Using Collapse Transformations and Continuously Rasterize in After Effects

[Music] hey what's up this is Kayla bored with school of motion and in this after effects tutorial we're gonna be talking about one of the most exciting features and all of After Effects now I'm not talking about 3d text and I'm not talking about how to create an explosion in After Effects No I'm talking about the collapse transformations tool now this tool may not fall on your radar very often but it has the power to completely change your entire After Effects workflow so if you're ready to learn something very important and something slightly technical let's hop in now I want you to note that you can download the free project file included in this tutorial by clicking the link and heading over to school of motion comm there will be a link in the description of this video so before we get going here I want to talk to you about what the switch actually does yes you know that it may depicts alight your vector layers and yes it may do some weird stuff to your 3d layers whenever you pre compose them but let's talk about the practical implications of what this which actually does to your layers in the timeline and to do that we're going to talk a little bit about the rendering order so in a typical After Effects composition the render order goes like this After Effects renders out your mass and then moves on to effects it moves on to transformation data blending modes and then layer styles now you don't have to think about this most the time because it pretty much comes second nature because you know you would expect that you'd be able to scale up your layer apply your masks add your effects add your blending modes and then your layer styles that's just the typical order that you use whenever you're working in After Effects but whenever you select this little star button right here something new happens and I think you may know what I'm talking about so I'm gonna go ahead and click play here and preview what happens here so I'm gonna play this back and as you can see whenever you select this box this continuously rasterize or collapse box here after effects will take the transformation data and it will actually compute it before it computes anything else and sometimes especially in the case of continuously rasterizing it will actually add in a new step in the process called rasterizing and let me stop and talk a little bit about what rasterizing means so After Effects is a raster based software which means it uses pixel information to calculate data inside of After Effects it's not a vector software which means it would use a mathematical formula to create the shape layers and different objects inside so because After Effects is of raster based software any asset that gets imported into after-effects must be rasterized or turned into a bitmap file a pixel-based file before After Effects can actually use it so so that's not a problem the majority of the time it when you're importing video or JPEGs or PNG s they're already pixelated and rasterizing doesn't even need to occur in order for them to be useable to after-effects now the problem is whenever you're working with adobe illustrator files or any other vector format that doesn't include pixel information After Effects will actually rasterize it as soon as you import it into the software now that's a problem because whenever you drag and drop it into your composition you'll notice that it typically gets pixelated so this is where rasterizing comes into play rasterizing is the process of recomputing that vector layers information so that it will get rid of the pixelation so let me kind of show you in action what this means so right now we have a little bitty logo I'm going to go ahead and scale this up so this is just the school of motion logo and as you can see it is pixelated and the reason why it's pixelated is because whenever we imported it into After Effects after effects only rasterized it to this size right here it's super small so we actually want it to be really big and we don't want there to be any pixelization so in order for to work what we're gonna have to do is toggle our switches here and just hit the continuously rasterize button and when we do that after effects will rasterize out this layer and you'll see that it recomputes all of the information and you'll get really nice sharp edges on your logo now this rasterizing occurs at frame 1 if we set a keyframe so let's set a keyframe for scale and then we'll scale it up over the course of one second to just something really big let's say that is the look we're going for cool off we can go ahead and play this back and you'll see that it still is not pixelated so what this button will do is recompute the vector file it'll rasterize the vector file for every single frame in which transformation data is changed so if we drop down the menu here under the transform menu anytime you change any of these parameters here rotation opacity position Anchor Point and scale after effects will recompute and re rasterize that vector file so it's the end of your pixelated vector woes now another cool thing that you can do is continuously rasterize files that are not vector files so in order to kind of illustrate this I'm going to create a new solid so I just hit command Y and we'll call this a demo solid and hit OK so I'm gonna go up here to our pin tool and I'm just gonna kind of cut out just a simple little triangle here so let's say we have this triangle but we actually want to scale it up so let's go ahead and scale it up and you'll start to see something very troubling so you'll see that the edges here are very pixelated and very fuzzy and that is not ideal especially if you're working on a shape based project that you need really sharp edges so what we can do is we can change the order of operations so remember that right now this triangle is being computed with the typical After Effects rendering order so the masks are being computed first so the triangle here is being computed first then effects are rendered then the transformation data is happening so these masks are being rendered out at a certain transformation percentage and then anytime we scale it up they're still locked into that transformation that was smaller at the beginning before we transformed it to be much larger so it's very very pixelated and so what we can do is go in here and hit the continuously rasterize button and you'll notice that you'll get some nice sharp edges there so that's incredibly useful if you do a lot of shape based work or solid based work and you know if we masked out something and then we decided to scale it up later it wasn't the end of the world we could just use that button and it would apply the effect to the timeline now one problem that you're gonna run into whenever you're working with this is the fact that the rendering order has changed so because the transformed data happens before the effects your effects are not going to be tied to this layer so for example if I drop in fractal noise on to this layer now you'll see that we have fractal noise there but if we scale it down you'll notice how the fractal noise doesn't actually go with the object you would expect that the fractal noise would actually scale up the reason why that's happening is exactly what's outlined here so the effects are being computed after the transformation data so there is no link between the effects and the transformations so it kind of acts a little bit more like a matte instead of a typical layer so that's just something to think about and it can be a little annoying but it's just one of the realities about the way in which After Effects computes this data so again if we deselect that star we can now go in here and as we scale this down you'll see that the fractal noise is actually attached to it because the rendering order is now changed so I'll just go ahead and click this back so that is the continuously rasterize feature and it's an incredibly important and useful feature inside of After Effects but this switch does one more very important thing so I'm gonna hop over here to a new composition composition number four here and I'm going to explain a little bit about what the collapse transformations feature actually does