Rotation in After Effects: Create an orbiting animation

1. Course Trailer: Hi everyone. I'm Brian Holland, a post-production professional for over 15 years. Today I'm sharing a technique to make a Ferris wheel type of animation. With this animation, I'll show you how to balance the x-axis using only two expressions, no keyframes and no cameras. I'll also cover copy and pasting icons from Illustrator to After Effects. And we'll give you some tips and tricks for working with paths. Beginners and intermediate animator should have no trouble following along. So let's get started. 2. Copy & paste icons from Illustrator: A client may send you a lot of Illustrator files that are filled with icons they use for their branding. So I'm gonna go over here and click on the avatars Illustrator file and open that one up because it has a lot of characters in it. A mic over here and select this punk guy or girl here. I mean, I need to expand it out so that it's not pixelated. And after effects, I think the default for Illustrator may be this. If you want to use pixels, you want to make a new preset here. And you want to make it 1080 pixels by 1080 pixels. For HD, I use this for icons in HD. It's never been a problem. You don't need to worry about CMYK. We're just copying this out of this Canvas. So you create this. And then I'm gonna go over here, make sure you copy Command C and Command V. Paste them in. Then over here and the size, make sure it's locked. And you want to make it 100. That'll make him 1000 pixels across and the height here. Then you want to go into aftereffects. I'm just delete this out here. I'm going to make a new composition here. Make your composition size the same size as the canvas you created in Illustrator. That was 1080 by 1080. Click. Okay, we're going to call this composition for this punk guy. We'll call him rooster. And want to make a new, this is right-click or control-click on the Mac. And you want to make a new shape layer. Then I'm going to toggle right back into Illustrator Command a to select all command C to copy. Then a minute Command V on the Shape Layer. Now, all of this does, if you look at it, it's nothing. What it did was it pasted all of this into masks. What you wanna do next is you want to open the shape layer by clicking the triangle next to the shape layer, then opening the masks folder can't really use this. You want them into paths as they are paths and Illustrator. But the reason you want to paste this in is because it gives you a count of how many lines are in that Illustrator file without you counting them are looking at an illustrator. So it says here I've got 13 masks. That means I need 13 paths. So you want to delete masks out. When I highlight content. You need to select this down here. You need to expand the layer switches pane. Then you want to click Add, and you want to add 13 paths. So I'm creating more paths by just duplicating path one by pressing Command D on the keyboard and just making 13. You're going to highlight all of these and you're going to expand them out. Then you want to go on the path layer, and I guess we could call it, you want to highlight each path. Then you want to command V to paste that in. So what happened here was we pasted all those paths from Illustrator into individual segments here on aftereffects. But look, it looks blank. That's just because we don't have a stroke added here. And then you put the stroke here. We'll putting this stroke up to 15. And model tough. Look at that. I like to do round caps. See his smile here. How it was squared edge with the butt cap to round cap looks better to me. Also, line joints. You can maybe see that on his v here. But I I kind of like rounding things out. Actually, it didn't make much of a difference at all on this one, but Ally icons it will. So now we have a shape layer in here filled with all the paths, not taking up a lot of space. And just one stroke. And here you go. We have a punk here, and we copy and pasted from Illustrator. Copying and pasting paths from Illustrator into After Effects in this way is a much faster way to work. And it takes up a lot less memory and your after-effects file, especially if you've got a lot of icons you're working with. It's also a lot less confusing. Everything's organized a lot simpler in your shape layers. Let's go back. We need a five icons to go around this punks head. So we'll go into Illustrator and we'll go into Finder and go down to well organized. So we go into holidays down here. We'll open that up and we'll grab the bat. We're going to go back to our untitled tab now, delete the punk out of the canvas. Then Command V, the bat in here. And we'll go back up here and we'll do the width that 100. And this you can see here it's just one path, right? Let's go into After Effects, what you have to do, new composition here, that then you make a new shape. Since this is one path, you can just put that in there. Command a, select all command C for copy. Then go into After Effects. And you can paste that here. And you want to put in a stroke here. And we'll do 15. And again, I'll come in here and just round them out a little bit. See you can see here on the joint really pointy, round it out there. So now that you know the flow here, we're gonna do four more of these. And I'm just going to fast forward through this footage. 