1. Class Teaser: Hi. My name is Lucas Ridley, and I'm an award-winning animator. This is my course on how to animate an explainer video in After Effects. In this course, I'm going to show you the tips and the tools that I use to create one third of my freelance income this last year. I'm going to go over ingredients of what makes a good explainer video, and then you can use them in your own recipe to make your own explainer video. This course is for anyone who wants to create their own explainer video for their company, product, or service. It's more focus for someone who's relatively new to After Effects. Thanks for joining me. 2. Planning Phase: Hi and welcome to the first class. Before we get started learning how to animate, we're going to go over the first step in the process, which is planning. We need to know what we're doing before we do it. There's a couple of different ways to do that. Some of the most popular ways are through a story. We can have a character and put them in an environment and a setting that explains the situation that's relative to the product or service that you're trying to explain. Another way that can also be used in conjunction with story is problem and its solution. You would illustrate a problem and show how your product or service solves that problem. We need to have an understanding of how we're going to explain the product or service. Then once we know how we're going to do it, we need to go into the audio phase, which means we need to write a script and record voice-over for it. A huge part of animating is having the voice-over locked because animating is all about timing. If we don't have the audio and script on beforehand, we're going to be doing a lot of rewriting and re-animating to time things appropriately. That goes along with music as well and sound effects. Just to fill stuff out and keep the pacing going forward, we want to make sure that the audio is recorded and we're certain exactly what the script want to say after we decided how we going to say it. Onto what most of this course is going to be about is creating the visuals. The visuals to start with, we need to gather reference and research, the look that we want to go for. We can pull inspiration from other sources, so start to look at other explainer videos and see what they did right and wrong, and start to get an idea for the style that you want. Color is very important. That's something you can do on the fly a little bit but it doesn't hurt to do a little research beforehand. Especially, if you have a logo or a brand identity already, you're going to want to use those colors and incorporate that throughout the video to create the theme and the tie of the logo with the feel of the video. Finally is storyboard and transitions. This is very, very important and really is one of the biggest ideas that we're going to cover here. For the storyboard and transitions, these can be rough ideas. Start to think and imagine how can you connect things from your script into visual identity? Think of metaphors of way to represent what you've written in a visual way and how you're going to be able to connect line by line and smooth transitions between the audio. Thanks for watching this. Now, let's get into the actual animation. 3. Intro to Animation Topics: Real quickly, I want to talk about how the course is laid out and why it's laid out this way. We're going to first start with transitions and we'll go over how to use nulls and animate masks to help us think of creative transitions. Then we'll go on to flourishes. These are little sparkles, and hints, and glints, and embellishments that we can use repeatedly after you make them one time. Then we'll go over how to create characters, how to build them, and how to animate them. Then finally, there will be some bonus sections to go over more specific aspects like how to create a ribbon and then how to do the very popular whiteboard effect. The reason why these are the main topics are because every explainer video has these included in them. I'm using the analogy again. These are the ingredients that are going to be used for your specific explainer video. You'll just need to create your own content based specifically around the product or service that you're trying to explain, and then use these elements. Thanks for watching and I look forward to seeing you in the next lesson. 4. Intro to AE (Beginners Only): Hi, and welcome to the class for beginners and after effects. We're just going to do a quick introduction to the program itself. I'm just going to go down here and start from scratch, click on the program and open it. I'm running After Effects Creative Cloud 2014 version. You might get this warning about graphics card, it's not a big deal. Just hit "OK." Here's a welcome screen, you could turn the default on an off and that show right here. I'll just close out of that. This is our workspace. If it doesn't look like this for you, you can go to Window Workspace and hit Standard or Reset standard. You can actually adjust different things, and sometimes you might accidentally pull tabs around and move things around in a way you didn't anticipate. Just go back up here to workspace reset standard and we're ready to go. To get started with you to composition, we need an empty space to basically start making things. So we can have multiple compositions in one project. Right now we're in a project. This is overall After Effects interface is a project to File Save. We're setting a project. But when we go down here and say, "Create a new composition." That's like a little mini video inside of our project. You need to settle the attributes here, I'm going to go with HD, 24 frames a seconds is very common for animation and so 48 frames, that's two seconds, I hit "OK." Now we have a nice blank canvas, we can start doing things on. On the left here we have our project. That's where if we bring in an image, right-click and import a file, all of that stuff will be here. [inaudible] we have something in there. All of those assets will be listed in the project window here. So we have our blank composition here, and we have nothing in our Layers window down here. So to do that, we can right-click anywhere and say, "New text." For example. We'll start with texts. So we can just type anything, we have to select the text to be able to change the color. We can change it to anything. We can change the font and the size, and we started doing some more typing, we could change the spacing or set it to auto, all fun stuff with text. The next thing, we'll need a background. Let's create a background of a different color and hit "OK." We could name that here if we wanted. Or once it's created, we can go click on the Layer window and hit enter, and then we can start typing and call this background. Now we can also change the view of this in the layer's composition so that we have a different color that represents it. That's a couple of creating couple objects here, we won't be using lights or cameras much that's for 3D, but null objects are pretty important. For example, we could parent the text to this null object. Let me just turn off the background because no object is just like this red square. It's just represented, it won't actually render when you render anything. But you can now notice when I move the null around, it's moving the text. So it's a way to create new pivot points. You can move groups of things around. If I unparent that and move them all over here, now I have a pivot point on the corner. You can also move the pivot points of things with this cursor up here fairly easily. This is the pivot point of things and it will scale and rotate from that, so we could move it down there and it'll scale and rotate from that position. That's most of the stuff we're going to be doing. We're going to have a few Shape layers. We'll get into that later. If you have any questions, ask in discussion, if you ever get stuck on anything, for example, let's turn back on the background and if we double-click it, we get to the isolated view of the background. Sometimes this confuses people because now we've lost our texts. If we were working on our text now where did it to go? How do we get back to that? So if this happens, you just don't worry about it. You can find this in the top left here on composition, we are just in a different tab and this isolated view. So if you ever get stuck on that, look up here and go back with the composition view. Let's name is composition intro over here. So we just hit enter to be able to do that again over here. One important thing we want to cover is we'll go onto preferences in general. I want to make sure that it is set for default spatial interpolation to linear. What that means is things will just behave the way we expect them to. There's a few instances where if you don't have this checked, some goofy things will happen with animation. Once we access all of these different attributes down here, we can animate them by clicking these little stopwatches on the left. So we've set a key frame for position. So if we move over and time and then drag it, now we can see that it's animated that distance. This is just a very quick overview for those of you who feel overwhelmed by aftereffects, it's basically Photoshop for video. So don't get too overwhelmed by it, we're going to be doing a lot in these layers and in this window. That's about it. If you follow along with all the ingredients that we'll be covering, you can piece it all together to your own recipe. Majority of this stuff you don't really have to worry about yet. All these little buttons won't affect you whatsoever. Biggest thing you need to know is how to create things, how to stack things and layer, click and drag it, rename things, keep it organized and how to animate. Follow along and these lessons, and you'll notice different shortcuts I use while I'm animating. It will speed up your workflow and get you familiar with the process. Thanks for watching and look forward to seeing you in the next lesson. 5. Illustrate a Megaphone with Masks: In this lesson, we're going to slow down a little bit and answer a question one of my students had. This is an updated video. I'm adding it a year or two after this course has been out. If you have a question or you want something for me to address, ask a question and maybe I'll make a video about it as well and update the course just like this video. The question was about masks and creating megaphone icon. Let's create a new composition by clicking the "new composition" button over here, and I'll just call this Megaphone. We want to choose a preset that's going to be useful to us in our project. I'm going to choose 1920 by 1080, 24 frames a second, and the background color doesn't really matter. I'm going to click this drop down menu that say 'Fit' so that we see the entire screen here. I'm going to start by creating a solid. I'm going to right-click down here and say New, solid. This is going to be the background main, and let's just make this like a light teal color. Then we're going to make a background for the icon, add a New solid. Same process right-clicking down there. I'm going to have this be somewhat orangish, and we can always change these colors later if we don't like them by going to, let's say we don't like this, how do we change that? We can select the layer and right-click in the effects panel here, we can see Effects Controls. We go down to generate, fill, and now we get a new color. Now we can change the color to wherever we want. That's one way to update a solid. Let's create this background. I'll hit 'enter' to rename it. I'll say BG_ Megaphone. I'm going to select a shape tool up here, and I don't want the square, I want the circle. I'm going to click and hold it and I'll have the Ellipse Tool here, if I shift click, then I can get a perfect circle. If I let go a shift it's going to be wherever my mouse is, but if I hold on shift, it will stay a circle. Now I can double-click this and go to align, and I can just align it to the center with these buttons aligned to this horizontal and align to the vertical center. Now we can start to make the megaphone within this little icon here. We're basically going to be making a lot of shapes like we just did with the circle, but we need to combine them in a way to create one big shape. I'm going to start with the rear end of the megaphone, and I'm going to make this be like a light yellowish, maybe even less saturation. If I want to switch to saturation here, I can just click these little radio buttons and then I have that option. [inaudible] I'm going to say the 'Back.' Now I can go back to this tool set by left clicking and holding. I'll go to the rounded rectangle tool and click anywhere, and by holding up and down, I can actually change the radius of these corners. I'm just going to hold it down until it's something that I like, and that's fine. I'm going to hit V on my keyboard, pull up the cursor tool here, and I'm going to center this as well with the align tool over here. We have our first little piece. Let's create a piece that goes on top of it. It's the middle section. I'll go right-click New solid, and create a gray type of material. Let's just go saturation all the way down. For brightness, lets just go somewhere in the middle. We could just say 50% here, and I'll just call this 'Middle.' I'll use that same tool and I'll draw this out except I want the corners of this to be a little tighter. I'll hold down the down arrow and wait until the edges get a little closer there. I'll put this somewhere, maybe like this, and we can use the align tools again to align that up. Let's move the back over a little bit. I'm going to just use my arrows and shift to knock this over a little bit. We'll do something like an [inaudible]. Now I'm going to make the actual megaphone piece. I'm going to create a New solid, again, and I'm going to make this be a much brighter gray. Let's go up here somewhere, let's say 90%. We don't want it to be totally white. We'll just call this the Funnel. Let's create a rectangle, and