• Write your text, pre-comp it, call it Text or whatever you want.
• Create a mask from the center to one side (top/bottom), change anchor point to the top.
• Bring down Scale property and unlink it, keyframe the text to go from 100% to 0% in 1s towards the anchor point.
• Cut the layer at the end.
• Duplicate pre-comp.
• Select the bottom one, click M to bring down mask properties, invert the mask and move anchor point to the bottom (so the text scales to the bottom).
• Duplicate Text pre-comp one more time. Select it, press M and delete the mask, move anchor point to the center. Create new keyframes to scale it from 0 to 100 in 1s (properties unlinked). Select both keyframes and delay it by 1 frame. It makes the text look like it’s scaling from the center.
• Change bottom and top text color by adding Fill effect to the pre-comp.
• Easy ease all keyframes.
• Select all pre-comps and duplicate them, put them at the top and put them at the back to extend your animation (or arrange in your preferred order if you’re doing a phrase like me). So far it should look something like this:
• Create new comp Wave of 10s, add your Split comp.
• Create new Solid layer, call it Map, add Gradient Ramp effect, make white at the left, black at the right and hide the layer.
• Select Split pre-comp, Right-click → Time → Enable Time Remapping and extend the layer to the end.
• Add loopOut() expression to Time Remap.
• On Split pre-comp add the effect Time Displacement, on Time Displacement Layer select your Solid layer (Map), and on Source select Effects & Mask.
• Change Time Resolution (fps) to 250-300.
• Add Fast Box Blur effect, change Blur Radius to 0.5.
• To bring back the sharpness add Curves effect, change the Channel to Alpha and change values (see screenshot).
• Play around with Max Displacement Time [sec] on Time Displacement effect depending on the look you’re going for. I set it to 0.5.
• Now this whole animation is driven by our Solid layer (Map) we created. So if you make any changes to it, the animation changes too. For example, you can change Ramp Shape to Radial on Gradient Ramp effect, and see how it changes your animation.
• I additionally added some texture on the text, used Track Matte and added wiggle(5,500) expression to the Rotation property so texture would be constantly moving. Also added some additional effects to the new Adjustment Layer on top such as Roughen edges, Turbulent Displace, Posterize Time and Noise. Let your freak flag fly - it’s a matter of taste and creativity of what you do with it. Your animation should look something like this:
Hey, wanna make some mountains? In honor of the launch of the music video I just finished, here’s a tutorial on how to build out 2D layers in 3D space in after effects.
Getting Started
First of all, build your vector layers. You can build them as shape layers directly in After Effects, but I prefer Illustrator. Here’s the file where I organized the vectors for each scene:
I highly recommend using Overlord for moving shape layers back and forth between illustrator and AE. It can preserve layer positions relative to each other or center vector shapes in comps, group and ungroup layers, all kinds of nice things. But also, Adobe software costs enough as is. Look up one of the many tutorials about pasting vectors into shape layers and get your vectors in there!
Wigglin
I wanted my vector layers to squirm a little. Originally it was to mimic the effect of paper cut animation, but once I moved away from that look it was to keep the background feeling alive and, sigh, like its own character. Everything except for very curvy layers (like the bridge in the first scene) has Wiggle Paths > Corners applied to it as a Shape Layer effect. This tutorial by Ben Marriott helped me get the wiggle paths + posterize time cutout effect I was looking for.
In order to keep the amount of wigglin’ consistent from scene to scene, I stored all my layer styles in their own precomp with a slider effect attached, applied Wiggle Paths to each vector, then connected the layer properties with the pickwhip. I ended up with an expression like
this = comp(“Wiggle control comp”).layer(“Wiggle parent”).effect(“Detail Slider”);
Apply it to the Detail attribute of your Wiggle Paths shape effect, and you can adjust the intensity of the look across multiple comps!
Parallax
I’m guessing you’re here for the parallax effect and notes on laying out out vector shapes and textures in 3D space. This tutorial from Camp Keyframe lays it out better than I could, but here’s the short version:
1. Set all your layers to 3D
2. Set your workspace to 2 views and select top view so you can see how your elements are positioned on the z-index
3. Make a null, set it to 3D, and make a camera.
4. Parent null to camera and adjust the position so its z-index matches the z of the camera.
5. Parent null to camera and use null for camera controls hereafter.
6. Parent all unparented layers to null, adjust the null’s scale property, and unparent your layers once they’re where you want them. What we’re doing here is scaling layers as we push them back in the frame, preserving the layout of our original vector comps while arranging them in 3D space. (Even shorter version - mountains are big but far away, rocks are small but close up.)