3. Add color to icons: So now we have all the icons in here. It's by the grim reaper, Fang, Brewster, and bat. So what I would like to do now, I'm going to double-click on Brewster him. And I want to just add in a few colors into him. And I want to separate some of these paths. So what I'm gonna do is I'm going to just select these and drop them down to make it a little easier to see, we can also bring down Transform. So in order to do this, we need to figure out where which one of these paths is his eyes, which is mouth, what does Hare and his shirt? Because I want to colors hair color and I wanted to do his his v neck shirt here, another color. In order to do that. Let's see. Okay, so that's his mouth path one. I'll just label this mouth. You press Enter, type in whatever you want to type in return. So that's his mouth. Let's see what this is. This is one of his eyes. This is another one of his eyes. So whenever I have his eyes, I'm going to have a moving together. So what you wanna do is you want to go over here to add, going to make a group empty, okay? And we can call this group, we'll call this eyes. Then we'll move up the eyes up to here. And 23, we're going to select both hold down Command and select both, and then drop them both in here. So you've got his eyes, they both go away and his mouth. Okay. So now I want to get into coloring. So I'm going to go in composition, you can go to compensate distance settings here. And I'm going to make the background color white. Course, the stroke is white so you can't see anything. But if you slipped select over here, I'll make because lines this color. So we've got a stroke, all these paths are coming down. They're hitting the stroke and they're coloring it. So let's move on. I want to color his hair now. Okay, Let's find each spike. What's this? This is this face. So path five, okay, that's a spike there. This one, that one, and that one. So five through nine are hair spikes. So I'm gonna go over here and make a new group. I'll call this hair. And I'll bring that here and I'm going to select five through nine here. Move that into here. So now it's hairs in one group. What I'd like to do now, I want to add in a fill to make the hair color pop. So I'm going to add here, I'm gonna go into add, as long as you're on this group, you want to add fill. Okay, there we go. And I'm going to make this fill color. You can go over here or you can go into here. And we make his hair yellow or orange, whatever that is. But it does look a little wonky here. The strokes are a little out. There, just doesn't look very good. So that's because all the user hitting, all these paths are going and then they're hitting this stroke here and displaying but the, but the fill is coming in first and the fill is over the stroke. To Aleve this problem, you want to bring the hair below the stroke, right? So if you bring it here, then the hair is here, but we have no stroke now because the stroke is above. So what you wanna do is get in the hair here. And let's put a stroke in the hair. Alright, that's good. So this little group here has its own stroke and fill. The stroke though is white. So let's change that to this color, but it's only two. And remember we made these 15 pixels thick. So now everything is even. All of the hair, all the strokes are even. And we have colored paths in here. What I'd like to do is I'd like to change this V neck, this I'd like to have a little shirt here color. It's a different problem. Let's see which one it is. It's not this. 12. No, Is it 11? It's 11. So 11 here. Now it's not as simple because if you notice if we take off his shoulders, wears his shoulders number number 10, you'll see that it's not connected. And if you go over here, we make a new group and we'll call this group V neck. And then you want to put in, we'll put the path in there. And well, we can't see anything because it's actually outside of the stroke. You can put it back up above the stroke and it's there. But if you put in a fill like we did last time, it cuts across and then well, is it 10 here? You see, we've got a little cut here. I want it to go. I want it to blend in with his shoulders here. I'm going to hide that one. Let's go into V neck. Now. You've got the path here. You want to select one of these, a select outside of it. And you want to select your pen. Ok, select, uh, one of the anchors. Then press the arrow or VI, and select the other anchor. What we wanna do is we want to connect these, how you connect paths in After Effects. You just go to layer and you want to go mask and shape path, and you want to click that to be closed. So now these two are closed. But again, it's outside, right? So you can just add in. You can go over here to your Pen tool and you can click over the path and it'll add a plus. And then you click click here. It's still a little weird. So you want to click on Convert, and that will round it out. And you can kind of eyeball it. And still it's outside of it. So let's bring this outside of the stroke, will go underneath the hair. So now we have a no stroke on here, but we'll