even though it's a funnel, we can start with this rectangle tool and then we can make it a funnel later. Let's click and drag this out. I'll just hold down shift to make it a square, perfect square, then we can use the align tools here to get it down to the middle. Now we can actually go in here and I'm going to zoom in a little bit, holding down space bar and clicking to move around. I'm going to select just these two end points here. I've selected that one, scroll on here, hold down shift and click that one. Now I have these two selected. When I double-click it, I get the transformation thing, but because they're so narrow, it's hard to see, but it is there. Now I can drag this down. If I hit 'shift ' it will stay in aligned, and if I hit 'command' and hold that as well, I'm holding shift and command, then it'll bring it in. I'm basically trying to get this to line up exactly with this edge. I'm going to hit 'enter' and I'm going to zoom in really close and see if this thing is actually right on the edge, it looks like it is. I'm going to go down here, looks like it's right on the edge. Cool. Now I can zoom out and grab this and bring this over here. I just did the same thing, shift selecting either side. I'm going to have the bullhorn be something like that. It looks like I need to move everything over now. I'm going to grab all of these, hit P, and just slide them over into X. Cool. Now we have them slid over. I'm also going to bring this back to the right a little bit. I want the middle section to be a little bigger. I'm also going to grab these and pull them out a little more. Then do the same thing and move all of the layers over just a little bit. We can also pull up the Title Action Safe here by clicking this, and we can see where the exact middle is here on the composition. That gives us an idea of how far away we are. Let's make one more layer here, and it's going to become the rim of the bullhorn. I'll go New, solid, and instead of being 90%, let's do 75. We're splitting the difference between this gray and that gray there. I'll just call this Rim. Now I will grab the rounded rectangle tool again. Let's go to the rim and click 'drag it'. Let's make it be like a narrow rim here. Something like that. I'm going to let go, and then align it vertically because we know all of these layers so far are aligned vertically. Cool, so now let's make the handle real quick. I'll right-click, and we can also right-click here. I'm going to right-click and say new solid. Let's just make this be somewhat of a black. I usually don't like to go all the way totally black because then we don't leave ourselves anywhere to go. I'll say handle, and now I'll create the handle with the same tool over here, and even though I'm going to have the handle be somewhat angled, which is going to leave this up and down for now, and then we can double-click this and rotate it. If we hover our cursor over here at the edge, we get this rotation tool. Now I can rotate it a little bit. If I hold down shift, it'll go at 90 and 45 degrees. I don't want it to be at 45 degree, so I'm going to let go shift and do this myself just by my eyes, and let's make this be a little bit smaller and get this back up. Maybe rotate it just to touch. We can also move the pivot point over here and we can put it from the top. Let's do something like that and hit enter. Now let's put this on the bottom, so it is behind all of these. I'll go down here and put it at the bottom and just click dragging it down the bottom. I'm going to minimize all these so we can see what we've created so far, and we basically have a megaphone. That's pretty cool. let's actually take these and give it a little more space because we can see this distance from this edge to that edge is much greater from this edge to that edge. Let's try to get it back in the middle a little bit. Shift select everything, hit P, and then just drag these over and keep an eye on this distance here and try to match that a little bit better. Cool. Now let's give this some dimensionality, by adding a shadow to the microphone itself and then also adding a long shadow here. First, let's start with the long shadow. I will create an adjustment layer actually and say new adjustment layer, and nothing really happens because adjustment layers are blank. We need to add effects to them so that we can see them. I'm just going to turn off the title action safe here so we can see what we're doing, and I'm going to call this long shadow. For this adjustment layer, and I'll just say underscore adjustment, so we can tell that it's an adjustment layer, not a solid, we are going to actually just create an adjustment here under the color correction. I'll go down to something like curves. You could also go to levels. It doesn't really matter which one you choose because they can both have a similar effect. We wanted to put this below all of the megaphone stuff, we just wanted on the background. When we turn this on and off of the eye, we can see that it's changing the actual color beneath it. I'm just moving the gamma here, which is the midpoint. You can see this little arrow here move around, that's the midpoint of the histogram. I'm just going to drop that down a little bit, and now let's mask out this adjustment to pretend like it's the shadow. I'm going to click this and with this layer selected, I'm going to click and drag an adjustment layer mask. You can see that it has created a mask here called mask 1. So let's duplicate this out. Now we have mask 2, they're right on top of each other. Let's just move this over here. The reason why I'm doing them together is because I want to rotate them to be at the same angle. I'm going to hit enter and then I'm going to click drag so we get both of them, and I'm going to double-click one of them. Now you can see we can rotate both of them. We just want to make sure that our shadow has a consistent angle. We can do something maybe like this and I'm basically looking at this edge over here, and I'm going to line this up so that it comes off of this. I did two of these masks because we need one for this edge and one for this edge of the handle. We have one for the bar over here, the rear end of it, the back of the megaphone and then we have the handle down here. I'm going to hit enter, and now they're at the same angle. But we have to separate masks that we can move around. I'm just going to line this one up. I'm going to zoom in and hold on space bar and I'm hitting command and plus to zoom in. I'm just going to move this to the edge of the handle here, and then I'm going to hit enter, and I'm going to grab these four end points, and I'm going to drag these over to the tip of the megaphone here. Now we have the shadow coming off of this. We can see we get a little corner here, that's not a big deal. What we can do is just click and drag that so it doesn't get over that edge there, cool. Let's do the same thing for the rear end part here. Let me zoom in. It looks like it's maybe not exactly on there, so instead of actually clicking this dot, you can select one of the long lines or just anywhere on the line and I'll select the two points that are in between it. I know I want this edge to be the same angle, so I'm going to select this edge and then just hold down shift and press up until I get it right on that edge. I can zoom out now, and let's take a look at this. It looks pretty cool. We need to fix this mask part here. I'm just going to drag that down, we don't need to worry about anything else about that. Now we have this long shadow. The reason why it's important to do an adjustment is because if later that we decide we want to change the color of this background, then it won't matter because we just made an adjustment layer so we can change this color all we want, and let's just go ahead and do that to show you an example. I'll go to generate-fill, and we can see that as I change the color, that shadow stays there, as long as it doesn't get super bright, because we're changing the gamma. That was the adjustment that we did there, so if we get super bright then there is no gamma to adjust because it's all white. That's why when you get too dark or too bright, you're not going to see that adjustment. But yeah, we could just change the color and we still have that shadow. That's why we use an adjustment layer to create the shadow instead of another shape. We can leave that to be purple, whatever, that works for me and let's take this mask here and clip this one with that mask. We have this megaphone circle here, we have that as a mask. We can copy that, command C, and then click the adjustment layer, command V. We had moved the adjustment layer, the megaphone, so it looks like the mask is not exactly in the right spot, so it's not a big deal. We can just move that back up to be where we want it, I'll just hit enter. The only thing we have left to do is to just change this circle a mask to intersect. Yeah, so where it intersects with these other masks, it's going to subtract it out. Now if we select off this, we can see that indeed this long shadow exists, and if it's a little wonky and not exactly where we want it to be, let me just zoom in here and use the arrow tools here to make sure it's right on the edge of that stuff. Now we've created that let's create a shadow for the megaphone itself. All right, so let's pre-compose all of these masks. I'm going to drop these down. I'm going to go to layer pre-compose, and I'm going to say megaphone. Now we have the megaphone, we can duplicate that, and let's do the same thing, same idea. Lets take an adjustment to that, a color correction rather to that duplicated version. We can say, let's do something different. Let's do exposure. Let's drop the exposure, this thing down, and now let's use a mask for that shadow, that darker version. I'm just going to grab the rectangle and go about halfway. I can hold down space bar to move it while I still have left mouse clicked, and now I'll hit V and click over here, and you can see that we have created a shadow for the megaphone. The megaphone is now shadowed there, and we have this long shadow for that. We did that all with masks. We didn't have to go into Illustrator, and now we have this asset that we could use, and we could call this megaphone or whatever. We could actually turn off the background and let's see this with the transparency so we know there's actually no background there. Well, first off, I called two compositions megaphones, so we have two megaphones over here. I'm just going to say precomp for this one. We can see this one has the background. Let's say this is the main and we want to use it in new composition, let's just click and drag it there. Now we have this entire icon, which is just one layer. Now we can animate this whole thing as we want to. There you have it. That's how you use masks to create and illustrate inside of After Effects, to use different icons which you'll revisit over and over again when you're doing explainer videos, especially because you need visual representations for ideas and objects and different parts of the script. This is one example of using and creating a megaphone with a long shadow and being self shadowed all with layer masks and solids. Thanks for watching. 6. Transitions Part 1: Let's get into animating some transitions. We're going to start with nulls. Nulls are very boring, just even the name nulls, but they're incredibly powerful what we can do with them. I'll start from scratch and we'll create a new composition. Right click in here, new composition. We can also click on this little icon down here and create a new composition. We'll keep with the naming convention I've created here and call it transitions and we'll say, "Okay". We're going to get back into [inaudible] that stuff in and edit it, we can hit "Command K" or "Control K". We can also go to Composition, and Composition settings. So we have our new composition, let's create a transition between the two images you've already seen. We've got the planning one, and we've got the intro. What I'm doing right now, is I can just click and drag other compositions into new composition. When I double click on this top one, we get to the new tab that opens up that composition, so that it nicely collects everything and groups it together inside one layer. So instead of having all these layers inside this new composition, we can just have one layer. That's also nice because if we want to move things as a group, now we have one transform value, we can move the entire thing around. In this case, we know the backgrounds are the same, they're both this blue color. Let's create a background that's this blue color. So we will right click, say "New" "Solid", and we'll color pick that background. We'll call it BG for background. Now we have our background, and we can click and drag that down to the bottom. Now if we move either of these around, at least have that background done. Alternatively, what we can do if we're worried about this corner obscuring that or something, you could go enter this individual compositions, and turn off the background layer in those compositions. So that now where we're in the main composition, we can see through it. Now it's a big jumbled mass, but that's just an option that we have. Let's say we want to go from left to right, like how people read. We'll slide this one just out of frame.. You can hit p down here to get position, or you could toggle down transformed values, and now we have the position value. We can click and drag it, we can also move it here, but it's a little easier to click and drag so we know we're only isolating that translation x. What we could do is, we could take both of these, we hit p, we can keyframe that, and then we can go down a little ways, and then with both of them selected, we could move that over. That works. We're going from one to the other. Only issue here is, if we wanted to change something later, we have two different layers with animation on it. Instead, let's use a null. A null will simplify things, or right click "New" "Null". I like to color these so that once we get a turn of layers, we can see what a null is just from that. Let's parent these two layers to the null. We'll use the pick whip, and we'll just click and drag it on top. Now you can also see that these drop-down menus changed. We can see that there's a little tick mark next to transition null. That's another way you can do it is use these drop-down menus. Now, when we go to null, and hit "P", it moves both of them together. We can see that little yellow box here represents the null. It's not ever rendered, so don't worry about that being on screen. But now instead of having two values animated, we just have one. We can click a key frame there, move down, and we're going to animate that out of the way. If you hit "Shift", it will move things quicker as you scroll values. Alternatively, you can hit "Command" or "Control", and I'll move things a lot smaller. Now we have that transition. This works for rotation. Let's do something a little more interesting. We'll take the animation off by hitting the stopwatch, and let's unparent these, and we'll do null. Will bring the null down here somewhere, let's do it over here. So that when we rotate it, it'll rotate it out of frame. We'll parent it, lets stop watch, we'll move down, null rotate it out of the way 90 degrees. Now I've got that, but we still need our other composition to come in and replace it. How would we do that? We've got it in place, and now all we have to do is parent it. We already have the animation done on the null, so it's already done for us. It'll rotate it in for us. It's really stiff and mechanical right now, so let's fix that. Will select the keyframes, will right click, go down to Keyframes system. Let me move this up so that you can see it. We'll right click "Keyframe assistant", easy ease, and you also see that's the "F9" command. We can see the tick marks changed, and that means that's easy ease. What that means is, it will smooth in the ease in and ease out points, so it's a little smoother. Now it's going smoother, look at that. We can also see this in the graph. You can go to the "Graph editor", and we can click the function here. We can see that it's rounded off at the beginning and end. That's what that means. We can change this even more. We can make it smooth really a lot, and go really slow at the beginning, and then pick up speed. Let's see what the difference is there, slower then fast. So it starts really abruptly. Let's talk about another animation principle called overshoot. Let's move down, create another keyframe, and then we'll go back to that original end keyframe. I'm going to hit command, click and drag, so we'll just get a little bit of rotation. Remember now we that we hit this keyframers, there was the 90 that we had it at. So now when we play, it will bounce, it will go pooh, and bounce in the frame. Let's dial back this easy ease, or we could just say easy ease again to get the default back, "Keyframe assistant" easy ease. So we get a nicer transition to it being introduced on. If we wanted to go even further, we could do another overshoot. Let's do another overshoot and see what that looks like. We'll click 90 degrees again, so I just hit the "Add keyframe" button down here. Now let's go back to the same keyframe, and let's go down just a tiny bit. So let's play that, boom. These are called overshoots. It adds to the transition and makes it a little more appealing. When you add that up, that's the final 10 percent, that makes it look good. So it looks much better than just using the linear from point A to point b, that we had the beginning which was very stiff. Now we have a nice smooth transition. If we wanted to drag that out if it's going too fast, we can click and drag it down, and now goes all slower, and it's nice and smooth transition. That's how to use a null. Let's do a zoom real quick, and I'll see you in the next lesson. 7. Transitions Part 2: Let's do a zoom real quick. We're unpairing both of these again. When done, let's delete the keyframes. Another quick tip is to hit "U" if you don't know what you had keyframes on. You can just select a layer and hit "U" and it'll pull up the attribute that had keyframes on it. We also need to get this back into the default position. We'll pull up the positions here and see what it is. It's 960, 540 and the rotation is zero. Now we're back to default. Let's zoom in to one of these. Let's get rid of this. Let's zoom into one. Let's zoom in. The next topic we're going to talk about is how to zoom in to, let's say we could zoom in on the blue here. Let's say we wanted a different background on the transition we're going into. We want it to be yellow. Let's go to the yellow portion of this. We're going to parent this to the none null, and we are going to scale and position this where we want it to be. We had a keyframe on both of those. We'll go to frame 15. Let's zoom back out here so we see the entire thing and let's scale up this now. Now we can go all the way in. Look what's happening too. When we talk about scaling, look how fuzzy all of this stuff is getting, and why that is, is because it's not being constantly rasterized. To do that, we hit this little box here. Look what that does. This is like magic. It's amazing. Now that we're scaling up, let's move it down, kind of into the center as well as we zoom into it. Now let me zoom in. Here we go. Now we got an all yellow background. Now we can create a new solid background that is yellow and we'll say, yellow background. To start an end, we can click and drag right here so we'll swap it over one frame. The transition will happen right here in this frame. Once we get to that point, look how quick it zooms in too because it's such a large distance. Let's do an easy ease again. We'll start a little slower and now it's easing in and now we switched to this. We can tell because this is no longer over it. That's just the null, that's not that big of a deal, but it's nice to keep everything organized. We know that the null that controls that these two are together, and so it ends there. Now we have a new background. From this point forward we do a new anything and that's yellow text. Let me go over here and change the text color to blue, and we just need to move it up on top. A little shortcut is Option+Alt, Bracket there to do that or we can click and drag it into place. We'll just get that centered up using the paragraph over here. We could also use the align options if we had multiple objects that we needed to distribute together and make them evenly spaced. That's how to transition from one background color to another background color. We did that using the null, remember, and we just covered constant rasterize. We're covering a lot of topics very quickly, so feel free to go back and review some of these stuff. Some of these may seem simple, we're just doing simple moves, but when you combine all these ingredients together on top of each other, it really creates an appealing animation. While we're on the text, what if we got to this yellow background and we didn't want just text to pop on here, we want it to follow a path into the screen, so animate from off screen. Just grab the pen tool and we'll start clicking a path. Click and drag, click and drag, click and drag, click and drag. If you click and drag and you've made a mistake, you can hit Spacebar and then it'll move it in as long as you have a mouse still down. Let's say I hit one over here and I'm like, "Oh no, I've got to click and drag. That's not where I wanted it." Hit Spacebar and we can move that out of the way. All right. How do we get this text on that path? We'll go to "Text", "Path Options", "Path" and we'll choose Mask 1. What we just made is that mask. That's what that's called, the Mask 1, and we can see that down here in masks. It has that color, we can change the color. In case that came in yellow or something we can't see it on the background, we'll change it to something that we can see for the time being. Now we have our text on the graph. All we have to do is keyframe it. We get it off of the frame here, keyframe, and then we go down a little ways. Let's go to here. Let's let it drift a little bit and then it will fly off. That's that easy. Let's do easy ease. Click and drag all the keyframes. I'm going off screen here. I'm just going to keyframe assist. Easy ease, switches it all and look at that. Boom boom. Flies in, flies out. That's how to animate texts in and out. We're covering a ton of stuff in this. This is great. Let's delete this mask and let's cover one of my favorites. We'll do a little 3D animation. To do 3D, click this box. Now this is a 3D layer. What that means is we have another transform option. Position here has X, Y, and now we have a Z. Same thing with rotation. We have X, Y, and Z rotations. Whereas before if we turn this off, look, we just have one rotation. We have X and y. We hit this box, now we can do 3D movements. That's pretty amazing. One of my favorite things to do is to rotate text and you see this effect all the time. Let's choose the Pan Behind Tool and click and drag the pivot point up to the top of the text. We can zoom in if we wanted to, no mouse, pan up and get that right there and then zoom back out. We'll go to, it's not the Z rotation, it's not the Y rotation or we could do those as well, let's go to the X rotation. Look at that. We can keyframe it at 90 degrees. Let's go down to the beginning here where we transition out of the how to this. Let's go X rotation. I'll just give this a few frames to start. Then let's go to 20. We'll go to zero and I'll rotate in. Boom, boom. It almost looks like it's scaling now because it doesn't really feel like it's rotating. How do we fix that? First off, we're going to need to do the same thing that we did earlier, that overshoot. Remember overshoots? This works with rotation as well. Let's set a keyframe a few frames after the last one. We'll go back and then we'll click and drag this a little bit past. Let's make sure we are going in the right direction too. We'll go a little bit past, let's say 10. Now let's try it. It's pretty good. No, it could be better, so let's keep going. Now it feels like it's rotating, but it has that linear, kind of bad feeling to it. I'm just going to select these two. It'll start linear but now these have been created to be easy ease. It still doesn't feel right. Why is that? It's a little harsh. Boom, it hits too hard. We can click and drag these down. We can also add more overshoots. We'll go four frames down, add another overshoot. Now we're on zero there. Remember to make sure you're going in the right direction here and you don't want to go past the value you did before. It should always be going down. We go past it here to negative 23. Now we go back to 10 positive, and then we go to zero. Then let's click and drag this out and make it a little more smooth. We're covering so much. It's amazing. Remember in the graph editor here, that just represents each one of these ticks is a tick here. We're just seeing this value over time. This is 50 degrees over time. The x-axis is time. The y-axis is the value. Now look at that. That looks way better and we can see that it's rotating. The other little trick we can do is let's add motion blur. Let's do that real quick. That's this little button over here. We'll use motion blur but again, we can't see it. Why can't we see it here? Because we're not seeing it. We haven't clicked the "Enable Motion Blur" in the preview. We'll click that, now we have it. See how that blurs now without rotation? Boom. All right. That's how you're going to do a 3D move with text. We've covered a lot. Look at that transition we've already created now. Those are a couple of transitions. You got to get creative. Combine these things together and create your own types of transitions. Thanks for watching and I'll see you in the next lesson. 8. Breakdown Example 1: Let's take a minute now and break down a couple of real-world examples from some work I have done. Let's watch the whole thing through to get an idea of what was created and I'll go here to fit. Cool. Let's break that down. We start with a radial white and that is simply just an offset from the white background to the blue circle. We can see that here. These are just key frames on a radial wipe effect. You can get to that affects panel by double-clicking if it isn't already shown up here. You double-click it, it pops up. These same attributes are available in the layers panel down here. We've got the background, we've got the blue circle. Then what happens next? We get the chair scales up and the shadow comes out. The chair itself is just the solid. If we hit m, we can see all the masks and also see them here. Just a bunch of masks, drawing it out. If you don't want to go into illustrate or you can do all of this asset creation within aftereffects using masks. This is a subtraction one. You can see that to create it a flat level service at the bottom, that's just the subtraction option here. Subtract. It's off the screen. Let me scroll down. Subtract. You can have different types of masks, you animate them. In this case, the entire layer was scaled up. You can also see that I did have a radial wipe on this, but I turned it off. There's a visibility switch right here and you can see it also appear it's off. That's just a decision I made later that had enough radial wipes with the ones we're already doing I didn't that to radial wipe on as well. We can see the scale starts right here. Here's the first key frame scale and that's just scaled up. With that as also scaled up is the shadow. Here's the scale attribute, just scaled up. Then the masks are animated, or the mask, there's one is just animated out to expand out. Here we can see those key frames here. That's pretty cool. We can see we just use this subtraction from this mask here. You can copy and paste masks. What I do was just hit Control C. Then we can see that there's two masks here, and I hit control V and I use an intersect blend mode for this masks. so that it would cut out the shadow from the circle. If we change this to something like add, we can see that it doesn't work. You can use these blend modes to really create anything that you want. Now the whole thing moves. You have multiple layers that move together. Like we talked about in the transitions we could go through and select all of these and hit P and animate that but we'd have three different layers animating. We'd have to animate together and keep track of. It's a lot easier as we can see that I used a null director chair null. We can scroll up and see, here's the director chair null. That's what has the animation on it position. We can see that right here. Boom, it goes over there. As that happens, we're just scaling up some texts. 