3D Animated Lettering in After Effects: 9 Styles, Infinite Possibilities

1. Welcome: Hello, and welcome to 3D animated lettering in After Effects. The thing about the 3D looking animated letters that I'll be showing you how to create in this class is that they're not actually 3D. There is a way to extrude texts in 3D space in After Effects. In fact, it uses the Cinema 4D render just within After Effects so it's real 3D. But actually that's not what I'm going to be teaching you in this class. There's a time and a place for real 3D texts that utilizes the 3D render. Think sports logos that look like they're made from metal material or something that you could hold in your hands or tag up on a storefront in real life. The look that I was going for in this class is more of a hand lettered illustrative style, and so the 3D extrusion technique was not the answer. Instead by making letters with 2D layers and just making them look like they're 3D, we get a ton of flexibility to make them more handmade, illustrated feel. I'm Megan Friesth, and I'm an explanimater. I illustrate, write, and animate educational animations mostly on health and environment related topics. According to Dribbble, motion design is the number one skill designers want to learn in the next few years because motion graphics are in high demand. Why? Because 80 percent of global internet traffic is video. Consider this, 85 percent of Facebook videos are watched without sound, which makes animated texts pretty useful. But even if you don't want to animate texts forever, the tips and techniques you'll learn and the skills that you'll practice in this class will help you become a better motion designer for any project you decide to tackle in the future. If this is your first time using After Effects, checkout my class, Animated lettering in After Effects to quickly get you up to speed for this class. Throughout the nine animated 3D lettering examples in this class, I'll show you how to add details like outlines, inlines, hatched extrusions, stripes, offset extrusions, multicolored extrusions, different kinds of shadows, and more. Plus, I'll show you how to animate each example in a unique way. By the end of this class, you'll have a solid handle on how to achieve this hand lettered illustrative look. You'll be able to explore different styles to create your own special look. You don't have to hand letter anything, but you can be one. The possibilities of what you can create with these basic and not so basic techniques taught in this class are truly infinite. If you're ready to make some 3D looking animated lettering, let's get started. 2. Getting Started: This class is made up of nine different examples using the numbers 1-9. You don't necessarily need to watch all of the nine examples in order, but I do move through basic steps a little bit more quickly in the later examples, assuming you've got a handle on them. If you do go out of order and get a little confused, just go back and watch the videos in order. That said, it is really important that you watch example number 1, known as the classic first. I'll cover all the fundamentals of creating this 3D looking effect in these videos, so it's definitely a must watch. I'd suggest watching this class and following along by creating the same thing that I create. Once you replicate the examples I have demonstrated, then challenge yourself to create something unique by coming up with your own style of letter or number by combining different techniques. This approach has worked for me in classes I've taken, and I believe it will help you get the most out of this class. For my nine examples, I used a font called Montebello. If you use a different sans serif font, you'll have no problem following along. Serif and script fonts can work, but might be a little bit more challenging for certain styles. I'll save that for another class. You can also draw out your own letters or numbers in either Adobe Illustrator with pen and paper, or with an iPad. You'll just need to get them into a vector format. That's beyond the scope of this class. If you're not already familiar with the process of creating vector layers, let's just focus on choosing a good font. For examples where we animate the path or the shape of the number, it's helpful to have a font that's very simple and doesn't have a ton of anchor points. These are examples like the 1, 4, 7, and 7. This font would not be a good one to use if you're needing to animate the path of your letter because it has all of these jaggedy edges. What I'm going to do to animate the path is right-click on my layer here, and then go to "Create shapes from text". It's created the shape layer. If you go in, you'll see the path, but if you look at this, look at all of those anchor points, there is a lot. If we were going to animate the path of this, it would be really difficult because we'd have to adjust all of these anchor points. Basically, what I'm saying is just choose a font that has smooth edges and is made very simply so it doesn't have all of these anchor points. Let me show you a good example. I'm going to change this font to Montebello. To be clear, I use Montebello sans. There is a rounded version of Montebello, but it has more anchor points, so I'm going to use Montebello sans because it's simpler and has less anchor points. Now, let me right-click and create shapes from texts out of this. If I go into the paths, you can see for one, there's only two paths while the other one had a law, and that's just the inside of the A and the outside. But look at how many anchor points are like 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8. That's very reasonable. So just at every corner. You don't have to use Montebello, but anything that has a low number of anchor points, if you want to animate the path. Not all of the examples have the path animated, so you could get away with more complex font for those examples. Let's take a look at how I set up my compositions for each example. I'm going to create a new composition, which you can do here, also this button, and I'll just name it A. I'm going to use a width of 1,080 pixels by 1,080 pixels. You don't necessarily have to use this exact size, but do make sure that it's at least a 1,000 pixels, because it's easier to scale things down if you need a smaller size. But if you use something too small and you're working with a really small composition, then if you need to zoom in, things will get pixelated and it'll be hard to see what you're doing. Then I'm going to use a frame rate of 30 frames per second, I'm going to set my duration to six seconds. The background color doesn't matter a lot because I'm going to be adding a background layer, but for now it's white. Then I'll hit "Okay." Then the first thing I'll do in each example, which I'm not going to cover in each video over and over, so that's why I'm telling you here, is I'm going to make a text layer and just type out the letter and number that I'm going to be doing. For this example, I'll just do A, and then I've set my font to Montebello and I've set it to Montebello Sans. If you're falling with the same font, but remember you don't have to do the same font. Then I've also set the font size to 1,000 pixels. I just want something really big that fills up my entire composition, just so that, again, would I need to zoom in and look at stuff really closely, it doesn't get all pixelated because it's really small. Then I'm just going to center this in the middle of my composition. If you don't see the align panel, all of the panels are going to be under window. The color doesn't really matter because we'll change that later. Then you can see in my timeline that I have this one text layer with my A. What I'm going to do is right-click on it, go to Create, Create shapes from text. This is a really important step because we need the text to be a shape layer. The effect that we're going to use to make the letter look 3D will not work on a text layer. So when you start working on any letter, make sure that you have the font, the size you want, all that good stuff, and then you create a shape layer from your text layer. Then when I go into my shape layer, you can see that I have the different components of the A. You can delete the text layer once you get the shape layer because you won't need it. One more thing that I'm going set up before we get started is my color swatches. The reason I'm doing this is because After Effects doesn't have a great system for colors and motion 3, this plug-in that I have here, helps a lot. But I'm going to be using a lot of different layers within my layer, like nested layers, and I want a lot of those to be different colors. Then motion 3 doesn't quite work perfectly for that. I found that it's nice to have a little square of each of the colors that I'm using on my composition, then I can just eyedropper to get the color that I want. What I'm going to do to create the color swatches is just use the rectangle tool and just dry out a little square. Then I'm going to get rid of the stroke. Then in the fill I'm just going to paste a hex number that I've copied. I planned out all my color swatches in how we'll walk of this was going to work out in Illustrator, so that's why I'm just copying the hex numbers that I've used in Illustrator here. But you could also use this color picker to pick your colors right in after effects. Then what I can do now is to duplicate this rectangle and move it over, and then adjust the fill on this one and paste in the hex number that I have copied from Illustrator. Then from here, I can just keep duplicating a box, recoloring it, duplicating a box, recoloring it. I'm not going to make you watch me do that, but I ended up having seven colors. Then what I'm going to do from here is just rename this. Then what I can do is right-click on the layer and go up to Guide Layer. Right away you can see this little hashtag looking symbol right next to the layer name. That means that it's been made a guide layer. What will happen with this guide layer is that when I render my final project, the guide layer will not show up even if it's visible right here in After Effects. Also, if I were to drag this composition into another composition, the guide layer will not show up. That's just a useful little thing that you can do is make guide layers that won't show up in your final render, but you can use them for reference layers, or color swatches, or something like that. Once you get your color swatches setup, you can just copy and paste the layer into all of your other compositions when you got to make different letters. Now, we should be all ready to jump into the examples. Remember to start with example number 1. If you ever have any questions, feel free to ask them in the discussions tab below this video. 3. Class Project: The project for this class is to create one 3D-looking animated number, letter, or special character. You can choose to replicate one of my examples or make up your own unique style. If you want to challenge yourself even further, feel free to animate a whole word, phrase, or really go crazy and make the whole alphabet. When you're done, post your project in the projects and resources tab below this video. You can post an animated GIF using the image button or post a video by uploading it to YouTube or Vimeo and enter the URL here. I love seeing your working connecting on Instagram. Tag me at explanimated if you post your work there. For real this time, let's get into the examples. 4. Set Up Number One: First example, I'll show you how to make I'm calling the classic. It just has a basic extrusion an outline around the face of the letter or number, and then a long shadow going in the opposite direction as the extrusion. Then one other detail will add to really sell the 3D look is some shading on the bottoms of the letters, where it would be darker. To animate this number, I'm going to show you how to do this fun little bendy effect. I've created this new comp, titled it 1, and copied it in my color swatches. The next thing I need to do is go to my Text tool and then click anywhere in my composition and then type number 1 and then let's just center that with the align panel. Then I'm going to click on my text layer and then right-click, go to "create", "create shapes from texts". Now, this has created a shape layer. You can tell that it is a shape layer because it has this little star next to it. It's also usually default blue and the text layer is usually default red. What I can do is just delete this text layer, and then I'm going to just work with this shape layer. I'm going to rename this really quick just because I might have an outline there, and I don't want this to get confusing. I'll just hit "Enter" or return on your keyboard and just name this one. I'm going to toggle down my letter and then go into the "fill". Then next to fill color, I'm just going to take this little eyedropper and click on the color that I want in my color swatches. Then I'm going to close up this number one and then just select it and hit "Command D" to duplicate it, and it's automatically named the duplicate two. But that's going to be confusing, so I'm just going to hit "Enter" and rename this depth. This is going to be the extrusion. I'm going to drag that below my number one. The first thing I'm going to do is toggled down, go into the Fill Color and change this to the darker blue. You can't see any difference because it's below the first number. The next thing you need to do is click on your depth. Make sure that this depth is selected. That's important and then go up to the "Add" button with this little triangle and go down to "Repeater". Now, the repeater is this whole trick that we're going to be doing on each letter or number to make the extrusion. You can see that under the depth it's added this repeater. Now if you didn't have depth selected, it would've added the repeater outside of the depth, and then it would have been repeating everything above it, which would include this other number one. Just make sure that you have the depth selected or if you didn't, just drag in the repeater, so it's underneath depth one. If you can't really tell if they're lined up, you can always close it up. If you don't see the repeater, then you know that it's underneath the depth. All right, so let's go in and toggle down next to our repeater. You'll see that I have copies and offset. These are things that I can adjust or animate. The number of copies is set to three by default. The reason you only see two copies is because one is underneath this original one layer. If I increase the number of copies, you can see that it adds more duplicates of my number one. We're not achieving that extrusion look yet. There's more things that we need to adjust. Under transform repeater, make sure that you're toggling down transformer repeater. That's important. You're going to see position. By default that position should be set to 100 in the x and zero in the y and that's the space in-between these copies. If I were to adjust the spacing to bring it down, you can see that these copies are getting pulled closer to each other. Eventually it just makes this big block. Now, if you're not seeing that effect, you might be under transform depth, and that has a position too, but it's a different position. Make sure that's not the one that you want. Make sure you're under transform repeater and then the position. I have 20 copies and I'm going to set my position to two in the x direction and two in the y direction. You can see that that's making this nice extrusion. Let me just increase my resolution and show you that if you zoom in on a corner, you can see that you have this jaggedy edge because you can start seeing the individual copies. Something that I find really helpful is to add a rounded corner to smooth this out. What I'm going to go and do is go back up to add and then go to rounded corners, then I'm going to adjust this. Right now it's set to 10. I'm going to put it down to like five and then let's bring it all the way down. Actually, just bring it out here and then all the way to the bottom. You can see that that's already made it better. If I take the eyeball off so it's not visible, the rounded corner does not visible. You can see that I have this jaggedy edge, but when I add back in the rounded corners, it smooths it out pretty well, and this is at 800 percent. When I go back out, it looks pretty smooth. Let's just review what we've just done because using this repeater, to make this extrusion is going to be really important for all of the letters that we make. What I've done is I have this one as the face, and then I have a duplicate for my depth. The reason I have two different layers for this is because I want a different color on the face, than I do on the depth. Then I've added the rounded corners just to smooth out the repeater and all the copies. It just looks like one smooth block of extrusion to make it look like a 3D letter. Then under depth in my repeater, I've adjusted the number of copies. When I adjust the number of copies, it's going to extrude more or less, and then when I adjust the position, it's going to adjust the which direction this extrusion look is going. I can make it go to any direction by adjusting the x and y. You don't have to adjust both like you could just have it going that way if you wanted. The thing that you need to be careful of is making this too big because, then, you're going to have gaps and you can see the individual copies. If you wanted it to be this big, instead of adjusting the position, you would want to adjust the copies instead. When you adjust the number of copies, you need to be a little bit careful because if you get too many copies, it's going to start slowing down after effects. Also if you have the position at something like one, it also adjust the size of your extrusion. These two things together are what's going to adjust the size of your extrusion. Make sure that you're not getting any gaps or jaggedy edges. What I found works pretty well is copies around 20 and position around two. You can adjust, you can make these negative to make it go the other way. I'm going to go with that look, and then the next thing I want to do is add that outline around the face of my number. I'm just going to toggle down the one, and then I have a stroke already. It's just hidden. If you don't have a stroke, you can go up to the "Add" button and do "Stroke". But since I do have this stroke, I'm just going to make it visible and then toggled down. I'm going to bring this to let's say 10. Right now my stroke is black. What I'm going to do is take the eyedropper and select a different color. Let's choose the same as the extrusion. Now I have a stroke or an outline around the face of my number. But now you can see that right here, the stroke is extending past my extrusion and that doesn't look so good. I need to fix that and it's actually really easy to fix. Because strokes in after effects are going to be center aligned. That is like half of the stroke goes on the inside and half of the stroke goes on the outside. That's why it's bringing the stroke out over the extrusion. A simple fix is just to have the same stroke on your depth. I'll just turn on this stroke, set it to 10 and then recolor. Now, you can see that everything is lining up. We've almost got our letter all set up, but I want to add that little detail of the shading at the bottom of the letter. What I'm going to do is just close up my number one. Then I'm going to go up to the "Pen tool", and then let me just zoom in, so it's easier to see. I'm just going to draw a shape. I'm just going to click and hold shift to make a straight line. I'm just going to draw a shape approximately where I think this needs to be. It's okay if you go over like I've done here, I've kind of gone over where my shape is. Now that I've drawn my shape, I'm going to get rid of the stroke. I'm going to zoom out so I can see my color palette and change the fill to this very darkest blue. Then I'm going to go in and name this. You can see that it's extending past my letter, but what I'm going to do is just duplicate this number one, and then I'm going to drag this duplicate layer above my shading shape layer. I'm going to rename it mask, and then I'm going to go to track map, if you don't see the track map options and then hit "Toggle Switches slash Modes," and then I'm going to set on my shading layer, the track map to Alpha map mask. Mask is just the name of this layer above it. Now you can see that it's nicely cropped in my shading shape. It just fits nicely on the bottom. I'm just going to go in and adjust this path of this shape. I'll toggle all the way down to "Path". Make sure you have the top layer path selected. I'm going to take these two anchor points, hold "Shift" to select the second one, and then just pull this down a little bit. Because I want it to look like this stroke is the same width. The last thing to set up here is the shadow. I'm just going to duplicate this one shape and name it shadow, and then bring it to the bottom. Then the shadow, if this was a 3D object in real life, would be extruded from the bottom of the one. I want to move this shape to line up with the bottom of the one, where it's touching the page where the extrusion is coming of the page. It's a little hard to see what I'm doing with this extrusion on my shadow layer. I'm just going to go in and turn off the eyeball. Then let's zoom in and try to get this really close to the edge. That looks pretty good. How I'm sending up all my numbers is that I have an imaginary light in my scene that's coming from the top right corner