do what we did last time. We'll go over here. We can just enter the hair. We can get a copy the Stroke command C and then Command V into there. And it's still a little weird, but that's just because you want to bring the stroke above the fill. And now we can put the head back on and let's change the color of the V neck. I'll drop into the VNet group. I want to select from my color palette here. So we'll go over here and make a shirt, a light blue. And everything looks kosher. I really like how this is turning out. I like how the icon has some fill, but it has only two colors and it's pretty minimal. And then it has the outlines. It's a nice, polished look. 4. Put icons in a container: What I'm gonna do is put each icon and it's in container. So I'm gonna go down here and create a new composition, 1080 by 1080. And we'll call this SARC bat. Okay? And we have white here. Yep, that looks great. We'll click Okay. Then you can come up here. You want to select it as a circle. And the fill. You can select whatever color you'd like, of course, but I'm going to go with an orange here. And then you just go over to the circle here. And you clip, you double-click, and that creates a shape right over here. Then you want to take your bat, move him over the shape. And we're going to scale him down a little bit. And we're going to shift P for position. And we'll move him a little bit up, right-click or control-click on the shape to get the dropdown menu. Or I want to have the same line color as our punk had in the other ones. So we'll go to layer styles here, Color Overlay. And we will, it always defaults to read like this. And that looks pretty good to me. So in order to save time, I'll just duplicate what I did here. Press Command D or Control D on the PC. I'll do Sir, fangs. I'll double-click on fangs here. And drag that here. And I'm going to highlight bat, click U 2 times. When you press U, U, it drops down everything that you've modified on that comp or shape. Highlight, transform, highlight, layer styles, copy, and then paste over the fangs. And then we can delete the bat here. And we're going to move these things down, S for scale, make it a little larger. Then we'll go and we'll do the same for the next three, I guess. We'll go, sir Graham. And we'll duplicate that. We'll double-click on that. Click the grim reaper, drag him in over here, highlight things w, transform, copy layer styles, paste over and delete your fangs here, he's a little big so I'll scale them down a little bit and move him up. I hold down Shift and the arrow up. If you hold down shift that does 10 pixels up. And then we'll do duplicate cert Graham. I'll do spiky here. And double-click that. Click on your spiny, drag them in. You, you highlight transform, highlight, layer styles, copy, and then paste into spiky. That looks good. And we'll go and we'll duplicate one last one, src for Voodoo. Double-click that drop in your voodoo. Here. You, you highlighted transform, highlight layer styles, and paste it into here. And I'll move him down a little bit. Scale is light. And now we have all these icons in their own little circle container. 5. Align your containers: Let's have these icons and their containers spinning around but not rotating. I'm going to make a new composition. And we'll call this circle of fear. Then click on create a shape. Make sure you click over here and the project double-click here, and that'll land a circle right in the middle there. You want to click S for scale. Let's bring it down a little bit. Then I'm going to go over here into Effects. I'm going to go and get the radial wipe amps got throw this on here. And since we have five circles. So let's make this a different color. We'll just do like a whenever color, green, whatever that is. And we put that effect with the radial wipe. Now since we've got 55 into a 100 is 20. So this transition wife goes up to a 100. So you just put this at which quantity. And then you can grab on to your circles. You can grab the circle. Here. You can scale it down. So what I'm gonna do is make the opacity down to 50 just to align it. So I want to put the center right at that corner, right there, right. Okay, circle bat. Let's do circle things. So I'm going to click you, you transform, I'm going to copy and I'm going to paste that into the pharynx and I'm going to put that at this one. Okay. Then I'm gonna go to the gram. And we can put that here. And I'm clicking Command V to paste the attributes here. And that puts it there. Let's go into this shape. Move that down to 40, 20 more percent and we'll grab the gram here. I'll put him here. This is an easy way to get this all to a line really quickly. And then go to here, we'll click on 60 here. And we'll do spy ID here. And we'll paste the attributes onto that. Okay? And then milgram voodoo paste. Let's go here and go to the controls and go to 80. And voodoo is here. So we'll put him here to make it full screen. Press shift forward slash. Ok, so you can just hide this. All these are here. Now, one thing you need to do, Let's put in a new null and the center. I'm going to press the Y key and bring the anchor point and the center of the null. And then that makes it easy to go over here