IntroductionOverview| 00:07 | Hi! I'm Chris Meyer of Chris Design and welcome to
the After Effects Apprentice lesson on parenting.
| | 00:11 | Parenting is a way of grouping together
multiple layers inside an After Effects composition.
| | 00:15 | If you change the position, scale or rotation of the
parent, all the children come along for the ride.
| | 00:20 | If the children have their animations, they
get to keep them, but now they are performed
| | 00:25 | relative to the parent.
| | 00:27 | As a result you can group together multiple
layers, keyframes as few as just one of them,
| | 00:31 | and create complex animation
with a minimum amount of work.
| | 00:34 | In this lesson, we're going to show you how
to create a parenting chain, explain what
| | 00:38 | does and does not come along for the ride,
and talk about what makes the good parent
| | 00:41 | and what's makes a good child.
| | 00:42 | We'll show you how to use null objects,
special non-rendering layers in After Effects and
| | 00:47 | give you few examples.
| | 00:48 | For example, how to create a title animation,
how to create special geometric constructs,
| | 00:52 | and how to create an anthropomorphic animation, such as
a robot arm, inside After Effects using parenting.
| | 00:58 | We also have a couple Idea Corners.
| | 01:01 | We'll take some examples you see is this project
and expand upon them to make them finished pieces.
| | 01:05 | We'll also have a couple
of sidebars at the end.
| | 01:07 | One will show you a particular gotcha with
parenting and how to fix it and the other
| | 01:11 | will just show you how to create your own
abstract backgrounds using the Fractal Noise
| | 01:14 | effect inside After Effects.
| | 01:16 | Some of this material is actually not in the
After Effects Apprentice book, but parenting
| | 01:20 | is such an importance subject, we want
to show you several different angles.
| | 01:23 | So if this sounds like fun,
then let's dive in and get at it.
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| Using the exercise files| 00:02 | Throughout these After Effects Apprentice
courses, you'll find that Trish and I focus
| | 00:06 | on core concepts of using
and learning After Effects.
| | 00:09 | Not specific tricks that only work
with certain pieces of footage.
| | 00:12 | Therefore, if you don't have any exercise
files, or if you want to use your own footage,
| | 00:16 | you'll still get a lot out of
just watching these videos.
| | 00:19 | That said, studies have shown that the best
way to learn something is to actually do it.
| | 00:24 | Therefore for the optimal learning experience
we suggest you do get access to the exercise files.
| | 00:28 | There are two ways to do that.
| | 00:31 | One is to get a lynda.com premium membership.
| | 00:34 | That will allow you to download the files
for After Effects CS4, CS5, CS5.5 or CS6.
| | 00:41 | These are the same files we're
using when we record these videos.
| | 00:44 | The other approach is to get a copy
of our book After Effects Apprentice.
| | 00:48 | The third edition covers CS5, CS5.5 and CS6.
| | 00:51 | If you're still using After Effects CS4,
then get the second edition of the book.
| | 00:55 | Those files are pretty close to the
ones we use throughout this video course.
| | 00:59 | Whenever there are differences
we'll note them as we teach.
| | 01:02 | Now either way we think it's a good value.
| | 01:04 | If you get the premium membership to lynda,
you could access to exercise files for hundreds
| | 01:08 | of other courses.
| | 01:10 | If you get one of our books, you've got some
additional text explanation for each of the
| | 01:13 | features we discuss and you've got a
desk reference next to you all the time.
| | 01:17 | Now throughout these lessons we're going
to be using a combination of After Effects
| | 01:20 | CS5, CS5.5 and CS6. Don't be thrown off by
any minor differences in the user interface,
| | 01:27 | most of the functionality of After Effects
is identical across all of these versions.
| | 01:32 | If there are differences from version to
version, we'll note it in the little caption that
| | 01:35 | runs along the bottom of the screen.
| | 01:37 | But all that said, we really hope you have a
lot of fun with these courses learning After Effects.
| | 01:42 | It's the application we've been using for
ages now, we have a great time with it, and
| | 01:46 | we hope you get the same
enjoyment out of it that we do.
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1. Parenting 101: Grouping LayersParenting basics| 00:07 | If you have access to the Exercise
Files that came with these videos, open up
| | 00:11 | project AEA_Parenting_101.aep.
| | 00:15 | If instead, you're following along
using our book After Effects Apprentice,
| | 00:19 | 2nd edition, where in Lesson 6, Parenting and
Nesting, and open up project 06a-Parenting.aep.
| | 00:25 | I have already queued up a RAM preview
and I'll press 0 on the numeric keypad,
| | 00:30 | and you see we have three simple layers.
| | 00:33 | We have a background animation of
these lines, we have an animation of a
| | 00:36 | rotating globe, and we have a circle of text.
| | 00:40 | Our plan here is we want to make the
text rotate around the globe and have the
| | 00:44 | two of them scale up towards this as a unit.
| | 00:47 | Now we could animate these objects
independently, but a better way to go about
| | 00:51 | it is to parent them together
so we can treat them as a group.
| | 00:53 | I'm going to press Home to
return to start of my composition.
| | 00:57 | I'll select Text and Shift+Click
on planet, so they're both selected.
| | 01:00 | I'll press S to reveal their Scale,
Shift+R to reveal Rotation, and Shift+T to
| | 01:06 | also reveal Opacity.
| | 01:07 | Now normally, layers are
completely independent from each other.
| | 01:10 | For example, if I change the Scale of one layer,
it does not change the Scale of another layer.
| | 01:15 | To group these layers together though I
need to use something called parenting.
| | 01:19 | To reveal the Parent column in the
Timeline panel, I need to do one of two things.
| | 01:23 | I can either right-click on a
column header and choose Parent and that
| | 01:28 | column will appear.
| | 01:30 | I tend to drag the Parent column next to
the Names of the layers, because I like
| | 01:33 | to see the names side-by-side, or you
can use a shortcut of pressing Shift+F4
| | 01:38 | to toggle the Parent column off and on again.
| | 01:41 | Now the next question becomes which
layer to parent to the other layer?
| | 01:46 | Who should be the parent?
| | 01:47 | Who should be the child?
| | 01:49 | Children inherit all qualities from
their parents, but parents inherit no
| | 01:54 | qualities from their children. It makes sense.
| | 01:56 | If I know I'm going to be rotating this
text, it'll be a bad idea to parent the
| | 02:01 | planet to the text because
it will inherit that rotation.
| | 02:05 | And just to show you that example,
I'll click on the Parent popup for planet
| | 02:08 | layer, choose Text as its parent, and
now as I go to rotate the text, you'll see
| | 02:14 | the planet rotates as well.
| | 02:16 | That's not at all what I want.
| | 02:17 | I'll undo, set the Parent popup back to
None, and instead I'm going to use the
| | 02:22 | pickwhip next to the Parent popup to
say the text will be connected to the
| | 02:28 | planet as its parent.
| | 02:29 | Now I can rotate the text without
having any effect on the globe, but if I was
| | 02:34 | to do something such as Scale the globe,
you'll see the text comes along for the ride.
| | 02:39 | That makes it easier because I
just need to set one set of Scale
| | 02:42 | keyframes instead of two.
| | 02:43 | And I'm going to go ahead
and set up a quick animation.
| | 02:46 | I'm going to enable keyframing for
Rotation for the text and enable keyframing
| | 02:50 | Scale for the planet.
| | 02:52 | For the text, I'll go to the end
of my composition, just to make it
| | 02:57 | seamless loop. I'll go one frame past
the end and say rotate 2 times during
| | 03:02 | with my composition.
| | 03:04 | press Home to back to the start.
| | 03:06 | And for the planet, I'm going to say
start at a Scale of 0, go 1 second later in
| | 03:11 | time, and set it back to 100%.
| | 03:16 | Now when I RAM preview, you'll see
the two scale up as a group and the text
| | 03:22 | continues to rotate around the planet.
| | 03:24 | Children inherit most transformations such as
Scale, Rotation, or Position from their parent.
| | 03:31 | However, there are a couple of
important properties that they do not inherit.
| | 03:34 | For example, let's say I also
wanted to fade up these two layers.
| | 03:38 | Well, you might say Opacity is
another transformation property.
| | 03:42 | Planet is the parent so let's go
ahead and set it to initially a 0.
| | 03:45 | Here's my Keyframe Navigator to go to
my Scale keyframe and go up to 100%.
| | 03:51 | But you notice already that the
planet is fading, but the text is not.
| | 03:57 | Opacity is not inherited
from parents to children.
| | 04:02 | Another important thing
that's not inherited are effects.
| | 04:05 | For example, if I put little bit of
Blur on this planet, you notice that the
| | 04:10 | text does not getting blurry.
| | 04:11 | Just the planet does.
| | 04:13 | Here's another example.
| | 04:15 | Let's say that I wanted to tint the text,
but not tint the parent, the planet.
| | 04:21 | I'll select just the text layer, go
Effect > Color Correction > Tint, and pick
| | 04:27 | for my white point maybe one of these
green continent colors from the planet.
| | 04:32 | Now my text has been tinted,
but the parent has not.
| | 04:36 | And in general, parents
inherit nothing from their children.
| | 04:40 | Children inherit just major
transforms, Scale, Rotation, Position from their parents.
| | 04:47 | And now there's my animation and
that's literally all there is to parenting.
| | 04:52 | You go ahead and choose who the child
is going to be, go to its Parent popup or
| | 04:57 | to pickwhip tool, and choose
who that child's parent will be.
| | 05:01 | And it will inherit certain properties,
but not all properties from that parent.
| | 05:05 | Okay, that was simple.
| | 05:06 | Now let's go into a little bit more
complex of an example where I have multiple
| | 05:10 | elements that I want to tie
together and animate as a group.
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| Parenting with null objects| 00:07 | In this movie, we're going to show a
slightly more sophisticated application of
| | 00:10 | parenting and to help
raise or animate our children
| | 00:13 | we're going to use a nanny,
known as a null object.
| | 00:15 | First, let's see where we're going with this.
| | 00:17 | If you've got the project files,
open up the Finished Movies folder and
| | 00:21 | double-click Parenting2.
| | 00:23 | In After Effects CS5 or later, that
will open it up in the Footage panel.
| | 00:27 | If you're using After Effects CS4,
hold down Option on Mac or Alt on Windows,
| | 00:31 | double-click, and then it will open in Footage.
| | 00:34 | I'll press the 0 key to RAM preview
and you see we have a bit of a title
| | 00:37 | animation going on here, where we've
got a number and a globe scaling up.
| | 00:41 | We have the words Season
Finale animating on from the left.
| | 00:45 | We have a type animation on TOMORROW on
the right, and as the globe and number
| | 00:49 | scale up and move to the left, we've got the
word such as TOMORROW moving along with it.
| | 00:54 | How do we create this coordinated
animation with a minimum number of keyframes
| | 00:58 | and in a way to make it easier
to accommodate client changes?
| | 01:02 | Well, this is where parenting comes in.
| | 01:03 | I'll stop my playback and open
up the comp, Parenting2_starter.
| | 01:08 | The first thing to think about when
parenting several layers together is who
| | 01:12 | makes a logical group?
| | 01:13 | Who is a unit you want to treat together?
| | 01:15 | For example, the station number 9 and
the globe behind it are something that we
| | 01:20 | want to keep together throughout the animation.
| | 01:23 | So we're down to the Timeline panel.
| | 01:25 | We don't need the Mode panel, so I'm
going to go ahead and right-click on
| | 01:27 | that and say Hide This.
| | 01:29 | But we do want the Parent panel, so
I'll just select Columns > Parent and
| | 01:34 | again the shortcut is Shift+F4.
| | 01:36 | And there's my Parent column next to my layers.
| | 01:39 | I want the 9 tied at the globe, so I'll
select the 9 layer and change its parent
| | 01:44 | popup to the planet.
| | 01:47 | Now when I pick up and move the
planet layer, the number 9 will always
| | 01:50 | come along with it.
| | 01:51 | Next, we want all of these guys to
operate as a group, but we've got all
| | 01:54 | sorts of things going on in terms of things
sliding in and out and moving into corners.
| | 02:00 | Maybe the planet might make a good
parent for this, but I'm not sure.
| | 02:04 | If you're ever not certain, a
fantastic parent is a null object.
| | 02:08 | A null object is a layer that does not
render, but through parenting, is capable
| | 02:13 | of passing its
transformations down to its children.
| | 02:16 | So I'll go to Layer > New > Null Object.
| | 02:20 | Nulls are really just special cases
of solids, so if I go to Layer > Solid
| | 02:26 | Settings, I can go ahead and rename the null.
| | 02:29 | in this case I'll call it
Title Parent Null, okay.
| | 02:35 | Its default color is red, which is not
very visible against my red background,
| | 02:38 | so I'm going to change its color to
something more visible such as say green,
| | 02:43 | which should give us some contrast.
| | 02:44 | There's something very important to
null objects is that their anchor point
| | 02:48 | defaults to their upper left
corner, not the center of the layer.
| | 02:53 | If you've watched the After Effects
Apprentice Advanced Animation course, you
| | 02:56 | know the anchor point is
extraordinarily important because it's the center of
| | 03:00 | all transformations, such
as Position, Scale, Rotation.
| | 03:04 | While I'm parenting where children are
inheriting transformations from their
| | 03:07 | parent, that anchor point
becomes even more important.
| | 03:11 | So question is where would we like the
center of all of our transformations to be?
| | 03:15 | Well, maybe centering things
around that globe would be a great idea.