150. We can see that happens right here. Not only that, but it has an overshoot, remember overshoots. We go past 100 percent and then back down to it. This key frame in the middle is 110 percent. Then we dropped down to 100. That gives it a little interest and calls attention to it when it scales up. Now you can remember this from the last video as well. If we select director and hit U, we can see that we did a lot of overshooting here, we're passed 90 degrees and then back past 90 degrees and then settled on it. Then what's great about this is once you do this one time, we can select and copy these key frames and add it to a new texts. That's what I did right there. That's the same key frames just copied and pasted there. Since they're not happening at the same time, it looks a little different. They're rolling out like one after the other. Boom, boom. Now I have a flourish which we'll get into later. But just to keep things going, we want to keep visual interests. We don't want to just hold on this for the next little bit and have nothing happened. Flourishes as our way to keep things rolling, keep the pace going. We just did a transition there just from scaling things up and down. Then we did another flourish. Now we took the entire thing to get that to transition to a new scene. We just scaled it down. We scaled everything down to now it looks like a little ballot card and we can get to that. We can see that there's a BallotCardNull layer 174. We can scroll up to 174 and there's about card null. Hit U you are going to see that animation. Scaling down, rotating and translating up. What's interesting about this one is the null that was controlling the director chair is parented to this ballot card null. We have a hierarchy here that the director's chair is following the null. The null is following another null. It's going to all move together. This ballot box here is just created with a bunch of squares, a bunch of squares with masks on them. That's it. Create a shadow, subtracted it out, and then have slightly different colors for each one to give an indication of shape. That's it. The card is animated down into the ballot box. How that's done is in this moment, I switched to a precomp. I took all these layers, I copied them and sent them into a precomp. That will now be able to move together and I could do one track matta, the concept of track mattas is that you can take a shape and subtract it by another one. All I do was take a solid, a black solid, create a mask around the area that I wanted and then I just chose Alpha inverted Matt. We turn this off and we'll turn off the matta itself. This just goes through. We don't want it to just go through we want to look like it's going in. I created this precomp of all the layers so that it will all be in the same precomp together, just copied and pasted it in. Then now we can have one track matta affected. I just created a solid, I create a mask around the area that I don't want it to show. Then when you select this, it'll automatically hide the track matta. We go Alpha inverted, and there he is. Now we have it disappearing right at that point. This is complicated or you have questions create a discussion in the class. We're covering a lot of topics that might seem complex at first, but once you try them yourself, you'll see that they're not too complicated. These hand-wavy things are just assets I create in Photoshop. These fan fingers are precomps of other animation. We can see when we hit U, nothing pops ups. We know the animation is hidden within the precomp. We double-click on one of the precomps. We're going to jump into it. We can see it's just a bunch of different layers and they all have their own animation on it. What's interesting is all this is showing up red and why is that? Let's zoom in here and see the key frames. We can recreate one of these. Let's hit "Command D" to duplicate the layer. We'll hit U and we will delete the key frames. That's fine. It's telling us we have an error because there's an expression we're going to do here in a second. Let's pull down all the transforms. Let's pull this one out to the side. We can see it's a 3D layer. I'm not sure why I did them, because we're not actually animating any of the 3D attributes. We can just turn that off to make it a little more simple for our purposes. We can also see that I've separated the dimensions here, right-clicking on them, you can see it's checked. If you uncheck that and it'll put them back together. Separate dimensions. We can create a looping animation fairly easily. Let's have it go up. Then we can copy this key frame and paste it over here. It's going to go back down. That's easy, is that key frame assistant easy eas or F9? Now goes up and down one time. If we all click on the stopwatch, now we get some more options. Let's click this little arrow over here and we get a ton of options that look really complicated and they're not really. Let me scroll down so we can see them a little bit. Click the arrow, we'll go down on property and choose Loop Out type cycle. We're going to cycle the animation. It gives us the script. We can deselect it and now we can see that it cycles up and down once it gets to the keyframes, that do it before. Once it gets to the keyframes, now it's just going to keep cycling. All we had to do was just three keyframes. Now we have this going up and down for infinity. Now to do this for rotation. Let's just copy and paste it. Just copy and paste the rotation values. We did the same thing. It turned red because we can see that we've already done. When you copy and paste it, it'll also take the script. We've already done that. We don't need do it again. You can see once it gets there, it's going up and down and left to right. We've just created a cycle animation. Pretty cool and that's pretty much it. Let's move on to the next one. Thanks for watching. 9. Breakdown Example 2: Okay let's break down another transition. Let's watch the whole thing through to get an idea of what was created. I've got a clock and then a guy, and then it transitions to his mouth, getting gum and band-aids and then a little mint symbol. So one thing that's important about this, is this is sync to audio. I'm hitting command and then scrolling and you're going to hear the audio. When you're timing stuff out use command and scrub to here where the audio is. You can just bring in audio like any other layer by importing it in the project. You can just right-click in an empty space down here and say import file, and just bring in an audio clip. You can just throw it in as a layer down here. It's probably at the bottom I like to keep them at the bottom. We can see its voice over here. It's the only audio clip that shows up. If you hit LL you can see the wave form of it. If you want to preview the audio in real time, you can use the preview button up here. Let's get all the effects. If you only see that little bar, click and drag this down, I'm going to make sure that From Current Time is on, otherwise it'll render previewing from the beginning of the entire project. We don't want that. If we want a RAM preview of the audio, we can click that and it will start from wherever the scrub marker is, we are going to see see it's RAM previewing it. If we just click it again, we can see that it's going to preview in real time. You can scrub, command, click, or you can use RAM preview to hear where the audio is. All we have is a square transitioning to a circle, so we scale the square down to a point that we can transition to the circle. If we hit U, you can see the key-frames and it transitions to a circle. We can see that we have masks that are animated, so we just scaled the mask itself, we didn't actually scale the entire shape, that happens later down here to the right. We can see right here is where the mask is animated. Transitions from one to another. The square gets scaled down as the circle mask gets scaled up, so we're just animating two masks squared to a circle. Then the clock hands are just separate players that are scaled up. Then we change the pivot point using the Pan Behind Tool up here to get them roughly where they need to be so when we rotate the clock hands, they'll rotate appropriately. We can see that these are 3-D layers and the hands are parented to the clock mouth. The clock mouth is just being rotated around it's y-axis. We can see those key-framed animations there. As that happens, all we're doing to get rid of the clock hands, is we've just ended those layers right here. See that? They just end where they need to end over one frame, poof they're gone. Then what transitions on is a princomp of a guy. We have a clock track map. All we've done is copy and paste the mask of the clock there. We can cut him out. If we didn't have this, we can toggle switches to get to that option. We say no track map, we can see that he isn't in the circle anymore. We have created an alpha map, and he lives in a princomp because he has a bunch of layers we don't want to see his arm, his hand, his head, his hair. We don't want to see all those layers here, so that's been sent to a princomp called breath checker, and we're going to get into character creation later. Then we have a flourish called a round circle. We can see the shape layer by the star. It's a Shape Layer. Here are those key-frames. It just rotates, that reveals the character who's in a princomp, he does his animation we'll get to later it and another one. Then it transitions with the color of this circle changes. You can even animate color,so we have an effect, we have a fill effect, we'll double-click it to get it up here, all that is is going over here to fill. In clicking and dragging that either here or on top of layer itself. We don't want two,we don't want to fill it again, all we do is animate the color. I wanted it to go from that white background to black. To be the inside of his mouth. We just did a rotation animation, the same time we're changing the color and, we are transitioning to his skin color by animating another mask from one background color to another. We can see that right here, all we're doing is animating a mask to get this. We're just going from one background color to another, and what creates interests is doing all of these very simple things, animating a mask is very simple. When you layer things up and you do things at the same time, you can create really interesting transitions like this. It just takes a little time and creativity to think how to do this. The tongue itself is just a mask, an animated mask again. We can see that green outline and we can see the key-frames here. All it is is an animated mask. That's it. Then the gum and Tic-Tacs here, those are just princomped assets because we didn't want each layer, the gum, the dark gum;those are just masks. That's all that is. Same thing with the Tic-Tacs. Those are just princomped so we don't have to have all the layers in here. You can see each one has a track map above it. You can see the icons indicate that, this track maps are for later that when it goes inside, it will be hidden. Like it's going inside the mouth. Otherwise, if we didn't have these track maps, let's just turn one off. We can see that it just goes out. So we have to create these track maps to hide things that we want. That's another reason why to princomp things, so you can track map layers altogether. Then that just scales down and then a new asset pops on, and then we have these mints come up one after another. That's the same animation just repeated. Let's jump into how that's created.We have these mint on princomp, so let's jump into one. We've made one princomp and we can see that we just copied it and then flipped it. You can flip something by scaling it in the negative. You can see I unchecked the chain link so I could do this separately, and then all I did was just rotated a little bit and scale it in the light to flip it to the other side, so it's the same princomp twice. Let's jump in, we have four layers of one asset I made in, happened to make this an Illustrator just because it had a couple extra colors and things that are just a little quicker to do in illustrator. You can see I moved the pivot point, down to the base,here's the pivot point and I'll move that down here and all that's done on these, it's the same animation for each one. It's just offset by two frames. Let's see. It's just offset by one frame so it's the same animation repeated, but then just offset. So scaling up with an overshoot and remember overshoots, scaling up with an overshoot. They're rotated permanently at different angles. We can see 91, 69, different angles, 49, and that's one asset repeated, one animation repeated, and then we repeat all of that princomp again to get mirrored sides. That's how all of these transitions were created. Thanks for watching, use it as inspiration to create your own layered approach to creating transitions with a lot of appeal. Thanks for watching. See you in next video. 