Use masks from Illustrator and Photoshop - After Effects Tutorial

- [Instructor] Go ahead and open composition 4.6 using masks from Illustrator and Photoshop. Expand the main folder, expand compositions, and here it is 4.6 masks from Illustrator and Photoshop simply double click it. And all we have in here is a solid and there are no masks or anything in here. So let's start with Illustrator. If you have access to Illustrator go ahead and open it up and if you don't simply watch. An Illustrator create a new document so create new, it can be the default, it can be anything. So I'm just going to go for print I'll choose letter, click on Create, and Illustrator is going to give me an empty canvas to work on. For example, I don't know if you know that Illustrator has a Line Segment tool, a Start tool, et cetera, et cetera. Now, there are other tools in here that right now are not showing up. Let's change the Workspace from Essentials to Essentials Classic. And now we're going to see many more tools. If you click and hold on the Line tool, you're going to see that Illustrator has a Spiral tool and that's pretty cool. Choose to Spiral tool and now I want to ask you not to release the mouse button. So I'm going to click and drag and I'm going to leave my mouse button down. Look what happens when I press and hold the Control key and I make this larger. See how it unravels. I can release the Control key make this bigger. I can add the Control key again and make it smaller and now I'm making the spiral much tighter. I can use my Up Arrow to add segments to the spiral and I can add many, many, many, many, many or I can delete segments from the spiral by using the Down Arrow. Now I'm going to complete the spiral to about yay and now I'm going to release the mouse button with the spiral selected, so I'm going to grab my selection tool with that spiral selected I'm simply going to copy. I can go back to After Effects. I can now select the layer in the timeline and simply paste. I want for this to be a little bit larger. So I'm going to press the letter m and now Control + t, Command + t on the Mac and I'm going to make this larger. I can press and hold Shift-Option-Command which are modifiers that let me resize from the middle and to keep proportions and I'm going to make this about yay big I can now release the mouse button first, then the modifiers and I'm simply going to copy the mask path. The beauty of having Illustrator is that we are able to create shapes. In this case, this spiral that would otherwise be very difficult for us to create manually. And I can now paste this onto anything else that I want to animate in a spiral fashion. For example, I can now draw a shape layer in the middle of my composition, say around yay. And I can now select the Press layer, press p for position, click on the word position and paste. And now this is going to go in a spiral fashion. Obviously, as pasting to two seconds the keyframes are moving in time. I'm going to make it go slower by simply dragging the last keyframe all the way to the end of my composition and I can now play this like yay. I'm going to add a little bit of motion blur by clicking here and there it is. And I think I'm going to make the bottom solid layer invisible. So I'm going to click on this eyeball and now I'll play my animation. If you want for these keyframes to go the opposite way, in other words, to start in the middle and then end outside, you can click on the word position, which lets you select all of the keyframes then right click one of the keyframes, choose Keyframe Assistant and then Time Reverse Keyframes, and now the animation will start in the middle and go outwards. This would have taken a very long time to keyframe by hand. And yes, I have used this in client project. Now let's go ahead and delete the shape layer and delete the mask from the bottom layer and make the bottom layer again visible. This time let's go into Photoshop. In Photoshop let's click on Create new Photoshop size is fine, click on Create, and now let's grab our Custom Shape tool. So click and hold on the Rectangle tool, choose Custom Shape tool and you can choose any of these shapes. Let me choose from wild animals. Why not? Let me choose the camel. So before I start drawing, I can change this from shape, to path, to pixels. I actually want the path and now I can click and drag and indeed I am creating a camel path. I can copy this now, let's go back into After Effects, make sure that your solid layer is selected and paste. And you can see that we can paste masks from Photoshop. And now we have access to a lot more shapes than we have if we were using After Effects alone.