroked line effect that we get so let's go ahead and call this base fill duplicate it and call it stroked line and now instead of a fill which will turn off but we'll still have the shape layer there let's go ahead and turn on a white stroke and add you know kind of whatever thickness we think looks good now basically what that's going to do is just create a second copy of the shape that's perfectly in line with the first so that's all working just fine so I'm going to go into the contents of this stroked layer here and go to the transform rectangle one where it says scale and unlink these properties and then just pull this value down ever so slightly and that's just going to create a little bit of an offset so that we can actually see that line away from you know the edge of our base fill and then you see at the very end of this we get actually a nice little bit of overlapping action here which is nice and another way that we can further push this is to offset the keyframes and we talked about this before as little uniformity as we can get is going to be helpful so if we were to offset these slightly we're going to get a little bit of overlap and if we actually then pull this keyframe in here a bit we're going to see now we're going to see these nice little overlaps that just add a kind of a visual Dimension to to this base element and then now that we offset that we're going to see a little bit of a leading indicator there where these actually don't move 100 in sync and this is really common as we said of taking base elements duplicating them and then doing a little bit of offsetting so that you can get a little bit more production for the time that you've spent to create that base element so that's looking pretty nice there now we are going to see that we do see this whole Center Line and that is a little bit pesky when we go to to duplicate this so let's go ahead and turn off the title In Action safe for a moment here and hit command semicolon to turn off our guide and look at this stroked line here and basically I'd like to be able to mask out this Center Line here and we already have a mask animating this on I'm actually going to go ahead and delete that mask and just start over with this layer come back to the rectangle angle tool toggle over to Tool creates mask and by default it's set to add but if we just go to the mask here on the on the layer we can set it to subtract and then I'm actually going to take this whole layer and move it over because now that we've cut that stroked line off it's not laying perfectly in the center but I still want it to you know reach exactly to the center here so that looks pretty in line and so now we still need to do a mask on animation because we deleted it and on a stroked line the way we can go about doing this is to add a trim path so here within the stroked line layer under contents we have this this Sub menu and this Arrow here that says add and we'll get more into this as we use shape layers more but the one that we want to look at here is called trim pads and this is basically going to allow us to animate the stroke on and off it's a transition so if we take this from 0 to 100 down here where it says trim pass we're going to see that this line is animating on and off now a stroked line and a rectangle has a Direction so when we say you know start to end zero to 100 it's actually going the wrong way and after effects allows us to quickly reverse path direction right here in this menu so let's go ahead and reverse the path Direction so we can see okay there we go that's what that's what we're looking for is to see that line coming right out of there foreign so I'm actually going to take that to zero percent come back to the first frame lay a keyframe I'm going to want to match roughly uh the base shape so then I'll come here and animate this just far enough so it gets I don't want to go to a hundred percent I just want to be able to ease from here to here so as soon as I don't see it on screen I'll I'll leave that keyframe there and we'll let's just match our classic ease ease in ease out like we have on our base layer and I will push this as much as we did on the other one which was you know pretty close to 100 percent and so we're back to uh we're back to getting what we need here for this animation now we can see still a little bit of an issue because our mask is a little bit lower there so let's actually go back to the mask and manipulate it by double clicking it to bring up a bounding box and I'll just cut that off right there and I can see I still need to move this layer over ever so slightly to line it up and let's see where we are yeah so that is building this base tile this is really a huge part of this animation that we're going to work on this is a great animation challenge in terms of thinking about animation principles and just getting in there and making shape layers do exactly what we need so let's move on to some more training where now we build on this my name is Jessica I'm a video editor but my company decided to take our videos to the next level and do more animated videos I needed to learn to animate very quickly I came in knowing nothing about Motion Graphics and I left knowing how to make things move I've gone from being able to do the screencast on my computer to being able to make videos with assets I can create myself you know whether you're at level zero or whether you just need to polish up on certain skills I thought it was perfect my name is Jessica and I am a school of motion alumni foreign [Music] so let's come back to the action and reaction comp where we had you know created this first fun little element and I can come over to my project panel and grab Wave 2 and go ahead and bring it in now this is the composition that we just made of this wave animation with the secondary line so I'll Define a work area to about here just this initial wave now this is where we want to mirror this element we're going to do it manually and so we can simply hit command D to duplicate the layer and then hit s to bring open scale now if we put a negative value on either of these scale properties and we need to click this this lock icon which is constrain proportions right where it scales by 100 we actually just want to flip one of these values by adding a negative in front of so