10. Flourishes Part 1: Okay, this next lesson is about flourishes. A flourish is important in an explainer video because it helps keep the visual interest going. What I mean is it adds animation when there is a lull. So let's look at an example real quick. Did you see that line that went under the project, it helped emphasize that word and it added a little extra animation where once all the text is done animating, it allowed some more motion to be happening on screen. Okay, so that's an example of a flourish. Let's keep watching. Okay, did we catch that? There's that little sparkle there at the end of designer when that text was done, kind of helped highlight that. So flourishes can help highlight sections. It can help keep the pace of motion going forward. We just saw one on all the light bulbs. It's also repeatable so we can create one flourish and use it repeatedly throughout the project. So now we're going to learn about flourishes and how to make them with Shape layers. We can either right click down here and say new shape layer, or as long as we have nothing else selected with F_2 or selecting anywhere else. Anytime we use create shape tool, we click and hold this, we get a couple of options here. Or if we want to draw one out with the pen tool. So what we're going to do is do a circle. We can draw it anywhere. We just need to make sure it's a little bigger than the existing one because it's going to go around the outside. We're going to use the align features down here to get this in the center and shapes have two main attributes, the fill and the stroke and right now we can see that the fill is colored green up here on the top and when you see that there is not a stroke so we don't want to fill so we can actually click on the word "fill" to get another option box and in this option box, you can select this Red Cross and we'll choose "none". Okay? Then we can choose the stroke color by clicking on the box next to the word stroke and let's choose yellow color. Actually, let's take the same hue and just shift the same saturation brightness, just kind of shift it over so we're in the same ballpark. Okay. Now it's really thin and I want to make it thicker. We can use the pixels stroke width right next to this stroke option here. Depending on the type of flourish you want to have that will affect the stroke width and how you do it. So now we have the circle. Now how do we animate this let's go down the Shape Layer and call this flourish circle and right next to add, there's a button that we can click and choose different types of animated effects. Okay, let me scroll this up real quick so you can see it. We're going to want to choose trim paths. This is one we're going to use quite a bit. Okay. So let's click that and you can see that it's been added here in the layer. We're going to start with this, not on, and we're going to go to a 100%. We could also go zero depending on which direction you want the flourish to come from. Let's key frame both of those and then let's move forward in the timeline and let's expand this out. It's as simple as that. But we also want this to go off. All right, so let's check this, move down another eight frames. Animate that to a 100. Now we play it back, it's a little flourish, but it's kind of static again. We have these linear keyframes here so let's see what we get. When we add the easy ease. We either go keyframe assistant down here right-clicking and say, easy ease hit F_9. That's nice. But it's like one, two, it's on and then it's off. What if we started the off before the on finishes? Let's move the off key frames down. It's a little bit better. Calls attention to the circle. But it stops. We see that it starts here and this is in the same position throughout the entire thing and then it hits that at the top. It just stays there for the rest of the flourish. What we can do to break that up is animate the offset so let's click the stopwatch on the offset. Move down in time till where we can still have a sliver left so we can see how much we're moving it and then just slide this down. Let's do a 90 degree move. I'm going to leave that at linear for right now. Let's see what that looks like. That's way more interesting with that subtle movement so we don't have any one piece of this flourish staying in the same position throughout. The other thing we could do is animate any other aspects of the stroke itself. Reanimate the color, the opacity, the stroke width. Let's make the end caps round so it's a little smoother. Now we can see that we went from a flat cap to a round cap. They call it a bud cap to a round cap. It adds to the smoothness a little bit. Let's animate the stroke width as well. See what that looks like. It will go up and then down. I'm having to hit function on my keyboard just because of the way it's set up, but you should be able to hit F_9 if not on yours. Animating the stroke width also adds another little bit of visual interest. Something else we can do is duplicate this and change the color a little bit, maybe to white. Right now it's the same stroke width. Let's pull up the animation by hitting U and we can see the stroke width is the same, of course as we've had. Something that we can do to offset that a little bit is to select keyframes here and click and drag them down by holding "shift" will keep them on the right time in the timeline. We can let go and it looks like it went back to the same spot but what this graph editor does is normalize the view. If I scroll this down, it's going to snap back to a normalized view so it keeps it a maximum view of what you're doing even though the values stay going down, it'll look similar in the graph editor. You want to go off the numbers here. drag it down. you can see we have drag it down. Now we're down to five units as opposed to what we're at when it was ten units. Now the white is showing up on the inside. That's interesting. What else we could do is offset this a little bit. What if we offset it a few frames? So that adds just a little more interest. We could also scale this up over time so it expanded out. There's another interesting thing about nulls. Now that we have two circle flourishes, we can parent these two to the null and just scale this out over time. I'm going to probably keep this linear as well. So it's kind of interesting. We could also swap the keyframes. See how that looks. It's kind of cool. That's one way to draw interest and keep things going forward. Now we have an asset, especially with them parented to this null we could duplicate this structure again, drag them down and then back up so they're together and then now that we have this null, we could move this effect around. We can also precompose this. We add another circle over here. What would be interesting is if we precompose this, because if we need to scale this later, let's keep it in the middle. Normally when you precompose something, you want to keep it in the middle of the composition. Let's select all three of the layers and say layer precompose. Now we have an asset that we can duplicate a lot of times and we can move around. We can animate all of these transform attributes now without messing up any of the animation we have, like this scale. Now we can scale this up and down. We can rotate this and now we have it all together and this is a repeatable asset we've now created that we can use in any way that we want. So that's one flourish. Let's talk about some others. Join me in the next lesson. 11. Flourishes Part 2: In this lesson, we're going to learn how to create a sparkle flourish. It's something that we'll use over and over and is very helpful just to add a little bit more interest in animation laurels. I went ahead and created for us a little animation of text animating simply by using the scale attribute and overshoot. Then I created a box flourish with the same tools that we learned last lesson. Okay? When we do texts like this in an explainer video, it's boring for the second half. There's not much else happening, it is just a word on a screen. There's a couple of other things that we can do, and that includes adding a little sparkle flourish; it is what I call it. Let's create a new shape layer by deselecting everything and let's use the Pen tool. Let's go to a point in time where we have an idea of where our word is going to be. I'll just add a little sparkle flourish to the end of this down here. Now we have one line. Let's deselect that by clicking "Layer." Now we've made the line. If we kept clicking, we would just keep making a shape, so we need to deselect that. We can keep using this one shape layer to animate multiple lines and I'll show you how to do that. Let's make another one here. Maybe another angle. We'll click the layer again. Let's come up with another angle. None of these being right angles, so it's a little more star-shaped. I will name this real quick. Okay. Now we have our three lines. I'm just going to turn off the box for a second so we focus on this. Let's scroll down into the sparkle flourish layer. It looks the same as the last lesson, and now we have three shapes. Let's go to one of the shapes. Select it, click "Add Trim Paths." Now it puts it inside that shape. If we are at the top level and we did contents and we didn't trim paths, it's going to add it outside of these three shapes. So it's going to control all of them and that's not what we want to have happen. We want to be able to control these independently. So we can delete that and make sure that we have these clipped when we're adding the trim paths attribute. We'll click "Shape Tool" and we'll do the same thing. "Trim paths" so now you see it's added in here. Shape number 1, add trim paths. Now we see that it's in each one of these. Okay. I'm going to scroll this back down and we'll get started on the first one. Let's go into the trim paths, let's find a point in time when we wanted to start. Let's just stand in the middle here, and we can move animation around later. Let's get this down to zero and set key frames. Let's also make this stroke have a round cap. Now at zero-zero, we need to animate this on and sparkles out pretty quick. We don't want this on the screen too long. I'm just going go ahead and animate this all the way off. Nothing's going to happen because it's staying the same throughout. The start and end is going to be the same, but as soon as we offset this a little bit, we're going to see it. That's the easiest way to do it. Other ways to make these uneven right now that they're same amount of time, we did one that's a little shorter or longer than the other. It will help have a longer section and a shorter section. Basically, what we're looking for when we do this is that the end gets a little more chance to go on and off. Now we have our first ray of the sparkle. We could easily ease this if we wanted. It's not going to do a lot because there's not many frames in between them, so there's not that big of a difference. Let's just make sure that all of these are maybe a little smaller in contrasts with the other thickness around. The nice thing about this, we can copy this and paste them in the other shapes. We need to make sure to remember to make these round caps as well. Now we have the same animation for all three. We could totally leave it like that, that's fine. But I think it's a little more interesting in animation when things don't all happen at the same time. Let's see which one. Is it the one at the bottom? Is it the one on the left? Let's have this one last a little longer along the middle. Offset this. Now they're not happening all at the same time. It's a little more interesting. The great thing about this, same as the last time, we can duplicate this layer out especially since we have all of the shapes in one shape layer as we've done. That's almost like precomposing it within a layer. We don't really have to precompose this because it's just one layer and we haven't done anything to the transform attributes of the actual layer itself. So all these are clean and ready to be animated if we wanted to. Another thing to note is we might want to move the anchor point of this. If we were to animate it, we'd want it closer to the center point of that, so we can click the "Pin behind" tool and get it over there. That way, if for example, let's duplicate this and put it on the other side as well. If we're going to do that, we're going to want to rotate it because if we move it over here, say we went on the bottom left corner, that doesn't really work. Now we move the anchor point around, it's easier to just reuse the rotate and now it rotates from that anchor point. This is all happening at the same time, so let's offset one keyframe just to make it a little more interesting. Maybe two. So that is a sparkle flourish. Now that we have that, we can copy and paste in other compositions. We can use it throughout the explainer video, and it'll just help add some visual interests throughout the entire project. Instead of just having text pop on, and just stay there, these flourishes add quite a bit more interest to just having text pop on. One final tip that I like to do every once in a while is add a Null, and I'll call it Global because I'm going to pin everything but the background to it. This global null is an interesting way to keep things moving. We could animate the scale and position if we wanted and just keep things moving throughout the entire thing. It scales back down and then I will use easy ease here. So it's just a way to keep everything together using a Null. Now that we have all these flourishes and we want it all to move together and we don't have to animate each layer separately, that's a great way to keep things moving even after the flourishes are done. This is still moving while the flourishes and null are all moving together. The null again is a great option to keep things moving. That's really big in this explainer videos not to just have text on screen and then just leave it there. We always want to have some visual interest, something always happening or about to happen, and so that's where interesting transitions, peppering in these flourishes where appropriate. Thanks for watching. 