and it's casting a shadow down this direction. The shadow would be over here on the one in the opposite direction as the extrusion. Let's just turn on that depth again in the shadow layer. Let's make it go in the other direction. Under "Repeater", "Transform repeater," I'm going to change the position in the x value to negative two and that'll make the extrusion go the other way. This is dark for a shadow. I'm just going to set the opacity on the main transform layer, the very bottom thing to 25 percent, and that shadow is a little bit short, you can't even see it on this side of the one. I'm just going to increase the number of copies to 30 to make it a little bit longer of a shadow. There we go. We've got our one all setup with the outline, the basic extrusion, shape shading on the bottom of the number, and a shadow going in the opposite direction as the extrusion. When I go to animate this number, you'll see that I've deleted my shadow layer, and that's just because it'll be easier to recreate it later. But I just wanted to show you the basic logic of how to set up the shadow here. 5. Animate Number One: There is one step that I need to do before I start animating, and that's to pre-compose these layers. I want my whole, entire one to be bending, and so I need to apply the bend effect to all three of these layers at once. What I can do is just select all three of these, so basically everything about my colors, and then hit Command Shift C to bring up the pre-composed box, and then I will just name this one pre-comp, and make sure that you have this checked or filled in, which is move all attributes into the new composition, and then hit "Okay". What that's done is taken all three of those layers and moved it into their own composition, and then put that composition back into this original one composition. If I double-click this one pre-comp, it will open up the pre-comp, which has my three layers. To make the one grow in from the bottom to the top, I'm going to animate the path. I'm going to go into my one Shape Layer, toggle down to the path, and then set a key frame at two seconds. I know that all my numbers are going to take two seconds to animate in. I want the path to look like this at two seconds, so that's why also the key frame here. Then I'm going to go back in time almost all the way to the beginning and I'm going to select just the top key frames. I'm going to click and hold to select all three of these and then just bring them down. I'm going to hold Shift to make sure that they go straight down. Then once that last key frame reaches that other one, then will let go and then I'm going to go back in. Sometimes you have to go, click back into the path in order to get the anchor points to be able to be selected. Now I'm going to take these two points and then bring those down to here. Then at zero frames, I'm going to make these all come together into one dot. Let me zoom in so I can see what I'm doing. I will just bring these about halfway to the center, and these all the way over to meet them and now we have like a dog. This layer you will see is my shading layer and we'll fix that in a second. Now this is going to grow out and then up, and you will notice if I go back out, my depth is now missing. What I need to do is have the depth have the exact same path animation as this face of the one. What I will do is toggle down the depth, and in the path, I'm just going to pair it the path to the path of the one so that they always have the same path, always have the same shape. To apparent this, I'm going to take this little spiral pick whip tool next to path on the depth, and I'm going to drag it up to the path that's animated on the number 1. Now you can see that my exclusion is back and if I play this animation, you can see that it has the same exact animation as the path, which is what I was going for. Next I need to do that with the mask, so I'll just toggle down and go into the depth and then go into the path, take the path, pick whip it to the path of the one, and now when we come down and this line shrinks together, so is my bottom shading shape, because it is a must. Now we have this growing and it looks pretty good. Let us just add some easing on these key frames. If you have the motion three plugin, you can add easing really easily with these preset buttons. If you don't have this plugin, you can always do F9 on the keyword with your key frame selected to add easy ease or you can select the key frames, right-click key frame assistant, easy ease. Then you can go into the graph editor and adjust these anchor points and the handles to get a custom looking ease. This is going to go slow and fast because I'm looking at my speed graph. So this is going to be starting out slow and then it will grow really fast, and then table off as it finishes. Let us see what that looks like. I think I actually want to do this a little bit different. I want it to gain momentum earlier on. I'm just going to adjust these handles to make it like that. It shoots up and then slows down. I'm just going to get out of my graph editor by clicking this button again. Now we can animate that bend. I'm going to go back into my original one composition, and then I'm going to apply this effect of bending to the pre-comp. What I'm going to do is go into my effects and presets panel, and if you do not see this, remember everything is under window, and I'm going to go in the search bar and just type CC ben. The effect is called CC bend it. I'm going to take that effect and drag it onto my pre-comp layer and then you will see that you have these controls. If you did not see this automatically open up for you, it is going to be under window. If you see that your letter number is getting cut off, that is okay. The first thing that we need to do is adjust the start and end points of the bend. That's what these little dots are representing, the dot at the cross here. This little circle here is the end of the bend. The end of the band is the end that moves the most when it's bending. It's like the free end of the bend. That's what I want to be the top of my number 1. It's almost in the right place, but it is cutting off part of my letter. If I just move it up, you can see the whole number. Then this little circle represents the start of the bend, and the star is the end that's anchored. So that's not going to be moving when the shape is bending. I just need to move it to the bottom of my number 1, and if you move it right on the bottom, you will see it glitches out. I'm just going to move it right below so I don't see any of the little glitching. Now that we've got those in place, we can animate the bend. I'm going to move to two frames again, and then I'm going to go up and click the stop watch next to bend to set a key frame for the bend to at zero, which is no bend at two frames. This is where my animation finishes. Then I'm going to go back in time to say about 10 frames, and I'm going to change the bend to let's say like 50. You can see that it is already started to bend a little bit even though I don't have much of my one showing. Then if you hit U on the keyboard with your layer selected, it is going to show any key frames that you have set. Now I can see these ben key frames. But I'm going to go forward in time a little bit and then bend this back the other way. So I will do like negative 30. Negative is going to move to the left, positive is going to move towards the right, and then I'm going to go forward in time. Then this back, let's say like 20. Each time I'm going to bend a little bit less. So it is like bending really far and then losing momentum as it grows and then it comes to a complete stop at two seconds. Now go forward in time, go back maybe like negative 10, and then here we will do about five. Let us see what this looks like. I'm just going to go ahead and time a little bit, hit N on the keyboard, that is going to set my work area to just these three seconds. That way when I play back my animation, it will just show those three seconds over and over again. That looks really stiff, and if that's the look I'm going for, then I'm done but since it is not, I'm going to have to adjust those key frames. What I'm going to do is just drag and select all of these key frames, and I'm going to hit F9 on my keyboard to easy ease them. Then I'm going to go into my graph editor, and I just want to make sure that this graph looks nice and smooth. This is my value graph. If I had something that looked like really junky like that, I'm going to see a really like sudden movement like jolts right there. What I want to do with my graph is just ensure that everything is nice and smooth. Let's maybe adjust these a little. That looks pretty good. There is no perfect formula here. You are just going to have to adjust your key frames and make sure that you have a nice taper. This is like a V lying on its side, this graph. If you can see where I'm tracing my mouse. So I'm making it so the bend is a lot and then it gets to be less and finally it tapers off in stops. That makes a nice smooth animation along with a nice smooth curve of my graph. I think I'm happy with this animation, and I have done this before. Normally, if you are doing it for the first time, it will take a little bit longer than it just took me to tweak it. Don't feel bad if that is you. There we go. 6. Animate Out Number One: Now let's animate the one L. For this animation, I'm going to do the opposite direction bend. So I'm going to have the top part of the one be the anchored part, and the bottom part be the loose part. I'm going to start this animation at four seconds. Now the easiest way to duplicate this animation is just going to be to copy these key frames. Command C and then paste them where my play head is at four seconds. You can see that it's pasted just exactly as they were, but I want them to go in the reverse direction. So while these key frames are still selected, I'm going to right-click and then go to Key Frame Assistant time-reverse key frames, and what this is going to do is just put my key frames in the reverse order. So now if I play this back, you can see that it starts bending a little bit and then gets to be even more bendy. But this is also animating with the bottom of the one anchored, and I want it to be bent the other way, I want to animate out. So what I'm going to do is set a key frame for the start and end values, here at four seconds. Then I'm going to hit U on the keyword to show those key frames. Actually, I need to bring these key frames one frame back in time. Now I'm going to set new key frames at four seconds where these are swapped in position. I can just drag these circles to swap their position, and that has also set key frames right here. You can see that the bend is going to be going with the bottom anchored, and now it's going to switch really quick in just one frame so you're not going to notice anything changing, and then it's going to start bending from the top, so that the bottom is the loose end. But I have one other thing I need to do which is obviously to make the one shrink. Let's go back into the Precomp. Now I can set key frames on the path to animate this one, shrinking from the bottom up. So I'm going to set a key frame here at four seconds, and then go forward in time to about four seconds, 20 frames. I going to have to go in to my one, so I can select this top layer right above the path. That'll make it so I can select my anchor points. Then I'll just click and drag to select these bottom ones holding Shift, drag them up, and then I will select all three of these. Drag those up and then move to the very end to six seconds. Then I'm going to zoom in, and then just drag these all together into one point. Let's take a look at our whole animation. We may check out the easing on this ending animation and I need to adjust these key frames. So that this one has the same look as this one. So it goes really quick and then it slows down, and this curve right here. It doesn't actually matter because there's no animation going on right here. The path is just staying the same. So you can just ignore if you have this weird loop. All right, so let's look at what that looks like. Okay, and let's look at the final animation with the bend. All right, now one thing I want to do is at the very first frame on this animation, I don't want anything to be showing, just because if I have all of the letters together, I don't want some little fragment to be there before the animation starts. So I'm just going into my Precomp, get out of my graph editor and then just drag this one layer, one frame forward. I'll need to do that with the shading as well. Now, you'll see nothing on the first frame and then it'll start animating in and I'm going to do the same thing at the end, so it doesn't end up with just this little fragment here. All right, now we can go back into the one, and it's looking good. The last thing we need to do to finish off the one is just to add back in our shadow. So I'm going back into my one Precomp and then duplicate this one shape layer again. Bring it to the bottom, and name it shadow. Then let's position it in place, and I'm going to turn off the depth for just a second. I think there looks just about right, and then let's turn back on the depth and change the position to negative two in the x direction, and then 30 copies. Let's make the opacity 25 percent. Now all that animation is already on that layer that I just copied and made into the shadow.So I don't have to copy and paste any key frames. It's already done for me. So that's why I decided to delete the shadow earlier on before I started animating and just knew that I could recreate it at the end here. So now if we play this back, we have our full animation of our first example all done. 7. Set Up Number Two: The next example is this number two that I've given the name of Slinky because the animation reminds me of those slinky toys. If you don't know what I'm talking about, I'm sure you can Google it. I've got my composition all set up with a background layer, my color swatches, and a two-texts layer. The first step is going to be to right-click on my texts, go to create shapes from texts and I can delete my text layer. Then I'm going to rename this too. I want my number to have an outline on it. I'm going go in, toggle down in a half a stroke. I'll just turn it on to be visible. If you don't have a stroke, you can add one here by using the add button. Then I'm going to toggle down my stroke, pick the color that I want, and let's bring that up to, let's say six. I'm also going to add rounded corners. Let's set that to five. You can use whatever value you want though. Though it's like it's worked on all of my corners except for this, and maybe even that one. Sometimes the round corners doesn't work. That's just has something to do with where the anchor points are in this letter. If you go back into Illustrator, you can actually probably fix this. Let me do that real quick. I'm here in Illustrator and I've created a text layer with the same font size. What I'm going to do is convert this to outline. To do that in Illustrator, you're going to hit Command, Shift, and O and that'll convert that to a shape just like in After Effects. Now if I select my letter and hit the A-key, or go up to the direct selection tool. I'm going to see these little circles where I can round the corners, and to make sure that I get them just the right amount, I'm going to actually go up to these corners, property right here and just type in five. Now it's rounded those even though for some reason After Effects couldn't do that. From here you'll need to get this shape back into After Effects. If you have overload, the easiest way to do this is just to select your shape and then hit the Push tool. But if you don't have this overload plugin, you can either save this file as an Illustrator file, and then import the file into After Effects, and then convert the vector layer to a shape layer. Or I'll show you a little super-secret trick that you can do. With your letter selected, hit Command-C, then go back over into After Effects. Then what you need to do is make sure you don't have any layer selected, go to your Pen tool, and then just click once on the Composition and then hit "Command-V." It should paste your shape of your letter onto your composition, maybe toggled down. You can see that you have a shape with the path. I can just toggle to show you that it pasted it. Now I'm actually going to delete this too and then re-color this, the colors that I wanted. Now we have those nice rounded corners. I can rename this too. The next thing we need to do is make the depth. For this one, I'm going to go in and I'm going to duplicate this shape one, but let's just name it two. Then I'll duplicate it and name it depth. Then I'm going to drag the depth below the two and make sure that's selected. Go up to add, and then repeater. Now I have a couple of copies. I'm going to go in and set the number of copies to, let's say five. Then I don't want this to have so much space in between the letters. I'm going to go into the transform repeater and set this to something like I think 16, 16. That looks pretty good. But I don't want these copies in the repeater to have a fill, so I'll just go into the fill here, and select the background color so it looks like there's no fill. The reason why I still actually have the a fill rather than just hiding it, is for this reason you'll see through, and you'll see this. But if that's the effect that you are going for, then you can just hide the fill. 8. Animate Number Two: To animate the two and I'm going to animate the scale. I'm also going to animate the scale and position of the repeater to make the slinky effect. I'm going to start out by going to my scale property on the two. I'll just go to the regular scale that's going to scale this entire thing, including the repeaters. I'll set a keyframe at two seconds for the scale to be a 100 percent. Then I'm going to do some overshoot. At one second, I'm going to have this be a 110, and then back at zero seconds, I'll have it be zero. It's going to scale from 0-110 and then back down to 100. Most actually add in one more keyframe, so at one second, 15 frames, I'm going to bring this back down to 90. That way it'll bounce. Something like that, and obviously, we'll use these keyframes. Let me just select them. Hit F9 to easy use them. Now, it's a whole lot better. I can even go in and fix the keyframes more later. Now, let's animate the slinky effect. This is a secondary animation on the repeaters. I'm going to go into my depth for this, and then under repeater, then toggle down transform repeater. Make sure you're doing transform repeater and not transform depth. If you toggle down transform repeater, then this scale is the one that's going to adjust the scale of your copies. You can see when I drag the scale down, it makes this effect where it looks like the two, that's the last copy is further away from us, then the two that's the first copy. What I'm going to do is set a keyframe for the scale to be a 100 percent at one second. Then the stopwatch, and then go to zero seconds and make the scale zero, and let's see what we have so far. Let's ease these keyframes and then I also want to animate the position of the copies. The spacing in between the copies. That's going to be with this position right here. I'm going to go to two seconds. I think I actually want this to be a little bit close together. I'm going to hit 12, and then also on the wide, and then I'll hit the stopwatch to set a keyframe and then let's go back in time and make this, maybe 20 and then at zero seconds will make the position zero. Let's see what that looks. I also need to add a position keyframe in between these two position keyframes, because remember we made the scale go all the way to a 110 percent, then back down to 90, and then back up to a 100 percent to give it that bounce. We need to do the same thing with this position. Here, let's make this go to 10, and let's ease these keyframes and take another look. I'm noticing that right about here, this is really glitch in the motion of the copies, isn't moving as much as the two right here and then it catches up. Let me just check out my graph editor to see what's going on here. What's happening is there's this little band in my curve and I don't want that. I want this curve to be smooth. I'm just going to select these keyframes. Right-click and go up to keyframe interpolation, and I'm going to set this from Bezier to linear and now it's smoothed out. I don't know why after effects decided to do that to my keyframes, but that's a fix if that happens to you. Now, let's take a look at this. That looks much more sensitive. There's one more thing I can do here to make this look even more fluid, and that's just to offset these keyframes on scale and position of the repeater. I'm just going to bring these forward in time, five frames and that'll just make it so that the number scales up. Then the repeaters follow behind it like a Slinky wood in real life. There's a little bit of lag there, just a five second lag, but it makes it look much more fluid and realistic to slinky. Let me just hit U just to see the keyframes that are set. I'm going slightly over two seconds now, and I want to make sure all my animation is done by two seconds. I'm just going to select all of these keyframes. Then I'm going to Hold Down option and then slide my keyframes back in time, and that's just going to shrink the time in between them uniformly. Now, I might have some keyframes that don't land on a whole number. You can see these keyframes are in between four and fives frames, and if you're really picky about it like I am, I'm just going to move these so that they are right on five frames. Maybe this will be 25 frames. I'm done nitpicking with that and I think it still looks good. 9. Animate Out Number Two: I'm going to make animating the two out pretty easy by just doing the same thing as the animation in, but in reverse. At four seconds, I'm going to copy all of these keyframes by hitting "Command C" and then "Command V". Then I'll just select all these keyframes that I pasted, right-click, go to keyframe assistant and time-reverse keyframes. Now it's going to not exactly time-reverse them in the way that I want. That's not looking quite like what I want it to. I actually want these keyframes to be mirror image of these keyframes. I'm just going to have to adjust that manually. Pretend you have a four, or three seconds and you're folding your keyframes over. That's what I mean by mirror image. Right here, this is going to be my first keyframe. I'll just select all these, move that up, and then these two keyframes, the first one starts at five frames, so the last ones can end at 25 frames. Then, these keyframes start at zero, so they're going to end at six seconds. See how that looks like. They're symmetrical. Now, let's play that back. Yeah, so that's the look I was going for, and it was a pretty easy effect to achieve. 