in this case the first value so we'll just flip it completely to the other side and now we'll see It'll animate on and we can see that we're getting a little bit of a line in there this is where you know there's kind of some inevitable cleanup so let's actually go back into Wave 2 here and make sure that this thing is just moved over and we didn't put any keyframes on the positions of these so if we just move this over one keyframe to the right and we come back to Action Reaction we can see all right now we we've probably overlapped them by one pixel and that actually works just fine for our our purposes here so we can go ahead and duplicate again so I'll hit command D then I'll hit s and then I'll add a negative to another value so now it should flip up to this side here I will again hit command D and hit s and this time I'll eliminate the negative on the first value so it'll flip it yet one more time now I think we're to a point where we can see all right now we're we're getting this really cool symmetry that's really nice but of course everything is is just running together and this is where we want to come back and and toggle switches and modes here at the bottom and take a look at some blending modes and we will definitely kind of come back to this but even just a simple overlay uh or soft light is just going to help us see kind of where we're headed so I'll overlay these two here so I basically also want to create duplicates that are rotated to the left and the right so I'm going to grab both of these top two elements here which kind of represent the top and you can use the soloing function to get a better look I'm going to hit command D then with those two layers new layer selected I'm going to move them to the top here in the layer just so I can keep track of them then I'm going to hit W to bring up the rotate tool and I'm going to hold shift to constrain and I'm just going to go to 90 degrees now we can see we're going to need to move this over so with both of them selected I'll just move it over to the side here I'm going to hit command D again on those two layers hit W to rotate them back the other direction and then line it up here in the comp I'll turn off the soloing so we can bring everything back on and now we can see all right we're starting to get a little bit closer now because we did overlap by a pixel uh and we can see you know this line here which I actually like because to me that adds kind of a nice visual element so we're at this point in the animation and I think this is looking really interesting and really beautiful and it's so fun just to create That Base shape and be able to duplicate that out and get all this fun overlapping action from here I would recommend you know here's a cool place to look at the way that these that these layers can blend right and and if we choose something like difference or exclusion we're going to get some really dramatic results so if we just kind of randomly select a couple layers here and there and choose something like difference we're going to start to see some really really Wild results now when we use difference we have this black background which I think we need to remedy now so let's go ahead and call this a gradient BG a gradient background and I'm going to go back to the generate 4 color gradient and this is going to help us create another layer of color for these Landing modes to work against and you know as of right now we can really decide if we want this to be a little bit warmer or cooler I think I'm going to opt for a generally warmer tone on the background so that when I choose something like difference or exclusion it almost kind of inverts it then it gives me a colder tone here and you can see just all of the the dramatic colors that we're getting here let's take a look if we were to manipulate this blue we can see we're going to start to move that part of the shot that color spectrum around just a bit this also allows us to go down to our very bottom layers and choose other blending modes as well like a hard light a soft light and overlay if I choose something like hard light it's going to be you know keep a lot of that saturation which is interesting and kind of create a little bit something like this now we probably want our base layer to actually exist above all of this so when we start to bring that part of the animation in and I think some of these hard lights work a little bit better than overlay because we're starting to lose some of these uh some of these white stroked lines and so uh overlay may not be the best choice if we want it to appear really really graphical and sharp so I'm going to kind of default to a lot of hard light layers here and these different layers the exclusion really isn't working quite as well and this blue is kind of bothering me a little bit here so I want to come up to back to this Four Color gradients and let's see where is Point this is point two over here this green I think I want to change this to where I pull a little bit more purple right there instead of that blue now the next thing we want to do is have a null object that can control all of these all of these tiles so I'm going to control click here and I'm going to add a null object and I'll just call this tile control and move it in the stack not that we need to move it necessarily it's a null object but we'll keep our comp as clean as possible then with all of the wave comps selected we will hit tile control now if we hit s we can verify all right that's working and this is going to help us maybe scale the shot a little bit more I think maybe we're seeing a little bit too much of this at the edges here and we might want to get to right about there where we can see just a little bit of kind of a cleaner shape and and emphasize this eye a little bit more here and I'm actually going to these differences are just not working as well I'm going to simplify it a bit and just kind kind of stick with with a hard light blending mode across all of these so now when it comes to this scale maybe we would uh like to just kind of stay at this scale but start to move forward and add even another layer of Animation so when the when the wave animation starts which is right let's find that frame in the precomp right there so I'm going to go back one frame on this scale and then move forward