7. Once your layers are all unparented, move your null around to text the parallax view. Now you can move your camera to pan left and your layers will respond.
Two side notes:
1. If you want an element to follow the motion of the camera, leave it parented to the null and it will stay where you put it in the frame as the background moves.
2. You see that little pixelated line in your switches? That pre-rasterizes your layers. This makes render times way faster because it’s inserting your precomp as a 2D plane, but if you want to blend scenes, turn it off to use your precomps in 3D space.
One more thing!
Even if two elements on screen aren’t touching, you’ll still get nasty collision renders if they’re on the same z-index. Select everything and press P to show your element’s position, and make sure the z is different for each of them.
Final step: textures!
Let me start by saying I did this step incorrectly on this project. If I could do it again, I’d export my shape layers to Procreate, use them as clipping masks, and scribble on them real nice and export them as transparent 2x pngs.
What I did instead was try to get spray and scribble and brush textures in Illustrator. Illustrator does not want to do this, it doesn’t like doing this, and it didn’t like me much by the end of the process. The one benefit was it was easy to name them the same as their corresponding shape layer, which made compositing easier.
Once you’ve imported them as layers, not a png series), it’s just a matter of copying and pasting the scale data (you can copy all dimensions at once if you select the attribute name rather than any one value) and position data. Make sure to set your texture layers to 3D and watch for z-index collisions!
Closing thoughts
I wrote this up in order to be useful to the community and find other folks who are at or near where I am as I learn After Effects. If this was useful to you or there’s something you think would be interesting, please comment or share your work!
open a new composition on after effects. you can set the dimensions to anything, but i’m using 540 x 300px for this tutorial. the duration i set to 5 seconds, but we’ll probably have to cut it down after we finish animating it.
1. select the pen tool (G) and draw the basic eye shape. this is going to be the whites of the eye, so set the fill to white.
you can set the stroke to any color if you want a border around your eye, too.
to help with drawing the eye shape, i recommend turning on the proportion grid.
to draw the eye, i
(1) start with the left corner and set an anchor point (click),
(2) go to the top-middle, click and hold shift while dragging the handle to the right to fill 2 boxes,
(3) go to the right corner and click,
(4) go to the bottom-middle and hold shift while dragging the handle to the left to fill 2 boxes.
hopefully that wasn’t too confusing??
this is the basic shape, so you can adjust it however you want depending on what you think looks best! i’ll be keeping it this way here.
2. draw the pupil of the eye, all you need is the ellipse tool. at the toolbar on the top, you can either click and hold the rectangle tool to get to the ellipse, or you can press Q three times.
be sure to press shift while you draw the shape so that it’s a perfect circle!
you can set the fill to anything, i’m making it black in this tutorial.
center the the pupil to the white of the eye by selecting both of them, going to the align panel to the right, and selecting these two buttons:
i turned off the proportional grid here, too, bc you don’t really need it anymore.
3. animating: moving the pupil
here, you can make the eye do whatever you want but i’ll just be going over the basic animation!
- select the pupil layer and press P to bring up position.
- click on the stopwatch to bring up a keyframe.
this is the starting position of your pupil. you can place the pupil anywhere, but i’m placing it at the center.
- move a couple of frames forward (here i moved 5 frames forward) with the current time indicator and copy and paste the first key frame. this is so that the eye will stay at the center for a few before moving on.
- move a couple of frames forward and move the pupil anywhere. i’m making it go to the right.
i want the eye movement to be a bit jerky, so i’ll be copy and pasting this keyframe a couple of frames forward before moving the pupil to another place (here, i’m going to the left).
- repeat the last 2 steps until you’re satisfied. i’m only moving the eye three times here (center --> right --> left).
i also cut the composition time here to 1 second long. move the time indicator to 1 second and hit N to cut your work area down.
so far, your animation might look a bit like this:
which is honestly a bit boring.
so, i changed the path of the pupil a bit. right now, the path is all straight lines. instead, i’m going to be curving the paths.