10. Set Up Number Three: I've got my composition ready to go to set up this three-leveled three. I have a three that I've already converted into a shape layer, my color swatches and a background. I'm going to go into my three and I'm going to duplicate this three shape layer and rename this depth, and drag that below the three. I'm going to go into the "fill" and let's fill it with the white blue here. Then I'm going to add a repeater and let's make 10 copies. Under transform repeater, I'm going to set the position between the copies to two in the X and two in the Y. I've got my first depth, now I need to make two more depths. Basically, all I need to do is duplicate this depth, drag it below, and then let's go in, change the color. I'm not seeing this depth because it's below the first depth. Something that I can do is under the repeater, I can change the offset to be 10 because that's the amount of space that this first depth is taking up. If I just move the second depth by 10 pixels, then it will show up right below the first depth. I'm going to repeat that whole thing on a third depth layer. I just have to change the offset now to 20 to account for both of those depths, and then change the color. Now, we have three levels of depth on our three. 11. Animate Number Three: To animate this three, I'm going to do a write on effect, like I've taught in my other classes, animated lettering and animated typography. What I need to do first is just draw the shape of this three so that I have a stroke that I can animate with the trim paths. I'm going to go back into my work in progress three and then grab the pen tool and then make sure I have no fail set and a stroke set. I'm just going to go in and try to trace as close as I can a line in the center of this three. It's not going to be perfect the first time, but I'll go back and fix it. Then I'll go back to my regular selection tool and then adjust these handles to try to get that more aligned. I'm using the space bar to get that little hand tool that lets me drag my composition around. It's getting closer. Let's just increase the stroke on this to see how accurate it is. It needs a little bit more work. I'm just going to go toggle down and select this path right here. Now I'll make it so that my anchor points are selectable. You don't have to be 100 percent accurate here. Hopefully, your font is close to being the same width all the way through like this font. But if it's not, it's going to be okay as long as it's close. Now I'm just going to name this 'write on' so I know what this layer is, and then I'm going to take this three layer and duplicate it. What I'm doing here is making a mask for this write on there. That's why I said it doesn't have to be perfect. I'll just name this, 'mask.' I'm going to go in and just delete these depths because I only want the three shape to be the mask. Now I am going to make this mask have an alpha matte of the ''write on'' effect. If you don't see your track matte options, then hit the toggle switches /modes button. I've named this layer that's the shape of the three mask, but it's actually a little bit backwards. The write on effect is actually working as the mask here. But the layer that I've named mask is a perfect shape of the three. I want that right on effect to anime in that shape of the three. My final result will be the perfect shape of the three. That's why I've done it this way rather than the other way around. I've set this mask to and alpha matte of the write on player and so now I can add a trim paths to this write on layer. Add and then trim paths. Then I can animate this. Let's say one second. We'll have the end value be 100, and then zero we'll bring this down to zero. We're not actually seeing anything animating right now. That's because the mask layer has the same fill color as the face of this letter. I'm going to bring this letter forward in time to one second. That way I can have time for the animation of this write on effect. I want to have three lines writing in, one for each color of the depth and then actually a fourth one for the face of the three. What I'm going to do is just close up these layers, and really quickly I want to actually make the end of this line a rounded cap. I'll just go in to the stroke in change this from butt cap to round cap. Then I'm going to duplicate my write on effect and my mask. I'll make four copies. Then I'm going to stagger these before I recolor them so I can see what I'm doing a little bit easier. Let's stagger each layer by three frames. The second one will start at three frames. The third one will start at six frames and the fourth one will start at nine frames. Now let's recolor this. I'm going to go into the mask. The top one is going to stay this color. But the third one is going to be the lightest color. Then the second one will be the medium till color and the fourth one will be the dark blue. Now we have four lines drawing in. We need to move the start of the depth back so that it doesn't start before the lines finish animating it. About their works. Then one other thing that I want to do is I'm going to make the lines increase in thickness as they write on. What I'm going to do is adjust the stroke width. I'm just going to select all the write on layers. Then in my search bar here in the timeline, I'm going to hit stroke. Then it brings up stroke width. I can just set a key-frame rather than having to toggle down each of those layers. This is a little shortcut. Then I'll bring this back to like one second. Let's animate this backwards in time to 60. Unfortunately, you do have to type it in all four times. Now you'll see as this animate on. Once they get towards the end, then it starts to grow to the width of the three. Next I want to animate the depth animating in. I'm going to go into my three layer with the depth and then I'm going to toggle down into the repeaters. I'm going to set key-frames on the number of copies. I'll make this animation take about 20 frames. I'll set a key-frame on two seconds for the amount of copies to be 10 on this first step. Then go back in time to where this layer starts and set it to be zero. You can see that, that has animated in my first chunk of depth that lightest blue. I'm going to do the same thing on my other two layers. I've set key-frames for the number of copies to go from 0-10 on all of my layers. But you can see that that's not looking exactly how I want it. That's because I need to also animate the offset. For the second and third layers of depth, I am going to need to animate the offset going from their final value and then go back and animate this to zero. Now you can see that that's going to animate all the on at once. Now if I zoom in, let's look at this part. I think it'll be noticeable here. You can see that as these copies are animating in, you get this effect on some of the frames where it looks like there's a partial opacity copy, that's visible. That's because the number of copies on this frame is not at a whole number. When this is animating in, you can see it maybe a subtle thing and you don't really know why something looks a little bit off, but this is why. What we need to do is make after effects only increment the number of copies by whole numbers. How we can do this is with expressions. This is a really easy expression. You don't have to know anything previously about expressions to do this. To add this expression, what I'm going to do is, option click on the stopwatch. Then in this box, I'm just going to start typing and it's going to delete what's already there. I'm going to type math with a capital M dot round and after-effects will probably start guessing what you mean. You can just hit "Enter" when you see round and then value. What this is going to do is just round to the nearest whole number. You can see that my number here is now red, which means that this property has an expression set, but it's also made it so that it's always going to be a whole number. If you look at this number changing over time, it's always a whole number. There's no decimals there. Also, if you look at the three, you can see that this lightest blue layer doesn't have any of those opacity copies on some frames. We need to repeat this step on my other two depth layer so I can actually just copy this expression. Then option click paste and option click Paste. That has fixed that and let me zoom out. All right. I'm going to staggered these key frames. So let me just close this up by hitting "U". Then I'm going to take the number of copies on the first layer, that's going to be first. The number of copies and the offset on the second layer is going to be staggered by five frames. Then the number of copies and the offset on the third layer of depth is going to be staggered to ten frames. So now you get a more interesting look when it grows. To make this three look like it's actually 3D, I want the three to look like it's popping off the page. So instead of the extrusion just growing like this, I want the actual three to move, like it's coming at us off of the screen. What I need to do is animate the position of the three as the depth layers grow. Here when the depth is finished growing, I'm going to set a position key frame because this is the final position I want the three to be in. Then I'm going to go to the start of the layer, and this is where I want my other position key frame to be. But I can't really tell how far I need to move it, so I'm going to use some guides. I'm going to go back to where this animation finishes. For this, you're going to need your ruler. I already have mine invisible, but if you don't see yours, you can go to command "R", or they're also under view. So what you can do is just drag from the ruler out. Just like an illustrator, you'll get this guide layer. I'm going to place a guide right on the edge of this depth, and then also at the bottom of this depth. Then I'm going to go to the beginning of this layer, and now I know where my three needs to be in order to line up. I have snapped the guides on, so it just snaps it nicely in place for me. If you want to turn on snap to guide, then it's right here. You can see that my three has moved but my write on layers haven't, but I'm also done with my write on layers, so I can just actually cut them here. I'm just going to select all of them, and then hit option and the right bracket to cut them. They've extended one frame longer than I want. So I'll just drag it back one frame. So let's see what we have so far. You can see that that is jumping because my three-layer animates on over here at the final position, but my depth layer actually starts over here and then animates into that final position. So what I need to do is just parent these write on layers to the three, so they inherit the position that it starts at. At the final position, I'm going to select all these write on and mask layers, and then just take the pick whip and drag it to the three. You can see that in the parent link panel, it's made all of these parented to this three. So now let's play that back and you can see that my three is in the right position, and then it animates up. So it looks like it's popping off the screen. If you scrub your play-head over the timeline to play back your animation, you can see that as this depth is growing and the three is moving, as if it's coming off the page, there's this gap between the guide and the three, and that's making it look like it's not really a real 3D effect. We want to really sell that this is 3D. So what I'm going to do is adjust the easing on this key frame to try to make the three always touching these guide layers. I'm just going to add easy easing and see if that helps. Not so much. So what I'm going to do now is actually just ease this first key frame, and then the last key frame when this is growing in, to have an easy ease on the very first one and the very last one. That maybe makes it a little bit closer, but I'm also going to need to go into my graph editor and adjust. So I'm going to look at the position key frames in the graph editor, and then I'm going to go to my speed graph, and let's just start playing with these handles at positions where there is a gap. Let me zoom in here. You really see that gap right there. And let's just bring these this way, so now they're touching, there, still touching at the beginning, little gap is forming there, and now it's actually going over. So maybe if we drag this handle. This is going to be just a little bit of give-and-take and you might not ever get a 100 percent perfect, but that looks pretty good. It's at least better than it was before. Let's zoom back out and play this back. Now it looks more accurate. Now I'm also going to add easing to my write on effects. So just hit "U" on the keyboard to see all these key frames. I'll just add a simple, easy ease to these. You can add any easing that you want. You can add it in the graph editor too. Then, you can also stagger these layers. So maybe like the scale grows on different layers at different speeds, if you want to do something like that. I've kind of just staggered these key frames so that the strokes grow at different paces. The next thing I want to do is add a shadow to this three. So I'm going to duplicate the three layer, and then drag it below the three and rename it shadow. Then I'm going to go in and delete the two depths here. So I just have the one depth. Then I'm just going to hit "U" and delete all the key frames that are on here. Then what I want to do is align this shadow to the bottom of the depth. So if this was a 3D object that was casting a shadow, the shadow would be extending from the bottom of the depth, like where this three is touching the page or the ground or whatever it's on. I'm going to take this shadow layer and move it so that it's fitting right on the bottom of the three. Now you can see that this shadow is showing, and so what I'm going to do is just go into the repeater, and under transform repeater, I'm going to change the position to negative two and two, so that the shadow is going to go in the opposite way of the depth. But this is a short shadow, especially for a three that has three layers, so let's make this have more copies. Maybe something like let's go to 60. Then I'm going to recolor this so it looks more like a shadow to the darkest blue. Then let's just set the opacity to 25. So that's looking like a shadow. I'm going to hide my guides by hitting command and the semicolon key. One other thing that you can do with the shadows is, you can adjust the end opacity to make it look like it's fading out. I'm just going to bring the end opacity on the repeater to zero. Now it's given it this fade effect. You can also adjust the start opacity if you want it to be a little bit fading earlier, something like that. Maybe I'll keep this at 50 or so. Now we need to animate the shadow as the depth is animating in and the letter is popping off the screen. So let me just close this up. We want the number of copies to be 60 right here with the animation of the depth growing end finishes. I'll just set a key frame here for 60 and then go back to the start of this layer and set a key frame for the number of copies to be zero. Then it's going to grow as the letter grows. But the letter has some easing on it, so I'm going to go into the three in this position this easing, I'd like to copy on to my shadow position. I can either do this by looking at this and then eyeballing it, and trying to copy this curves look in the graph editor, but that's going to be nearly impossible to do, which is why I like this plug-in called "EaseCopy". So what you can do with EaseCopy is just select these key frames, hit "Copy", and then select the key frames that you want to apply that same easing values too, and hit "Ease". Now you can see if you have both these in the graph editor, that they have the same easing. So now let's play the whole thing back. All right. It's looking good. The one thing that I added in this other final version is some highlights on the three, and all of these are, is just a stroke that I've drawn out with the pen tool and I've animated them in by animating their stroke width. I've also parented them to the three, so that when the three moves, they will also go with it. 12. Animate Out Number Three: I'm going to animate the three out and basically in the same way that it came in but just in reverse. Let's go over to my working progress file. The first thing I'm going to do is make the three collapse onto the screen. I'm going to go into my three Shape Layer, hit U to see all my key frames, and then go to four seconds where the animation out is going to start. Then just select all of these key frames and copy and paste them onto my timeline at four seconds. I need to have these key frames go in opposite direction. I'll right-click on them. Key frame assistant, time-reverse key frames. This worked for the actual key frames, but the spacing of these key frames is not in the order that I want them to be in. You can see that with this animation. I need to mirror image these two sets of key frames. The first thing out is going to be the last thing in. For these four key frames, they are the last thing in. When the animation out plays, they need to be the first thing to animate out. These key frames are actually fine because they're right in the middle. Then this set of key frames was the first thing in, so it needs to be the last thing out. Let's play that back. That was [inaudible] that I'm going for. Let's move on to the animation of the trim paths. Since I cut all of these layers. I'm going to need to duplicate them, to use them again on my animation O. I'm just going to click select all of these Command D to duplicate. Then let's drag them to five seconds on my timeline. Let's have them all lined up at five seconds. Then I'm going to hit U to bring up all of those key frames. I'm just going to get rid of the N key frames because I actually want to animate the start of the trim pat,. so that it animates from the top of the three down to the bottom of the three to animate out. I'm going to unclick the stopwatch on the N value, but I want to make sure that the N is at a 100 percent. That looks good. We can just go into our first write on and animate the start of the trim path.. At five seconds, the start will be at zero, and then at five seconds, 20 frames, let's bring the start value up to a 100 percent. You can see that that's going to animate that line out from the top down. Let's do the same thing on the next write on. Make sure you're working with the right write on effects because now we have them intermixed. Make sure you're working on the one that is occurring at the end. We'll go in, set the start to be zero at five seconds. In fact, 20 will be a 100. Same thing here. Same thing on this last one. Okay, so we've animated all of these lines out, but our three is still here. That's because we need to chop this three shape layer where it's animation end so that's going to be at five seconds. Then make sure that you bring this one frame back. Let's see what we have. Isn't quite the look we're going for. Let's see what's going on. First of all, all of our write on animations are happening at the exact same time. That's why we're only seeing this one. Also, the stroke width is really small here when we need it to be bigger to fill up the whole three. Which you can see that it's not filling up the whole three because of the shadow that's still here. What we need to do is go into our key frames and just swap these key frames from where the stroke width. I'll right-click on them with both selected, go to key frame assistant time reverse key frames, and now it'll be thick, and then, so let's do the same thing on these other write 'ons'. You can't even see the stroke width. I just need to drag this forward in time so I can bring the stroke width over. Then I'll put them back in their place. Okay, let's have all of the stroke width animation start at the same spot. We need to reverse them. I already reversed those first ones. Let's see what this looks like. Okay, again, we have all of our trim path animations happening at the same time. We'll start with this top right on first and then let stagger the next one to be three frames later in time. We're even