| | 03:18 | I can either pick up and move the null
object where I think it should be, as I
| | 03:22 | have done here, or even better would
be to select planet, type P to reveal its
| | 03:27 | Position, select the word
Position, and copy to get its value.
| | 03:31 | Then go to my parent null, P for its
Position, and Command+V to Ctrl+V paste to
| | 03:37 | make sure it has exactly the same
Position as center of the planet.
| | 03:40 | That way, if we parent the planet to
the null, the planet won't go drifting off
| | 03:45 | center if we scale that null object.
| | 03:48 | Okay, next let's go ahead and
make our children assignments.
| | 03:50 | So I'm going to select planet and
Shift+Click on the Season Finale layer.
| | 03:54 | That will select all the layers
between the one I have currently selected
| | 03:57 | and the one I click on.
| | 03:58 | Now that they're all selected, I just
need to change to parent for one of them.
| | 04:02 | I'll use the pickwhip in this case to
select Title Parent Null, release, and
| | 04:07 | you'll see now that all of them
have been changed to use that parent.
| | 04:11 | Close this up a little bit.
| | 04:13 | Okay, we have our parent-child
assignments. Now let's do some keyframing.
| | 04:16 | I already have my layers
arranged in one pose that I like.
| | 04:19 | So I'm going to go to a point in time
where I want that pose to be held at 2
| | 04:23 | seconds and use this as a
point to enable keyframing.
| | 04:27 | I want this whole group to move
down in the left corner and maybe be
| | 04:30 | scaled differently.
| | 04:31 | Since they are all parented to the null,
I don't need to keyframe each of the
| | 04:34 | components individually.
| | 04:36 | I just need to keyframe the parent individually.
| | 04:38 | So I'll select Title Parent Null.
| | 04:40 | I have revealed Position already.
| | 04:42 | I'll type Shift+S to also reveal
Scale and I'll enable keyframing for
| | 04:46 | Position and Scale.
| | 04:48 | Now I'll move a little bit later in time,
say around 2:15, and decide on a new Position
| | 04:53 | and Scale for these layers.
| | 04:55 | Let's say I want them to be bigger,
that I want my little bug and the word
| | 04:58 | TOMORROW to be larger in the frame.
| | 05:00 | I'm going to go ahead and increase the
Scale here to say maybe around 150% and
| | 05:06 | notice that everyone gets larger.
| | 05:07 | That's because they're all tied to this parent.
| | 05:10 | Now normally you would say, Chris, going
over 100% is not a good idea for Scale.
| | 05:15 | Well, here is as important concept of parenting.
| | 05:17 | The Scale of the parent is also
multiplied by the Scale of the children to
| | 05:22 | determine their final Scale.
| | 05:25 | In the case of the planet,
I'm going to type S for Scale,
| | 05:28 | its original Scale value was 40%.
| | 05:30 | So 40% times 150% gives
just 60% Scale for the planet.
| | 05:37 | Safely underneath a 100, not blowing
up the pixels, no damage is being done.
| | 05:42 | So that's one advantage of parenting.
| | 05:44 | These two are factored
together or collapsed or concatenated.
| | 05:48 | Since my other layers are text layers, 9,
TOMORROW, and Season Finale, and they
| | 05:54 | are all continuously rasterized,
which means they automatically redraw
| | 05:58 | themselves to stay sharp,
| | 05:59 | I don't need to worry about their Scale.
| | 06:02 | Okay, I have got a larger Scale
value. Now I want to position things.
| | 06:06 | Since this is being designed for
broadcast television, I need to worry about
| | 06:10 | the Title and Action Safe areas
around the edges of a TV screen, where the
| | 06:14 | bezel is, etcetera.
| | 06:16 | To view where these are, I go
to my Grid and Guide options and
| | 06:20 | enable Title/Action Safe.
| | 06:22 | You can also just press the
apostrophe key on the keyboard.
| | 06:24 | I want to move this group
down at the lower left corner.
| | 06:27 | I need to keep my text inside the inner
Title Safe area and this is now going
| | 06:33 | to fade off Season Finale eventually.
| | 06:34 | I don't care where it ends up.
| | 06:36 | I click anywhere inside my
null object. It's my parent.
| | 06:39 | When I drag it, the whole group gets dragged.
| | 06:41 | So I'm going to select number
9 carefully within Title Safe.
| | 06:45 | I notice that my planet is still safely
inside Action Safe, so I don't need to
| | 06:49 | worry about TV bezel cutting that off.
| | 06:51 | Life is good and now I
have my initial animation.
| | 06:54 | everyone scales up and moves
into the corner as a group.
| | 06:57 | I only need to make one set of
keyframes for the title, not for all of
| | 07:01 | the component layers.
| | 07:03 | Just for fun, I'll press 0 on
the numeric keypad to RAM preview.
| | 07:09 | And there is my final move.
| | 07:11 | That final landing is a bit hard for my taste.
| | 07:14 | So I think I'm going to select those
keyframes, right-click, Keyframe Assistant
| | 07:19 | > Easy Ease In, just to make
them land a little more softly.
| | 07:25 | That's a little bit more
elegant. I prefer that.
| | 07:28 | Okay, I have got the whole group
animating the way I like, but now I can go
| | 07:32 | make the children animate independently.
| | 07:35 | Now an obvious problem is that Season
Finale gets shelved off of the left side and
| | 07:40 | kind of just maybe outside action
safe, but I don't really trust it.
| | 07:43 | So let's go ahead and fade that out.
| | 07:45 | Remember nothing you do to children
are passed along to the parent, and
| | 07:48 | regardless, Opacity is not passed
between parent and children either.
| | 07:52 | So I'm going to go just 2 seconds.
| | 07:53 | I can hold Shift while dragging the
Time Indicator to snap that point in time,
| | 07:57 | go to Season Finale, T for
Opacity, enable keyframing.
| | 08:01 | I'm going to use a keyboard
shortcut K to jump to the next keyframe and
| | 08:05 | then fade it down to 0.
| | 08:07 | And I preview again.
| | 08:09 | Now it faded away as my bug and the
word TOMORROW shifts into position.
| | 08:17 | Quick and easy animation made a lot easier,
thanks to using null objects and parenting.
| | 08:21 | Of course, you can do a lot further with this.
| | 08:23 | I can add whatever animation I
wanted to the children without ruining the
| | 08:26 | animation being done by the parent.
| | 08:29 | And indeed, in one of the Idea Corner
movies later on in this lesson I'm
| | 08:32 | going to show you some ideas of how maybe
spice this up, animate the title on, etcetera.
| | 08:37 | But for now, I want you to this
concept of parenting saves on keyframing.
| | 08:42 | Null objects make great parents
because they're kind of like neutral third
| | 08:45 | parties, where you needn't worry
about who is rotating who, etcetera.
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| Working with geometric constructs| 00:07 | The next trick I'd like to show you is
how to use a combination of parenting and
| | 00:10 | null objects to quickly and easily
create what would otherwise be complex
| | 00:14 | geometric structures.
| | 00:16 | This particular trick is not in the
After Effects Apprentice book, but don't worry.
[00:00:120.27]
You can use any source for it.
| | 00:21 | I want to go up to Composition > New
Composition. I'm going to pick some preset
| | 00:26 | that happens to have Square Pixels.
| | 00:28 | This just removes any pixel
aspect distortion for what you see.
| | 00:32 | It's not required what I am doing
and I'll give it a name such as
| | 00:35 | Parenting-construct and click OK.
| | 00:40 | You can use the any layer for this trick.
| | 00:42 | I'm just going to use a text layer just for fun.
| | 00:44 | Now I'll type in any
nonsense word such as geometric.
| | 00:48 | I can pick whatever font that I want,
or in this case it may be fun to use a
| | 00:52 | symbol font such as say, look down
further in the list here, Zapf Dingbats or one
| | 01:00 | of the Wingdings fonts.
| | 01:01 | That way you get all sorts
of interesting strange looks.
| | 01:04 | I use the up and down cursor keys to
quickly move between these choices. That's Zapf.
| | 01:08 | Other thing I am going to go with
Wingdings just because it's kind of interesting.
| | 01:12 | And I'm going to make my point size a
little bit smaller, because I'm going to
| | 01:15 | have a whole bunch of these
on the screen at the same time.
| | 01:17 | I'll return to my Selection tool, V is
the shortcut, and I'm going to create some
| | 01:22 | simple animation for this one starter layer.
| | 01:26 | Maybe I use Scale. S reveals that and
Transparency. Shift+T. I'll go up later in
| | 01:32 | time like 10 frames.
| | 01:34 | Enable keyframing for Scale and Opacity.
This will be my final resting spot.
| | 01:38 | Go back to 0 and maybe start from a much
larger scale and also fade it up during this.
| | 01:45 | So now I have one layer
performing simple animation.
| | 01:48 | Let's say that I want a wheel of
these layers all doing the same thing.
| | 01:53 | Well, I can create a whole bunch of
these layers and rotate them and carefully
| | 01:55 | position them, or I can use parenting in nulls.
| | 01:58 | I'll create Layer > New >
Null Object to be my parent.
| | 02:03 | I don't want one particular layer to be
my parent here because I don't want all
| | 02:06 | the other text layers scaling
around one of the text layers.
| | 02:09 | I want everyone scaling around the central null.
| | 02:12 | Remember that in nulls, the anchor point,
the center transformation, is in the
| | 02:16 | upper left-hand corner.
| | 02:17 | So if I do any rotation or scale,
it's going to be around that center point.
| | 02:20 | So let's go ahead and move my text in
relation to that null object's anchor point.
| | 02:25 | I can carefully line it up like
spokes of a wheel, or I could have fun and
| | 02:30 | create a little bit of an overlapping
look and put it slightly up into the
| | 02:33 | right of where the anchor point is.
| | 02:36 | Next is to deciding how many of these
layers I want to replicate around my wheel.
| | 02:40 | Let's say I choose 9 copies of the layers.
| | 02:43 | So I'll select my geometric text layer.
| | 02:45 | Again this could be any layer you create.
| | 02:47 | I am going to go ahead and duplicate it
another 8 times, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8,
| | 02:53 | giving me nine identical layers.
| | 02:56 | I want all these to eventually be
parented to my null object, which of course
| | 03:00 | I can rename, wheel of text null, but
instead of parenting them all at the
| | 03:08 | same time, I'm going to take advantage of
transformations to help me arrange the layers.
| | 03:13 | So I have got my first text layer where
I wanted, I'll parent it now, but I want the
| | 03:19 | next layer to be rotated
slightly around this wheel.
| | 03:22 | Rather than rotate the text, I
can rotate the parental null.
| | 03:26 | I'll type R for Rotation and I
want nine of these around a circle.
| | 03:32 | That's 360 degrees like up on a
calculator, or I can let After Effects to the
| | 03:38 | math for me. 360/9, Enter, is 40 degrees.
| | 03:46 | Great! I didn't have to do any math myself.
| | 03:48 | I'm going to actually copy that number
so I can use it for the offset later on.
| | 03:54 | I'll parent to my second text layer
to that null and say take that value +
| | 04:00 | another 40 degrees. 80 degrees, great!
| | 04:04 | Parent another one.
| | 04:05 | Select it again. Plus, if I forget what my
value is, I'll just paste in the value I
| | 04:10 | copied earlier, great!
| | 04:12 | There is another one, parent that, and
obviously just keep going around this wheel.
| | 04:18 | And I'll do this quickly for you,
because seeing someone else type in and do
| | 04:23 | math can otherwise be pretty boring,
but you can see how rather than having to
| | 04:29 | position all these layers by hand or try
to do some sort of tricky alignment and
| | 04:33 | distribute or anything like that, I am
using a null object to help me arrange my
| | 04:40 | layers ahead of time.
| | 04:44 | And that should be my last one, great!
| | 04:47 | So there are my nine layers around my null.
| | 04:50 | I'll turn off the video switch for the
nulls so it doesn't distract me. Put this
| | 04:52 | back to 0 and now as I rotate that
null object, all of those layers rotate
| | 04:58 | around my wheel for me.
| | 04:59 | And remember, I created an animation for one of
those layers to begin with. So I'll go back to 0.
| | 05:06 | As I slowly scrub my time indicator you
can see that all those layers scale down
| | 05:12 | and fade up together.
| | 05:13 | That's because I did my transform
animation before I did any parenting and
| | 05:19 | before I duplicated all these layers.
| | 05:21 | Every time I duplicated the layer,
it got the same keyframes as the layer
| | 05:25 | that I was duplicating.
| | 05:26 | Let's create a little animation just
for fun here, keyframe Rotation there, go
| | 05:31 | to the end, may be give it
something simple like one rotation.
| | 05:37 | I suspect this is going to be
better with Motion Blur, so I'll Enable
| | 05:40 | Motion Blur for the comp.
| | 05:41 | And not for the null parent.
| | 05:43 | That won't do anything, but I will
do it for all of my other layers.
| | 05:47 | So I RAM Preview and you see they
come into position and keep rotating.
| | 05:57 | Now one thing that will make your
life easier is if you can do all of your
| | 06:00 | animations to one object
before you duplicate it and parent it.
| | 06:05 | That way you won't have to copy
and paste a lot of keyframes later.
| | 06:08 | You'll find it will be
particularly hard to line up your position
| | 06:10 | keyframes after the effect.
| | 06:12 | So try to plan ahead if at all possible.
| | 06:14 | However, another really cool thing
about text is that you can apply animation
| | 06:19 | presets after the fact as well.
| | 06:20 | I'm going to go back to my Home and
I'll press U to reveal all their keyframes.
| | 06:26 | I'm going to go to where I have the
layers fully on and fully opaque and I'm
| | 06:31 | actually going to go ahead and drag
down and turn off the Animation stopwatch
| | 06:35 | for all those animations, because
instead of using a transform animation, I can
| | 06:39 | apply a text animation after the fact.
| | 06:43 | Text animations do not rely on transformations.
| | 06:48 | Therefore, I can apply them to a layer.