in time to where it kind of stays on this position here where it starts to move and I'm going to scale this up because I think adding even one more layer of Animation to this will help sell this action and reaction idea so I'm going to easy ease and again we know that we want the initial part to be really really fast and then ease into that second post so it's basically a jump so even now there's just a little bit of subtle movement of us scaling up right at the same time that that moment of of reaction happens so that gives us a nice little bit of extra information there now from here when we go to this second pose I like that these are kind of pulling in that's kind of cool we get to this fun shape but let's go ahead and rotate let's go ahead and rotate this whole thing as well as scale so we're going to want to scale up I think just a little bit then I'm going to hit R for rotation then I'm going to hit U just to see all of the keyframes I have on this layer and I want the rotation really to start here and then reach the reach the kind of Apex so right in the middle then I'm going to rotate this by 90 degrees I'm going to easy ease and this is as just like our our base element a classic easy so keep coming back to really these three types of animations yeah we're going to need to be scaled up a little bit more because now we're seeing uh the edges of this so the scale is going to need to be is going to need to be a lot larger our N scale so I'm going to scale this up and I'm also going to scale this pose here just a little bit and we can see we're just off by about a frame so I'm going to move the scale up and offset the rotation ever so slightly so we're going to get to here and then I want to be able to rotate all of it as as the shape is actually changing itself in the pre-comp we've done a lot of good work to build up the reaction animation but we still need to go ahead and animate our base element here so with the base layer selected I'm basically going to do kind of a jump animation with some position and some scale I want it to almost feel like it's jumping from further away coming towards us and landing in the center right where it is now so I'll turn on my title and actually save I want it to stay right in the center I think that's working with the way our shapes look because we want it to kind of hit that spot right there so when it comes to the position animation we're going to I want to go straight up and down and let's work on that first so we'll it can be sitting right here that's fine at about a half a second and just for ease I'm going to turn off all the wave animations and that's fine and so so on this position I'm going to start to animate this up and then at about a second I'll just copy and paste that first keyframe to get right back to the center and again let's think about what would a jump animation look like in a graph editor I'll Default easy ease those that's good basically we know remember it's a jump it's fast out then it eases at the top right so this is still part of the top so we're still easing here and then a smashing into animation so that's kind of what I'm looking for there right just a really simple animation that can make the audience feel uh a little bit of this action reaction now we also want to do the scale so I'm going to hit s and leave the graph editor so I can just hit U on the keyboard and take a look here so we actually want this scale here that's all good and fine and by the N scale here though I'd like it to be a bit larger and I also want to do this thing where I kind of pull apart the layers and so uh here I'm also going to animate the scale on the base blue and base yellow so that as we come forward we'll actually scale this one up and scale this one up a little bit as well now with all of those selected I'm just going to put a Default easy ease on those and so now we're getting a little bit of an illusion that the scale is is coming towards us and the more we push that illusion the more it's going to feel like you know it's coming from back in Z space towards the camera now I'm going to go to this base layer and hit R and add just a little bit of rotation right PSR we have a little bit of position we have some scale now let's just add that one layer of rotation and then we'll we'll be done with this here and let's just rotate this just so that it adds another layer of animation and then I'll just Default easy ease those and you'll see I think it adds a nice little element that it appears like that element is is rotating so now as animators in After Effects what we often have to do is build different animations and work on our timing so if I turn all these waves back on I don't think our timing is set up yet and so we need to make sure that on this final frame that we're all lined up so I want to grab the tile control and I want to grab all my wave tiles and I want to just move these layers until those first frames match up right so when it hits that's when that reaction should happen and then the animation begins very good so we start to see it we get the transition and then we see that reaction now the beginning of this scene it's getting a little bit muddy here I've got all these colors I think I'd like to create a little bit of a transition one more layer of a transition here and so I basically want to duplicate my gradient background and I want to come up to the effects panel and come to this transition Sub menu and choose the CC radial scale wipe and basically this is going to help me create a scaling in effect and now it looks like there's just this faint element moving across here because we have the same color so I want to come to this Four Color gradient and basically choose a whole new set of colors here so you know where it's yellow I'll take it to Pink where it's green give me some red you know where it was pink previously I'll take even a darker blue and I'll just quickly swap those so now when I'm using this CC radial scale wipe we'll see uh that we actually are kind of feeling that feeling that transition a bit now because we had all those blending modes having having this one here is going to change the look of what we're seeing and so you could you know you could flip the order of these whatever background we need to have at this point is is going to be relevant