starting to see that, and then three frames later, this one will come in. Three frames later, the last one will come. Let's add easing on these start trim path key frames. I'll just select them all and I'll just apply an easy ease, but you can use any kind of easing that you want. That's looking good. The last thing we need to do is just get rid of our shadow.. To animate the shadow out, I'm just going to see what key frames I have to work with. I'm just going to make this simple and animate the number of copies to be from 60 to zero. Let's play that back. We also need to cut this shadow layer at five seconds. Now, we have our final animation of the three with the animation in and the animation out. 13. Set Up Number Four: I've got a composition setup to animate this four with my background color swatches and a four converted into a shape. The first thing I want to do is make that hatched extrusion. I'm going to go into the four, and then just duplicate this shape, and then name it hatched, and then let's drag it below the four. I'm going to hide this original four so I can see what I'm doing on the hatched version. I need a stroke on this and not a fill. I'm just going to go up to Add, and then Stroke, and then I need to make sure that this is underneath hatch. Mine came out to be not directly underneath hatch, I'm just going to drag it up. Then I'm going to adjust the stroke to let's say five and color the Dark blue, and then I need to delete the fill because I'm not going to need that. Then one other thing that I need to do is change this from Butt cap to Round cap and change the join to Round join. Then what we're going to do is actually create a dotted line and then extrude those dots so that it looks like they're stripes. I'm going to use the dashes to make a dotted line by hitting this plus next to dashes, and then hitting it one more time to get a gap. The first time I hit the plus it gave me a dash, the second time I hit it, it gave me a gap. What I'm going to do from here is just take the dash down to zero. Because I have rounded caps on, it's going to just leave it as a dot. Then I can adjust the spacing between the dots with the gap. I'm going to set the gap to 18, and then what I'm going to do is go back up to Add, and then Repeater, and then let's just close all this up so we can see everything. Now you can see that it's repeated, that dotted outline of the four, but I need to adjust the size. Let's go with two, two and then we can adjust the number of copies. I'm going to set the copies to like 14. As you can see that some of these little hatched lines or stripes are overlapping in some places and I don't like how that looks. I'm going to go in and fix that. Right now you can see that I have two paths and that's because this four has the outside shape and then the inside shape. If you are doing a different number or better than I'm, then yours will obviously be a little different, but the idea here is that I want to get the extrusion to be on just the right and bottom side of the four. What I need to do is duplicate these paths and then cut them up, I have one, that's just this line right here. One is just this line here, and here, and here. One that's here. Then the last one is just going to be the diagonal on the inside of this triangle of the four. Path 1 is the inside triangle. What I'm going to do is just zoom in so you can see it. Then I'm going to need to cut this shape so that I can delete this side, and this side. I'm going to select two anchor points. Those two anchor points go up to Layer, Mask, and Shape Path, and then where it says Closed, it's checked, but I want it to be unchecked so I'm just going to click that. I can see that it's opened up this triangle, and I can just click this anchor point and delete it and now I just have that diagonal line. Let's do the same thing with Path 2. But for Path 2 I'm going have 1, 2, 3 versions. Let me just duplicate that three times. We'll just hide all of them but Path 2 and we'll work on Path 2. I'm going to do the same thing and open this up by selecting two anchor points, going up to Layer, Mask and Shape Path and uncheck Closed. I'm going to make this path just this long side on the right of the four. I will delete everything else. Then let's hide that path and show the next one, Path 3, and we'll also need to open this one up. Then this one is going to be this side that has three paths. I can delete everything else. Then we can hide Path 3, show Path 4. This one is just going to be this segment here. Again I'll delete everything else in and let's show all of our paths. Now we have the extrusion on all of the sides of the four that we want it to be on and we just show the four. You'll notice in my final design that I have a gap between the four and the hatched extrusion. Let me just add that in. Under the repeater, I'm going to add that gap with the offset property. I'll just set that to six. You can see that's added a little gap in between our stripes and our four. The last thing I want to do is add in an inline on this four. I'm just going to make sure that nothing selected, grab my pen tool, and then make sure I have no fill, and a stroke set with the color and with that I want, and then just draw this out. I'm actually going to draw each segment as its own shape because I know that I'm going to want to animate them separately. I'll just draw the first one, and then make sure nothing is selected, and then click again to draw the second one and that way it will make a new layer. Make sure if you want straight lines, that you're holding down shift. If you get a little bit off on one of your lines, you can always go back into the path and adjust it. Then after you've adjusted all of your lines, make sure they are all lined up. You can go in and change the cap to a round cap if you want. I'm just going to select all three of these, and then type in cap in the search bar just as a shortcut to get to these, and now I've got my four all set up and ready to animate. 14. Animate Number Four: Before I animate the four, I want to split up the hatched extrusion and the actual face of the four, because I want to animate them separately. What I'm going to do is duplicate this four. Let's name this one, hatched extrusion. Then I'm going to toggle down and just delete the face of the four from this one, toggle down the four and delete the hatched extrusion. Now I have them separated. You can see in my final animation that I use these inlines as emitters. The diagonal hatched lines come out of this inline. They move in the same direction as the diagonal line that they form. They're moving from the upper left to the lower right. First, I'm going to move my inlines into place. Using the four shape as a guide, I'm going to set keyframes on the paths of these inlines. First outside the final position which is going to be at one second. To set keyframes on all of the paths of these inlines. Then I'm going to animate backwards. Go back to your zero frame, zero seconds. I'm going to move each of these inlines to the left most side of the four, but I'm also going to be moving them up. They're moving at a 45-degree angle, which is the same angle as these hatched extrusion lines. When you move these lines, you want to make sure that the path is selected here. That way when you move them, it's going to set a path keyframe and not move the position which we haven't set keyframes for. Then I'm going to do the same for each of my other lines. The next thing I'm going to do is hide the main four and then work on the hatched extrusions. I'm going to go in and set a path keyframe for each of these at one second. This is their final position. Then back at zero, I'm going to animate them up towards the inline. I'm going to hold them at a 45-degree angle again. Making sure I have path selected, I'll just move these up to the inline. This path is going to be a little bit trickier. I'm going to move these two all the way to the left. Then these two all the way up. What I'm going to do is extend all of my inline so that they line up with the extrusion strips better. Now we have all of that animating on, let's animate the main shape of the four. I'm going to set position keyframes on these two paths at one second and then go back in time and animate them up towards the inline. Let's see what we have now. It looks pretty good. One more thing that I'm going to do is just make another copy of this extrusion to make it look a little bit more interesting. I'm going to close up all my layers, take this hatched extrusion, duplicate it, and then let's recolor it. I'm going to choose this teal. Then I'm going to stagger all my keyframes so that I see different pieces going in at different times. The inlines are going to be the last thing to move. Let's take those keyframes and move them to start at one second. Then let's have the first extrusion be this teal one. That's the one named, hatched extrusion 2. Then the second one is going to be the final one, the darker one. I'll move those keyframes somewhere around here. Then the four is also going to move later, maybe like here, something to that effect. But I still need to animate these extrusions coming in so that they're not overlapping over here. I need to go in and animate that repeater. Under repeater, I'm going to animate the number of copies. These end keyframes, let's make the number of copies, this, 14, and then back at the start will make this zero. Then let's do the same thing on the other hatched extrusion. I just need to reorder my layers, that the hatched extrusion that's the darker blue is on top. I also want to animate my hatched extrusion out. I'm going to go into the repeater, and then it comes in, and then I want it to start animating out as this dark blue one catches up to it. Let's make the number of copies go down to zero in about 20 frames. Then you'll see that that actually brings the number of copies back to the upper left, and I actually want it to be moving down to the bottom right, it keeps that continuous motion down to the bottom right. What I'm going to do is animate the offset. It's going to start at six and then move all the way down to, we're just going to have to guess and check. I'm going to try 30. Yeah, I think that looks about right. Now let's close up our layers and hit "U" to see all of our keyframes. Let's add some easing. If you have the Motion-3 plugin, you can use these presets to make the easing really easy for you, or if you have another plugin, or you can always do easing and then adjust the graph editor. I'm just going to select all my keyframes, then I'm going to apply the slow fast ease. Let's see what that looks like. That looks all right. I'm just going to leave that for now. But normally, I would probably go in and do some tweaking and try out different combinations to see what I like best. 15. Animate Out Number Four: To animate the four, I'm going to continue with that motion to the bottom right corner and I'm just going to make it look something like this. The extrusion goes first and then the shape and the inlines. Let me show you how I did that. Starting at four seconds, I'm going to set a key frame for my inlines to be at this place with the path key frame. Then same with the four. Then for the hatched extrusion, I'm going to animate out the number of copies. I'll set a key frame for the number of copies, and I'm also going to animate the offset just like I did when I animated out that extra extrusion, the teal one at the beginning. I'm going to go in to the repeater and set a key frame for the offset. Then I'm going to move over one second to five seconds. Then I'll animate the number of copies to zero and the offset to 30. That's what I used before for the other extrusion, so I think that'll work. That looks good. Now I'm going to animate the four and in the lines out. I actually want this animation to start at five seconds after the extrusion finishes animating out. Let's move these key frames and then we'll move our play head to six seconds so that I can animate these out. For these, I'm just going to move them at a 45 degree angle, and remember, make sure you have path selected as you're moving this. Then I'm going to animate the four, shrinking down to meet those inlines. Now let's see what we have. That looks pretty good in the whole thing. Not bad. I need to ease these two key frames. Let's just select them all just to be sure that they all have the same easing. Looks good. Then one other detail that I forgot to do earlier is to animate the stroke width in for these inlines so that we start with nothing and then we end with nothing. I'll just go in here, type in stroke width in my search bar and then I can set a key frame, let's make this take like five frames and then I'll set these down to zero at zero frames, and then I'll do the same thing at the end, but in reverse. From six points to zero points. Let's also have a path finished just a little bit earlier. Then we can cut it so that you don't see it when those inlines disappear. I need to fix this just a little bit because I adjusted the timing. Let's see what that whole thing looks like. At the beginning, we need to cut this four paths. We don't see any of that coming in. It looks pretty good. 16. Set Up Number Five: I've got my composition set up and I added the rounded corners on this five in Illustrator because when I tried to do an aperture effects, it wasn't getting all the corners rounded. To make this extrusion that offset from the five, I'm going to first go into the five and duplicate the five shape and then let's rename this depth and drag it below. Let's recolor it and then let's add a repeater, set the number of copies to a 20. Under transformer repeater, I'm going to set the position between the copies to 2 and 2. Then now let's add a gap. To do that, I'm just going to duplicate this depth and rename it gap and then I will call it gap the color of the background. Now, I need to make the number of copies a little less, so let's try like four and there we go. It looks like we have a gap between our extrusion and or number. There's a couple other details I'm going to add to this to make it look even better. In the depth, I'm going to go into the repeater and then adjust this and opacity, it looks like it's fading out. If I have the start opacity as 100 and the end opacity is zero, and then what I'm going to do is just duplicate this depth, drag it to the bottom and then I'm going to go into the repeater and just bring this end opacity back up to 100. I'm going to change the fill color on this bottom depth to the darkest blue. Now, it's a effect, but if you look closely, you can see that it's fading from the lighter blue to the darker blue, and I can actually go in and maybe bring start opacity down a little and I'll adjust where is effect starts. Maybe this is like an 80 or something, you can just do what looks good to you. Then one other thing I'm going to do is add a highlight on this offset extrusion. I'm just going to duplicate the depth one more time, name this highlight and then I'm going to change the fill color to something that's lighter than this blue. I'll just choose something like that and this actually made this fade effect more pronounced. If you wanted to do something like that you could, or what I'm going to do here is just take off this fade. I'm going to turn the start and end opacity backup to 100 percent and then I'm going to make the copy something small maybe like five. Now, I just have this little thin line that's like a highlight on the extrusion. The last thing I'm going to do on this five is make an offset outline. I'm going to do this by duplicating the actual five layer, and then I'm going to go in and delete everything. All those extrusion layers. I just have the five, let's rename this outline and then we'll go in to the five. We don't need the fill, so I'll just delete that and then go up to add stroke, and then let's drag that into the five underneath it. Then we can re color this and resize it any color we want. I'm just going to make sure this is set around cap and round join and then I can take the position of this and just offset a little bit. If you want to be precise, you can just type in whole numbers into the position. The last thing I need to set up here is the shadow. To do that, I'm just going to duplicate the five and name it shadow. I'm going to drag it below the five and then the first thing I'm going to do is just hide all of the extrusion so the gaps, the highlight, and the two depths and I'm going to position this shadow at the bottom of the exclusion. Because remember if this was a 3 D object in real life, the shadow would come at the base of the extrusion out. Let's just position this right at the edge of the extrusion. Let's just hit pin and make sure we have these both at even key frames. Let's show all of our gaps in extrusions and they're going to be going in the same direction as my exclusion obviously because I haven't changed it. What I need to do is just adjust the positions on these repeaters to adjust the direction of the shadow. I'll start with the depth and then make the transform repeater position negative two, and then actually I don't need this second depth. If I just make this have 100 percent opacity, because I'm not going to see that fading color in the shadow. I'm also going to delete the highlight because that won't be visible on the shadow either, then the gap will change the position to negative two and that should be it. Now, I just want to make this shadow like 25 percent opacity. If you look at this and think about how shadow would act on this five in real life, the gap wouldn't be right here. We need to just take that gap and move it by changing the offset. I'm going to move the offset to like I think 20 and then move this gap below the depth and then I'm going to duplicate the depth because the face of the five would cast a shadow. I'm going to make that here by just going into the repeater. Let's just make like two copies because this would be pretty thin, and then I'll adjust the offset until I can see right there. Maybe something like that. If you think about this, that is how shadowed work in real life because the extrusion would be casting the shadow as like a mirror image of what it actually is. Then this face of the five would also be cast in shadow after the gap. It'll just be this thin little line here. We also need to have our offset outline casts a shadow, to do that, I'm just going to duplicate this outline, bringing it down below the shadow and let's name outline shadow. I will color it the dark blue and just make it 25 percent opacity like my shadow. Let's drag it's position to wherever it looks about. I'm just going to eyeball this. Maybe something like that. This looks a little bit messy just because of the nature of how the five is set up with the offset, occlusion and the gap and stuff. One thing I can do that will make it look a little bit better is to make it blurry. I'm going to go over to my effects and presets panel and then type in fast blur, and I'm just going to use this fast box blur on my shadow. I'll just adjust the blur radius to something maybe like three, and I also want to apply this effect onto my outline shadow so they match. I'll just copy this effect by clicking where it says Fast box blur, hit command C and then command V to paste that same effect on the outline chatter. I think that looks a little bit better because it's a little bit more subtle and less distracting from the actual number. 