They're going to happen locally to
| | 06:51 | the child and not realize they're
being dragged around by a parent or
| | 06:55 | otherwise being transformed.
| | 06:56 | Go to my Effects & Presets > Animation Presets.
| | 06:59 | Again I could browse if I wanted to,
but I already know what I'm after.
| | 07:03 | I want to go into the Text category,
Curves and Spins, which is kind of a fun
| | 07:07 | set, and I'm going to pick Whirl In.
| | 07:10 | I have got all of my text layers selected.
| | 07:11 | Double-click Whirl In.
| | 07:12 | They will all get that animation.
| | 07:15 | Oh, look what I did!
| | 07:16 | I have my Current Time Indicator, so
rather than start at the comp, my first
| | 07:20 | keyframe's not going to be till here.
| | 07:21 | That's all right. I'll undo.
| | 07:22 | Go back to 0 and double-click again.
| | 07:26 | Now I'll press 0 to RAM Preview and
you can see this really fun geometric
| | 07:30 | construct I have of an animation preset
being applied to each of these children
| | 07:35 | text layers around the central
parent. And that's a lot of fun.
| | 07:42 | In the next chapter, we're going to
move onto more complex trick, creating
| | 07:46 | anthropomorphic behaviors by creating
a chain of parent child relationships.
| | Collapse this transcript |
|
|
2. Parenting 201: Anthropomorphic AnimationsPreparing files| 00:07 | If you have the exercise files that came
with these videos for this chapter open
| | 00:11 | up the project AEA_Parenting_201.aep.
| | 00:16 | This particular exercise was not
part of After Effects Apprentice.
| | 00:19 | It was actually included in an earlier book
of ours called After Effects in Production.
| | 00:23 | But we thought it would be
useful to show it to you here.
| | 00:25 | Open up Finished Movies and
double-click the movie RoboTV-final.
| | 00:30 | If you're using After Effects CS4, hold
down Option on Mac or Alt on Windows to
| | 00:34 | open it in this Footage panel.
| | 00:36 | This is the final composition you'll be
building,and let's RAM preview it briefly.
| | 00:40 | (Whir, whir, whir)
| | 00:52 | This robot arm was animated
inside After Effects using parenting.
| | 00:56 | Each link of the arm is actually an
independent layer that we tied together in a
| | 01:00 | parent-child relationship
and then animated as a unit.
| | 01:03 | Let's start by taking a look at
how something like this may be built.
| | 01:06 | I am going to switch over to
Photoshop where I have it as a layered file.
| | 01:09 | I'll turn off all the layers to start with.
| | 01:12 | Here is the outer frame.
| | 01:13 | Here is the large arm,
carefully centered on this focal point.
| | 01:17 | Here's the medium arm and here is the small arm.
| | 01:20 | This particular object was built in a
3D program, although it could be built
| | 01:24 | in something like Photoshop, Illustrator,
or even in After Effects using Shape layers.
| | 01:29 | If you're using a 3D program, make
sure you use a very narrow angle of view
| | 01:33 | equivalent of a zoom lens and move
the camera very far back in space.
| | 01:37 | That way, you'll reduce perspective
distortion, which will make this easier to work with.
| | 01:41 | You might have noticed that all
of the arm pieces are lined up in a
| | 01:44 | perfectly straight line.
| | 01:46 | You may have seen other models from 3D
programs where the characters have their
| | 01:50 | arms straight out at angles. Starting
points like this with something like 0 degrees
| | 01:55 | Offset is what makes it much easier
for you to build relationships between
| | 01:59 | multiple layers later on.
| | 02:01 | I'll return to After Effects, select
Comps as that's what I want to build my
| | 02:05 | own new composition in, and type Command+I
on Mac or Ctrl+I on Windows to import a file.
| | 02:12 | If you have the Exercise Files,
navigate to the Sources folder and
| | 02:16 | select RoboBody.psd.
| | 02:19 | This is the layered
Photoshop file I just showed you.
| | 02:22 | Import this file as a
composition and retain layer sizes.
| | 02:27 | This will automatically crop the
individual layers just down to the amount of
| | 02:30 | space needed for them, which will
make it more efficient to handle.
| | 02:34 | Click Open. You'll get a
second Photoshop dialog.
| | 02:37 | For Layer Options I tend to
turn on Editable Layers Styles.
| | 02:41 | That way, if someone created this in
Photoshop using layer styles, we will maintain
| | 02:45 | them and be able to edit
them later in After Effects.
| | 02:48 | For this particular model, Live
Photoshop 3D is not necessary because I didn't
| | 02:51 | actually make a 3D object in
Photoshop. This was just flat art.
| | 02:55 | So it doesn't matter whether this is off or on.
| | 02:57 | Again, make sure Import Kind is set to
Retain Layer Sizes or similar wording
| | 03:01 | in earlier versions.
| | 03:02 | I'll click OK and two items
are created in the Project panel.
| | 03:07 | One is a folder that contains all of
these individual pieces of my Robo frame
| | 03:13 | and arm pieces and a composition which
puts them all together aligned just as
| | 03:19 | they were in Photoshop.
| | 03:20 | I'll toggle the Transparency Grid on
or off, so you can see what's going on.
| | 03:23 | I'm going to drag the layers down in the
Sources folder just to keep things sorted out.
| | 03:28 | This composition came in at the
document size created in Photoshop.
| | 03:32 | I'll go ahead and open up the
Composition Settings and for now I'm actually
| | 03:36 | going to change this to the
size of my final video output.
| | 03:40 | Since I'm about to group this together
using parenting, I can move it around the
| | 03:43 | video frame as necessary.
| | 03:45 | So I'll select NTSC DV.
| | 03:47 | You'll see that the elements
automatically stretch to match the non-square
| | 03:51 | pixels in this composition.
| | 03:53 | Last thing I am going to
do is verify the duration.
| | 03:55 | I indeed want a 6 second long composition,
so I'll go ahead and keep this duration.
| | 03:59 | If you've got a different duration, type in
6.0 and that will give you a 6 second length.
| | 04:07 | Once again, here is our individual pieces:
| | 04:09 | the frame, large arm, medium arm, small arm.
| | 04:14 | In the next movie we'll go about
connecting all these pieces together.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Building the parenting chain| 00:07 | My next task is connecting together
these individual layers in a way to
| | 00:11 | make animation easier.
| | 00:14 | For example, if I rotate this medium
arm piece, I'd like this little arm piece
| | 00:18 | to follow along with it.
| | 00:19 | So I should probably parent
the small arm to the medium arm.
| | 00:22 | Likewise, if I move the big arm and
rotate it, I would want these other smaller
| | 00:26 | arm pieces to follow it.
| | 00:28 | So at a minimum, I want the medium
arm to be parented to the big arm.
| | 00:32 | However, I would not parent the small
arm directly to the big arm. I am going to
| | 00:37 | leave it as a child to the medium arm.
| | 00:39 | By creating a parenting hierarchy like
this, moving one piece will move children
| | 00:43 | of children, kind of like the leg
bone is connected to the hipbone.
| | 00:47 | It's the same thing is connecting
together your own limbs and that's why it
| | 00:51 | sometimes is referred to as an
anthropomorphic type of animation.
| | 00:55 | Finally, I like to have all the arm
pieces connected to the frame, so if I
| | 00:58 | pick it up to move it around, all the arm
pieces go along with the rest of the mechanism.
| | 01:03 | However, that's not all I need to think of.
| | 01:05 | What's also very important is the
anchor point for these individual pieces.
| | 01:10 | I need to carefully think about what
center point I want these individual pieces
| | 01:15 | to rotate our scale around.
| | 01:17 | For example, I'll select the
Small Arm and type R for Rotation.
| | 01:20 | I'll scrub its Rotation and I really
don't want that arm rotating around its center.
| | 01:25 | That makes no sense.
| | 01:26 | What I really want it to rotate around
is this pivot point right in the middle
| | 01:30 | of this circle. Likewise for
the medium arm and the big arm.
| | 01:34 | That requires carefully setting up the
anchor point, and I highly recommend you
| | 01:38 | do this before you make
your parenting assignments.
| | 01:42 | If you do it afterwards, you have a
chance that your positions and anchor point
| | 01:45 | is not making as much sense.
| | 01:46 | So I am going to zoom in to 200%, hold
down the Spacebar to temporarily get the
| | 01:51 | Hand tool, move it down, and I'm going
to switch to the Pan Behind tool, which we
| | 01:57 | sometimes also refer to as the
Anchor Point tool. Y is the shortcut.
| | 02:01 | I want that anchor point to
be the middle of this circle.
| | 02:06 | I'll pick it up and start dragging.
| | 02:08 | I can just move it freely around and
try to position it correctly or after I
| | 02:13 | have clicked and started moving, I can
add the Shift key to restrict my movement
| | 02:17 | to just X or Y. If I feel that my
anchor point is started out centered along
| | 02:22 | this vertical line, I'll hold down the
Shift key and drag it to what I think
| | 02:26 | should be the center of that rotation.
| | 02:28 | Let's check it to be sure.
| | 02:30 | I'll scrub Rotation and make sure
that my arm stay centered in that pivot
| | 02:33 | point and frankly, it looks pretty good.
| | 02:35 | If necessary, I can nudge it,
but that looks like it should work.
| | 02:39 | I'll undo to get back to 0.
| | 02:41 | It's really important to have a nice
known stable starting position and I'll
| | 02:45 | move down to the Medium Arm.
| | 02:47 | I'll type R to reveal its Rotation,
hold down the Spacebar, and drag to center
| | 02:51 | the arm in my viewer, and again it
pivots around its natural center point where
| | 02:55 | the anchor point defaults at 2.
| | 02:57 | I'll undo, start dragging, then hold the
Shift key and drag this into what looks
| | 03:03 | like it should be roughly the center point.
| | 03:05 | I'll scrub the Rotation and that's not too bad.
| | 03:10 | It might be a little bit out around.
| | 03:11 | So I might try to adjust it.
| | 03:12 | I am moving it around a little bit here.
| | 03:15 | See if that looks any better. Not really.
| | 03:18 | So I just undo and get back to where I
was and leave that as its anchor point.
| | 03:22 | Again, note that I'm using the Pan Behind tool.
| | 03:26 | This moves the anchor point and position at
the same time so that I'm not moving the layer.
| | 03:32 | I'm just moving the anchor
point position's relationship.
| | 03:35 | Pan down here to the big arm, select it,
R for Rotation, with the Pan Behind
| | 03:40 | tool start dragging anchor point, add
the Shift key, and try to center it up and
| | 03:47 | that looks really good.
| | 03:48 | Let's practice by rotating.
| | 03:52 | A little bit out around.
| | 03:53 | Let's see if we can make that any better
by putting it down here. No, that's worse.
| | 03:59 | I'll make one more shot at this, but I think my
initial position might end up being the best.
| | 04:04 | Nope! That's not around again, so I'll just
undo, be happy with that, and I'll go back
| | 04:10 | down to 100%, re-center.
| | 04:15 | After I have set up my anchor points, I
can return back to the normal Selection
| | 04:18 | tool and now it's okay to parent.
| | 04:21 | So just as we said back in the
Advanced Animation lesson, set up your anchor
| | 04:24 | points before you animate.
| | 04:26 | Same goes for parenting.
| | 04:28 | Set up your anchor points before parenting.
| | 04:31 | At this point it is just very simple.
| | 04:32 | The small arm is connected to the medium
arm, the medium arm is connected to the
| | 04:36 | big arm, and the big arm
is connected to the frame.
| | 04:40 | That way if I move the big arm,
everyone follows along. That's nice!
| | 04:46 | Medium arm moves just the small arm, but
not its parent large arm, and the little
| | 04:52 | arm just moves all by itself.
| | 04:53 | So it all works out really nicely.
| | 04:55 | So that's our parenting chain.
| | 04:57 | Pretty simple to set up.
| | 04:58 | But before we start animating it,
we need to know what we're going to be
| | 05:01 | animating it in relation to,
| | 05:03 | what's going to be our timing,
| | 05:04 | and what positions and space
we want this arm to point out.
| | 05:07 | Now to save your time we've
already created a video edit for you.
| | 05:11 | Go into your Sources folder
and open up video edit.
| | 05:15 | We've already spotted out
important parts in the music.
| | 05:17 | I'll zoom back a little bit here and
cut video to go along with the music.
| | 05:21 | We've also added composition markers
that show where each video clip starts.
| | 05:26 | This will make it easier to set the
timing later on, and I'm just going to drag this
| | 05:29 | outside the Sources folder
and close that back up again.
| | 05:33 | What you still need to do, however, is
place a few items of text around the screen
| | 05:37 | to give you something to aim the robot arm at.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Arranging the frame| 00:07 | To save you some time I went ahead and
built this video edit in time to my music.
| | 00:12 | Now I want to treat this entire
composition as one element in my final
| | 00:17 | RoboBody composition.
| | 00:20 | Again, we'll be covering this a lot
more in a future lesson, but all I need
| | 00:22 | to do is find my video edit composition,.