12. Body Building: Welcome to the first video on creating a character. In this lesson, we're going to learn about creating the body. I've sped up this screen capture because it's fairly straight forward. It's essentially several different layers of color and creating masks to create the shape of the character.I created one mask for the body. Then I duplicated that out so that it can make the subtraction masks from that, so that the subsequent colors would be in the same circle. Now what I'm doing is creating each of the phoneme shapes. Meaning, you can see the layer names, the D, the F, the M. There's a shape that your mouth makes for each letter or a phrase. I'm putting each mouth on its own layer and creating multiple layers If it has teeth or a tongue, but they're each going to stay on one frame and we'll learn why in a moment. You will have access to this file so you can go through and just use the shapes I have. What I'm doing there is you can click and drag the slider, to where you want the composition to end and right-click on that slider and say trim comp to work area. Then it will reduce the time and the timeline for the composition. We've created all of the mouths, and they're in their own composition. Right now we're just making the rest of the head and making adjustments, so that everything fits properly. Here, don't forget to also change the pivot point. You want to move the pivot point, wherever the body parts going to rotate from.. Therefore,the head, we're moving the pivot point to the base of the head where the neck is where we want the head to rotate by. What we're also doing is we're parenting body parts to one another. We're going to parent the head to the body. Now to make the mouth usable so we can animate between the different mouse shapes, we're going to right-click and go time freeze frame. When we do that, we'll get a square key-frame on the layer and if we can click and drag the value number here, we can actually get to different points in time in that pre-comp. That's why we put different mouths on different frames and time and that pre-comp. Let's create a way. It's a little easier to animate. First we're going to add a slider, is going to expression controls, slider control. Now we just have a generic control that right now isn't doing anything, because it's not connected to anything. Alt click on the stopwatch to get the different options for this attribute and we can click and Drag it onto the slider control. That'll build the expression for us. Now we can right-click on the side of control variable and edit the value so that it fits the scale that we're working with, because we only have so many mouse shapes, we don't need the slider control to go to 200, 000 we only needed it to go and affect a certain frame range. To figure that out, we can see how many frames the slider control effects and then go on and say edit that to only affect that range. In this case it looks like it's about 0.36. Now the slider only controls that value range. If we had more mouths, we might need it to affect greater value. Right now it can go from 0.36 and it will animate each of the mouths. That's how you make a mouth for a character, makes sure it's parents into the head, of course, so that it follows it along. But that's pretty much it. You also want to make sure that when your key framing it, that you key-frame before and after. Otherwise, it will change the value between each one. You can see here, I copied and past that same value, right, until it changed and that's the frame I want to change over one frame. Otherwise, it will go through every mouth in between that one and the next key-frame. You want to make sure you have two key-frames every time you change the mouth. One whole the previous one and one to change to the new one. Now let's just finish out the body by adding eyes and parent those to the head as well. Of course, this is very basic character design work. Feel free to make your own characters as wild and zany or detailed as you'd like. This is just me showing that with very simple layers you can get away with a lot. Thanks for watching. In the next video lesson, we will discuss how to create the arms and legs for this character. 13. Arms and Legs: In this course, we're going to learn how to make the arms and the legs of this character. We're going to start by creating a shape. We're going to go to the pen tool, and we're going to go ahead and turn filler, because this is just going to be a stroke, we can change the width later as well. But we're going to click and drag on this first one to create the shoulder, and then we're all going to do one other time to make the hand. Click and drag it out, and that's our first arm, basically. We're going to get the stroke width to something appropriate. Normally I like to see the shoulders working into the body there, and we're going to call this right arm. Before we do anything else, we want to get our pan behind tool and put the rotation in the right spot, you hold Command or Control, it should pop to an area that you want it to be in, so if you hit Command, it'll snap to that corner. That's where the shoulder is going to rotate from, the arm's going to rotate from. Now if we go to rotate, we can see it's rotating as we would expect it to. Now let's duplicate the arm, and this is going to be our right hand and we waited to duplicate that because we want to make sure that that rotation point is on the same spot as the arm. It looks the same right now because we've just duplicated it, so we're going to change the stroke to be skin colored, and we're going to change to a round cap, and we're going to add a trim path to it. Now we're going to toggle that down and then go down to 99 percent, and now we have our hand. We can increase the stroke width, so that her hand is a little larger than our sleeve. Now we have that and we'll want to parent this to the right arm, so that when we rotate the right arm, the hand will follow. We have the right hand layer parented to the right arm, now we need to parent the right-hand path to the right arm path, so let's scroll down to path, and we see we have that here, and then let's open the path on this so we'll be ready once we hit the stopwatch here. So we're going to hit Alt Stopwatch and we get these options, now we have the parenting option, we're going to click and drag that over the path of the arm. Now, if we grab the actual path, we have our pen tool selected. We can select the end, it's going to follow. If we didn't do that, the circle would be in the same spot, the hand would be in the same spot, but now that we have it parented to the layer and the path, we can rotate this and we can affect the path and it will follow. Since we're not going to be animating the right-hand, a useful feature is to use the shy layer. So it doesn't do anything now that we've clicked it. We have to toggle this option to make it disappear. Now we just have the right arm and it's a lot cleaner. The only thing to worry about this, is that if you start to move things around, say if you wanted his arms to go behind his head and you move his right arm down and then rotate his arm up, his arm will go behind his head, but his hand won't and because they're the same color, you won't be able to really tell, but now going over his eyes or his face, you can see that. Whenever you're using a shy layer, you want to make sure that if you're moving layers around, that you unshy everything, so that you get the arm and the hand and you can move them around. You can duplicate this process for the other side as well, and a quick way to do that, we'll unshy this so we get the hand back, we'll just duplicate those layers, drag them on top together, I'll rename them. Now a quick way to get it in the right position is to uncheck the link constrained proportions, and now we can say a negative 100 to flip it. We can hit P to get the position data and move the position over. We'll still need to make sure that the shape path is parented to the correct path. When you duplicate things, they might keep their parenting from the duplicate and not follow as you would want it to. Right here we can see its parented to the right arm, and that's wrong. We want to parent it to the left arm, so we will click this and go down to path. Now it's parented to left arm. That's a really quick way to duplicate your appendages, so we'll do the same thing for the legs very quickly. Now we have our character, the only problem is, when we move the body, his arms and legs don't follow. So we want to remember to parent the arms and legs to the body, and I'm going to hit the Hide All Shy Layers, so it'll be a little simpler. I can shift, select them all and say parent to the body. Now, they're all going to move with the body. How we actually animate the appendages are by key framing the paths. In the path, we can hit a key frame and toggle all these down, and once we have all the paths keyed, we won't have to go back into all these menus after the fact, we can just hit the shortcut U and pull up the key frames. You can see it gets cluttered here when you have to go through all those menus. You can close everything down and then hit U, and it will only pull up the path. Now we have a key frame and everything, we have our default position, usually you want to save a default position just in case you need to go back to it you can copy and paste it somewhere else. Sorry, but you'll need to do that by each layer, you can't do it as a group. Real quickly I wanted to mention that this is not an IK setup. An IK stands for inverse kinematics, and all that means is that, when you move the body, everything moves together. The feet don't stay on the ground, and the hands don't stay in their world position. One thing I would recommend maybe thinking about doing, if you know you're going to do a lot of chart work and you'd like that functionality, you could purchase a plugin called RubberHose, and when you click it, you get the little window and you can create a new RubberHose, and this is an inverse kinematics setup and there's tutorials on their website that shows you how that works, but I just wanted to mention that as another option. If you want to have his feet stay on the ground as he walks around, or if he moves his body, just up and down in some way, you'll have to key frame every frame that his body is moving. A good way to do that is to set guides. You access the guides by hitting Control R, you can also get it from the View menu and say Show Guides and Show Rulers. What that's going to do is when you're animating, you can have that snap to the cross hairs of those two guides, so if I move his body down, an easy way to get his leg back into place is to hit that guide and of course you're going to bend his knee to keep the same volume. But that's how you would do that, and you would make sure that you're key framing that, every frame. Snapping is done from the view menu as well, you can go to View Snap to Guides. To animate the actual character, we need to animate the paths and we do that with the pen tool. We can see with the selection tool, we can't select it, so we need the pen tool and now we can pose up a character as we need it to be. Since we've parented everything properly, the hand should follow, and you can do the same idea with the trim paths on the hand to create short sleeves or shorts. You just add another trim path, and parent the layer and the path to the main leg, if you want to do shorts or short sleeve shirt, and that's it. When you're creating your characters before you create them, you'll want to think about what you're using them for. You don't want to create a character with a bunch of mouth shapes, if they never talk. You want to be efficient in how you create your characters, and what they're going to be used for. If you have any trouble with this, post a message in the discussion, you'll also have this After Effects Project file to go through and see how I did everything. Don't forget about those hiding shy layers. 14. Rendering in After Effects: Welcome to the course on rendering. I've created a short animation using the character from the earlier lesson. You can deconstruct my animation when you download and open up a project file, but I basically just made a cycling wave, and I actually added a little shadow on here with a darkened curves adjustment layer, which you can find down here. Let's learn how to render, now that we've created our animation, I want this to cycle, so I've picked a spot where it's done with the animation, and once it starts playing again it'll look like it's cycling, it'll go back to rotating the character back end. I know this is the point in the time that I wanted to cycle. I can click and drag this work area barred down to where I want it. Then I can right click and say "Trim Comp To Work Area". Now you can see that shorten my timeline. Now when I hit "Play", and this loops, it will, we're getting too little surges of the high scaling up. We're going to actually loop it from the beginning right here. Let's bring that back down, say "Trim Comp To Work Area". Now let's see that loop back. Now that we have the composition set, we can command shift, slash to get the render queue, or we can go to Composition, Add to Render Queue. The two main things we need to set are the filename and the output module settings. We'll click on "Lossless" and we get this output module settings window. First you want to select the type of format because that'll give you different format options here. I usually go with QuickTime and for format options, then you can select your Codec. There's a bunch of codecs, especially if you're on a Mac, there's a couple extra ones. Basically everything is converted to H_264 on the web. That's a pretty safe when we go by. Now, if you want your animation to be an exact file size, you can start playing with the limit data rate and typically 12,000 is as high as you're going to need it to be on the web before anything above that really can't see anyways. We can set those things that'll help control the file size. I'll hit "Okay". We can now re-size it after the fact if you want to get this to be 720p, for example. Then you want to make sure that your audios on if you have audio in your file. That's pretty much it. You can click "Okay" and