- select the anchor point to get to the handles and drag the handles to create curves. play around with them until you’re satisfied!
now, your animation might look like this:
getting better! last thing i did was add easy ease to the keyframes. it just makes it flow a bit better.
select all your keyframes and either hit F9, or right click > keyframe assistant > easy ease. it’ll turn your keyframes from diamonds to hourglass shapes.
now it looks like this:
and that’s the basic animation!
one more thing: it’s not noticeable on the gif above bc the bg is the same color as the pupil, but the pupil is actually spilling over the eye right now. (i actually made this mistake on my gfx, too, haha!)
changing the bg color to gray so that you can see:
all you have to do is set a track matte.
- duplicate the white and move it on top of the pupil. (cmd/ctrl + D)
- set the track matte of the pupil to alpha matte. you might have to toggle switches/mode at the bottom.
and it should be fixed now!
4. animating: opening/closing the eye
- select all of your layers and pre compose them. (right click > pre compose). your eye should be all in one layer now.
closing the eye:
- select the pen tool and your precomposed layer. draw a rough eye shape around the eye. no need to be exact.
- move to just a few frames before the end of the composition. press alt/option + M to create a keyframe for mask path. move to the end of your comp and drag the first top point of your mask downwards to close the eye.
(i changed the bg color back to black so you can see better :’))
i also added easy ease to the keyframes afterwards.
opening the eye:
- just copy and paste the last two keyframes and put them in the beginning, but be sure to reverse the order. that’s it!
if you’ve been following this tutorial pretty closely, there’ll be timing issues in your animation. here’s how it looks for me right now:
imo, it’s too fast right now.
5. fixing the timing
- first, i extended the time for the work area to 1 second and 15 frames instead of just 1 second.
- double click the precomp layer to bring up all the separate layers from step 1-3.
- because the eye opens after 5 frames, i’m shifting all of the pupil keyframes to the 5th frame of the comp.
- go back to the main composition where the only layer is your precomp. i’m going to be bringing the last two keyframes (the ones where the eye is closing) a bit before the end. (here i chose 5 frames before the end)
- i still felt like the eye opens and closes too fast, so i extended the work area time to 1 second and 25 seconds.
and finished!! here’s the final product:
if u have any clarifying questions, pls feel free to shoot me an ask! i’ll be happy to help :-)
Dropping this ╠╣═╔╗ loop
in tribute of this 09-11-16 TrapcodeTAO day Of The Tentacle inspired After Effects tutorial
Tentacular Entanglements 01 | 6 ed.
COLLECT NFT ◄◄◄
15XTZ
Tentacular Entanglements RGB | 6 ed.
COLLECT NFT
5 XTZ
blinking animation after effects tutorial:
a tutorial on how to do a very simple blinking animation in after effects. this tutorial assumes that u know some of the basics of after effects and the pen tool.
disclaimer: this is the way i did it in some of my edits. im not claiming this is the correct/easiest/best way. it may not work for your editing style. this is a very simple animation so it will look best on flat vector type gfx and when its viewed from a distance.
01: open your gfx in after effects- if you have hair strands that are over the eyes make sure the hair is on a seperate layer (i made the illustration in ps and just saved the hair/bg layer as a seperate pngs).
02: select the pen tool and create a layer for the eyelid (closed). make sure there are anchor points on the inner and outer corners of the eye. adjust the fill color of the shape so that it matches the color used for the skin.
03: hit the stopwatch on ur layer under contents > shape 1 > path 1 > path
04: move the time indicator forward a bit and then drag the path on the outer corner of the eye up and towards the inner corner so that u have a nice curve for the opened eyelid. u can play it once to see if u like the result and if not adjust it.
05: optional: add a bit of depth with a drop shadow. keep the distance low. u may have to add a mask to prevent the shadow from peeking out at the top.
(no shadow)
(shadow)
something you may have to do depending on the edit: add a fade in/out animation to the shadow so that its only there when the eyelid moves over the actual eyeball to prevent a line from appearing at the top of the eye when its opened.
06: repeat on the other eye. add keyframes/easy ease to ur liking- done!
A full walk through tutorial on how to make the above gif, focusing on combining two video clips by using After Effect's roto brush to mask and it's color manipulation tools. Basic knowledge of After Effects will help, as well as my previous tutorial on making gifs from video clips if you don't already know how to do that.