I am going to move it up to Comps so
| | 00:26 | I keep track of it.
| | 00:27 | I'm going to drag it down to the bottom of my
layer stack, so it appears behind everybody.
| | 00:32 | You'll notice that those composition
markers that I placed have now come in
| | 00:36 | as layer markers for
this layer. That's great.
| | 00:39 | And grab that video layer, position it
behind the frame, type S to reveal the
| | 00:44 | Scale, scale it down a little
more tightly inside the frame.
| | 00:50 | That's okay.
| | 00:51 | Let's go ahead and look at it later in
time, see how my framing works out.
| | 00:55 | Now the skydiving footage does have little
bit of vignetting going around on these corners.
| | 01:00 | So I want to make sure I don't bring that in.
| | 01:02 | So let's go ahead and cheat it
a little bit in that direction.
| | 01:05 | Let's make sure it looks
good for the rest of the clips.
| | 01:08 | I don't mind it being a little lower.
| | 01:11 | So let's go ahead and drag it down, later.
| | 01:14 | A little vignetting issue there.
| | 01:17 | That should work pretty well.
| | 01:20 | Note again, my composition markers
came forward, but none of the individual
| | 01:25 | layer markers that I placed on
the music soundtrack came forward.
| | 01:28 | I'd still like to have access to
those to time my robotic arm movements.
| | 01:33 | What I can do is simply go back to the
video edit comp, select the Music layer
| | 01:37 | with all of its markers, Copy,
go to RoboBody, and Paste.
| | 01:44 | And now I have got my music track
with all of those individual markers.
| | 01:48 | However, there is something to watch out for.
| | 01:50 | I have got the music in this composition
and I have the music in the prior composition.
| | 01:56 | I don't want two layers of
music playing at the same time.
| | 01:59 | They will add together, they will be
too loud, and they will be distorted.
| | 02:02 | So I can either turn off the Audio
switch for that nested composition or I
| | 02:10 | could go back to that comp, leave the
Audio on because I still want to preview
| | 02:13 | and edit in context, but take
advantage of a nice little feature in After
| | 02:17 | Effects called Layer > Guide Layer.
| | 02:20 | A guide layer is only audible or
visible inside the current composition.
| | 02:27 | It will not appear further down the chain.
| | 02:29 | So I go back to RoboBody.
| | 02:30 | I don't even need to worry about the
Audio switch, because it won't carry
| | 02:34 | through to my next composition.
| | 02:36 | Okay, I have the time element sorted out.
| | 02:38 | I know where my video clips start.
| | 02:40 | I know where all the
important beats of my music are.
| | 02:41 | The next thing I need to worry about
are my spatial cues. Where do I want this
| | 02:45 | arm to reach in space?
| | 02:47 | For that, I am going to create a couple
of words describing each of these sports.
| | 02:52 | So I'll select my Text tool.
| | 02:54 | It automatically opens up the
Character and Paragraph panels. I'll go ahead
| | 02:59 | and left align my text.
| | 03:00 | I'm going to pick a different font
such as one that Adobe supplies with After
| | 03:05 | Effects like Minion Pro.
Place the cursor, start typing.
| | 03:13 | I'll start with a bullet, which you get
by holding Option on Mac and then typing 8,
| | 03:16 | space, snowboarding, and
that's a little bit on the wimpy side.
| | 03:22 | So let's go ahead and massage our type to look
good before we create any more of these titles.
| | 03:26 | I think I want it to be a
little bit bigger. That looks nicer!
| | 03:30 | Let's see what additional
weights I have in this family.
| | 03:33 | That was something a little bit heavier
like Semibold and maybe even something
| | 03:36 | with little bit of a movement
to it like Italic might look nice.
| | 03:41 | I have got movement in my video and I
have got movement in my type and white
| | 03:45 | type is frankly boring.
| | 03:46 | Let's see what we've got here.
| | 03:48 | I am seeing a common color here.
| | 03:51 | I'm seeing the wood of the snowboard.
| | 03:53 | I am seeing the wood of the
skateboard ramps and the street circuit.
| | 03:58 | I'm seeing the brown ground underneath.
| | 04:00 | I think I'll pick one of those
colors to be my starting-off type color.
| | 04:05 | Maybe something like in that range.
| | 04:08 | I can always adjust this later,
but this is a good starting point.
| | 04:11 | Now that I have set up my type with my
font, my font style, and weight, my point
| | 04:15 | size, and my color, any new words I
create will all have that styling.
| | 04:20 | I'm going to press Enter to make sure
that this line of type is accepted, place
| | 04:24 | my cursor, and start typing another
line such as Vertical Ramp, Street Style,
| | 04:36 | another skateboarding type, and down
in here Skydiving, and I'll press V to
| | 04:45 | return to Selection tool.
| | 04:47 | I can make them in a nice arc like this,
or I can have a bit of fun and go ahead
| | 04:52 | and move them in and out a little
bit like maybe something like this.
| | 04:57 | I want to make sure I stay
inside video action and title safe.
| | 05:00 | So I'll go ahead and toggle on
by Title/Action Safe grid. Oops!
| | 05:04 | I have got that word outside of title safe.
| | 05:07 | So I bring it in, bring it in,
make it a little bit better spaced in
| | 05:11 | that direction, okay.
| | 05:12 | Finally, for the sake of neatness,
maybe I want these evenly spaced.
| | 05:17 | So I am going to pick out
where I want my lowest title to be.
| | 05:21 | Maybe this far down.
| | 05:22 | That's my lowest title.
| | 05:24 | I'm going to select all of my other text
and I'm going to take advantage of the
| | 05:29 | Align panel to go ahead and
distribute these in space.
| | 05:33 | I'll choose the tool to vertically
center their distribution and now these
| | 05:38 | additional layers will be spread out nicely.
| | 05:40 | I don't like how that looks. I'll click off,
select skydiving, move it a little bit higher.
| | 05:45 | I think it's a little bit too low
there. Select my other layers, Distribute
| | 05:50 | again, and that's a better spacing.
| | 05:53 | Okay, I know where I want
the arm to move in time.
| | 05:56 | I know where I want the arm to move in space.
| | 05:58 | Finally, let's go animate that arm.
| | 06:00 | That's what we'll do in the next movie.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Animating the arm| 00:07 | Okay, time for the payoff.
| | 00:09 | Animating this anthropomorphic robot
arm to go ahead and reach out to each of
| | 00:15 | these titles in time with our video edits.
| | 00:18 | I pressed Home to return to the current time
indicator to the very start of the composition.
| | 00:23 | I'm going to enable Rotation
for each of the arm pieces.
| | 00:27 | I now need to start moving it into position.
| | 00:30 | Unfortunately with this default
parenting setup, you cannot just grab the end of
| | 00:34 | the arm and move into place, because
none of the other pieces are going to
| | 00:37 | follow along with it.
| | 00:38 | To do that would require
something known as Inverse Kinematics.
| | 00:42 | There are scripts available to do that in
After Effects, but that's not the default.
| | 00:46 | Instead, you need to build
stuff from the bottom up.
| | 00:48 | So say I wanted to setup an
initial at-rest position for this arm.
| | 00:52 | I will need to manually scrub
first the Big Arm to get it into place.
| | 00:56 | Remember, you can hold Command on Mac or
Ctrl on Windows to scrub by minor increments.
| | 01:02 | And let's pull down the Medium Arm to
a nice at-rest position like that and
| | 01:06 | then rotate the small piece back up
kind of coiled upon itself. Okay.
| | 01:11 | I would like to go ahead and
point out each of these videos at
| | 01:14 | one-second intervals.
| | 01:15 | So boarding at 2, remember our marker.
We cut to one skateboarding exercise.
| | 01:23 | At three we cut to another and
at four we cut to the skydiving.
| | 01:27 | So I'll go to one second and start
rotating these individual arm pieces in a
| | 01:34 | fashion I think might reach up
toward the word snowboarding.
| | 01:42 | Not quite there.
| | 01:43 | I need to straighten out
the arm pieces a little bit.
| | 01:45 | I'll go like that and I need to pull the
Big Arm up a little bit, maybe around there.
| | 01:52 | And this does require a little bit of
work to get it right, but you will get there.
| | 02:00 | The effort is rewarded when you
eventually get something into position.
| | 02:03 | So there's my first movement for my at-
rest position, reaching out to snowboarding.
| | 02:08 | And I can go head and do a standard
reach like that or if I want to have fun I
| | 02:13 | can give a little bit of
flare to this animation.
| | 02:15 | Let's say that I want to add a little arm
piece at the end to do a twirl on the way up.
| | 02:20 | I'll just simply go to that keyframe,
select its Rotation value, and type +360
| | 02:26 | on to the end, saying I want
you to do another rotation.
| | 02:29 | After Effects will do the math for me.
| | 02:31 | I'll press Enter and now it will do a
little unfurl for me as it gets up into position.
| | 02:37 | And that's a more fun animation. I like that.
| | 02:40 | Okay, once I have hit that pose, I want to
hold it for a few frames to point out that title.
| | 02:45 | So let's look at these markers in
the music to decide how long to hold.
| | 02:48 | So one of these bass notes that I have
marked, it happens at seven frames later in
| | 02:52 | time than that rhythmic chugger I barked out.
| | 02:55 | That might be a good whole duration
because then the new bass note will motivate
| | 02:59 | the arm to keep moving.
| | 03:00 | To set another keyframe at the current
value, I just need to drag my cursor down
| | 03:04 | at the Add Keyframe switch
and there's those keyframes.
| | 03:09 | I'll go to two seconds where the
video changes and let's move the arm into
| | 03:13 | another position to then touch vertical ramp.
| | 03:16 | As I start to scrub, you'll see
all parts of the arm move at once.
| | 03:19 | That's because I had to have
all the arm pieces selected.
| | 03:21 | Remember to go ahead and select
just the piece you want to rotate.
| | 03:25 | So I'll go there, move back to my medium
piece, and rotate up my small piece.
| | 03:34 | Not quite there, so let's reach it up
a little bit higher, reach back, close.
| | 03:36 | Command or Ctrl for fine increment
scrubbing. Down like that and over like that.
| | 03:46 | I'm going to go ahead and
preview this animation. That works!
| | 03:51 | Might be a little bit boring after
everything else I have done here, so let's
| | 03:54 | go ahead and make the little piece rotate
360 degrees in the other direction to hit this point.
| | 04:01 | So it will come away, going
to a back-rotate like that.
| | 04:05 | So forward-rotate, back-rotate, that's fun.
| | 04:09 | Okay, so let's find another hit point here.
| | 04:12 | Here's another one, seven or
eight frames later in time.
| | 04:15 | By the way, a lot of music is
structured around factors of two.
| | 04:19 | So if my main chugga's are 30 frames
or one second apart, I expect another
| | 04:26 | subdivision to be at 15 frames apart,
and another subdivision to be in seven and
| | 04:31 | a half frames apart, between seven and eight.
| | 04:33 | This time it worked out at seven.
| | 04:35 | I have marked something at eight.
| | 04:36 | You can see how this rhythm is playing out.
| | 04:39 | I'll drag down a keyframe there, go to
3 seconds, and move into a new position
| | 04:48 | to go ahead and point out my other title.
| | 04:52 | I need to fold up a
little bit to get to this one.
| | 04:54 | Yeah, I need to come up a little tighter there.
| | 04:59 | And by the way, there is no
one right solution to this.
| | 05:04 | Every time I do this exercise
myself, I come up with a slightly
| | 05:08 | different solution. And that's okay.
| | 05:10 | That's where creativity comes in.
| | 05:12 | You have a bit of fun.
| | 05:16 | In honor of keeping that Small Arm
interesting, I'll make him rotate 360 forward again.
| | 05:21 | See how that looks. Rotate and hit.
| | 05:23 | That's fun.
| | 05:24 | I'm going to go another seven or eight
frames in time just to go ahead and keep
| | 05:27 | the same spacing of my keyframes.
| | 05:30 | Mark those out, and finally go to
four seconds and come up with another
| | 05:34 | position for skydiving.
| | 05:36 | And let's go ahead and put the arm
here, maybe bend the medium piece down
| | 05:41 | further, and pull the small piece back.
| | 05:44 | Okay, so I need to pull the large piece up.
| | 05:46 | A kind of visual puzzle here
to make this work. Here we go!
| | 05:51 | I'll pull Medium Arm down, rotate
the Small Arm over, and now I have got that text hit.
| | 06:00 | And I have got a rhythm going here.
| | 06:01 | So let's go ahead and rotate 360
degrees backwards for the Small Arm.
| | 06:06 | So it does a little back flip there.
| | 06:11 | Next hit eight frames later.
| | 06:12 | Same rhythm going here. Add Keyframes.
| | 06:17 | And for the very end of my composition, I'm
going to press Minus to zoom back in time.
| | 06:21 | I need to come at rest again.
Maybe I'll come to rest at this last
| | 06:24 | little rattle right here.
| | 06:26 | Let's say that I want the arm to go back
to its at-rest position where it started.
| | 06:30 | That's very simple to do.
| | 06:31 | I'll select its starting keyframe,
copy, and then immediately with my time
| | 06:38 | marker in place, do Paste, and it will paste
the value I just copied to the current time.
| | 06:44 | I'll do the same thing for this layer.
| | 06:46 | Select, copy, paste.