17. Animate Number Five: To animate the five, I have some trim path animations going on at the beginning as the five scales in. Then I have the five growing from the inside out. Then I made this turn effect where it looks like it's turning to show off that it's 3-D. I'm going show you how I animated this, starting with the turn into 3-D. At two seconds where the animation is finished, I'm going to set some key frames. I want to go into my five and go into the depth and set a key frame on the position. Since I want my gab and my highlight and my other depth that makes the fade all to have the same position as this depth, I can just parent all their positions to this one. I'm going to hit the titla key just so I can see my timeline in full screen. It'll be easier to toggle down and get to everything that I need. What I'm going to do is, in depth 2, transformer repeater, position. I'm going to pick whip, this position to this one. Now this will always have the same position as the position of this main depth. I will do the same thing with the highlight and with the gap. Then I'll hit the tilta key again to close that all up. Now if I set another key frame for the position to be one second, then you can see that these are all going to come out at the same time. I only need two key frames to control all those pieces. Let me show you how I animated the five in. I'm going to just total down, go up to add, offset paths. What this is going to do is allow me to expand or contract if I go negative this five shape. I'm going to set that to zero, so I won't be doing anything right now. Then I'm going to go back to zero seconds. I just see this five, and the depth hasn't animated in yet. I'm going to shrink this all the way to where it just looks like a thin line. I'm going to go with -40, and then I'm going to go forward in time, and bring this all the way to zero. At the same time this is expanding from the inside out, I'm also going to scale up the five. Let's start this scale at zero, and let's just do fifty percent. Then we'll set a key frame, and then at one second, let's make this have a little bit of overshoot. Let's go to 110 and then at 2 seconds we'll make it 100. This will also add to that turn effect. Let me just hide this out real quick. So it'll come in and then as it scales back a little bit, it'll also have the extrusion come out. It looks more like it's turning because of the scale, which is cool. I'm also going to scale in this outline. I'm just going to do a shortcut and copy and paste the scale key frames. But then instead of having this to scale up the same amount, I'm going to have it scale up to 120 here. It gives it more of that 3D look as if the outline is closer to us than the five is. Now to animate the outline and the five coming in from nothing. I'm going to use trim path animations for this. I'm going to create an inline that matches up with this thin version of the five so that the inline can animate on with trimmed path this five and then this five shape can take over from there. Let's just draw out with the pen tool, this shape of the five. Now I'm going to need to adjust the key frames on the five so that I can animate the trim path in before the offset path animation starts. Let's just move this offset key frame to start at 15 frames. Then, lets have the inline which we need to name. We'll have the animation end here. Let me go to add trim paths and then go down and instead of end key frame at 15 frames, go back in time and let's make this zero. It's going to write on and let's parent it to the five. I'm just going to add zero seconds, zero frames. I'm going to parent the inline to the five shape so that it maintains the same scale as the five shape. As this is scaling in, the inline is now still in line with the five. Let's chop this five shape layer so that it doesn't start until fifteen frames where it's animation starts. This is going to ride on. Then the five shape is going to take over. Now he can cut the inline layer, and now this animation will expand from here and then do the turning look with the extrusion coming out. Let me just change the color of the in-line and we should be good to go there. I'm also going to add trim paths to the outline. We're going to add trim paths and let's make this finish at 20 frames until I set an end key frame. I'm also going to start a key frame, and then at zero seconds I'll just set both of these to fifty. That way the line will start from the center and animate out in both directions, so it's not just one end of the line that's animating. It'll look like that. What I can do is, to make this a little bit more interesting, I can duplicate this outline and change the color maybe. Let's go with that. Then under trim paths, I can just adjust the offset. Let's make this a 180 degrees different than the other lighter outline. Now when this animates in, we have two versions that animate both from the center. I want that lighter outline to be the final color. Let me just drag the darker outline below. Now I need to animate the shadow. I'm going to make that visible, and then toggle down and go to the depth, and the repeater and then the position in between the copies. I'll set a position key frame at 2 seconds for the position to be at its final position of -22. Then I'm going to go back to one second and set this to zero and zero. That'll only change the one depth because I need to parent the position of the other depth and gap to this position. Let me do that. Let's see how that looks. We can see the shadow right here because it's not scaling the same as the five. I'm just going to go back to my two second endpoint and then parent the shadow to the five, and so then it will scale the same as the five. But the position is offset on the shadow. Let me just animate the position. I'll hit P to bring up the position property. Then back at one second, I'm just going to set this to zero because now the shadow is parented to the five. Any change in position is changed from this five. It needs to be offset by 38 pixels here. But here I want it to be exactly lined up, so it's easy to just zero this out. Now let's see how that looks. Perfect. 18. Animate Out Number Five: To animate the five out I'm going to do the same thing as I did to animate in, but just in reverse. I'm just going to select all of my key frames and then copy and paste them. If you have the Motion 3 plug-in, something that's super useful is this clone feature, because you can copy and paste all of your keyframes at once. If you try to do this by just doing copy and paste, After Effects is going to actually duplicate your layers and that's not what we want. I'm just going to select all of these key frames and then hit "Clone" and it'll paste them right at my play head. If you don't have Motion 3, you'll just have to copy and paste each layer on its own, so each layer individually. But now this has pasted the exact same key frames, so that's not exactly going to work. What I need to do is select all of these, right click, Keyframe Assistant, Time Reverse Keyframes. Now it's going to be closer to what I want except for the ordering is wrong. What I need to do is just make all of these keyframes mirror image of these keyframes. But I also, since I cut this inline layer, I'm just going to delete these keyframes and duplicate this, hit "U", time reverse these keyframes and bring this one to the very end. Then let's mirror image these keyframes so these ones are going to go to the very end. These ones are fine, these ones need to go towards the end and let's see how that looks. Again, we need to cut some of our layers so this five layers are going to need to be cut here, so that the trim path animation on this inline can finish. Then the shadows need to be cut here. Actually the shadow animation needs to start sooner and then be cut here. On these keyframes to animate the five out, I'm going to apply the opposite easing. I'm just going to select all of these and apply the slow fast rather than the fast slow. On this one, I had slow fast so I'm going to do fast slow. You can see in the graph editor that the easing is mirror imaged as well as the keyframes actual positioning. Let's take a look at what the final animation looks like. 19. Set Up Number Six: I've got my composition set up, and my six is converted to a shape layer. It has a stroke of six points and a fill. I added the rounded corners in Illustrator just because it wasn't working, it wasn't getting all the corners in after effects. The first thing I'm going to do is actually make the depth on a completely separate layer. I'm just going to duplicate this six and then rename it depth, and you'll see why I'm doing it on a separate layer rather than within this six layer in a little bit. I'm going to just go in and this Group 1 is my six, and I'm going to add a repeater. Then I will move the number copies to 20 and I'll change the position to 2:2. Now let's make the stripes. I'm just going to close this up and then go up to my pen tool, with nothing selected, I'm just going to draw a line across my composition and I'll hold down shift to make sure that it's a straight line. Then I don't need a fill so I can just go up here and take off the fill. I'm going to change the stroke width to four. Then just make sure that that color is the same color as the face. It looks like I'm going to rename this strips. Then obviously we only have one line, so we can actually use the repeater to make stripes. What I'm going to do is go to, "Add repeater." Then I will increase the number of copies, and if you look closely, you can see that this is just extended our line. But we want to make the stripes going vertically. What we need to do is go into the transform up here, and set the position in the x to be zero. Then adjust the position and the y, to adjust the spacing between these lines. I'm going to bring the number of copies up to 70 and then the spacing to 16. I just wanted to make sure that all the stripes are covering my six. Then what I can do is hit "R" to bring up the rotation property and rotate these at whatever angle. I'm going to choose 45. Now I need to create a mask to fit the stripes in the depth. I'll just duplicate this depth layer, bring it above the stripes. Let's name it mask. Then on the stripes layer, I'm going to set the track map from none to Alpha Matte "Mask." If you don't see the, "Track my option", remember just hit the "Toggle switches slash modes button". Now all of my stripes have been masked in this depth. If you look at my final design, you can see that I have this nice stroke going around the stripes and then I also have a different darker stroke going around the six. Let's work on that now. For the depth, I need to make sure that the stripes are below the face of my six and that the depth is below that. Now you can see that the stroke around the six doesn't have those stripes going through it. To get the outline around the depth, what I'm going to do is select my depth, right-click and go up to layer styles and then, stroke. This is a way that you can add a stroke to an entire layer. I'm going to recolor this. If you look closely, you can see that the stroke is on the outside of this entire six shape, and so what I need to do is set the position from outside to inside and then bringing the size up to six so it matches the size of the outline around just the six face. That's looking good. The next thing we need to do is setup the shadow. If you look at my final design, the shadow that I chose to use on the six is a slanted shadow. It's like the page or the ground or whatever background is behind this six is at an angle. The six is like popping off of it. The top of the six is not touching that background. You could also think of it as like a sticker that's peeling off the page. But the page is the thing that's at the angle rather than the six, and you could do it the other way around too. To make the shadow, I'm just going to duplicate this six layer and name it, shadow. Normally we duplicate the one with the depth to make the shadow. But I'm just going to do the regular flat six for this one and then I'm going to bring it all the way to the bottom. I also want to make sure that the stroke is colored the shadow color, which will be the dark blue. Also the fill be colored the dark blue. Now I can go in and under transform Group 1, I'm going to adjust the skew. You'll know that you're under the right transform if you have the skew property here. Adjusting the skew kind of tilts your letter like this. I'm going to set the skew to 10. Now I need to adjust this so that the bottom of the shadow layer lines up with the bottom on the extrusion layer. I'm just going to go to the position and then move this over to something like this. Then I can make the shadow 25 percent opacity. With that we have the six all set up and we can move onto animating it. 20. Animate Number Six: First, I'll show you how to make the 6 pop off the page and the shadow to animate in. Then I'll show you how I did this reveal with these lines. First let's set a keyframe on the depth to be at this position, so go into the Repeater, Transform Repeater, and then set the Position to be at 2, 2 at two seconds, go back to one second and set this to 0, 0. Then we also want the same thing to happen with the Mask so that the stripes are masked out for this. What I'm just going to do is go into the Repeater, go down to Transform Repeater, find this Position, and parent this to the position of the depth. That way those will always have the same position. That's looking good. I'm also going to animate the position of the 6, so that it looks like it's popping off the screen when the depth animates in. Let's just go in to the 6, and set a position keyframe at two seconds, and then go back to one second, and we're going to want to set another position keyframe. But first I need to add some guide layer so I know where to move my 6. I'm just going to hit Command R on the keyboard to bring up my rulers. From the ruler I can drag out a guide line, and bringing it to the right edge of the 6, and then the bottom edge of the 6 where the depth ends. Then I can go back to one second, and just move the 6 into place. I also need to parent the Mask and the depth to my 6. Setting these position keyframes has made it look like the 6 is popping off the page as the depth animates in. To hide my guides, I'm just going to key command and the colon key. Now let's animate the shadow coming out. I'm going to go into my shadow, go down to the Transform Group 1, and I'm going to set a keyframe at two seconds for the skew to be 10, and then go back to one second, and set the Skew to be 0. You can see that that has offset my shadow from my 6. What I need to do is just set a position keyframe here at two seconds, and then set a position keyframe here at one second to line a backup. Now let's see what this looks like. Looks like it's turning a little bit. One more thing I'm going to do to make this effect look even more like it's 3D and it's popping off of this. Then go to background is I'm going to add a rotation. I'm going to set a rotation keyframe on the 6 to be 0 at two seconds, but then going to read 10 at one second. You can see that my shadow is now showing from behind the 6 and I don't want it to, so I also need to parent the shadow to the 6 to fix that, and make sure that your parenting at the final position. Now let's take a look at this. Now we have another problem, which is that the shadow is going below the 6. Let's just move that into place. And it should be now zeroed so that it's exactly in line with the 6. Now, we've got the effect we are going for. If you want to you can also animate the stripes. I'm just going to go in and animate the stroke width of the stripes. At two seconds I'll make the stroke width the final position of 4, and maybe at 15 I will bring this down to 0, and then my striped animate in as 6 is popping up the page. To make these lines that reveal the 6. I'm actually going to create a bunch of diagonal lines in Illustrator, rather than making them in After Effects using the repeater, because I want them to come from both directions, and I won't be able to do that with the repeater. Now I'm in Illustrator, and I have this 6 jurist as reference. It's the same font and size as the one in After Effects just so that I can make these lines and know that it's going to cover the 6. I'm going to walk this 6 layer, and then create a new layer for my lines. Then I'm going to go over to the line tool and just dry out align across my airport, and I'm holding down Shift to make sure that it straight. I'm going to set the stroke width to something like 20. Then I'm going to select this line again, hold down Option and Shift, and then drag it to about the center of the camp. Now I have a duplicate. Then I'm going to select both of these two lines. Go up to Object, Blend, Blend Options, and I'm going to set the spacing to specify distance in the point to 20, because 20 is the same width as my stroke. Then I'm just going to hit "Okay." It doesn't do anything yet, all you have to do is go back up to Object, Blend, Make. I can see that it's filled in that space between your two original lines with new lines. What I want to do now is go to the Direct Selection tool or A on the keyboard. Just unselect and then reselect just one of the points on this top line. I'm going to hit this "Horizontal Align" center so that it aligns that point in the center of my airport and makes this nice diagonal line. Let's do the same thing on this anchor point on the right. Now you can see that I have this triangle. What I'm going to do is select this, go up to Object, Expand, and then just hit "Okay." What it's going to do now is just give me those individual lines because I'm going to need those individual lines to animate each one in After Effects. But I need to make a duplicate of all of these lines that I have now, and then bring them to the bottom of my 6 to cover the rest of it. I'm just going to hold down Option and Shift while dragging this down. Now I have a duplicate. I'm going to hold down Shift again, and then rotate this 180 degrees, and then just use my arrow keys to nudge it down so that it's lined up perfectly with no space in between. That looks good. Now let's just select everything on this layer. All of the lines, and I'm going to rotate this 45 degrees. Hold down Shift again, and now I have diagonal lines at a 45 degree angle, and it made a square shape that almost covers my 6. What I need to do now is just adjust this so that it covers my 6. I'm going to hold down Option and Shift to scale this in place and in the right proportions. I'm going to make sure that it's covering the whole 6 and leaving a little bit of extra room for any depth. I bring my 6 on top, something like that. Now some of these lines are not even close to the 6, and so they don't really do much for the masking and animating the 6 in. You would leave them for decoration, but I'm just going to delete some of them. First I need to make sure that this is all ungrouped. I'm going to hit Shift Command G to ungroup them, and then I'll just delete maybe these ones, something like that. Now if you have this plugin called overlord, you can just select all of your lines, make sure that you have this bullet shaped to layers checked on, and then push them into After Effects, and open all the line on its own layer, and it will be all ready for you to inmate. I uses plugin all the time and I'm not paid to say this at all. But if you work between After Effects in an Illustrator a lot, this will save you a ton of time. But if you don't have over learned that's totally fine. You don't need it. What you can do is just have all of your layer selected. Go up to this little hamburger menu right here on your Layers panel, and then go down to Release Layers to Sequence. Then you need to select all of your layers. They are now nested in this layer 3. What I need to do is drag them above layer 3 so that they're no longer nested. They're all on their own layers. This is really important so that After Effects can recognize your layers and you can animate them individually. Now I'm going to have this extra layer 3 that I don't need. Delete that and I also don't need this 6 anymore, so I'll delete that. Now make sure that you save this file, and make sure you save it somewhere near your After Effects projects. Then back in After Effects, I'm going to hit Command I to bring up the import window, and then I'm going to find my Illustrator file, and make sure that I have import as change this from Footage to Composition Retain Layer Sizes. If you don't see these options, click on this "Option button" down here, and hit "Open." Now you can see that it's made a new compact with all of the lines. These are all vector layers, so I need to convert them into Shape layers. I'm going to select all of the Layers, right-click go to Create, Create Shapes from Vector Layer. Then that's created all of these lines that I can now animate with the trim paths. I don't need my Illustrator layers now, so I can just go in and delete them. Now I need to animate the trim paths. I'm going to go into my first layer and go down to the Add button and then add Trim Paths. Then I'm going to set an end keyframe at 20 frames for the end to be at a 100 percent, and then add zero frames for it to be zero percent. Now you can see that this just animates in, and I need to apply that on all my other layers. I'm just going to select these trimmed paths, hit Command C, go to zero frames, and then select all my other layers and hit Command V to paste. Now this is going to add the trim paths to all of my other layers. But I have half my layers going one way and half my layers going the other way. I want them to be a little bit more varied. What I'm going to do is go into the search bar, my timeline and type in path, and then this is going to bring up the path. I also have this button for the direction of the line. If I click this button to switch the direction of the line, you can see that now the line will be coming in from the other direction. What I can do is just use these buttons to make some lines going one way and some lines going the other way. Now I've got something that's a little bit more varied. Now I need to stagger my layer so that the animate from the top right to the bottom left. What I need to do is just make sure that these layers are in the right order. It looks like my top layer, all the way through here is the bottom half. Let's just move all of these layers to the very bottom. Layer 46 here is the very top. I just need to flip all these so that layer 46 is the top one. I'm just going to go full screen on my timeline and do that really quickly. All of these layers should now be in the right order with the top layer in my timeline being the first layer that I want to animate in, and the last layer being the last layer that I want to animate in. I'm going to go to zero on my timeline, select all my layers, starting with the top layer, and then go all the way down to the bottom layer. The order that you select your layers does matter here. Then I'm going to go to Option and right back to trim all my layers temporarily to one frame. Then I'm going to right-click, go up to Keyframe Assistant, Sequence Layers, and then hit "Okay." What this has done is offset all my layers. So what I need to do is just drag them all out again, so they last the whole time. Now when I play this back, they're all sequence, and so they come in the order that they were lined up in my timeline. Now I can go back into my six and bring the lines in as a mask. I'm going to grab my lines composition from the project panel and drag it on top of my six. Then on the six layer I'm going to set the Track Matte to Alpha Matte lines. Remember if you