to a line. Keep it right in the center between everything. Pick, Whip these onto the null. And you know what? Let's, let's bring up the press T for opacity. Bring this up to a 100. And you can click rotate. And they rotate. But, you know, they're kind of getting dizzy. So they don't because they're not keeping on their plane. So let's take off these. Let's select this to none. I'm going to show you the next step. So what you wanna do first for the center, you want to call this null center pretty easy. Then you want to make a new null. This one here. We'll put it over the bat. Then you want to move it over the bat and the timeline area just to keep it organized. Then we'll duplicate that. Put this one over the fangs. We'll put this right here. Will duplicate this and put it over the gram. Duplicate again. We'll put this one over spiny, put this right over spotty. Duplicate this again. Remember it always helps to have snapping on to get these nulls right over your comps. And so every single one of these has its own PNL above it. 6. Add expressions: I have these expressions written out for you so you can just copy and paste them. You can download it from this project and Skillshare, I'm going to call each one of these null icon. And I'm going to copy this and just put it and paste it over every single one of these nice and orderly here. Then you want to link all the null icons to the null center. So pick, whip it to the center. This center here is going to rotate everything around. You want to make everything in here, just make it 3D. So click that box because you want to get the 0 to one and you want your rotations divided out. And the null icons, you can click R for rotation here. Then you want to hold down Option and click on this timeline here where you can enter in type hyphen, then type T H. And this should pop up and then press Enter. And it should select in Type C, OMP or just C and it should just pop up and then you can just enter it in dot layer. Okay, then it puts in that you want to put in quote, in ULL Space, Center, quote and trans form dot z rotation. Enter. This here is connecting to this centers 0, 1 and keeping it at a even horizontal plane. And you want to put this in, sit every null on here. So click on R here, click Option and the z, paste it. Right here. Click our options Z, paste in. Our option Z, paste our options, and paste. Here. Let's just close down everything, select all, and hit you, close it down. So you want to connect each one of these, each comp to this null icon. Then after that, select every comp, then hit R on the keyboard. And then we're going to put in the x rotation, hold down option. Click the timer, and then click hyphen this comp dot layer. And then in here you put null center, just like last time, whatever name you put here has to be here in the quotes. And then go outside the hyphen and hit dot trans form dot x rotation. And that's it. And then you want to copy this. And you want to put that in the x rotation of every comp here. Option click on the X rotation timer and paste the code in. Okay, I'll do a demonstration, highlight the center and all, and press R to bring up all the rotation values. We're going to spin this around using the z value. And look, everything is on an even playing here. So let's just set this to 0. What I like to do, I don't like to see, so I'll click all these nulls and hide them. And click the dimer to make our keyframe. Click here. And we'll do it four times. And let's just see what happens. See how it works. Pretty good. Could be slower. Let's go, let's make it two. It looks wonderful. And there's no warping because we're not using the camera and using auto orient. Auto orient can make these containers go like egg shape or any shape you're using to do this or any text or anything can kinda get warped by that camera lens. And this technique won't allow that to happen. 7. Add swirls: We have these spending. Let's go ahead and do the finishing touches. Will put the punk guy here in the middle and we'll press S for scale, bring him down. I'm certainly not in love with the space between the containers and the punk in the middle. So let's space them out a little bit. You can go over here, you can click Scale. Let's move these out a little bit here. What I'd like to do is just bring down the size of each one of these icons are a little big. Maybe something like this. Okay. So now that, you know, they're kind of spinning around him. And we have this here. Says duplicate this circle. Press U, you get all, open up everything. Let's just delete the effects because we aren't going to need that. And we're going to need a stroke. So I'll click this on a minute. Hide the fill. And the stroke will make it the same colors as shirt here. And what I like to do, although we're going to thin this out later, make them a little thicker just so I can see what everything looks like. I'm going to scale it out a little bit. So it's more in the center of these icons circles. Okay? So what we'll do is we'll add trim paths and we'll set the start. Maybe. Well, first of all, you see how it, it has a flat end here. Let's go into the stroke here and just make it a round cap. All right, I think the start could