Select, copy, paste.
| | 06:51 | So now my arm will end up back at rest.
| | 06:55 | And that's kind of a boring movement
again, so let's have that funnel arm do
| | 07:01 | one more twirl, +360 Rotate.
| | 07:08 | Bang! Now let's RAM preview.
| | 07:10 | (Whir, whir, whir)
| | 07:23 | That was kind of fun, wasn't that?
| | 07:25 | Now obviously, there's a
lot more you can do with this.
| | 07:27 | And indeed in the Idea Corner chapter
that comes next, I'll show you some tweaks
| | 07:31 | I might make to this particular animation.
| | 07:33 | But this gives you the basic idea of
how to link together components of an arm,
| | 07:38 | kind of mimicking maybe a
human or not quite human chain.
| | 07:41 | And once they've been put together,
animating them in a way to go ahead
| | 07:45 | and create these complex movements that
only require you doing some simple rotations.
| | 07:50 | Notice that I did not have to
animate the positions of any of these arms.
| | 07:53 | They kept the same relationship to
each other, once I have set up my parenting chain.
| | Collapse this transcript |
|
|
3. Idea CornersAnimating titles| 00:08 | You created this animated opening
title in a movie earlier in this lesson.
| | 00:12 | Well, it's okay but we can make it a lot
fancier and that's what I would like to
| | 00:16 | show you in this Idea Corner.
| | 00:18 | Now, what I am already doing is
using a null object to move all the title
| | 00:22 | elements as a group from their
initial position off into this corner.
| | 00:27 | Since I'm done with that particular movement,
| | 00:29 | I don't have a need to see
that null object anymore,
| | 00:31 | I am going to turn off the
video switch for the null.
| | 00:35 | Null objects don't render any way.
They don't give you a render time hit.
| | 00:39 | They will never appear on the screen. It's
just a matter of reducing clutter at our display.
| | 00:43 | Next, I don't like everyone being on
at the same time because I'm forcing the
| | 00:47 | viewer to process all this
visual information at the same time.
| | 00:50 | To lead them from one item to the
next, I might stagger their appearance.
| | 00:54 | For example, I might decide that I do
indeed want my station number and my bug
| | 00:59 | to be on from the very beginning
of the composition. That's fine.
| | 01:02 | Then I want them to start
reading about my program.
| | 01:04 | Since I already have a fade out
keyframed for Season Finale, I don't want to
| | 01:08 | pick up and move the layer, as
that would move the keyframes as well.
| | 01:12 | So in this case, I will just select it,
go to the correct time, hold on Option
| | 01:16 | on Mac, Alt on Windows, press the left
square bracket, and trim it to start at 15 frames.
| | 01:22 | Okay, maybe 15 frames or a half second after that
| | 01:25 | I now want my next element to come on.
| | 01:26 | When my show is going to be, so I
have got them reading my station, Season
| | 01:30 | Finale, day that it's on.
| | 01:32 | In this case, I don't have any
keyframes yet for Tomorrow, so I will just
| | 01:35 | press the left square bracket without
any modifier keys and now that whole
| | 01:39 | layer will slide back.
| | 01:40 | So, here is my stagger. The bug, Season
Finale, name of show, people animate into
| | 01:46 | position. Zero to RAM preview and
this is what it looks like at speed.
| | 01:51 | Okay, I have given the viewer some
important clues about how to read this title
| | 01:55 | but now let's make things more
exciting, have them animate on.
| | 01:57 | I will stop my playback.
| | 02:01 | Let's say I want my Season Finale to slide
in from the side rather then just popping on.
| | 02:05 | I want it to be all the way on by the
time our next element comes on, so I'll
| | 02:09 | hold down the Shift key and my time
marker will snap to the start of this layer.
| | 02:12 | Select Season Finale.
| | 02:14 | Type Shift+P to also reveal its position.
| | 02:17 | Okay, this is my at rest position. I
will enable keyframing here and now let's pick
| | 02:21 | an initial position for it.
| | 02:22 | Hold down Shift key and drag, snaps
into position, and now I will just scrub
| | 02:28 | Season Finale's position.
| | 02:29 | So, it starts off screen.
| | 02:32 | Now it will slam into
position and then my title comes up.
| | 02:35 | But it's a bit boring and a bit sudden, so
let's add some sort of text animation to it.
| | 02:41 | In the previous After Effects
Apprentice lesson on Type and Music, you have
| | 02:44 | learned how to create your own type
animations but for the sake of expediency,
| | 02:47 | let's go ahead and use a preset.
| | 02:48 | I will select Tomorrow. I can either
browse my presets in Adobe Bridge or I
| | 02:55 | already know which one I want.
| | 02:56 | I am going to go down to Animation
Presets > Text > Animate In and I am going
| | 03:02 | to use this particular animation
called Random Shuffle In. There it is.
| | 03:07 | Now, before I apply an animation preset,
I need to make sure my current time
| | 03:11 | indicator is where I want the animation
to start, because remember when you apply
| | 03:15 | a preset, the first
keyframe goes at your current time.
| | 03:18 | So, hold down Shift and snap to
beginning of my layer, make sure the
| | 03:21 | Tomorrow layer is selected, and double-click
Random Shuffle In to apply that animation preset.
| | 03:27 | With the layer selected, I will type UU
to see what properties have changed and
| | 03:32 | I will drag the current time
indicator to watch the animation.
| | 03:34 | Got a couple of issues here.
| | 03:37 | One, the text was coming in from
the left, which I guess is the same
| | 03:41 | direction of Season Finale but looks a
little bit messy to be honest and two,
| | 03:44 | it's taking far too long.
| | 03:46 | Well, it's pretty easy to edit
animation presents because after all they are
| | 03:50 | just normal keyframes.
| | 03:51 | I will select the second keyframe.
| | 03:53 | Drag it back to two seconds, which will align
with the other keyframes for title parent null.
| | 03:59 | Also, I am going to play around with
the Position offset for these characters.
| | 04:04 | Move to point in time where my text is
in transition and then start to scrub the
| | 04:10 | position value to get a
position that fixes animation better.
| | 04:14 | Maybe shuffle in from the
other side of the screen.
| | 04:17 | Maybe start completely off-screen.
| | 04:18 | There is my T in Tomorrow, and
I will push it just off-screen.
| | 04:21 | I can have it come straight on, just like
Season Finale came in straight from the left,
| | 04:25 | or if I want to tie the title in
more to this animation above it maybe I
| | 04:29 | will go ahead and raise this
position so it seems to be coming...
| | 04:32 | Maybe just a little bit higher, like that.
| | 04:36 | Do a RAM preview.
| | 04:40 | Okay, now I have got a nice staggered
sequence going on. it slides in, animation
| | 04:45 | in, slides into final position.
| | 04:46 | It works okay but I want my things being a
little more elegant, a little more smooth.
| | 04:51 | Notice that everything is
defaulting to linear keyframes.
| | 04:54 | We already used Easy Ease In on the
parent's movement, so let's go ahead and try
| | 04:59 | that on the rest of these.
| | 05:00 | I am going to type Command+A on Mac,
Ctrl+A on Windows to select all my layers
| | 05:04 | and press U to see just their keyframes.
| | 05:07 | The first U closes everyone up, the
second one reveals them, and I am going to
| | 05:11 | select my second keyframes in my animations.
| | 05:15 | I am not going to bother selecting
Opacity because you really don't see that
| | 05:19 | much of a difference when you ease
in and ease out of opacity keyframes.
| | 05:22 | Right-click, Keyframes
Assistant > Easy Ease In. RAM preview.
| | 05:31 | A little bit more elegant, but
it still feels herky-jerky to me.
| | 05:34 | So, maybe another approach would be
to overlap these animations so they are
| | 05:38 | tied together even more.
| | 05:40 | I will pause my playback and start
playing around with moving some of these
| | 05:43 | keyframes later in time.
| | 05:44 | Right now, this frame stops animating and
the next one starts animating at one second.
| | 05:48 | Maybe I will press Page Down five
times to move forward five frames and just
| | 05:53 | back off that keyframe five frames later.
| | 05:56 | Since I had this other keyframe
selected, it moved by the same amount.
| | 06:00 | Now, let's try that animation.
| | 06:06 | That overlaps feeling a little better.
| | 06:08 | Things are just little bit more tied.
There's not that start and stop motion as
| | 06:11 | animation. Kind of like that.
| | 06:14 | The final thing that's annoying
me is everything is very strobe-y.
| | 06:16 | The characters kind of go blop, blop,
blop, blop, rather than sliding in.
| | 06:20 | So, to cure that we'll use
our old friend Motion Blur.
| | 06:23 | I'll stop playback, go to my Motion Blur
switch in the Timeline panel, turn it on for
| | 06:28 | Nine, planet, Tomorrow, and Season Finale.
| | 06:31 | I can just drag my curser down.
| | 06:33 | Note that turning on Motion Blur for the
parent has no effect because that would
| | 06:38 | only blur the invisible null.
| | 06:41 | You need to turn it on for
each layer even if it's a child.
| | 06:45 | That's another thing that's
not inherited by parenting.
| | 06:48 | And finally, I will turn on my master
Motion Blur for the whole composition.
| | 06:52 | One last RAM preview. I can already see
from the preview that things are sliding
| | 06:58 | in much nicer here, not too strobe-y and
things tie in a bit better. And there's
| | 07:02 | my improved title animation aided by parenting.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| RoboTV: Keyframe interpolation| 00:07 | In this Idea Corner I want to go
through the process of refining and improving
| | 00:11 | this RoboTV animation.
| | 00:13 | Now keep in mind there is no one right solution.
| | 00:18 | However, the general principles remain the same.
| | 00:20 | The first thing I'm going to do is
preview this a few times and just see what I
| | 00:23 | like and what I don't like
about the current animation.
| | 00:26 | I press to 0 on the
numeric keypad for RAM Preview.
| | 00:29 | (Whir, whir, whir)
| | 00:47 | A few things stand out to me.
| | 00:49 | One is that I'm not
entirely happy the arm's movements.
| | 00:52 | For one it's a lot slower through
here and at the end than it is in-between,
| | 00:58 | hitting the individual bullet points.
| | 00:59 | So I'm going to do something about that.
| | 01:02 | Two is at this type just sits there.
It feels to me like it should be animating on
| | 01:07 | and perhaps even doing something
special like hitting every time to the arm
| | 01:11 | comes to one piece of type.
| | 01:13 | Third, I'm missing the background.
| | 01:15 | I need to put something behind here.
| | 01:17 | Hopefully, something that ties in a bit with
some of the things I see inside the video.
| | 01:21 | You see a lot of squares, a plywood,
and lands. That gives me an idea.
| | 01:25 | Finally, I want to make sure that
everything is nice and readable.
| | 01:28 | For example, this text is not
entirely readable over this robot arm.
| | 01:32 | So I might want to improve that as well.
| | 01:34 | So let's go tackle these.
| | 01:35 | My first problem is the arm's movement.
| | 01:38 | I have a longer period of time at the
start and end phase than I do in-between words.
| | 01:45 | There is a couple of ways I can
speed up the arm's movement in there.
| | 01:48 | One is I might grab this last set of the
keyframes and just move them earlier in time.
| | 01:52 | For example, maybe to
punctuate that particular base note.
| | 01:55 | So I am going to select these keyframes,
start dragging, add the Shift key, and
| | 02:01 | now they will snap to that particular beat.
| | 02:03 | Now that duration looks
roughly the same as this duration.
| | 02:06 | I'll RAM preview again.
| | 02:08 | (Whir, whir, whir)
| | 02:15 | Yeah, I do like that timing better.
| | 02:17 | Next, I would like to make the
movement of this arm more realistic.
| | 02:21 | My first job out of college was
actually programming assembly line robots and I
| | 02:25 | know that these big heavy arms do
not start and stop instantaneously.
| | 02:30 | They have a lot of mass to them so
they come into there final resting place
| | 02:33 | slowly to make sure they hit there mark
and there is a little bit inertia as they
| | 02:37 | leave a spot as well.
| | 02:38 | However, as you see down here in the
Timeline panel, the default keyframe type in
| | 02:42 | After Effects is all linear,
which means sudden starts and stops.
| | 02:46 | So let's refine that.
| | 02:48 | To do this we should head into the Graph Editor.
| | 02:50 | We cover this back in the After
Effects Apprentice Advance Animation lesson.
| | 02:55 | I'll go ahead and click Rotation for
the Small Arm, then Shift-click on Rotation
| | 02:59 | for Medium and Big Arm to get
them all up at the same time.
| | 03:03 | And you can see that these straight lines
indicate constant speed in-between the keyframes.
| | 03:10 | Well, let's change that.
| | 03:11 | I'm going to start by selecting all
of those keyframes by dragging a marquee
| | 03:15 | around them and I'll start with the
instant gratification trick of using
| | 03:19 | Easy Ease keyframes.
| | 03:20 | There is actually a button for it down
here at the bottom of the Graph Editor.
| | 03:23 | As soon as I click on this, you'll see
that all of these curves have changed and
| | 03:27 | indeed we're now slowly
coming out of this value changes.
| | 03:31 | That's what the flatness at the top indicates.
| | 03:33 | Changing value more quickly in the
middle and slowly coming into the next value.
| | 03:39 | I can talk about it or I can
preview it so you can see it.
| | 03:41 | (Whir, whir, whir)
| | 03:50 | Just that little bit of easing
I think has helped quite a bit.
| | 03:53 | But I'm going to push this one step further.