don't see the track matte option click "Toggle Switches/Modes. Now let's play this back, and we're not seeing anything. That's because this depth layer showing up and blocking the animation of the lines so we can't see it. What we need to do is just wait until the depth comes in to bring this layer, so I'll just trim it like to here. Now you can see the animation of the lines animating the six in. If you look carefully right here, you can see there's a jump because that's when the depth comes in, and our lines animation wasn't finished animating by here. What I need to do is make the animation on the lines finish faster. The first thing I'm going to do is go in, select all my keyframes and add the fast slow motion preset onto them. Then the other thing that I'm going to do, which unfortunately is a little bit tedious, is just to stagger my layers a little bit differently, but do it manually so that these finish a little bit sooner. I'll just like take some of the layers and move them up to eventually get to have all the layers moved up of it. I'm getting really close. Just need to make sure everything finishes by one second, 10 frames. All right, now we should be good. Perfect. Now let's add the decorative lines they animate over this six, but are actually doing any masking. I'm going to go back into my six comp and go to the Project panel and then duplicate this lines comp. Now I have lines 2 and I'm going to go into this version, go to the Start, select all my layers, and then hit the left bracket to line everything up at the start. Then I'm just going to go into my first layer and go down and set some star keyframes. Also to star keyframe for the star to be at zero percent at zero and then a 100 percent at a 100. Now, if we just saw this, we can see which one it is. Now you can see that the line starts from nothing and ends from nothing. I'm going to make sure that my end keyframe goes fast and then slow, and my star keyframe go slow and then fast. That way I'll get a nice line coming in and then shrinking. Now I want to copy these star keyframes onto all my other layers. I'll just copy these two keyframes. Make sure that my play head is at zero. Select all my other keyframes and hit paste. Now all my other lines should also be animating in and out. But I don't want the decorative lines to look like this. What I'm going to do is just keep some of them and also stagger them. Let's just hide a lot of the lines. That way we can only change them because if we delete them, then they're gone. But if we just hide them, we can change our mind. Let's try something like that, and now let's stagger these layers. Again, I'm just going to select all my layers, then trim them to one frame. Right-click Keyframe Assistant, Sequence Layers and then drag them all out. That gives us a nice staggered effect, but I only have some of the layer, so it looks cool. Then I'll go back into this six and drag this lines too on the very top, and let's see what that looks like. Cool. Another thing I can do is duplicate this lines to comp and recolor. I'm going to go in to Effects and Presets panel and look for Fill, and then I will just drag that effect onto my lines. Lets recolor them the lightest blue. Let also change the stroke width. I don't have any control over the stroke width unless I go into this comp and then change all of the stroke widths. But that's also going to change it for this one because they're the same comp. One thing I can do that or give it a cool effect is to add a choker. I'm going to look for that in my Effects and Presets, and I want this simple choker. I'll just drag that on top of my lines to the duplicated version. Then let's bring the choke match up so that it shrinks the line size. But you can see that another effect that this has is that it combines lines that are close together, which looks cool and even does it while they're animating, so just joined up those lines. I think I actually want this to be this blue, I think that's a little better. One more thing that I can do so that my lines aren't overlapping is just drag the top lines so that they're offset a little bit. Maybe something like that. What offset their timing as well, so let's bring them to about five frames. Let see what this looks like. The last thing I need to do is ease my keyframes. I'm going to hit U on the keyboard and then select all of these keyframes. I'm just going to apply the fast low preset. If you want to, you can spend the time to do different easing on different sets of keyframes if you wanted to you. Let's take a look at the final animation of the six. 21. Animate Out Number Six: The animation of the six out is basically the same thing as the animation-in but just in reverse. The first thing I'm going to do is hit U on my keyboard to see all my keyframes, and then I'm just going to copy and paste them at four seconds. If you don't have this MOTION-3 plugin, you'll just have to copy and paste them layer by layer. If you do have the MOTION-3 plugin, you can just select multiple layers at once and hit clone. Then what you need to do is select all these new keyframes and then right-click Keyframe Assistant, Time-Reverse Keyframes. Then you'll see that this animates back down. Now what we need to do is animate the lines mask out. What I'm going to do is go into the lines composition and I need to set keyframes on the start value to animate these lines out. I'll go into my first layer and find the start value and just set a keyframe, and then 20 frames later, I will animate this up to 100 percent. Now I just need to copy all of these start keyframes onto all of my other layers. So Command C to copy, select all the layers, Command V. But now the problem is all of these keyframes are happening at the same time but I'm not going to be able to stagger the animation like I did before because that way only works with staggering the entire layer, and I don't want to mess up the layer staggering here because that is working on the animation-in. I just want to stagger these keyframes. Luckily, there's a plug-in for this and I'm not getting paid to say this either and this plugin is actually pay-what-you-want, it's called Dojo Shifter; and so what you can do is select your keyframes and then you have some options here of how much you want to offset the frames by. I'm just going to put in one frame and then I'm going to make sure that I have offset keyframes selected so it just offsets the keyframe and not the entire layer, and then I'll set the offset to one frame; make sure frames is selected here, and then hit stagger. Now this has staggered all of my keyframes, but I actually want that to happen in the opposite direction. I want the animation to happen from the left-bottom to the top-right. I'm just going to undo that. I'm going to select my keyframes again and instead I'm going to set the offset on my keyframes to a negative value, and instead of doing one, I think I'm going to do negative 0.5 because I need that animation to happen a little bit faster. Then just hit stagger, and let's ease these keyframes while we're here. I'm going to have them go fast and then slow, and let's bring them over a little bit, so we need to give the six time to flatten out. Maybe around here, a little bit after four would be good. Let's try that; and we're not seeing anything again and that's because we have the depth layer and the shadow layer showing here. Let's cut these both when the animation finishes, and it looks like the animation on the lines mass is starting too early so I need to go back in and just move these over a bit. That looks good. Let's play that back. Now we just need to add in our decorative lines at the end. What I can do is just duplicate this, right-click, go to Time, Time-Reverse layer, and then you can see that now it's going to play the animation in reverse right here. That's another way to do it rather than setting keyframes. Now let's do the same thing on these lines, the letter-colored ones. I'll duplicate them, right-click, Time, Time-Reverse layer, and let's see what this looks like. Now we have our whole entire animation of the six. 22. Set Up Number Seven: I've got my composition set up with my background colors and a seven that's converted into a shape layer. This time I was able to add the rounded corners within after effects. The first thing I'm going to do is just duplicate this seven and then drag it below. We'll name it depth. Then I'm going to go in, add repeater. I've actually just wanting the repeater to be like a stroke. Just the line. I need to just delete the fill and then add a stroke by going to the "Add" button and then stroke. Then let's make this stroke color a darker blue. Then I'll make it a width of eight. I'm just going to go ahead and change the caps to round caps and rounded joins. Now I'm going to set my repeater to just one copy instead of three. Then I'm going to go into transform repeater and set the position to something like 16,16. But since I only have one copy, that's not going make any difference because this is the position in-between the copies. What I really need to do is go to offset and then bring this up just a little bit. It is necessary to set the position so that I get this at the right angle that I want it to be at. I'm just going set this to a really small number like 0.8. Now we have our stroke that's offset. But I want this stroke to end here and here and here, so that it's not going behind the seven. I just want that line, like an accent line or something. What I can do is go up to "Add" and then trim paths and make sure that the trim paths was added below the depth. Now I can adjust the end value to make this line an open line instead of a closed shape. I'm going to have to adjust the end value or the start value and the offset to get this line where I want it just on this one side. Then I'm going to need to duplicate this depth to create another line that's along this side because these lines don't connect. The only way to make those two separate lines will be to have two separate depths. Let me just go through and get this one line where I want it. Something like this. If you're trying to make really small adjustments, one thing you can do is just click your cursor in the box with a number. Then you can use your arrow keys to just adjust by one pixel or percent or whatever. Something like that looks good. Actually I want this to come down around the bottom edge to. What I'm going to do is adjust the offset because the offset will move this whole line around the shape. If I bring this around like this, just right before it starts to turn, and then I need to adjust the start, something like that. Then let's duplicate this depth. I'm going to go into the trim paths and just move these numbers around to get the line where I want it. Actually let's hide the other depth, so we can see more clearly what we're working with. If you need to, you can use like fractions. At 45.5, actually, I guess I wanted to go the other way, 44.5. There we go. Now I'll close up these two depths and show them both. To make another line, I'm going to just duplicate this. First let me be really clear with my naming, so I know what's what. This is going to be depth, 1.1. This will be depth, 1.2. Then I'm going to duplicate both of these, bring them below. Then this one's going to be depth, 2.1 and depth, 2.2. Let me hide the depth one, so I can see more clearly what I'm working on. Then I'm going to go in to the repeater and bring the offset to something like 1.8. Now we have the two lines. Let's do the same thing with the other depth. Now we can show all of our depth. Let's repeat these depths one more time to get a third line. This time I'm going to set the offset to 2.8. Another thing that I can do is adjust the stroke width on each of these lines to make them look like these are going away from us. The one that's closest to the seven is going to be the thickest. I'm going to make this one 10. I'll keep the middle one at eight, and then I'll set the furthest one away to six. Now we just need to set up our shadow because of the seven. Then just duplicate the whole thing, drag it below, and rename it "shadow." I'm going to just make sure that the fill color is also that dark blue that I use for my shadows. Then I'm going to add the blur effect. I'm going go over to effects and presets and look for fast blue, and then drag that effect onto my shadow layer. I'll just adjust the blue radius to make it a soft shadow. This kind of subtle shadow makes it look like the seven is just floating above the page and a new light is coming from overhead. I'm going set my blur radius to five. Then I'm going to make the opacity like 50 percent. It's just a subtle effect. 23. Animate Number Seven: To animate the seven, I'm going to animate the path of the seven shape. I'm just going to go in, and first what I need to do is parent all of the paths on all of these depths to the path of the seven. That way, they'll all have the same shape even when I animate this path, to animate the shape of the seven. I'm just going to hit toggle on my keyword to open this up in full screen, so I have a little bit more space, and I'll just toggle all of these down. I'm looking for a path, and then I'm just gonna take this spiral pick whip and drag it up to the path of the main seven. I'm going to do that for every depth layer. Now you'll see if I set a key frame on the path to be at this position at two seconds, and then if I go back in time and animate this path and my path is selected, but you'll notice that nothing is showing up as selected on my composition, and that's just because this button got to be turned off. If that ever happens to you, it's this button right here toggle mass and shape path visibility. Now I can see my shape, so what I'm going to do is just adjust the handles on each of these corners to make the shape like bubble looking. I'm just going to go up to the Pen Tool and then I'm going to grab this Convert Vertex tool. I'm clicking and holding on the Pen Tool to get this little sub menu, and I want this little upside-down V shape. I'm just going click with this tool on the corners, and you can see it just made my handles straight across this anchor point, and it affects the whole shape of my seven by doing that. I'll just do that on each corner, and if you want to, you can go in and further adjust the anchor points. I'm just going to leave it like that for now, and then I'm going to go back down to zero seconds and then copy and paste this final key frame, and then I'm going to drag all of these anchor points in towards each other so that I have nothing basically I'm just collapsing my shape in on itself. At first I need to make sure that I'm using my Selection tool and not that Convert Vertex tool. I'm also going to draw out a guideline, so if you're not seeing your rulers, its command R, and then I'll drag out this guideline so I can just snap things into place really easily. I'm also going to hold down Shift to make sure things are moving in straight lines. Let's hide the shadow layer for now just because it's not animated yet and it's a little distracting. Now this is going to come out into this big balloon version of the seven and then come back into the seven, so it's almost like an overshoot animation. We don't want to see these offset lines when the seven is nothing, so what I'm going to do is animate these lines in. To do that, I'm going to go into the repeater, and set a key frame. I'm going do at one second, 10 frames for the number of copies to be at one, and then I'm going go back to say like 10 frames and make the number of copies zero. It seems like that wouldn't really work because there's no numbers in between one and zero. But actually after effects is going to go through all the decimal places, as you can see to animate this in. What that will look like is a fade, but you're not seeing that right now, and that's because of the layer order of these effects. I have my repeater and then my stroke. I need to actually have my stroke and then my repeater. This makes a big difference in how the repeater is repeating. It repeats everything above it. It's going to repeat my stroke and fade it in when the number of copies is increasing, if I have the repeater below the stroke. If you're not seeing it makes sure that your layer order looks like this. Now you can see that this top part of the seven, this first line that I set the key frames on is fading in,so that's the effect that I want all my other layers. I'm just going go through, make sure that I have the right order of effects on my depth layers, and then add the key frames to increase the number of copies from zero to one. I've done all that and let's see what we have now. All of the offset lines are fading in. One thing we can do to make this look a little bit more fluid and interesting is to have the animation on these offset lines, offset in time. What I'm going to do is just go up to the first depth, and under path, I'm going to toggle down next to the stopwatch with path, so now I can see the expression on this layer that parents this path to the main path of the seven. I'm going to add to this expression to offset the animation. I'm just going to click on this expression and then click after it so I can add to it, and I'm going to add dot value at, and then it's going to start guessing what I mean. I want value at time, make sure your capitalization is like this and that you have no spaces, and then I'm going to type in time minus 0.1. Then make sure you have that end parentheses there, and then you can click out. Make sure that your expression looks just like this, and then let's play that back. Remember this depth is this first line right here. If you look really carefully, you'll see that that animation is delayed by just a little bit, and that's the effect that we want to add to all of our layers, so let's just go in, do the same thing on this one, dot value at time, time minus 0.1. This one should be a little bit more obvious. See how this line isn't coming out from behind the seven until now, just a little bit delayed. Let's add another expression on these other layers, but we'll just increase the amount of time that it's delayed by, by a little bit so that we have each one of these delayed even more. I'm just going go in to depth two path, and let's make this one dot value at time, time minus 0.2, and same thing for this one, the second depth, and you can see that one's delayed even more. Then for the path three, let's delay this even more. Time minus 0.3. You can even copy and paste this whole expression to save time to do this on third depth. Now you can see that these fan out, and when I play back the animation, you'll see that each one is delayed a little bit more, so it gives it this nice fluid look. It'll also help if we add easing to our key frames. I'm just going to select all of these and use one of my presets. But remember, you can always do right-click easy ease, or just your graphic [inaudible]. Let's play this back, and we have this nice fluid animation, and all this took was one layer, which is pretty cool. Now we need to apply the same things on our shadow, and actually what I'm going to do is just duplicate this again, go over to my shadow, copy this blur, paste it onto my new shadow, which is now named eight. Delete the old shadow, name this one shadow, and drag it below. That way you don't have to copy all of these key frames, and I can just copy the effect, reapply it, and now we have the whole thing with the shadow. Don't forget to adjust the fill color on your shadow, and the opacity. 