be around five and this would be a rather just make it the eye around 15. Maybe 15.5. That's good. So what we'll do is you want to animate these, these are going to draw on, there's going to be one between each one of these, right? So we'll have them trim path on. That's how we'll animate this. So we'll click, an end user will click the keyframe here. We'll go, we'll just go with a second just to make it using click and here. And at the start, if you want to make it go away, you just click five because that's where it started. Now remember that this should be included up here because look, it's not spinning with the rest of them. So put it back at 0 and we'll pick, whip it up to Bruce, up, not Brewster, up to null center. This will rotate everything around. Select both keyframes here, and go into easy ease. So this one's going to come on like that. What I'm gonna do is I'm going to duplicate it. And we'll do the next one. We know what, It's easy. You start at one because it's expanded by then. We'll click UU here and just push this up and down here. And you can get the offset here. And then we'll do another one. You do an offset here. And another one. And an R ofs right about there, right? You had an offset and the trim paths. Okay. So I'm going to go and select to a for all and just click U to collapse. These to me are a bit big. But let's, let's see how it's looking so far. So it kinda does that. I like to stagger things out. So we'll go 10 frames stagger. We're gonna go over here on the timeline, and we're going to stagger each shape by 10 frames. This will make them appear on, at a different time and it'll give it a better look in the end. See how this works. And it looks pretty good. So let's bring these down to reasonable fat. It's mainly that's even too fat. Is codify. Yeah, that's that's pretty good. Okay. This punk guy here with take him was just hide him for a second. Let's make a duplicate of this one. Push, this one will push this all the way. You can just press this bracket here to make it go all the way to the end. Let's click Scale. And this one here, let's make it smaller. Let's make this color and make this a yellow. Okay? And then I'm gonna go ahead and make it kinda fat. We'll just make this at 0, take this off or will keep it on. But let's just start it at 0 and end at a 100. So that's kinda there. Let's click here the timer, and click this at a 100. And let's push this keyframe back a little bit here. So that looks pretty cool. Something like this will make these a little bit easy ease here. And we will, I think that this could be a lot lower Liga 20. And I would like to do another one of these, scale it up Even like this size. And so let's go ahead and collapse all these layers. Select all Empress, you yield. There's no wrong or right way to do anything in After Effects is so many different ways to get the same solution. This is the big one was small and I'm just going to name this circle, radial. And just kind of put this away down here. We don't really use that. We'll start with the large one, so I'll make this 1 first Move. This will go up 10 frames here. Actually. So that's our scene. These to happen there. This guy. Now it would be cool to have him pop on after these circles. So these kinda go like that. Put his endpoint here. We'll go into him. And what's cool about the way that we set this up is that we can trim paths here. And we can set an end here. And we can go 1 second into here. And we'll set this to easy ease. And we'll start this at 0. And that's not really getting all the paths trimmed to include this hair and everything. We could just put that down here. So then you've got like this kind of luck. We're kinda draws on the, I kinda like how it's turning out with the colors. You can also do, which is cool. You can do it individually. So each part comes on like that. But we'll do it simultaneously. If it gets a little more interesting. Where we have him here and will press I to go to the endpoint here. Will scale them, will click scale here. Then we'll go to one, 27 just a second. And you know, like I'll click are here. And I'll click shift and asked to see the scale. I'm going to click the rotation timer. And I'm going to click there. I'm going to turn him a little bit this way. We will also start the scale around 0. Right here. I'll have him pop out a little bit. He say, the end, the end scale is about 31. So let's just do 34 here. And again, we're going to set it to ease. Looks like looks like that circle comes and he pops it. Maybe push it back a little bit. Okay. Let's have all these icons pop on. I'm just going to label them yellow circles. These are kinda like transitional things. I want those to come on first and then I want these icons, the pop on. Let's go over here. All these circles are connected to these null. I'm going to click the scale timer here, and I'm also going to bring this to one and hit it again. And then I'll just say 0 here. We'll make these eaves as well. Where do these ys out to? 79? So right here will have a pop-out to about 83. So what you can do with this, if you're back at 0 here, I'm going to just go to each null. If I copied and copied the scale here. And you just collect, click