| | 03:55 | As I mentioned earlier, the robot arms
need to come into their stop position more
| | 03:59 | slowly to make sure they don't miss the spot.
| | 04:02 | So they don't jiggle back and forth.
| | 04:04 | However, they're able to leave a
spot very quickly. They don't care about
| | 04:07 | precision at that point.
| | 04:08 | So to better mimic that I want to
click off to lose my current selection and
| | 04:12 | drag marquees just around the keyframes
that exit those held positions at each
| | 04:18 | word, hold down the Shift key, select
those keyframes, hold down Shift, select
| | 04:23 | those, and select those as well.
| | 04:26 | Now that I have all of those exit
keyframes selected, I could either drag the
| | 04:30 | influence handle for one of them and
this will shorten the influence for all
| | 04:34 | my selected keyframes.
| | 04:36 | If I do have a problem, I drag up or down.
| | 04:38 | I can hold the Shift key to make it
come straight in and out of the keyframes.
| | 04:41 | O r again I could just take advantage of
these buttons at the bottom of the Graph Editor.
| | 04:46 | For example, for Auto Bezier which does
give a little bit of rounding to my velocity.
| | 04:50 | I'll click on that and you'll see
how the curves have changed slightly.
| | 04:54 | They still come into keyframes slowly,
but now they exit keyframes more quickly.
| | 05:00 | You'll see something very similar
if I choose linear keyframes as well.
| | 05:02 | The handles go away, the curves are
very similar, but I am going to stick
| | 05:06 | with Auto Bezier just to get that little bit
of extra rounding come out of these keyframes.
| | 05:10 | Let's RAM preview again.
| | 05:12 | (Whir, whir, whir)
| | 05:19 | Well, now I have got a problem.
| | 05:20 | I have got this very awkward
overshoot as I try to land on each word.
| | 05:25 | Again, if you look closely at what's
going on the Graph Editor, you'll see
| | 05:28 | exactly what the problem is.
| | 05:30 | There is a little keyframes influence
handle coming into each of these keyframes
| | 05:36 | and that is what's
causing this overshoot behavior.
| | 05:39 | You'll see we are 341 degrees here, but
as we move along here we're overshooting
| | 05:44 | to almost 346 degrees
before landing back at 341.
| | 05:48 | What we want this robot to do is to
hold its position during those seven or
| | 05:52 | eight frames and indeed
that's the answer. Hold keyframes.
| | 05:56 | So I'm going to marquee around all
of the entrance keyframes when we're
| | 06:01 | landing on a new word.
| | 06:02 | Again, I am holding down the Shift key
to add to my selection and I'll click on the
| | 06:07 | button at the bottom of a
Graph Editor for hold keyframes.
| | 06:11 | Watch what happens to the curve
as soon as I click this button.
| | 06:13 | You'll notice that these
lines have flattened out.
| | 06:16 | There is still an influence handle
coming into that keyframe, but it's being
| | 06:19 | ignored by the hold behavior coming
out of a prior keyframes and indeed we're holding 341
| | 06:25 | degrees for the entire seven or eight frames.
| | 06:28 | RAM preview one more time.
| | 06:29 | (Whir, whir, whir)
| | 06:36 | That's exactly the behavior we want,
just a little bit of velocity change coming
| | 06:40 | into and leaving keyframes, no
wandering, while we are supposed to be holding on
| | 06:44 | each one of those words.
| | 06:45 | I click on the Graph Editor Button to
go back to the normal view and here are all
| | 06:49 | our edited keyframes.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| RoboTV: Text animation| 00:07 | Next let's animate on our titles.
| | 00:09 | Our previous After Effects lesson,
Type and Music, demonstrated some of the
| | 00:13 | different techniques for animating type.
| | 00:14 | I think I'll like to go for cascade to
have things spill on to the screen just
| | 00:18 | as the arm reaches a word.
| | 00:19 | I'm going to focus on this last word
skydiving here and let's get that to
| | 00:23 | work to my satisfaction.
| | 00:25 | This is the point where the robot arm
hits that word. That's where I want my
| | 00:29 | animation to finish.
| | 00:30 | I'll select skydiving, I'll twirl
it open, and go Animate > Opacity.
| | 00:37 | Opacity is one of the key
ingredients to our cascade recipe.
| | 00:41 | In addition to cascading I think I'll
like these to be slamming down into position.
| | 00:45 | So I am going to add the Scale parameter.
| | 00:47 | Now remember one of the key things of
setting up a cascading recipe is you need
| | 00:52 | to twirl down the Range Selector, go
into the Advanced section, and change the
| | 00:56 | shape to either Ramp Up or Ramp Down.
| | 00:59 | That's required for a
cascading type of animation.
| | 01:01 | I'm going to reduce the Opacity to 0.
| | 01:03 | So I see how this is fading off
over the course of my selection.
| | 01:08 | Increase Scale to something large.
Maybe somewhere around there.
| | 01:11 | I could play around this later and start
playing around with the Range Selection itself.
| | 01:18 | If I only want this animation to go over, say,
half of the characters, I'll set it at 50%.
| | 01:23 | For cascade animation I need
to animate the Offset property.
| | 01:28 | Now I do know at this particular point in
time I want the animation to be completely on.
| | 01:34 | That requires an Offset value of 100%.
| | 01:37 | That means transitioning the entire
word on when the animaton is done.
| | 01:41 | So I'll set a keyframe there,
and start thinking about timing.
| | 01:45 | For how long I want this
word to take to come on?
| | 01:48 | I have mentioned before that the timing
in-between our rhythmic chugs is every
| | 01:53 | second or every 30 frames.
| | 01:56 | A good timing division are divisions of 2.
| | 01:58 | 15 frames, 7-and-a-half frames.
| | 02:02 | I am feeling that 7-and-a-half may be
pretty quick to bring a whole word on.
| | 02:05 | So for starters, I'm going
to try 15 frames instead.
| | 02:08 | I'll press the Shift key and press
Page Up to jump forward 10 frames in time.
| | 02:13 | Then press Page Up 5 more frames, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5.
| | 02:15 | Now I'm going to set my other Offset keyframe.
| | 02:19 | The first Offset keyframe should be
negative at the end, negative your spread
| | 02:24 | between start and end.
| | 02:25 | So I'll set this to -50 and
now my word is completely off.
| | 02:28 | Let's RAM preview.
| | 02:31 | Maybe go back to this
previous beat at 3 seconds.
| | 02:35 | Press B to begin my work area and choose a
nice rhythmic end here like at 5 seconds.
| | 02:40 | I'm actually going to go one frame before.
| | 02:43 | I like to have a loop in my music right
through this section and I don't want to
| | 02:46 | repeat the beat at 3 and the beat at 5.
| | 02:48 | So I am going to press N at
one frame before. RAM preview.
| | 02:52 | (Whir, whir, whir)
| | 02:59 | I like the timing, but I
don't like the movement.
| | 03:03 | It's animating from left to right, but
the bullet is at the left end of the word.
| | 03:09 | I think I need to turn this around
to get the impact of the arm and the
| | 03:13 | bullet hitting together.
| | 03:14 | Well, that's not too difficult.
| | 03:15 | You might be tempted to think
that all you need to do is play your
| | 03:18 | animation backwards.
| | 03:19 | So you can select those, right-
click, choose Keyframe Assistant >
| | 03:23 | Time-Reverse Keyframes.
| | 03:25 | Well, that doesn't work either because
now they are animating off the screen
| | 03:29 | rather than animating on
the screen. That's okay.
| | 03:32 | You have another ramp shape, Ramp Down.
| | 03:35 | This will reverse the
direction of that animation.
| | 03:38 | So in addition to having reverse
timing you have a reverse direction and now it
| | 03:42 | snaps down into position.
| | 03:44 | Preview that quickly.
| | 03:45 | (Whir, whir, whir)
| | 03:49 | Perfect! That's what I'm after. It looks good!
| | 03:51 | Okay, let's make a few more improvements.
| | 03:54 | For one, I'd like to add
blur to my type animation.
| | 03:58 | It just makes things look
kind of nice and elegant.
| | 04:01 | So go to Property > Blur and I'll increase the
Blur amount so that it's soft as it comes down.
| | 04:09 | Now that I have some Blur and Opacity
going on in a shorter selection, I think I
| | 04:13 | am going to scale up bigger.
| | 04:14 | So I'm going to increase this in size,
make it a more dramatic slap-down, maybe
| | 04:18 | around there, and there are a couple
of more adjustments I'd like to make
| | 04:21 | underneath More Options.
| | 04:22 | For one, I want it animating
around the center of the characters.
| | 04:27 | To do that I'll use Grouping Alignment.
And we'll scrub that until things look
| | 04:31 | roughly centered right
around there. That looks good.
| | 04:36 | Maybe just a touch higher like there.
| | 04:40 | Finally, to really make this thing
pop I'm going to take advantage of
| | 04:43 | Inter-Character Blending.
| | 04:45 | Since I have overlapping characters in
addition to some nice blur, I am going to
| | 04:49 | go ahead and use a blend mode to
highlight the interaction between the
| | 04:53 | overlapping characters.
| | 04:54 | I'll try Add and now I have got a nice,
bright, hot glow as the characters
| | 04:59 | come down into place.
| | 05:00 | I'll preview that one more time.
| | 05:02 | (Whir, whir, whir)
| | 05:06 | I like that. It's got some pop to it.
| | 05:08 | I've animated one line of text.
| | 05:10 | I'd like to animate all the other lines.
| | 05:12 | First thing I'm going to do is trim
this layer to begin my first keyframe.
| | 05:17 | So I'm not confused looking at the
timeline as to where things start.
| | 05:20 | I hold on Option on Mac, Alter on Windows,
press left square bracket and trim it.
| | 05:24 | Then with skydiving selected I'm going to
press U+U to see what parameters I have edited.
| | 05:30 | This will tell me what parameters I
need to copy to my others text layers.
| | 05:34 | I edited Grouping Alignment.
| | 05:36 | I hold Command or Ctrl and also
pick Inter-Character Blending.
| | 05:40 | The whole Animator is new so
I'll click on that as well.
| | 05:44 | Transform Position unique to this layer.
| | 05:46 | I don't want to copy that.
| | 05:48 | And Source Text is unique to this layer.
| | 05:49 | So I don't want to copy those.
| | 05:50 | I just want to copy these three items.
| | 05:53 | At this point I could go to Effects &
Presets and make an animation preset of
| | 05:58 | this particular animation we've
just created. Or I can just copy these
| | 06:02 | parameters, Comamnd+C or Ctrl+C, and
start to paste it to the other text layers.
| | 06:06 | So I am going a little earlier time.
| | 06:09 | Our animation takes 15 frames.
| | 06:11 | So let's go 15 frames before this
hit, 10, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. Look at that.
| | 06:18 | It times exactly with the Servo noise. Perfect!
| | 06:20 | Now press the left square bracket to
slide this layer to start that time and
| | 06:26 | then Command+V or Ctrl+V to paste.
| | 06:28 | I scrub my time indicator. Perfect!
| | 06:31 | That's what I want there.
| | 06:32 | I'll do this quickly for the other layers.
| | 06:34 | There is that hit 10, 1, 2, 3,
4, 5, left bracket, paste.
| | 06:41 | Put here 10, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 left bracket, paste.
| | 06:50 | Double-click my Work Area to now
cover the entire composition and RAM
| | 06:53 | preview one more time.
| | 06:54 | (Whir, whir, whir)
| | 07:08 | Big improvement!
| | 07:10 | The last tweak I am going to do to my
actual movement in this composition is to
| | 07:13 | add Motion Blur to all the layers at move.
| | 07:16 | To do that, I'll go to the Motion Blur
switch in the Timeline panel and turn it
| | 07:20 | on for all of my text layers.
| | 07:23 | Remember you can click-and-drag it
vertically to enable multiple layers and
| | 07:27 | then I'll do the same for the robot arm pieces.
| | 07:29 | Drag down to get all of those pieces.
| | 07:32 | You won't actually see or calculate
Motion Blur until you also enable it for
| | 07:37 | all of the composition.
| | 07:38 | Now you'll see the end of my arms blurring
and the text looks even more interesting.
| | 07:42 | However, that can slow down previews.
| | 07:45 | If you find this slowing you down too
much, you can go ahead and disable the
| | 07:48 | Motion Blur switch while you continue working.
| | 07:50 | Since I have a fairly fast computer
here, I'll leave it on because I like how it looks.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| RoboTV: Finishing touches| 00:07 | Next, let's put in the backgrounds
so we have something more interesting
| | 00:09 | than black to look at.
| | 00:12 | I'm looking at this so I'm seeing a
lot of plywood on this ramp, a lot of
| | 00:18 | plywood on this street circuit, and a lot of
the squares and things have been put together.
| | 00:22 | I'm seeing squares in the plots of
land underneath and of course squares in
| | 00:26 | the robo frame as well.
| | 00:28 | So some background layer or texture that
echoes this square pattern maybe appropriate.
| | 00:34 | I'm going to go to my stock footage
collection or I can go ahead and create
| | 00:37 | something in After Effects using one
of its plug-ins like Fractal Noise.
| | 00:40 | It just so happens I have already
made a couple of layers I think might be
| | 00:43 | appropriate, but at the very end of this
lesson I'll show you how I made these backgrounds.
| | 00:47 | One thing I have created is
this animated blocky pattern.
| | 00:50 | We'll play for you that.
| | 00:51 | And I thought that might be
appropriate, given the square patterns and all the
| | 00:55 | videos I'm playing around
with and then the frame itself.
| | 00:58 | I have a second layer like
that I call a lighting layer.
| | 01:02 | I like things that have smooth,
amorphous shadows and highlights because those
| | 01:06 | help to add mysterious lighting onto
any background or any piece of footage.
| | 01:10 | So I am going to drag blocky
behind everybody into the video edit.
| | 01:14 | It's kind of boring and gray
so let's give it a tint.
| | 01:16 | I'm going to go to Effect > Color
Correction, and not use the Tint effect, but
| | 01:22 | use the Tritone effect.
| | 01:24 | Tint changes your black and your white points.
| | 01:27 | Since any color you pick is probably
going to be lighter than black or darker
| | 01:31 | than white, the results tend to be washed out.
| | 01:34 | I prefer Tritone for this sort of
tinting, because it can keep black and white
| | 01:39 | the same and just change the Midtone.
| | 01:42 | Just for starters I am going to go ahead
and pick something off to this robot arm.
| | 01:45 | Maybe some desaturated blue as a starting point.
| | 01:47 | That's not too bad actually.
| | 01:49 | Maybe little darker.
| | 01:51 | Maybe a little more saturated just to
make it sit down there, around there.
| | 01:56 | So there is my animated
square pattern in the background. Kind of cool.
| | 02:03 | But it could always be more exciting.
| | 02:05 | So let's go ahead and go back and choose
that lighting layer I created. Put that
| | 02:11 | on top of my blocky background.