24. Animate Out Number Seven: To animate my seven out, I'm going to do the same thing as the animation in, but just in reverse, so I'm just going to hit "U" to all these key frames, and then copy them all, and paste them all at four seconds, and the reason that it works to paste all these key frames, and it doesn't create another layer is because all of these key frames are on the one layer, so that's one of the reasons why it's nice that I can get all this animation under one layer, so I'm also going to do the same thing with my shadow. I do need to copy these key frames, again, even though they're the same ones on my seven. Now I'm going to select all of these key frames, right-click, go to key frame assistant, time-reverse key frames. Now I just want to mirror image these key frames from the start key frames, so you can see this big block of key frames starts at 10 frames when it animates in, so at the end here I want to make it finish at 10 frames from the end, so I'll just drag these over, and same with these ones. Now let's play that back. One last thing I'm going to do really quick is just make sure that there's nothing at zero frames, so I'm just going to bring my layer one frame forward in time on both the shadow in the seven, and then I also want to make sure that it ends on nothing, and it looks like my layers are cut perfectly so that I end on nothing as well, and that's how I animated the seven out. 25. Set Up Number Eight: I've got my composition set up and my eight converted to a shape layer. I'm going to duplicate this eight and name this one depth, and I'm going to be making the depth on the separate layer and you'll see why in a little while. So I'm just going to go in and add a repeater, and let's color this repeater the darker blue and let's make 20 copies and make the position between the copies to two. Now we need to move this below the eight so we can see the eight. The next thing I want to work on is the shading on the eight. So I'm going to make some gradient shading. Let me show you in my final version. So I have like a lighter blue up here and then it feeds into a darker blue in the cracks of this eight and then also towards the bottom and then at the top of these cutout circles right here, it's as if there's a light in my scene that's coming from the top right, but I actually am not adding any lights. It's just the shading that's giving off this effect. So I'm going to draw out some rough shapes to make the gradient and then I'll use a mask to crop them into the depth of the eight. So I'm just going to go up to the pen tool and make sure nothing is selected and then start drawing out a shape that goes where this gradient is going to go. I'm going to have to adjust this little bit. I'm going to connect this point and this point. We don't need this fill, so let's just take that down. Then I'm going to go in to the shape and then I'm just going to delete the stroke and I'm actually going to delete the fill too. Then I'm going to go up to this Add button and choose gradient fill and just drag that underneath path so it's all within this one shape. So the first thing I'm going to do here is adjust the points of the gradient. So we have a start point and an end point and you can see that represented with this dot connected with a line to this other dot. So I'm just going to move these so that the gradient is more aligned on my shape, something like that. But I don't want my gradient to be black and white, I want it to be the colors that I'm using in my color palette. So I'm just going to go to edit gradient and where it's white, I want it to be this dark blue, and then where it's black, I want it to be this darkest blue, the even darker blue. Then I'll just hit okay. You can see that I have this gradient, but I need to make a mask to crop it within the depth. So I'm just going to duplicate the depth, bring it above my shape layer with the gradient, rename it and then I should rename this gradient. Then on my gradient, I am going to set the mask so I'm going to go to toggle switches/modes. Under Track Matte, I'll choose Alpha Matte "depth MASK", and there we go. Except for it's still coming over our eight and what we need to do to fix that is just drag this face of the eight over the depth mask. Now we have this area looking really good. Let's do that for all of the other pieces. Remember that the inner part of the eight is going to have the shadow at the top. So what I can do is just go into the gradient and I could actually just duplicate this shape because I already have my gradient already set up, then I can just move this path and put it where it needs to go for the second part of the gradient on the bottom loop of the eight. It looks like I'm going to need to add a point. So I'm just going to go up to the pen tool, click and hold and then choose the add vertex tool, and then click on my path. Go back to the selection tool by hitting V, and then drag that out. I might need to adjust my gradient on this one. So let me just go into the gradient and click the start point and you can see that my start and end point are still up here, so I just need to drag them over towards where they need to be. So something like that. I'm going to duplicate this shape again and then make the inside circle of the eight. Actually, I've too many anchor points here, I don't need them all and it'll just clean things up and make it a little easier later on if I delete some of these. So I'll delete those two. Then let's go in to the gradient just click on start point. So it shows this on my composition and then I'll move the start and endpoints, and I need actually flip these around because I want the top to be darker and then it fades like this. Now I'm going to duplicate the shape three and bring this up and then I'm going go into my gradient, adjust the start and end values. So that's looking pretty good. We've got all of our gradients on the eight, making it look really 3D. For the shadow, for this eight, I'm just going to do like a spotlight shadow. So I'll just use the shape tool and when I click and hold and go down to the ellipse tool and then just draw out a oval and let's make sure this is about the size of our eight. So I need to go even bigger. So I'm going to go in ellipse path and then size, and then just scale this in the x-direction. Maybe I wanted a little taller to and let's bring that down. We're going to center my anchor point. It's not super important that you do that, but I like to always have my anchor points centered. Let's make the capacity of this like straight 25 percent. That looks pretty good compared these colors. Maybe a little bit down. All. Let's name the shadow and just bring it to the bottom. With that, our eight is all set up and ready to animate. 26. Animate Number Eight: The first step in animating the eight is just to animate the path of the eight condensing into one line. I'm going to use my rulers and my guides to make a line in the center of my comp. If you don't see your rulers hit "Command R". Then from the ruler, you're going to drag out a guide layer right in the center of your comp. If you want to know the exact center, you can go up to title action safe with this little button right here, and then you can make sure your guide's right in the center. I'm going to go into the path of the eight and set some keyframe. I actually have three paths because I have this outer shape, and then the inner circle, and then the other inner circle. It looks like my path 3 is going to be the outer part of the eight. I'm just going to set a keyframe on all three of these paths at two seconds where my animation will we finished. I'm going to need to parent the path on these depth layers to the path that they correspond to on this main eight layer. I'm going to need to do that for the depth and the depth mask. I'll just go into full screen by hitting tilda. Then I'll go into the depth, go down, find the paths, and then parent path 1 to path 1 on the main eight, path 2, and part 3, and then I need to do the same thing on the mask. Then I'm going to go back to zero seconds and move these anchor points in towards my center line. I'm just going to hold down Shift to make sure that they stay horizontally aligned. I can actually turn on snap to guides to make it snap right to the center line. Then I'm going to drag these handles all the way in towards the center line as well. I'm going to do the same thing on the bottom, and then I'm going to do the same thing on the arrow part of the eight. These handles here, I'm just going to flatten into the center line. Now, the eight is basically disappeared. But you get this weird stripy, glitchy thing going on because of the depth. I'm going to actually animate the depth coming out. I'm going to go into my depth layer and go to the repeater, and then animate the number of copies to come in, in like two frames. I'm going to set a keyframe for 20 copies here, and then a keyframe for zeros' copies here. I need to also parent the depth mask to this number of copies so that it always has the same number of copies. I'm going to take, under depth mask, the number of copies parented to the depth number of copies. Now, we see basically nothing. If I hide my guide, you can see that there's a little bit of something remaining, but we'll fix that in a little while. For now, you can see that this grows out, and then as the path animation happens, it makes it look like the eight is turning. Which is cool because this is not actually 3D, but we're just making it look like it is. I'm actually going to increase my number of copies because I want this to be a little bit thicker. I'm going to go to 70. You can see the edge of my line is pretty jaggedy, and that's because you're starting to see those copies. What I can do is just go into the position and just set the position to something like one, one rather than two, and it makes it a lot smoother. But this part that's sticking out here is because the depth mask, it doesn't have that same position. Let's parent the Position to the position of the depth, and now I'll fix it. You can also notice that our gradient is getting all messed up, but we're going to fix that at the very end. Let's just make some keyframes on the position of this eight. I don't really like how it's at an angle here, so what I'm going to do is just position keyframe to be at 1, 0, so zero in the y direction, right here. Then I'm going to go forward in time and maybe about here, I'll make this 1, 1. That actually, is looking like too much too. Maybe I'll just go with 0.5, 0.5. Now it looks better. If you look at this closely, you can see that the eight looks like it's moving down because when the depth animates in, it's coming down. I want the eight to look like it's rotating on a point at the bottom. What I'm going to do is just animate the position of the eight, so eight accounts for that depth coming down. Where I have this keyframe on the position of the repeater, I'm going to set a keyframe on the actual eight, and this will be the final position. I also have the anchor point of my eight at the very bottom, so you can just use motion 3 or use the pen behind tool. Which is also Y on the keyboard to position your anchor point at the bottom of the eight. Before I set anymore keyframes, I also need to parent the depth, the gradient, and the depth mask to the eight, so that they all move together. Then I'm going to go back in time to about here and set another position keyframe. But I don't know exactly where I want this to be, so I'm going to use guides to help. I'm going to drag down a guide from the top, right at the bottom of this extrusion. That's always going to be the base of the eight. Then back here, at two frames, I want to drag the eight down so it sits on that guideline that I just made. This way, it's going to look like it's rotating on a point, like it's sitting on floor, right here. I'm going to add some overshoot to these paths animation. I'm going to copy and paste these final keyframes at one second. Then at one second, I will make the overshoot. I'm just going to expand this top cut out of the eight, by dragging these anchor points to make the circle bigger, and then same for the bottom. Then the main shape of the eight, I'm also going to make bigger. Something like that. I'll only just hide my guides. If we play this back, you can see the overshoot, but let's stagger these keyframes to make it more interesting. What I'm going to do is have the path three go first, and then I'll have the top circle of the outcome in maybe at 15 frames, and then let's drag this keyframe up as well. Then I'll do the same thing for the bottom circle, the O. But this one, I'll just offset by about let's see, let's put it right in between, something like that. Now let's look at what we have. Not bad, but I think this is a little bit slow to finish this part of the eight, the main part. That looks a little better. I also have been noticing that I have this little fragment here, so let me try to fix that. That's going to be on path two. It looks a lot better. Let's add easing to these keyframes. I'm just going to use the fast, slow preset here, and that makes it look even better. The next thing I'm going to do is animate the scale of the eight as it turns and opens. I'm just going to hit U and then S to bring up the scale property. Let's have it fully scaled in like how about where this position keyframe is on the depth. We'll set a key frame for a 100 and then I'll go back to zero. I'm going to set the Y scale to 50%. Just going to scale up and down. Let's check out what this looks like. Let's also give this some easing. I'm using that same fast, slow preset and check out if any of our other keyframes need easing. The position keyframes need easing and these two number of copies, that one it just happened so fast that I'm not going to worry about easing it. Let's look at what we have now. Let's also add some rotation on eight as it's coming up. I'm just going to go in and set a rotation key frame to be zero. No rotation at two frames, our final position, and then I'll go back in time. Let's make this rotated maybe nine. Then maybe at 15 frames we'll go back the other direction. Maybe negative eight. We're going to taper off the rotation as it gets closer to zero. Now let's go maybe six and then how about negative three? Let's give these keyframes some easy ease. Let's check out what we have. It looks pretty good. We can also go into the graph editor and just make sure that this curve is nice and smooth. It helps to look at the value graph and just make sure that this is nice and smooth and that it's tapering off. I think I'm happy with how it is for now. I might go back and adjust later. Now if you're anything like me, this gradient has really been bothering me because it's not in the right place and it looks really terrible, especially right there. Let's fix that. What I'm going to do is go into my gradient. At two seconds, I'm going to go into the paths of these shapes and set keyframes. What I'm going to need to do from here is a little bit tedious. I'm just going to have to look at where the eight is and where the gradient is and set keyframes to try to get it to line up better. I might end up putting a lot of keyframes to sound for this because there's no perfect way to do it. Let me just go in here and take shape one, which is this top part and just line up these shapes so that they fit into the crevice of this eight a little bit better. Make sure it's good at the top and the bottom. Let's go back even further. It's really messed up here, let's move these over. Move this over. Then here it's looking really bad again, let's set some more keyframes. Now let's watch this back really carefully and just make sure that it looks okay. I might need to set some more keyframes. Let's check one more time. I think that's going to do it. Looks good. Like I said, getting the gradient to line up with the eight is a little bit messy if you look at the keyframes, because you end up putting a lot of keyframes. But there's no perfect way to do it. Just make sure that you don't have any bad frames. Go through, watch very slowly. Just drag your playhead over the timeline and make sure that it's always looking okay. If you have to keyframe every single one of those frames, then you might have to keyframe every single one of those frames, but at least you know that it looks good. The next thing, once you get that all set up and it looks okay, you're happy with it. We can animate the shadow. I'm just going to set a scale and position keyframe on this shadow. Hit U to see both of those properties. That's at two seconds, and then go back in time. We'll just move the shadow along with the eight so that it's always looking like the eight is casting that shadow. On the eight let's just bring up the rotation property because when it rotates, that's probably when the shadow is going to need to move. It will only need to move this way a little bit and then here it's going to need to move back to the right. Then here it's going to need to move over this way. Probably also scale at this point. Then here it will probably be centered again. Now let's do the scale. The scale is probably going to be a 100 here. Probably even here. It's going to start shrinking here. Let's just drag that one over and then I'll shrink the scale a little bit, something like that. Then at zero, I'll just bring the scale down to zero as well. Let's ease these keyframes. These just have a easy ease on them. You can get away with just easy ease for these two. I think that looks pretty good. Let's just cut all of these layers right here so that the first frame is completely empty and then it will just come in like that. If you've gotten this far, that is awesome. I know this one is a long one. If you want to go one step further though, let me show you how to animate this twirly line. I'm going to just go back into my work in progress comp, and then close it up. I'm just going to draw out a path to animate this line on with the "Pen Tool." I'm just going to do something that sweeps around the eight, something like that, and obviously let's get rid of the fill. I'm going to set the stroke to 12, and let's show my colors again so that I can choose A different color, something like that, and then let me go in and just fix this path, it looks a little wonky, that looks better. I'm going to go in, and change the caps of this to round caps, and I can delete this fill because I'll never going to need that. Now, let's add trim paths, so, "Add" "Trim Paths" here and then I'll just set a key frame for this to finish animating, probably around here. We'll set the end key frame here and then back at zero, we'll set the "End" to be zero. This is going to animate any how I wanted to, except for that it's going over the eight, and I want it to go around the eight, so I need to make some masks. First, let's name this, and then close it up. Then to make this mask is going to be two parts to it. First, I'm just going to duplicate this "depth MASK" and we'll use that, so then on the twirly line under "Track Matte" I'm going to choose "Alpha Inverted Matte." This is going to make it so that anywhere where the eight depth mask is, is not going to be showing. But I want the line to go over the eight here, behind the eight here, and then over eight behind the eight, so that it looks like it's wrapping around it. What I need to do is go into my "depth MASK", and let's just show that for now. I want to make some masks within this mask. To get a new mask within this "depth MASK 2" layer, I'm going to hit "Command, Shift, N", and you can see that, that it has added this mask right here, and it's also created this orange box around my shape. Now, I can just go and adjust this mask. Then I'm going to drag this mask to the areas where I want the line to go under the eight. So I'm going to move this down about here, and then up here, and let's just turn off this mask here, in that way it will show that the line is now going behind the eight. Then also this top section, I want the line to go behind the eight, so I need to create a new mask. What I'm going to do is just duplicate this "Mask 1" and now I have "Mask 2", I can just drag it above, and position it right here. I'm going to want you to play this back, and make sure that the mask is working properly. But first, let's animate the start of this line so that the line animates out. I'm going to set a key frame on the "Start" to be a 100 percent at this end point, and then at zero, it's going to be zero. Now, you're not going to see anything because the start and end point of the line are always the same. But what I'm going to do is add easy on these key frames. The N value is going to go fast and then slow, and then the start value is going to go slow and then fast. If you don't have motion three, you can always do this in your Graph Editor. Let me just show you what the graph looks like. This is the speed graph, the pinkish, purplish line is the N value, and the orange is the start, and then if you look at the value graph, you can see why you actually can see this line here, but it starts off with nothing, and then ends with nothing. One last thing to do before I check to make sure all the masks of working, is to parent the rotation of the twirly line to the rotation of the eight. This way when the eight rotates, I won't have it hitting any of these lines, and making the mask look like they're not working properly. I'm going to first, make sure that the anchor point of the twirly line is at the bottom, and because that's where the eight rotates from, so I want the twirly line to rotate from around here as well. I just use my "Y Tool" or my "Pen Behind Tool" to drag this anchor point down. Now, I'm going to hit on the keyboard for rotation on the twirly line and the eight, and then just take this pick whip to parent the rotation of the twirly line to the rotation of the eight. Now, let's play this back and check to make sure everything's working properly. I got an issue right here, so I'm just going to go in and adjust the mask. I think that's all we had to fix. Now, if you want to add a second line to this twirly line, you can just go in, and I'm going to drag the trim paths into this shape, and then duplicate the shape. Then I can re-color this, and even change the stroke width. Then I'm going to go under "Transform Shape 2", and just take the Y position here and drag it down, so you can see that that's offsetting my two lines. I can also adjust the trim paths to make this line a little bit shorter. If I go into the Graph Editor, and just drag these, maybe something like that. Let's check this one more time. It looks like I have a little issue right there, so let's just make this figure. I think we've got everything, and if you've made it this far, awesome job, we've animated the eight. 