then you click "Render". We've got our animation done. That's how you render in After Effects. Thanks for watching and continue on to the bonus lessons to learn some specific effects for explainer videos. Thanks, bye. 15. Whiteboard Effect: Welcome to a bonus lesson where we will learn to create the whiteboard effect. You've probably seen this quite often, and it's basically where a pen draw on a whiteboard. You can do this digitally so I've created a character just using shapes, you can see it's just one shape layer with a bunch of different shapes. One important thing to note about this effect is we want to make sure that the shape lines are rounded because a pen is rounded. An easy way to do that is to download this plugin, that's for free. It creates a really easy way to access creating those ButtCaps into round caps. Because without this plugin, you have to go through each shape layer and find it in the stroke which is down here. So you can imagine how tedious that would be if we had to go through each of these shape layers where with this script we'll just go to Window and ButtCapper, and you can switch it up. You can hit ALT to do the connections and just normal click to do the ends, so that's very useful. Diving in, here's our character and we want to make it look like he's being drawn on the screen. So how we're going to do that is with the stroke effect, but first, we need to, since this is a shape layer, we need to pre-compose it. Because if I was to start using the pen tool on this, you would think I'm drawing another shape and not a mask. So I need to pre-compose this layer, layer pre-compose. So we've pre-compose that man layer here. Before we get going, we need to apply the stroke effect, which I've searched for in the effects panel over here on the right, generate stroke, and we can drag and drop that on the layer or in the effects panel over here. So it's on and when you choose the path is all masks, and we're going to create one mask path. So we're going to select the pen tool on the top left here or hit G. I'm going to start on the face, and I'm going to time-lapse this out so that you don't have to watch the entire thing, but the idea is to go in the middle of each of these lines and try not to cross over a one prematurely. Meaning, this has to represent the path of the pin, and if it goes over a section before its time, then it's going to have like kind of dotted sections, and it'll make sense once you start that you want to make sure you have a clean direction of the path and that you're pretty much lined up in the middle of it. So that when we increase the stroke width, it's not going to go out or be lopsided on one side of the stroke. We get started here and we'll speed this up and catch you in one second. Now that we have drawn the mask cells, we can play with the stroke a little bit so we can see that it's not completely covering the entire drawing. So we can increase the brush size until it's just started to hide everything, and we can come in here and adjust some of the lines so you can see we're being accurate and drawing it right in the middle of the shape can be very important. Now we can change the paint style from unoriginal to reveal original image. Right now it's, we see we have a start and an end, and that is at 100 percent. So we can keyframe this, and that's going to be the animation. So let's go down to 0, and then we'll hit the stopwatch here to set a keyframe, and we can see that in the layer by hitting U and selecting layer in U. Now we'll go forward in time, maybe a 100 frames, and then we'll bring this up to a 100 percent. If this is distracting now, this path, we can always hit this little toggle display of masks, but just remember that's off. Don't forget that, because sometimes it can get confusing. So let's see what we have. Now we have the character being drawn on, there's a couple dirty areas where the path is drawn on prematurely. Right in here, it looks like I went over the face before I started on that section. So I'll turn the mask back on, and then I can just drag this in so that it's no longer doing that. So make sure you do this little fixes, it just helps sell the effect because we are doing this digitally. We want to make sure it's as clean as possible and same for these areas here where you come across other lines. You might just want to clean that up, just a touch and favor the sides of the drawing that doesn't have those. So let's make some corrections there. Now we've cleaned it up a little bit more. So you just want to keep doing that as you're watching it, but it looks like it's pretty good. We have this effect on, but we don't have the handle here. It's just revealing on like someone invisible is writing it. We're going to see handwriting it. So you can bring in an image, I have one, you can take a photo of your hand. I have a PNG, so that means it has an alpha in it. Not all PNGs have alphas, but this one does. JPEGs can't have an alpha channel, and alpha channel just means it's transparent. So I can drag this in and we can see that the transparency is there because we can see everything, but the hand behind it. So the first thing we're going to do once we bring in the hand photo is move the pivot point with a pen behind tool, but hanging wire up in a top-left, looks, like the pen line tool, and then putting the pivot point right on the tip of the pen, and obviously, you're going to make sure you have a black pen and if you have black lines. Now what we're going to do is go to the mask by hitting him. We're going to select mask path, hit Command C or Control C, and then we're going to go to the position of the marker hand and paste it in. Let's select the shape layer of the man and hit U. We can see that we've paste it in on the top layer here, where the hand is. We've pasted in the animation, it looks like of the path, but they don't match. So it's really simple to do, to match them up. Just select the last keyframe here and drag it out to match this other keyframe that we had set. So now when we watch, it looks like the hand is drawing our man. So I realize when I started to draw this mask path that I wanted the hand to come off at the end so I just extended that mask path out here at the end, so then I knew the hand would go off. So to do that for the start to get select the keyframes, slide them down 10 frames or so. Just drag this off, and so that's just for the handler, you can see there's just a keyframe here for the hand and that's not really related to the line animating on and off, that's in this layer. So we can animate the hand-on. It's going over all these lines, but that's just the animation of the hand picture, that has nothing to do with the mask path on the man that's revealing it. So that's another little trick to bring him in. Another little trick to help sell this is adding some rotation animation. So our hands don't just move up and down and side to side, they rotate from the elbow and the shoulder. So to sell that motion a little bit, we can set keyframes and rotate the arm up and down so that it looks like there's a little more motion going on in the hand than just going up and down. So it's hard to tell right now, but this will help sell the effect a little bit. You can get more particular about it if you'd like, but for now, I'm just going to pick a couple spots and animate that. So let's look at how that looks now. So the hand comes in, it's rotating. You can see the rotations happening. Just helps sell the effect that it's actually as someone's hand moving. So that's basically the whole idea, and I hope you have fun trying it for yourself too. Thanks for watching. 16. Animate A Banner Ribbon: Welcome to the bonus lesson on how to make an animated banner. Banners are very common elements to explainer videos. Here's a quick one I made. So we see it wipes on, but it has a three-dimensional effect that there's the foreground and the background ribbons. You could probably figure this out on your own, how to make this by now, if you've watched all the tutorial videos, but I want to go through and show you how to make it step-by-step. Anyways, so we're going to right-click "New", "Solid" and we'll make a similar red banner. This one, let's call that Top. I'm going to click the rectangle mask and draw that out. I'm going to do it on the bottom here. So we'll fake the opposite of what we just saw. This one is at the top, and so to fake the three-dimensionality of it, we put the tail ribbons on the bottom. So in this one, we'll just flip that around just to mix up a little bit. So we'll duplicate what we just did. I'll call that LeftBack. We'll duplicate this mask so that we know it's the same height. We just want it to be a little shorter. We'll leave that first one there as a reference point. Let's say, well, almost split the difference here. Let's just go and split the difference. So it's in the fourth of this, that's where it intersects. So we'll leave that and then we'll make a triangle. To make a triangle, we will hit "Shift" and draw out a square. Then we'll double-click on that and then rotate it. Holding Shift, we'll get it to rotate at 45-degree angles. We'll bring this in as far as the points allow. Now, if you remember from earlier ones, we will subtract this area so now we have that tail section. We can go ahead and zoom back out here. We'll just fit this. Then I'll duplicate this. Oops, I double-clicked it. So just to get back, we go up here to Composition. I will enter to rename it and I'll say RightBack. Okay. Now I'll hit "Scale" and I'll negative 100 in X to get it to flip on the other side. Now I can delete these first two masks that were just there as reference from the top one. I need to make sure obviously the top is on the top layer order here so that it shows up on top. So we're almost done. Now, let's duplicate this one again. We'll call this RightShadow. I like just to leave the colors in the right spot. I like to do color corrections to change the value of stuff if I'm wanting to stay in the same range. Problem with Curves is it oversaturates it when you do it. So alternatively, instead of Curves, you could use Hue and Saturation, which actually has a lightness bar here. We can bring down the lightness a little bit. Then we can put this and where it needs to go which is in front of the left. Turn off the top here one second. In front of the left and above the back ones. So I'll turn that back on so we can see where we're going. Then I'll bring up the shadow to there, zoom in to see where we're going. Now we seem to connect the dots here. So grab this, bring it to the edge, and move it up into position. Then we just need to connect the dots to the edge. We actually select that one, then just move it down. Then we can just bring this corner down. I hit "Enter" so I'll go back to Composition. When we animate this, we'll see this for two frames. So we want to make sure that makes sense based on what that looks like. So now we can just duplicate this layer. Because we know we made the other side even, we can just do the same scaling thing. Because LEFTshadow, the scale, uncheck the link, go negative 100. It'll flip to the other side. So now we have our ribbon and we need to animate it. It's pretty simple, we just need to do more masks. So let's jump in and start animating. So we'll create another mask and we'll go right to the edge of where it'll start. We'll twirl it down so we can get the keyframe here and we'll animate the mask path. But I wanted to start on maybe ten frames in. So I'm going to slide that keyframe down to ten. All right. So let's go four, five frames in, and then we'll animate this sucker wiping on. I'll hit "Enter". We'll change this mode to Intersect. Now you can see that it reveals that tail. So we'll go to the keyframe moderns, and then we'll go up to the LeftShadow. Let's bring that down where it's appropriate, and then we will draw another one. So we'll do Subtract this time because we don't have that tail piece. It's already Subtract, something that made us have to choose Intersect. So now we can just use a straight Subtract. We will need to keyframe it again. Then let's go two frames forward, and then we'll wipe this off here, and then change this to Subtract. So now we can see we've got that going. It looks like it's coming at us. Make sure we're on this last frame. Then we'll do the top one. We'll do the same just Subtract thing. So we'll start with the whole thing and we will keyframe that. Then we will 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, maybe frames later, we will wipe this down there and that will change it to Subtract. Now we can see that it does wipe it on. As soon as that one comes at us, then that one starts. It's little fast relative to how we started the tail. So I'm just going to pull those keyframes out a little bit. Okay. Then do the same thing for these last two. I'll speed that up. So now we have our ribbon animated as if it's a three-dimensional object. If we wanted to put text on the ribbon, all we have to do is type in some text. We could wipe it on with the ribbon just with another mask. So now we have the text that looks like it's on there. Then later if we, of course, wanted to move everything, we could create a new Null. I'll just move this down and change this to a Yellow. Then we can parent everything to it. Now we have our ribbon that you could copy and paste this in every project and change the text. It's a great asset to have. Make it one time and then reuse it. So I hope you enjoyed that and have fun with it. Thanks for following along and I hope you enjoy the course. 