Since it's a pattern of blacks and whites
| | 02:16 | averaging by 50% gray, in cases like
this I really like to use modes like
| | 02:21 | Overlay, Soft Light, and Hard Light.
| | 02:23 | They help to increase the intensity,
saturation, or contrast of an image
| | 02:26 | balanced round 50% gray.
| | 02:29 | So I'll start with the Overlay mode.
| | 02:31 | I will now have some more intense dark and
bright areas on my video. This is without.
| | 02:35 | This is with.
| | 02:36 | Let's go and RAM preview again.
| | 02:38 | (Whir, whir, whir)
| | 02:50 | I think it's little too distracting.
| | 02:52 | So I think I'm going to make this darker.
| | 02:53 | I can either play around with the
darkness of my mid-point color or I can even
| | 02:59 | play levels to this and
play around with the gamma.
| | 03:01 | But this gives me a starting point.
| | 03:03 | Finally, I'm having some readability issues.
| | 03:06 | This type just isn't standing up so
well, particularly when the robot arm is
| | 03:09 | interacting with it.
| | 03:10 | I'd like to make the type stand out more.
| | 03:12 | There is a couple of ways of doing it.
| | 03:14 | One is to use drop shadows,
which I'm sure you're familiar with.
| | 03:17 | You might have noticed that drop
shadows have already been added to these
| | 03:20 | individual robot arm pieces.
| | 03:22 | That's how one piece is standing
out from another piece and giving it
| | 03:25 | the illusion of depth.
| | 03:26 | I also put a drop shadow on this
robot frame when I created it so any video
| | 03:31 | inside has a nice depth as its inset.
| | 03:33 | But I have not applied
drop shadows to my type yet.
| | 03:36 | So let's choose that. I can either use
| | 03:38 | Effect > Perspective > Drop Shadow or
I actually prefer the look of Layer >
| | 03:45 | Layer Styles > Drop Shadow.
| | 03:47 | It gives me more options on how
I adjust this particular shadow.
| | 03:52 | For example, I want to center it.
| | 03:54 | I am going to put its Distance down to 0,
but I do want to increase its size a little bit.
| | 03:59 | So it does fit out a little bit
more and a little bit more darkness.
| | 04:04 | So it gives me little more contrast
to sit away from the background and sit
| | 04:09 | on top of that arm. Without.
| | 04:12 | With. Subtle glow, but it helps.
| | 04:14 | I'll select my Drop Shadow layer style, copy.
| | 04:17 | I select my other text layers and paste.
| | 04:22 | Now they all have a nice drop shadow.
| | 04:23 | That helped the readability.
| | 04:27 | The text now seems to float off the
background, but I still think it can be
| | 04:30 | more distinguished.
| | 04:31 | So another thing I'm going to try out
is actually to add a stroke to my text.
| | 04:36 | I normally don't like big obvious strokes.
| | 04:39 | They tend to look a bit
heavy-handed, to be honest.
| | 04:42 | But simple black stroke, one pixel,
and Fill Over Stroke so the stroke is very
| | 04:48 | thin just around the edges can do a lot
just to help give that little stroke to
| | 04:52 | text make a look nice.
| | 04:53 | So now I'm going to have stroke that I
like, I can go ahead and pick multiple
| | 04:58 | layers and give them all the same treatment.
| | 05:01 | Black stroke, 1 point, Fill Over Stroke.
| | 05:05 | And now my type is a lot more readable.
| | 05:06 | Now I'm pretty much done.
| | 05:08 | The only thing left is a little bit of
bookkeeping just before I hand this off
| | 05:11 | to another animator.
| | 05:12 | I'm going to change the Composition
Settings' name to something that's a little
| | 05:15 | bit better sense, like RoboTV composite.
| | 05:23 | The last thing I'm going to do is
select all my text and also parent that to
| | 05:29 | the robot arm frame.
| | 05:31 | The reason I'm doing that is now the text
and the arm positions are very intertwined.
| | 05:37 | If some wanted to pick up and move
this frame later on, you'd want the text
| | 05:40 | move along with it.
| | 05:41 | Otherwise, things might become misaligned.
| | 05:43 | Speaking of misaligned, my videos
is not moving with the frame.
| | 05:46 | Well, that's easy to fix.
| | 05:47 | I am going to parent that to my frame
as well and now it can all be picked up
| | 05:52 | and moved as a group.
| | 05:53 | This is particularly handy if someone
changes a video format, a client comes
| | 05:56 | along and says scale down a little bit
smaller, scale it up larger, etcetera.
| | 06:01 | Grouping it altogether gives an
animator just one object to have to manage to
| | 06:06 | free arrange the layout in
the whole frame. There you go!
| | 06:09 | That's one set of adjustments
to make this video look better.
| | 06:11 | If you're curious to see what I did
on another occasion, you can go to
| | 06:14 | Comps-Finished and here is a different
video sequence and a different RoboTV
| | 06:18 | that I have created when
I was in different mode.
| | 06:20 | I used some different text.
| | 06:21 | I spaced the text out more.
| | 06:23 | I had some different arm movements.
| | 06:24 | They had a little bit more character to them.
| | 06:26 | I had a much more extreme scale going on.
| | 06:29 | Again, there is no one right solution.
| | 06:32 | However, there are some principles
about interest, readability, and elegance
| | 06:37 | that do apply almost no
matter what you're trying to do.
| | Collapse this transcript |
|
|
4. SidebarDealing with non-uniform scale issues| 00:07 | In this sidebar I'd like to show
you a gotcha that can crop up with
| | 00:10 | parenting and how to fix it.
| | 00:12 | You don't need any particular source files.
| | 00:14 | Anything around will do.
| | 00:16 | If you were in the first project file
that came with this lesson, you can go
| | 00:19 | ahead and use that planted layer.
| | 00:21 | If you're in the second project file,
I have saved for you a pair of sphere objects.
| | 00:26 | To demonstrate this I'm going to
create a composition, again using a
| | 00:29 | square pixel preset.
| | 00:31 | I'm doing that just so you can
see the distortion more clearly.
| | 00:34 | This works at any composition size. And
I am going to title it non-uniform scale,
| | 00:40 | because that's the name of this issue.
| | 00:41 | I'm going to drag my two spheres into
this composition and let's say that I
| | 00:49 | decided that this sphere will be the
parent and this one will be the child and
| | 00:54 | let's say that my design happens to dictate
that this sphere needs to start out distorted.
| | 00:59 | So I'm going to type S to reveal scale,
turn off its Constrain Proportions and
| | 01:04 | squish it into an oval.
| | 01:05 | Say so it's roughly half as tall as it is wide.
| | 01:10 | So you can see what's
going on underneath the hood.
| | 01:12 | I'm also going to reveal the Scale for
what's going to become my child sphere.
| | 01:16 | It sorts out at 100, 100.
| | 01:18 | I parent this sphere into large copper
sphere and watch what happens to the Scale value.
| | 01:24 | It becomes 100, 200 even though it did
not change apparent size in the Comp panel.
| | 01:28 | Here is what's going on underneath the hood.
| | 01:31 | Whenever you parent one layer to
another, After Effects should not change the
| | 01:36 | appearance of the child.
| | 01:37 | However, the parent's
transformations and the child's transformations are
| | 01:41 | factored together to determine
the final appearance of the child.
| | 01:45 | Since the parent was already scaled 50%
in Y, under the hood After Effects had
| | 01:50 | to scale the child by 200% in Y. So 50
times 200 gets back to the original 100% scale.
| | 01:59 | Convoluted math it may seem, but that's
what going on to maintain the original size.
| | 02:03 | Normally, you can just ignore this.
| | 02:05 | But what happens if you decide
to say rotate this child as well?
| | 02:10 | As I do so you see
something very strange going on.
| | 02:13 | Basically, the parent is casting a sort of
reality distortion field around that child.
| | 02:18 | You're not rotating a nice sphere;
you're rotating something through this distortion.
| | 02:24 | And obviously this might
not be your desired result.
| | 02:27 | So let's go ahead and undo back to where
we started and show you a better solution.
| | 02:33 | Once again, we are going to
use our friend the null object.
| | 02:35 | I am going to create a
Layer > New > Null Object.
| | 02:40 | Give it a name such as scale correction.
| | 02:43 | You can give it any name that you want.
| | 02:46 | Just to I can keep my hierarchy
straight, I'm going to put it between the
| | 02:49 | spheres, because it's going to sit
between these two in a parenting chain and
| | 02:53 | soak up those non-uniform scales.
| | 02:56 | I want my null to be centered over my parent.
| | 02:58 | So I am going to select my parent,
reveal its position, copy it, and paste onto
| | 03:03 | the null so that they are centered up.
They'll transform from the same position
| | 03:07 | and type S to reveal the nulls of the scale.
| | 03:11 | I'm going to attach the
null to my intended parent.
| | 03:14 | You'll see it gets the same scale
distortion as we had before, but since null
| | 03:18 | objects do not render, it's
basically soaking up that distortion.
| | 03:22 | Now I can take my child, parent it
to the null, and you will notice its
| | 03:28 | scale does not change. Well, why is that?
| | 03:31 | That's because 50 times 200 means that
so far through the parenting chain we
| | 03:36 | have a 100% Y-scale,
| | 03:39 | therefore no strange distortion needs
to be done to the child to make it look
| | 03:43 | the same in the composition.
| | 03:45 | The null object has soaked up all
of those strange distortions for us.
| | 03:49 | Now when we rotate the child, it
does exactly what we expected to do, no
| | 03:54 | reality distortion field.
| | 03:56 | So not only do null objects make
fantastic parents when you're creating a
| | 04:00 | parenting hierarchy, they also make
great connectors in-between objects in a
| | 04:05 | parenting hierarchy to help us soak up
these non-uniform distortions and also
| | 04:09 | just be good things to
attach other children on to.
| | 04:11 | If you ever have something weird
happened late at night, remember this movie and
| | 04:15 | remember this trick.
| | 04:17 | Use a null in between children to
act as a mediator in-between them.
| | Collapse this transcript |
|
|
5. Fractal Noise BackgroundsSetting up| 00:07 | Earlier in this lesson when we had you
build this RoboTV composition we gave you
| | 00:11 | a couple of movies to use as your background.
| | 00:14 | We gave you this movie which had a
nice generic soft curtain of light sort of
| | 00:18 | feel and we used this as a lighting
effect, and we used this movie which had a
| | 00:23 | very blocky sort of pattern meant to
mimic some of the square blocky pattern
| | 00:27 | that we saw in the other elements in RoboTV.
| | 00:29 | Well, these were actually created using a
plug-in in After Effects known as Fractal Noise.
| | 00:34 | And Fractal Noise is a good
utilitarian plug-in to use.
| | 00:37 | Therefore, I am going to show you how we
created these two backgrounds using the
| | 00:41 | Fractal Noise effect.
| | 00:43 | You don't need any source files to do
this, because you are just going to use
| | 00:45 | solids and plug-ins
already inside After Effects.
| | 00:49 | The first thing I'm going to do is
create a new composition and you have a few
| | 00:52 | choices as to what size
you make this composition.
| | 00:55 | You could make it the same size
as your final overall composition.
| | 00:58 | In this case, we are
creating an NTSC DV size Comp.
| | 01:01 | But another approach is just to make
some of these textured movies, render them,
| | 01:06 | and have them around as your own stock footage.
| | 01:08 | In that case, you might want to create
them at a larger size such as an HDTV
| | 01:13 | size and have those files around that
you can pan, zoom, rotate, and otherwise
| | 01:18 | use as necessary for different projects.
| | 01:20 | But just to make renders faster, we're
going to use this smaller DV size for now.
| | 01:24 | I'm going to name this fractal noise -
soft because the first example I'm going
| | 01:32 | to show you is this nice
generic soft background.
| | 01:35 | I'm going to make it 6 seconds
long, again so it will render fast and
| | 01:38 | because that was the length of our
final composition. I tend to like to make
| | 01:42 | looping backgrounds at least say 16-
20 seconds long, but we'll do this now
| | 01:48 | just for expediency.