so we've already talked a little bit about what happens when you actually click on this switch and after effects it changes the order in which after-effects render something however whenever you apply this switch to a nested composition that's a composition inside of another composition so like a pre comp it will actually connect the transformation data between this layer and all of the layers inside the other layer and what I mean by that is if we were to select this layer any scaling that we do to this composition will actually affect all of the layers inside of this composition so this is the contained composition and this is the nested composition so this chart kind of illustrates everything that we're talking about here so I'm going to go ahead and fit this and we'll make sure it's full res here so the way in which After Effects will render out this composition is kind of different and kind of unique so what's going to happen is all of the masks and effects inside of this composition will be rendered out first and then the transformation data between this layer and all the layers inside will now be connected so as you scale it'll scale up all the layers inside as you rotate it will rotate all the layers inside and so everything is connected with the transformation values now you'll then be able to move on to blending modes and layer styles inside of this layer so all of the layers here would have their blending modes and their layer styles adjusted and rendered out and then we would move up to computing mask for this layer effects blending modes and then layer styles so this process is a little confusing so instead of looking at this composition anymore I'm going to actually hop over here to our composition number six and kind of give you an analogy here so typically in After Effects pre comps are rendered out as video footage and what I mean by that is let's say we have this icon here I'm going to go ahead and duplicate this icon I'm going to push it back in 3d space again we have a 3d scene here and I'm going to move it over here and then I'll duplicate that and move it over here to where it's kind of cut off here I'm going to select all three of these icons and hit shift command C to pre compose and you can even go up here to layer pre compose and it'll do the exact same thing and we'll call this icons and hit OK so this icons composition typically will not retain any sort of 3d data for the icons inside so what I mean by that is if we go to layer new camera and just create any old camera here and hit C or the unified camera tool here we can begin to move around in 3d space and you'll see that if we make our icons layer 3d here that the edges kind of get cut off and that is not ideal because we actually want our sequence to be 3d we want these objects to interact in 3d space so to fix that what you can do is hit the collapse transformations button so now we can see that we can move around and the edges are not being cut off and they actually retain their 3d data and information now this is an incredibly useful tool if you do a lot of 3d shape work in After Effects and you'll notice actually if we kind of zoom out here that After Effects this pre-comp is actually kind of a box instead of a typical 2d kind of window or footage layer so it actually has all the 3d data inside and it's kind of contained inside this 3d box here cool so that's super important because it allows us to move these objects in 3d space and they'll still retain their 3d information so you see that as we kind of zoom down here those objects have 3d capabilities and so we can move them around here we can even scale them down and rotate them so I'll hit W for rotation and as you rotate them they will actually still have all that 3d data inside so typically in After Effects if you pre compose something it's going to render it out like it's footage now when you do it this way it renders it out much more like it's a folder that's kind of housing everything and it's just a really handy tool if you're trying to clean up your timelines so let's go over here to our 7th composition here and another great benefit of using this feature is the ability to apply effects to multiple objects without having to drag and drop in effect onto each objects so what I mean by that is if we kind of use our unified camera here you can see that we have a 3d scene and again like before we have these 3d icons and they just sitting on top of these pyramids so let's say we wanted to add in a style ization so let's let's do like a glow well drop in a glow onto these icons and you'll see that it actually applies a glow to all of the layers and not just one individual layer but the cool thing is they will still retain that 3d data information now you know this is really great however there's one exception anytime you apply an effect to a layer or a pre-comp with this collapse transformations button selected that layer will lose its ability to interact in 3d with the other layers in the composition and what I mean by that is I'm gonna go ahead and turn off this glow effect here it'll also go up here and delete the glow effect from our pre composition so now we can move the camera around and you'll notice how you see how this background icon here it goes behind the pyramid that's you know super useful it's retained its 3d information but what happens when we apply the effect well anytime you apply any effect it will actually make it to where it loses its ability to interact with objects in your scene in 3d and so yes it will still interact with the camera as if it's in 3d but the objects other 3d objects in your scene will not be rendered out correctly so that's just something to remember and think about and then also even if you have your effects turned off it will not interact correctly with the objects in your scene so the only fix is to completely delete that the effects from your object and the same is true for masks if you apply a mask to this layer all of the layers inside will lose their ability to retain 3d properties with the other layers in your scene and again that goes back to this collapse transformation chart so because we added in a mask or in effect all of the layers inside lose their ability to interact with the 3d layers inside of the nested composition so anytime you apply any of these four types of I guess we can call them effects but for different types of modifiers to your layers you will lose the ability for your transformation data to enter act independently so it's just something you think about but it can be a super useful tool so that's about it I hope you found this tutorial to be useful collapse transformations is something that is incredibly useful especially when you're working with 3d compositions and you have a bunch of 2d layers that need to be spread out in 3d space I personally use this all the time for 3d mats so mats that are motion tracked into footage in 3d space I will pre compose them in my composition and we'll just kind of clear everything up this is a great workflow tool and it's definitely something that I think you will find a lot of great uses for the more you sit down and mess around with it so if you will learn more go check out the article over at school of motion the article has way more information than I was able to get to in this tutorial about the way in which After Effects renders things out and a few other implications for using these features and After Effects and again if you want to download the project file used in this tutorial you can do so by checking out the article at school of motion if you want to learn more about motion design go check out the other tutorials and articles we have at school of motion and of course if you want to take your skills up even further check out the courses and boot camps over on the website they are the best way to up your motion design skills in only a matter of weeks again this has been Caleb ward we'll see you next time

Channel: School of Motion

Views: 51,506

Keywords: motion graphics, tutorial, rasterize, collapse transformations, continuously, vector, vectors, illustrator, pixellated, pixelation, How to Fix, After Effects

Id: J3ApvB8sqD0

Length: 17min 1sec (1021 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 17 2018