AfterEffects Software Workshop 24/1

ADVANCED KEYFRAME TECHNIQUES

back to solid shapes.

select all layers and press U to see all animated properties.

Shapes currently moving across the screen at constant speed. What we're going to look at is acceleration/deceleration, to give the animations a much more natural feel.

First way we're looking it is AE's quick and easy way of doing it.

In the animation menu we can select 'Easy Ease Out' and apply this to the first keyframe (we're going to do this to the green box to start with)

The spacing of the keyframe dots become closer together, making the green box start off slower and speed up, in a more naturally accelerating way.

For the blue box, we are going to use 'Easy Ease In' to cause it to decelerate towards the second keyframe.

Therefore it will start off a bit faster, allowing it time to decelerate.

And finally, with the grey box, we select 'Easy Ease'. which will cause it to accelerate AND decelerate, which is the most natural way of movement.

We can also view the timeline as a graph:

Using this, we can have a greater control over the speed of the action (in this case, change of position). The graph above shows the linear movement of the red solid.

The image below shows the motion graph of the green solid:

We can change the shape of the graph to make certain actions more pronounced:

There's a couple of quite basic methods for affecting the speed of actions.


Couple of test videos taken from the first part of this session

softwareworkshop5vid1 from Mike Mooney on Vimeo.





softwareworkshop5vid2 from Mike Mooney on Vimeo.




Making use of these skills to create a quick pendulum animation.





softwareworkshop5vid3 from Mike Mooney on Vimeo.




Parent Child Relationships:


It is possible to assign layers as 'children' to a particular layer. As this might suggest; the 'child' layer constantly follows the parent BUT can still move freely within various boundaries. 

NESTED COMPOSITIONS:

We can combine (nest) layers using the pre-compose tool:

The layers have been replaced with one layer called 'car'

Changes can now be made in the 'car' composition, and this will automatically change the the 'car' that's nested in another composition...slightly like linking files in InDesign.


And a quick video combining all the skills learnt in this session. Pretty amusing little video:





softwareworkshop5vid5 from Mike Mooney on Vimeo.

AfterEffects software workshop 17/1

First things first, make sure the composition settings are as shown below:

Creating TEXT in AfterEffects:

Grab the type tool in the bar at the top, click somewhere in the composition and begin writing.

Of course we can change the size/font etc.

Along side the standard Transformation controls; there are also some text properties that appear when a text box is created:

The anchor point of a text box is in a DIFFERENT LOCATION. It is possible however to reposition the anchor point:

However also by selecting the 'Pan Behind' tool you can move the anchor point without the layer itself being repositioned. Here it is:

Text-specific functions.

Here we've got rid of the last words and set a keyframe:

At each keyframe  I added the next word, so therefore each word will appear after various intervals. The square keyframe represents a keyframe hold; as in there is no interpolation.

There are few other formatting properties that are specific to text. With these it is possible to change the colour, size etc. of individual letters and whatnot:

By selecting the 'animate' button we can obtain further options:

This will show up as 'Animator 1'.


Similarly to the Transform options, we can change the positions of text:

And we can also alter how much of the text is being affected using the 'Range Selector' tools:

These are fairly complicated and I will have to return to these when I have more time.


There are also some advanced tools to get involved with:

For example, we can choose to deal with the Range Selector in terms of specific characters as opposed to percentages, as this may be more accurate.

After Effect text test from Mike Mooney on Vimeo.


We can also deal with the anchor points in similar ways to when importing a Composition.

When scaling for example. we can go into the 'more options' section and change how the word will be affected; whether the individual characters or the whole word becomes affected.

Once again by messing about with the Range Selector tools we can change how the transformation occurs:

Therefore it is possible to determine when each individual letter will be animated. By controlling the smoothness, we can decide how sharply the letters transform into their next state, as shown below. With a smoothness of 0% the letters will pretty much snap from one state to the next.

We can go on to add additional properties to the Animator, for example tracking:

which can be used to avoid collisions and whatnot.

We can also use paths to affect the location of the text; using the 'Path Options' set of tools:

A couple more test videos:

After Effect text test 2 from Mike Mooney on Vimeo.

After Effect text test 3 from Mike Mooney on Vimeo.

AfterEffects software workshop 13/12

Keyframe Interpolation

Interpolation = 'to insert between fixed points'

keyframe interpolation = change settings of bezier

'toggle hold keyframe' = no interpolation.

'rove across time' - will position square relative to first and last keyframe - A CONSTANT SPEED


Today we began by learning a few things about keyframe interpolation. Interpolation means the transition between one point and the next.

Say we take a simple object such as a square solid and animate it:

This will leave us with a simple animation - the square will move smoothly from point A to point B. The smooth movement is due to the path being formed by bezier curves, so there are no sharp movements. 

In some cases however we may want sudden, sharp movements. We can achieve this by altering the Keyframe Interpolation:

By switching this to Linear the path will switch to one without bezier curves and handles, meaning the square solid will very suddenly change direction.

We can also achieve a slightly different level of control by selecting Continuous Bezier. 

There may also be occasions where we do not want consistent movement whatsoever; we might want the square solid to disappear and reappear in various places. Say we've made an animation with a few keyframes, as shown below:

If we select the keyframes and select 'toggle hold keyframe' the square will not move between the points, instead it will just disappear from one and reappear at the next.

Magic.

 The second half of the lesson involved making use of Illustrator as well as mask functions.

For example we can make a shape follow a path created in Illustrator:

Set the keyframe and then copy the shape from Illustrator. The shape will then follow this path.

We can also make the shape retain its orientation around the path by selecting 'auto-orient':

Masks work fairly similarly to other Adobe programmes.