| | 01:49 | Inside your comp, either create a
new shape layer or a new solid layer as
| | 01:55 | the size of your composition and I'll name
this after the plug-in I'm about to apply.
| | 02:02 | By the way, the color is not important.
| | 02:04 | Next, I'm going to apply Effect
> Noise & Grain > Fractal Noise.
| | 02:10 | Fractal Noise and Turbulent
Noise are very similar to each other.
| | 02:15 | Turbulent Noise is actually GPU-
accelerated, so in some cases it maybe faster.
| | 02:20 | It also is set to create a more
realistic form of Fractal Noise for those
| | 02:25 | trying to create natural
phenomenon such as smoke and fire.
| | 02:27 | However, Fractal Noise has the
advantage that you can actually force it to make
| | 02:32 | seamless loops and since we're creating
background textures, that's what we're
| | 02:35 | going to take advantage of here.
| | 02:37 | So here is Fractal Noise
at its default settings.
| | 02:40 | In the next two movies, we're going to
change these settings to create a soft
| | 02:44 | amorphous lighting type background, plus
a stylized geometric blocky background.
| | 02:49 | We'll also animate them both.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Using soft lighting effects| 00:07 | I have Fractal Noise applied to my
layer and initially it looks like I have a
| | 00:11 | cross between cotton balls,
clouds, and I don't know what.
| | 00:16 | However, it is very customizable.
| | 00:18 | It also does not animate to start
with but we'll also add that later on.
| | 00:22 | The first thing to look at is your Fractal Type.
| | 00:25 | This selects different fractal
patterns to give you basic starting points for
| | 00:30 | your fractal explorations, including
some different ways of treating the numbers
| | 00:35 | that are generated underneath the hood.
| | 00:37 | When I am creating a generic lighting
effect, I have personally found Dynamic
| | 00:41 | Twist to be a really good starting point.
| | 00:44 | You can see it has more of an
interesting sort of fire look to it than the
| | 00:47 | clouds we started off with.
| | 00:49 | Secondly, you have the Noise Type
pop-up, and again this further defines how
| | 00:54 | the fractal is being painted on your screen.
| | 00:57 | Soft Linear is the default.
| | 00:58 | It tends to have a nice contrast.
| | 01:00 | Linear has a little bit less contrast.
| | 01:03 | It doesn't look so good
with other fractal types.
| | 01:05 | It does look good with Dynamic Twist.
| | 01:08 | There's Block, which we will be
playing with later on for that background.
| | 01:11 | But when I am trying to create some
nice soft fading in and out shadows and
| | 01:16 | bright spots, I happened to like Spline.
| | 01:18 | Again, it gives me this nice, soft,
swirly pattern, which is a good starting
| | 01:23 | point for creating smooth lighting effects.
| | 01:26 | But feel free to change any
of these to taste later on.
| | 01:28 | Next, I want to turn this from clouds
into curtains, something that's a little
| | 01:32 | bit longer in dimension.
| | 01:33 | So I'm going to twirl open the
Transform section where I can scale the Fractal
| | 01:38 | Pattern and I'm going to
turn off Uniform Scaling.
| | 01:43 | That way I can stretch this
to be taller than it is wide.
| | 01:48 | And this is how I start to get my
curtains of light sort of effect, and just to
| | 01:53 | give you a preview of what we're about
to do I'm going to go ahead and scrub
| | 01:56 | the Evolution and you can see how our
curtains now move in and out, up and down.
| | 02:00 | Now right now this is far much too
detail for a sort of lighting effect.
| | 02:06 | It's closer to fire than shadows and highlights.
| | 02:09 | To reduce the detail you
have a couple different choices.
| | 02:12 | You can reduce Complexity, which is
basically how many layers of different noise
| | 02:18 | patterns are being added on top of each other.
| | 02:19 | 1 is just a single layer,
2 is two layers, and so on.
| | 02:26 | For my lighting effect I'll
tend to go between say 2 and 3.
| | 02:30 | Another option is to go into the Sub Settings.
| | 02:33 | Sub determines how those additional layers
of complexity are mixed into the final result.
| | 02:39 | Sub Scaling is how large or
small those iterations of noise are.
| | 02:45 | A smaller Sub Scaling creates more
detail because it's scaling down, making
| | 02:51 | tighter or more complex those individual layers.
| | 02:54 | A higher Sub Scaling reduces complexity,
because the individual layers are not
| | 02:59 | scaled down as much.
| | 03:00 | They're more similar in size.
| | 03:02 | Sub Influence controls how those
individual letters are mixed together.
| | 03:06 | If you turn this down to zero,
we basically only get one layer again.
| | 03:09 | But if you start to bring up Sub
Influence it determines how those additional
| | 03:14 | layers of complexity are mixed in.
| | 03:16 | I am going to go for something around here
where I have my soft shadows and highlights.
| | 03:22 | Not a lot of detail like
a fire effect might have.
| | 03:25 | Next, to make this animate I want
keyframes with that Evolution parameter
| | 03:29 | we're applying with.
| | 03:30 | I'll scroll down little bit here, turn
on Evolution, and I'll go to the end of my
| | 03:34 | composition and to create a seamless
loop I need to go one frame beyond the end
| | 03:40 | of my comp, therefore I am at a point
in time equivalent to the first frame of
| | 03:44 | my composition, coming
back around to the head again.
| | 03:46 | I'll have this rotate say
2 revolutions of Evolution.
| | 03:52 | Press zero on the numeric keypad, RAM
Preview, and see if I like that speed or not.
| | 03:58 | If it's too slow I can create more
revolutions inside my timeframe. If it's too
| | 04:04 | fast I can have fewer revolutions or
fewer degrees of change, but I like this.
| | 04:10 | Okay, the next thing you might
notice is, "Chris, it's not looping, why?
| | 04:14 | You put that keyframe where you said
I had to put it but it's not seamless."
| | 04:18 | Well, to make a seamless loop in Fractal
Noise there is one more thing you need to do.
| | 04:22 | You need to open up Evolution
Options and turn on Cycle Evolution.
| | 04:28 | This is what forces Fractal Noise to
seamlessly loop and is not available
| | 04:33 | in Turbulent Noise.
| | 04:35 | It's bit of a cheat but you
know, sometimes we like cheats.
| | 04:39 | Since I'm evolving two full
revolutions for the length of my composition, to
| | 04:43 | create a more complex pattern I'm
going to say don't repeat yourself until
| | 04:46 | you've gone through two cycles of Evolution.
| | 04:50 | Now RAM preview and once the
buffer gets calculated, we should have a
| | 04:56 | nice seamless loop.
| | 04:59 | We'll come around to the very
end and come back up to the head
| | 05:02 | completely seamlessly.
| | 05:04 | So the nice thing is I could render
this movie, import it back into After
| | 05:08 | Effects or any other program, and loop
it for as many times as I want, depending
| | 05:11 | on what length of background that I need.
| | 05:13 | The last thing you might play with is
just, say, adjust these patterns or
| | 05:18 | highlights and dark. Like I don't
really like this pattern right in here.
| | 05:22 | I'd like to try to get a
different pattern if at all possible.
| | 05:25 | To do that, I can go ahead
and play with the Random Seed.
| | 05:28 | Let's try some different values and see
if I can create a pattern of lights and
| | 05:32 | darks that I think might be more interesting.
| | 05:34 | Let's try that one.
| | 05:36 | Yeah, I think I can live with that pattern.
| | 05:41 | That's a pretty good background.
| | 05:44 | You've a lot more parameters inside
Fractal Noise, but this is your basic recipe
| | 05:48 | for creating a nice background lighting effect.
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| Working with block patterns| 00:07 | Okay. That's one example of Fractal Noise.
| | 00:09 | I am going to turn that layer off
for now, go back to the start of the
| | 00:12 | composition, and create a brand new solid
to create a different Fractal Noise effect.
| | 00:17 | So I am going to call this fractal noise blocky.
| | 00:23 | It's the size of my composition.
| | 00:24 | And just to keep things clear I am
going to change the name of my first
| | 00:27 | example to soft and change the name
of my composition to something more
| | 00:34 | generic, like examples.
| | 00:37 | Selected my blocky layer and I will
apply Effect > Fractal Noise again.
| | 00:42 | This time I will try out different
settings for Fractal Type and Noise Type.
| | 00:46 | You may remember when we played
around with Noise Type there was one called
| | 00:49 | Block and this is a great head start
for that very geometric square-base
| | 00:53 | pattern we saw earlier.
| | 00:54 | Now that I have got that basic noise
type, I can try different fractal types to
| | 00:59 | see what sort of contrast do they give me.
| | 01:02 | Basic gives me some pretty sharp
contrast here. Max gives me something that's
| | 01:06 | just very, very plain, very little detail.
Cloudy gives me something that's very
| | 01:11 | bright and blown out.
| | 01:13 | I happen to find that threads gives me a
nice low contrast subtle blend of colors.
| | 01:19 | If I want to increase the contrast, I
just increase the Contrast value, just to
| | 01:23 | get some more high values back in.
| | 01:25 | Now even though we've chosen a noise
type of Blocks we still have a very cloudy
| | 01:30 | sort of pattern and again this is
because Complexity is a bit on the high side.
| | 01:35 | Having a high Complexity is great if
you're trying to do things like plasma
| | 01:38 | rays, fire, things that
have a lot of detail to them.
| | 01:41 | But when you're trying to create
background elements, sometimes simpler is better.
| | 01:45 | To really understand what's
happening with this block type, I am going to
| | 01:47 | turn Complexity all the way down to
value of 2 to where there is just 2
| | 01:52 | layers of Fractal Noise.
| | 01:54 | This will give me a good
opportunity to explore the Sub Settings.
| | 01:58 | As I mentioned earlier, Sub Scaling is
how much each subsequent layer of noise
| | 02:03 | is being scaled down.
| | 02:04 | So I chose 50%, my next layer of
noise is half the size or twice the detail
| | 02:12 | of my original layer.
| | 02:13 | I can now use my Sub Offset to carefully
line up these different layers of noise.
| | 02:17 | Maybe over there and maybe over there
and Sub Influence again is the mixture.
| | 02:24 | Again, to show you what's going on I
will put Complexity down to 1, 1 layer,
| | 02:29 | there is my basic block. 2, 2 layers,
one-half the size of the other. 3 will go
| | 02:36 | down and size it again and now you
see it get a lot more detail back in this.
| | 02:38 | So you get an idea of what's going on here.
| | 02:41 | Again, Sub Influence is how
those sub-layers are mixed together.
| | 02:47 | You can go for a really neat aligned
appearance like this or if you want to
| | 02:51 | loosen things up, you can go ahead and
take the Sub Scaling off of a perfect
| | 02:54 | number, like say even just like 51 or
52 to where things don't quite line up
| | 02:59 | and you've introduced some
imperfections into the square pattern. Likewise you
| | 03:03 | can go ahead and play around with
the Sub Offset. Go ahead and change how
| | 03:06 | things line up, so there is some alignment, but
some misalignments, a mixture of order and chaos.
| | 03:12 | You have the same options to animate this.
| | 03:14 | For example I can use Evolution again.
| | 03:16 | I will enable keyframing.
| | 03:18 | Press N to go to the End.
| | 03:20 | Press Page Down to go one frame
past the end to create a seamless loop.
| | 03:24 | Maybe I will create a slow evolution,
just one revolution. Go back home,
| | 03:29 | twirl-down Evolution Options, and enable
Cycle Evolution as well so it's seamless,
| | 03:34 | and press 0 to RAM preview.
| | 03:36 | Now that it's calculated, you can now see
my pattern of these square blocks fading
| | 03:42 | in and out over time.
| | 03:45 | If you want to align the grid better
to your frame, you have other options.
| | 03:49 | In addition to the Sub Settings, you can
go back to Transform, you can go ahead
| | 03:52 | and scale things up or down to try to
make them match your edges a little bit,
| | 03:57 | and maybe use a little bit of Offset
position to go ahead and frame it better.
| | 04:03 | Maybe over there, a little bit of Scale.
| | 04:08 | And if I need to I can even turn off
Uniform Scaling and scale differently in
| | 04:11 | the X and Y. Back over a little bit there.
| | 04:15 | I will increase the Contrast now
just get some bright areas back and as I
| | 04:19 | showed you earlier to go ahead and
tint this, I can go ahead and apply Color
| | 04:22 | Correction, something like Tritone.
| | 04:25 | Change my Midtones.
Decide what color I would like.
| | 04:28 | Something like this blue
or purple might be nice.
| | 04:30 | And I can combine multiple
layers of this fractal effect.
| | 04:33 | I'll put the soft layer back on top,
enable it, and rather than using it in its
| | 04:39 | normal state, I will turn
its blending mode into Overlay.
| | 04:43 | This way I will brighten or darken the
underlying layer based on the pattern to
| | 04:48 | my Fractal Noise around top.
| | 04:50 | Without my lighting layer, with.
0 to RAM preview and you will see that in
| | 04:55 | addition to having the square block
animation we also have some light and dark
| | 05:00 | areas traveling throughout this
| | 05:02 | thanks to the fractal noise soft layer on top.
| | 05:04 | So those are a couple of quick ways
you can use Fractal Noise to create
| | 05:08 | random backgrounds.
| | 05:10 | You may not necessarily use these
elements on their own, but they create
| | 05:13 | nice eye candy to blend into other
layers to give them certain impressions
| | 05:16 | for certain fields.
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