17. Blend 3D Animation with 2D: Hi Skillshare students. Thanks for taking this class. I wanted to create this update video just to teach one more aspect of explainer videos that I don't touch on, haven't touched on so far. Not incorporating 3D animation, which I do a lot in my explainer videos. This won't be a tutorial about how to animate in 3D. I have a lot of other classes on Skillshare that you can enroll in, where I teach 3D animation and Maya. I encourage you to do that. In this tutorial or this lesson, it's about the workflow. What are the concepts? How do I approach switching from 2D animation to 3D and back to 2D? So you can follow along by downloading the book rig. I've added it to the project files in the section where you can download project files. So you can try and follow along for yourself and try to do this as well. But I encourage you to check out my other classes where I teach how to animate in 3D and Maya. But this will give you a good idea of how you can take your animation to the next level by starting to incorporate 3D animation, which is in such high demand as everyone knows. Thanks for watching and I will see you in class and keep watching to see how I do it. Let's jump right in and see what we're going to recreate. This is from an actual client project that I mad, and this is what we're going to recreate. Not this animation. So there's this animation that happens, and that actually has some 3D elements in there. But the one we're going to make is this transition from this badge look into this book, which are these lines. So we have this kind of rotation. Then the yellow expands out to create the book cover. So we have this rainbow look, but the book covers the two yellow ones. So in an After Effects, this was just super simple. I mean, these are just masks getting rotated and these ribbons that I showed you how to make in the course, the explainer course that's just another mask. So those masks get expanded out and animated and then we're left with this one frame. So essentially the workflow, this video is going to be more of a workflow tutorial, now here's every button you press. Just I want to demystify this process so you can apply it with whatever 3D package you use. I'm going to use Maya. If you're not familiar with Maya, you want to learn and I teach a bunch of other classes about it. You're free to check in to those. Basically, the workflow for this transition, I'm just going to play it back. So we go from these badges, we have this transition and then we go to the book. So it's a pretty seamless transition. But the one trick is we are switching over on one frame. So you can see where the edges, we start to pick up the shadow of the book cover right here. So between these two frames is where the switch happens. But when you're playing it back, you can't see even that little bit of the switch. It happens so quick over one frame and we match it so well that it's kind of invisible. That's like an invisible cut. So I want to show you how I did that. We're going to recreate it somewhat. I'm just going to go through the workflow and show you how it was done. So let's say this is what my After Effects project looks like. I've done everything up to this point. So these are After Effects masks and solids, and that you should all know how to do by now if you're watching the explainer course. So I basically want to render out all the way up to here. I went ahead and rendered out this whole thing just so you can kind of have it and see it. If you're in an enrolled student, you can download these and the project files along with this 3D book rig. But so the idea is to render out images. For Maya specifically, you want to render out jpegs and use this format. If you can see down here it says,'' image sequence dot '', and then it has the number. So it'll render out the numbers of the frame numbers. But the important thing here that Maya really likes is the period right before the frame number. If this is an underscore, you might need to rename this and something like Adobe Bridge and do a batch rename. So just make sure you have a period right before the frame number in when you're exploiting this out of After Effects. So Maya understands and can pick it up. So let's jump over to Maya. Here is the book rig that I've made, which again, you can download as part of the project files if you are an enrolled student in this class. So the general idea is now we need to get those images that we've already, we've rendered out of after effects, we need to bring these into Maya or whatever 3D package you're using. So the way to do that is we need a camera that we're going to render from. So I'm going to go to Panels, create a new camera and I'm just going to move quick through here because again, this isn't like a step-by-step tutorial. This is more of a workflow tutorial. So I want to get the camera lined up here with its attributes. So it's exactly centered on the book. Then the one big difference between going from 2D to 3D is the lens distortion of cameras where, you know, for an After Effects, this is all very flat and we're not getting any distortion or perspective necessarily because it's just whatever we created as a shape. Whereas when you're in 3D, you can start to see this black line here that's from the perspective and the type of lens and focal length that we're using. So we can control that over here in Maya, and to compress all this down, we need to choose a much higher focal length, which also means we need to zoom the camera back out. Now you can see that that black line is much skinnier here. So the larger the focal length, I went to 200 millimeters. This is in millimeters. This is just like if you had a DSLR and you put a 200 millimeter lens on it, it's going to compress the image a little bit so everything's a little flattened. When we're matching 2D to 3D, sometimes we need to do that in the camera so that we don't have, you know, let me go back to 35 millimeters, which is the default. We don't have this big black line here which is just part of the perspective of a 3D object. So we want to flatten that perspective a little bit by doing a bigger focal length. So now we have the camera figured out and now we need to bring in the image. So in Maya, there's a couple of ways to do that, but the most obvious and easiest way is to go down to the environment and create an image plane. We hit Create, we'll see this little yellow x pop-up and now we are under the image plane tab. I'll just automatically by creating one, it puts us in there. It's asking for an image name. We want to bring in the sequence of images that I've made. So let me just jump over to those. You can select any one of them and it should bring them all in, as long as you hit this button that says use image sequence. The other little caveat to that is, I'll just hit four, so we can see through the book and to the image plane. The only comment to this is, it's going to number, and this says 947. It's taking the frame number from aftereffects. It's going to line up with that frame number and Maya. So you might need to extend your timeline so that your image sequences is actually there. You could also offset it with this feature here. But just to keep things one-to-one, it's not like I'm doing a big sequence, there is no reason to have to offset things and then get confused about frame number. So I try to match it in Maya as well. So let's go to that frame. Now we have the sequence, and now we can just match up to the frame that we want to match it to, then we can choose which frame we want to match. So it's maybe this one when it's finished doing its animation, and we have this still frame. I'm going to hit five to bring back, or sorry, six with textures. I'm just going to toggle this. It looks like we might need to basically just adjust the camera until it matches with the background. I'm going to toggle between four and six. The other thing that we can use, there's a little grid system up here. So we can see if we toggle that off, let me turn this off and turn on and off the polygons because we're seeing the wireframe of the book. I could actually just say, six and then use this to toggle everything. It looks pretty darn close like. That was super-quick. That took a few minutes, and now we've already matched up the files, the image sequence of the 2D image with the 3D object. So we just need to match on that one frame, then we can animate this book from this point forward in any way that we want that will make sense with the 2D animation. In a 2D animation, we basically have it rotate in and then it zooms away, so that's like a nice smooth transition. We could keep rotating it because we're going from right to left rotations, so maybe we could even keep rotating it. But it does have this little pause here, so it get hitched. It'd be a little hitch in there, there's a little bit of acetyl. It makes sense that, I ended up doing a zoom out. That was just the easiest transition there. When we jump back in a Maya, I'm not going to go through the whole process of animating this, but I'm going to go to a view just to to give you a quick view of what that might be like, I'll do two paint side-by-side. Then choose perspective here. You can even see the image plane back here that we're matching to, and this is where the book is in 3D space. I have fun with this, try to recreate it. I rigged the book and it's pretty basic rig, but you can actually, if you're an enrolled student, you can download these project files. I encourage you to actually try this, try to recreate this for yourself. Basically what you're going to do is, frame seven, seven, seven is what we are matching to. You can basically, from this point forward, ignore the image plane. We could even say show and turn off the image plane here, and I'm going to turn off the grid and we turned on to try to line it up and am also going to turn off the NURBS curves here, because we're not going to see that in the render. I'm going to turn on the film gates, so we can see what the film gate is. Then I'm going to turn off the grid, so we can get an idea. I'm just hitting alt B to change the background color. We can also bring in a plane that's green colored like this, if we really wanted it one for one. But when I created this, I just rendered an alpha channel, so I just brought this without a background from Maya and use the background and after effects because it was 2D, it's not like there was any shadows or anything on it. If you wanted to, I don't think I did, you could fake a shadow here, is really what I should have done. Because you don't anticipate it hitting anything here, this is one way I would improve this is to add a ground shadow. I would just fake that using masks and aftereffects. The shadow would be bigger here and then it gets to the size of the book here, just to give it something to sit on here and make a little more sense. But so how to move forward from this point in Maya, to get there, is go forward however far you want to almost going to, now that we know where the animation is going to be, I'm going to definitely bring this way down. When I'm scrubbing in the timeline, it's a lot easier to see what we're doing. I'm going to start from that first frame here, then let's just pull this back. We can just start animating this thing however we want. We can also animate the camera, instead of animating the book itself, we could always animate the camera, that's easier or do both. Especially with the focal length, that might be easier to animate the camera just because we're zoomed so far out, and with the focal length that we have the lens on, it might be easier just to pull the camera back and animate the camera like that. But again, I don't want to mess up my camera. Well, I guess I am on frame 826, so it doesn't matter. We just going to make sure we keyframe, if we're going to do that, we got to start with a keyframe, because if I start moving this, there's no key frame here, so I can't get back to that. Open-end bracket is the way to go back and forth between keyframes in Maya, if you are trying to keep up with Maya stuff. That could be also one thing to keep in mind. If you're not going to animate your camera, you might want to lock these attributes. I can go down here and say lock selected. Now I can't accidentally change that view that we definitely wanted to keep it locked on. But yeah, here is the beginning of that animation. It's a little slow. So then you just start going in here, massaging the animation however you want it to go. That is how you start to incorporate 3D into your 2D work. Then I wanted to include the end of it, because you can see how we get out of this too. So I think I animated the book here and that fell down, and then I animated the camera on the second half, and then the book opened to this. Then I just use this as a mat for the image, and then we zoom in to the book basically. That's how we get out of the 3D moment and we're back into 2D here. This was a hybrid 2D, 3D thing, the emblem here in the middle was 3D. Then I use 2D everywhere else until this switch to real moment over one frame, and then we're back to 3D, then we zoom into the book here and we're back to full 2D. That's how I did it for that project. Definitely, it's really simple concept. You switch over one frame. How to do that is rendering out the image, matching it in whatever 3D package by bringing in an image plane. Then animate however the heck you want to animate, because now you're free forming the 3D stuff. The other thing I'll say about 3D getting that 2D look is just keeping the shader super-simple. You can see here there's no textures or anything. It's super basic because I'm trying to match the style of what I was already doing in the theme of these colors and all that. So it's very directionally lit. There's just one shadow there. It's not like lead with multiple, too many directional lights, but it was hard. I wanted a hard shadow and it would make sense with the style of the 2D stuff that I was doing. So basically this is how you get going. I could finish this out, but I will let you guys do that. I will see you in the next class, our next course. Hopefully if you decide to join any of my Maya classes, you will get a much more in-depth look at how to use Maya and to begin to incorporate that into your motion graphics work. Again, I hope you enjoy it, and I look forward to seeing you guys try to recreate this for yourself and learn Maya with me as well. I hope to see you in class and thanks for watching. Bye.