each null, not the center, but each icon, and click that. Okay, so let's see here we have them all popping on. It's kind of a mess though. So let's kinda like move that's going to just shift things around a little bit. And things will look a lot smoother here. So first things first, let's start with the bat. And I'm going to move everything around here so that it everything kind of starts after the yellow, after this yellow outer line. So that's about there. And move this over here. And bat comes on and then and then we'll do the mouth. And I'm just going to move this into place here, slide it over. Grim reaper, move this guy over here, and we'll move them both here. Spd is the hair shine to keep it sorted. And then voodoo is next last one that goes here. So let's see how this is animating. All right. It looks pretty cool. 8. Animate paths in icons: Another cool thing we could add to this. Let's have him smile and blink around. Let's see how that looks. After he gets drawn on. We have is the eyes here, right? So if you open the full, the group here, you've got EIS. And we can click Scale will go up ten frames. So we'll go 0, 1, 24. Okay? So I'm just going to add another keyframe here. And, and then the middle one I'll do, I'll make them squint. So I'll unselect that and I'll only do the vertical at 0, 0. But look, it's like, it looks like they're moving. So what that means is with this, see this anchor point click lie, and just move that right middle there. And what we can do is click 0 here. Let's see, well that looks okay. So let's see if he's blinking. Awesome, looks great. So we can copy this and we can have them blink a few times. Kinda cube. I'll pay. I'm just copying the keyframe and I'm just pasting and you just paste them a bunch of times. Alright, that's cool. Let's also have these eyes. Let's have a move a little bit too. So when he gets drawn on, then he is the position can kind of change. You can move, will put a keyframe there. We'll do the same thing, will go up to a 128 10 frames over and push that. And so when he's here in the middle tab and look right, wrongs up, horizontal MOOC, look over here. So we'll select these keyframes. If you hold down Option and Shift, you can move, move over the keyframes really easily. These eyes, they need to be used because that just a little bit with a little robotic there and blinks two curves. And what we'll do is we can put another position here. I'm going to copy this keyframe here. And then I'll just throw that here. Looking back. And then maybe we'll have them. He's blinking a little bit. How blink again. We'll do a position here and we'll have him move up this way. And he's blinking, moving back, blinking, moving, looking over. We'll have them re-center. So I'll just throw in a keyframe here and then I'll paste the keyframe there. So looking back and it might be interesting where his mouth is here. So I'll show you how to animate these paths. You know, you have in blinking. He's looking around blinking. So maybe Winnie, maybe when he looks over there, he gets a little sad. So we'll bring this up ten frames to one. And all you have to do is you can move this here and move that like that. And maybe he has like a smear like that. Let me look over there. And then you can click another keyframe here. And then you can be like, Oh, well when I bring this up here, when he looks like he looks over there and I'm sliding this keyframe along here. But when he looks over there, so I remember I copied the smile key for the original keyframe from the smile, right? I went over here and I copied it. And then I'm just going to paste it here on the path. And it goes right back to smile. So he's like, Oh, look, oh, didn't like that. Oh, that looks good over there. Like That. Oh, OK. And you can play around with stuff like that. The eyes, the blinking is pretty cool, so it's really easy to do to put another one here. Give them some life here. He likes that. Okay. But what happens when he looks over there again and he was looking over here. Let's copy these keyframes. And we'll throw them here. After he blinks here, he blinks and money looks over there. We'll go up to his mouth here. We'll copy that frame and we'll put it here. But we'll move that over here and tighten it up. Make the keyframes closer together. Option Shift. We'll move you, move your keyframe back 10 frames. So Let's see how this, all this kind of works together. Let's throw this into a HD size main punk, and we'll just call it 1080. Now, how high it is. And we'll throw the circle of fear into here. Oops. And then we'll just use drag it onto there. Now, this size here is wrong. Should be 1920 by 1080 and we'll just make the background white. And there you go. Cute stuff. All right, So that's kinda it. I wanted to show you how to make one of these rotation things that move around. How to really work with paths. Getting them from Illustrator into After Effects, having them draw on. And really understand the inner workings of how password between Illustrator and after effects and how to make things rotate and just cold, they're x-axis. All right, Well, thanks for listening and I hope to do another one of these. You'll see how much time I have.