so I'm actually going to make this my main background here so I'm going to hit command X on the radial scale wipe on that layer and command V to paste it to this layer and then let's go ahead and create a completion animation here where we start at a hundred percent so this is where this is what we're going to see here on framework frame one so I'm going to say 100 percent and then as this animation starts I just want to see this scale all the way down now just adding a circle to cut across these lines and these rectangles and kind of boring shapes a little bit is just a nice helpful way to I think further you know improve the beginning of this transition here and we are going to want this to go all the way to zero but we'll work on the timing of it maybe we want it to be landing just a little bit before that element hits and I think for me here this is a good candidate for just a classic ease that we're probably going to want to push the default easing in After Effects is just often way way too mild and so I I think you're going to find yourself basically pushing and exaggerating any any default eases for the most part so that adds a nice element there we bring that circle in it really Narrows our Focus right to the center it feels like the circle it's kind of almost jumping out from that background and landing and creating this reaction and then we rotate and go to the second pose here now because we have this set up we can go back to that initial layer so you know when we get to this point when we start to do this whole second transition let's see if we can use this same layer and add more visual interest to this second layer here by actually just kind of reversing that out perhaps or even just bringing it right into the center like so like that's kind of interesting we'll add one more element to get to this point here and I'll do a similar easing on this one we can see that's not at all what we want by default I just want to make sure I'm selecting each keyframe handle and and pushing that so it's really Snappy so now with that second layer and this radial scale wipe I think we're we're starting to add some a lot more visual interest uh to each of these little transitions now we want to transition off I'd like us to then get all the way back to where we were at the beginning to actually create a little bit of a loop out of this and so we need to so we need to go back into this base element and the in the way that we brought these on we need to take them back off so let's go to this base fill here and hit U and we'll see our mask path here and if you don't see your mask it may be because the toggle mask and shape path visibility icon is not selected and you'll see if I select that then I can I can see my mask here and so I want to make sure that my Mask doesn't move during the middle of this animation so I will add a keyframe to make sure that it's totally in position here I'm going to zoom out actually and say okay once we get to this second pose it's going to hold for just a moment and then I basically want to animate this all the way off and I'll make sure that you know that default easing isn't really going to be enough so I'm going to get in there and just quickly exaggerate that and push that forward so now what we're going to see is comes on Wave animation that second pose now this is going to dramatically change what we see but first we need to make sure that we get this stroked line off as well and we built ourselves an easy way to do that now if we want to reverse it let's actually lay a keyframe on the the start position right here and then as this is animating off let's just go for it it should be getting to about 33 but really just till it's off screen just till it's cut off by the composition and we'll ease that and we're going to need to hit Plus on my keyboard there plus or equal sign and go ahead and push those really quickly and so now we should see that our base element is going to line up with what we need for the loop second pose everything's off so if we come back to our action and reaction comp now we should see okay we're going to get the rotation the second Circle and they fly off now it looks way too fast when we see it and so I can just go back in here and take these back two keyframes and just extend that out a bit and I'm going to define a work area at the end here so I'm going to slow it down even more because we have it at such a large scale that feels a little bit more comfortable I don't want to see those just completely rip off the screen but let's go ahead and rotate a little bit more so we got to this position and as it starts to animate off let's get this let's get our tiles to a whole new position so let's try to take it now to kind of a diagonal so let's take it to a 45 degree angle as it's starting to animate off and I'll actually move this back just to coincide with the end of that so we'll see you know starts to rotate as it pulls away and you know this is really the process right and those those are actually already eased uh the default easing is probably it's probably not going to do it for us so I'm going to add a little bit more exaggeration on that and basically we just need to move this last keyframe out a bit and as that's starting to pull away then I want to go back to the CC radial wipe CC radial scale wipe and then move this all the way out like so to a hundred percent and so basically that should give us kind of a good foundation for Loop if we can start and end on that same background and we'll see that we're definitely going to need to get in there on this CC radial scale wipe and just go ahead and push that a lot more so let's go and take a look so that's all looking good get that rotation pulls out comes back so I know this has been a lot to follow this is a lot of complexity where we're building on the knowledge of what we understand doing comps doing all this blending adding the position scale rotation hopefully this has helped you learn a lot about how to master this kind of shape driven work in Adobe After Effects so thanks so much for watching and happy animating thank you [Music]

Channel: School of Motion

Views: 58,450

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Id: MySjLD2Lu1g

Length: 45min 39sec (2739 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 21 2022