27. Animate Out Number Eight: If you want to animate the 8 out the exact same way that it came in, you could certainly do that. But I tend to do things the hard way, and so I decided that I'm going to animate the 8 out the opposite way that it came in. It animates in as if it's turning like this, and then I wanted it to keep turning, it's like it's turning in a full circle almost, throughout this whole animation. I'll show you how to do it that way. At four seconds, I'm going to set a keyframe on the depth, and the repeaters position. Then almost to the end like two frames from the end, I'm going to set the position to be negative one and zero. This is the opposite way as it was in the beginning. Then some of these keyframes I can copy over, I'm just going to make the number of copies decrease here at the end, from 70 down to zero, my layer ended, just drag that longer. Then on the 8, I'm going to copy all of these keyframes, and paste them. Then I'm going to right-click "Keyframe Assistant", "Time Reverse Keyframes". Now I'm going to need to mirror image all of these keyframes, the first thing in is going to be the last thing out. First my scale keyframes, I'm going to drag to the end, this position keyframe, I'm going to drag to almost the end. These path keyframes, I'm going to drag to the end. These path keyframes need to move this way, and these path keyframes are actually good right where they are. Let's play this back and see how far we're off. It's not so bad, but I want to adjust to a couple of things. I'm just going to bring all of the path animations up to four seconds. I'm going to delete those overshoot keyframes, these middle ones. I want the animation on the inner circles to go first, the top path is the top circle and then the second path is going to be offset a little bit. That's the bottom circle. Then the final path is going to be offset even more, and that the main 8 shape. Now let's see what this looks like. It's not bad, but I need to do a few more things, one of those is the shadow. I need to copy all of these keyframes at four seconds, and then time reverse them and mirror-image them. These ones are going to be the last ones out because they were the first ones in. Now my shadow should line up, looks pretty good. Also that gradient needs to be fixed, we just go into the gradient, hit "U" to see all these keyframes. I'm just going to set keyframes here at four for the current state, and then I'm going to need to set new keyframes. I'm not going to be able to copy and paste to reuse these ones. Let's start by setting some keyframes here. The inner circles might not need any keyframes, they might be okay. But these other shapes are definitely going to need some adjustment. That's more keyframes here, and let's just play this back and make sure we don't need to set any other keyframes. The gradients on the inner circles, they're starting to move before I need them to, so lets just move these two start keyframes over. These ones are not moving quick enough, see if we can just move these keyframes over this way. Now they're moving too fast, let's move these ones this way. I think that's working. Let's just close this up and watch the whole thing. Now let's work on the trolley line. At three seconds in 29 frames, I'm going to set a scale keyframe on this trolley line. Then at four seconds, I'm going to set a keyframe for this to be flipped. I'm going to unconstrain these proportions and then just do negative 100 in the X. When that's done you just flip it horizontally. Then I'm going to grab all of my other keyframes, copy and paste them. Then keyframe assistant, time reverse keyframes. Now let's just double-check that the mass are working. I have an issue right here, I'm going to toggle down and go into my Mask, and just set a keyframe at four seconds for these Mask paths to be in this position because those were working at the beginning animation, I don't want to mess them up. Now where this is messed up, I'll just set a new keyframe, bring that down. We can actually just drag this one back to make sure that it's going to be in place in time. I've also got some issues over here, let's just make this one bigger. I'll actually just replace this keyframe. I think I got everything. Let's close this up and watch back or whole crazy 8 animation. 28. Set Up Number Nine: If you've been following along in order, then we are on the last example. So you already know that I've got my composition set up and my "9" is converted into a shape layer. So the first thing I'm going to do is duplicate this 9 to make the depth. I'm making it on a separate layer for this one. Then I'm going to go in and select the "9", hit "Add", Repeater. Then let's make the fill color of this, the dark blue as always, and go into the Repeater, make the copies 20, and the Transform Repeater Position will be 2, 2. Then let's close this one up and bring it below the 9. Then I'm going to make the outline around the nine. I'm also going to do this on a separate layer. Everything needs to be on a separate layer for when we do that split with the accordion look. So I'll just duplicate this nine, name it Outline. Then we'll make it have a stroke instead of a fill so we can delete the fill, go up to "Add", Stroke and make sure that's in the 9. Then we'll make this the lightest blue. I'm going to make this 12 and also make the cap, a Round Cap through when we animate this with trim paths, might as well do a Round join 2, just to make it consistent. Then we can close that one up. All right, so now I'm going to make the outline have some depth to it. So I'm going to just duplicate this outline. Again, the reason why I'm making this on a separate layer is because when we do that accordion effect, that split effect, I'm going to need everything to be on it's own layer. You could just put it with the outline if you weren't going to do something like that. So then we'll name this outline depth and make sure it's below the outline. Then go in, "Add", Repeater. Let's make the number of copies, 5. This isn't going to be as thick as the depth on the nine. Then under Transform Repeater, I'll set the position to 2, 2. Let's recolor this. I'm going to choose this bluish tealish. So we have a little issue here, which is that the depth on the outline that we just created is showing on the outside of the 9, right here and right here, and right here. So I'm just going to use a mask to mask those sections out. I'll duplicate the 9, and bring it above the outline depth. Then let's name this layer, Outline Depth Mask. Then let's take the outline depth under Track Matte, go to Alpha Matte. Now we only see the outline depth on the inside of the 9, which makes it look more 3D and more realistic. Another thing we can add is a shadow on this outline. So the outline is 3D. It's sticking up from the face of the 9. So it would be casting a shadow as well. My shadow is going to be cast as if the light is in the upper right. So let's make that shadow now. I'm going to make the shadow within the outline depth layer. What I'm going to do is duplicate this 9, which is my outlines depth, and then bring it below. Let's name this one shadow. We could also name this one depth to be really clear. Then in the shadow one I'm going to change the stroke color to the dark blue. Then I'm going to close that up. Then under Repeater, and then under Transform Repeater, I'm going to make the position negative 2 in the x and then keep it at two in the y. Now you can see that that shadow is sticking out right here. I'm also going to change the opacity under Transform Shadow. I'm going to set the opacity to 50, so something like that. Now the last thing to set up this 9 is just to make the shadow on the entire 9. So I'm going to duplicate the depth. Let's name this shadow. So then we need to position this shadow at the base of the 9, so where the extrusion is touching the page. So I'm just going to go in and actually just turn off the visibility on my Repeater with this little eyeball. That way I can easily see what's the shape of the nine and what's not, what's the extrusion? I'm just going to bring that, there looks good. Then I'll turn back on my Repeater. Then I'm going to go into the repeater and set under Transform Repeater, the position to negative 2 in the x. Then let's set the opacity on this to 25 percent. If you want to, you can also make the shadow a little bit longer. So I'll just go in to the Repeater and set the number of copies to 30 and now I have a longer shadow. So that's the setup for the 9. 29. Animate Number Nine: The first thing we'll setup when animating the nine is just the trim passed in the animate, these different shapes. Back in my work-in-progress comp, I'm going to go into the outline and then add Trim Paths. Then we can set key frames on the n value. I'm going to make this take 25 frames and then the n value will be at 125 frames, and then at zero, the n value will be zero. Then I'm also going to adjust the offset because right now this just starts and then the starting point of the line is just static, and I wanted to move because that'll make it look a little bit more dynamic and fun. Let's just set the offset to negative 50. Set that key frame, and then 60. I just know these numbers because I've already done this, but normally I would just play around with it and see what looks good. Then I want my inner circle and my outer part of the nine to be going in opposite directions, and it looks like that's already happening. That's good. If that wasn't the case, you could just go in and you have these two paths on the nine, and it looks like path one is the inner circle, path two is the outside of the nine, and if you wanted one to be going in the opposite direction that it's currently going, you can just use these buttons right here to reverse the path direction. All right, so we've got the outline setup, now let's just do the same thing on the outline depth. What I can do is just copy these trim paths in, paste them on the outline depth, and let's see if that works. It does, but they're going in the same direction at the same time. What I'm going to do is just go into the path, go into the depth, and then let's change the path directions on these, so we'll switch both of them. Now that makes it so that these depth lines are not lined up with the outlines. Now we'll animate on and you can see them both. On the outline depth, I'm also going to animate the number of copies on the repeater because when the trim path animation is happening, I just want to have one copy. I'm just going to set a key frame for it to have one copy right here where the trim path animation ends. That way the whole beginning up until the trim path animation ends, it will just have the one copy. Then you can't see that right now, but remember, I'm going to split these out to make that accordion look, so you will see it later. I'm going to have all the layers be close on top of each other at zero seconds, and then they're going to be all spread apart at 25 frames, and then they're going to come back together at one second 10 frames. This is where I'll increase the number of copies to five. It would really help if I click the stopwatch to set key frames. At 25 we want this to be one. All right, then that will animate n. We also need to animate the shadow n, so let's do the same thing on the shadow. We'll go into the repeater, number of copies is going to be five at 110, and at 25 frames it will be one. I'm also going to innovate the opacity of the shadow because I don't want it to show up when I have the layer split out. So I'll just animate the opacity from 50, where all the letters come together, which is at 110, and then right here where the trim path animation just finishing, this will be zero. You'll be able to see these things a lot better when everything is split apart. All right. Let's close this up. These ones are set ready to go. The other thing that we need to do is animate the nine and the nine depth n. But I'm going to need to draw a path that just a stroke that's in the shape of this nine so that I can animate in the nine with trim paths. So I'm just going to go up to my pen tool first, I just so the nine, so it's easy to see what we're working with. Then I'll grab the pen tool and just draw out the shape of the nine. I'm going to draw this out in the way that I want it to be animated. I want to start here and go around like that. Then let's increase the stroke width on this, so it fills the whole nine. I'm also going to set the caps to round caps, and then close that up. Then let's name this nine right on, and let's un-solo this. What I'm going to do is bring this below the nine and then make the nine a mask, so alpha matte nine, and now that's obviously changed its color because this is the wrong color. Let's recall this. Then we need to add trim path to this right on nine, so add trim path, and then let's set a key frame at 25 frames for the n value to be at 100 percent and back at zero, we'll animate this down to zero. Now this nine is writing on. Now the two things left that are animating on are the depth and the shadow. For the depth, I'm going to animate the depth coming out. I'm going to go in down to the repeater, will set key frames on the number of copies. At 25 frames, I'll set this to have one copy, and then at one second 10 frames, I will set this to have 20 copies. Then that's just going to pop out like that. If you look really carefully when this is animating from 1-20, at the places where the number is a decimal point, you can see faded copy right here that's animating in. So to fix that problem, make it just two whole numbers as it animates between one and 20. I'm just going to option click on the stopwatch and then type in "math.around(value). Make sure you have your expression looking just like that. Then you can see that it's fixed that issue. It's only going to do whole number increments. The other thing we need to do is animate this depth n with the trim path animation. What I'm going to do is close up this depth and just duplicate my nine and my right on, and then let's drag that right above the depth. I'll just name this 9.2. For this right on nine, I'm going to make it the same color as the depth. Then I'm also going to make the path go in the opposite direction. But we're not going to be able to see this right on nine right now because there's still the depth layer right underneath it. I need to cut this depth layer at 25 frames. Now, you can see you have to look carefully because everything is on top of each other. But now you can see that this ride on nine for the depth color is animating in and it's animating in the opposite direction of the main nine. Now we need to work on the shadow. I'm just going to go in and set a keyframe at 25 frames for the number of copies on the shadow to be zero and that makes it completely disappear. Then I'll make another keyframe at two seconds to have the number of copies to be 30. This will just animate out like that. I can also make this fade in as many they are if I want to. I'll just go to the opacity, set the opacity to be 25 percent at the end and at the beginning it will be zero. Now we just need to do that splitting effect. How I'm going to do this is with the Skew property. First, I'm just going to turn on the visibility and solo this just to show you what the skew does. So I'm going to toggle down, go into contents, into the nine and then where you see transform nine. This is important that you get the right one because there are two transforms and we want the one that is nested under the shape. It should be transformed colon and then nine or whatever you've named your shape here. I'm going to toggle down and then go to the skew. At two seconds I want the skew to be zero. That's what it is now, it looks normal, perfect. Then at 25 frames all the layers are going to be split apart. I want the skew to be like 15.. You can see what that does is like makes it look like it's turned in 3D space so It looks like this side of the nine is closer to us now and this is going back away from us. Even though this isn't a 3D layer, it just an optical illusion with the skew. Make sure that your skew axis is set to 90 degrees because changing this will change how your letter skews. You can use a different value if you want obviously, but I'm using 90. Then I want all of my other layers to skew just the same exact way as this nine. What I'm going to do is parent all of the other layers skew properties to the Skew property of this nine. I'm also going to make sure that this Skew axis is also 90. I'm just going to hit tilde on the keyword to see my timeline full screen. We can go into my outline first, into the nine, transform nine and then let's take this skew parent it to this skew, take the skew axis parent it to this skew axis. That one's done so we'll close it up. Then let's do the same thing on all of the other layers. Remember if you have layers that have more than one shape, you're going to have to do it for each shape because this transform is unique to each shape within a layer. Sorry, I know that was tedious. In the future, just something to think about is if you know you're going to do a lot of duplicating of layers you might want to connect them before, to like parent it before you start duplicating and then all your duplicates will already be linked up. Now we can see that we have all of our layers skewed, but they're still all on top of each other so we need to split them apart. We're going to be animating the position for that. But before we start animating the position of these layers, let's point a few things. We want the outline depth mask to always follow the outline depth. We want the nine right on top always follow the nine. We want the nine right on two, to always follow this 9.2. Now you want the shadow to follow the depth. Now we can set position keyframes to make these layers split apart. I'm going to start with the outline layer and at zero frames I want everything to be all pushed together. I'm going to set a position keyframe for this position at zero frames and then at 25, that's when everything's going to be all split apart. I'm going to offset the outline by a 100 pixels in both the X and Y, and then the outline depth by 50. What I'm going to do is go in and make this 442 and then 641. Then at one second, ten frames, I want everything to come back together again so I'll just copy and paste this keyframe from zero frames. Let's do the same thing on the outline depth. At zero frames, it's gong to be at this position, at 25 frames, we're going to offset it by 50 pixels. I'm just going to go in, click on the number, hit my arrow key to the right, and then I can hit minus 50, that way I can just have aftereffects do the math for me. Then all do the same thing, but do plus 50 in the y and then at 110 will copy Starkey frame. Now we also need to offset the depth but since the depth is not showing here, I need to actually work on the right on effect. I'm going to do the position on the 9.2 layer, which is the mass of the right on, because the right on is pointed to the mask. I'm just going to hit "P" on the keyboard, go to zero frames, set the position to be here. Then when it's all split apart, this is going to be plus 50 in the X and then minus 50 in the Y so it's going back behind the nine. Then back at ten frames, I'm going to set the depth back to the star. But the depth is coming in here. So I need to add position keyframes to the depth or I can just parent the depth to this 9.2 layer. Now let's see if that worked. That looks good. But I need to hide this main nine layer because it's acting as a mask and that way we'll see the trim path animation animated. Then there's one other detail that I want to fix, and that's this second layer, this outline deaf is a really small stroke. That's because we're only seeing half of the stroke because our mask is cutting off half of that stroke. What I'm going to do is go into the outline depth mask and then just add a stroke and set this to the same size as on the outline depth, which is 12 and that's fixed that problem. The last thing I need to do is add easing to my keyframes. I'm just going to hit to you to see all my keyframes. First, I'm just going to select everything in that easy easing. Then everything between zero and 110, I'm going to select and add the first, slow preset. If you were doing this in your graph editor, you would just want to drag your handles so that you make this shape in the graph. Then everything that goes from 25 to two seconds, I'm going to select. Then to these ones I'm going to add the really slow and then really fast preset. If you were doing this in your graph editor, you would just want to pull the left handle all the way to the right so that you get a graph that looks like this. Now let's play that back and see how it all looks. This animation that we've added at the end, where it just has the slow, and then really fast, that's giving it that snapping look we're just like is drifting and then it snaps into place. Now there's just one more thing. If you look right here, when all the letters are collapsed back on itself, this nine looks distorted. That's because of the way that the depth is. I'm going to go into the depth and then toggle down, go into the repeater and then under transform repeater, I'm going to set a keyframe for the position to be at 2-2 at two seconds. Then at 25 frames, I'm going to set this depth to be negative two. That way the depth will start by pointing up. Like right here, where they all come together, the nine looks like more legitimate 3D shape rather than that distorted thing that we were having before. But also let's add easing to these key frames. This is going from 25 to two. I'm going to add the very slow, very fast preset to that, and that even makes it look better. I need to do that same exact thing though on this outlines depth. I'm going to go into the outlines depth and find the repeater position. Then I'm going to parent this repeater position on the outline depth to the repeater position on the main depth. That way it'll do the same exact thing. Now let's play back the final animation of our nine. 30. Animate Out Number Nine: To animate the nine out, I'm first going to collapse it all into one flat shape and then I'm going to animate the trim paths out. So first, let's collapse into one chip. So I am going to go into the depth first, then let's go into the repeater and the number of copies instead of keyframe here for the copies to be 20. Then I am going to go to four seconds, 20 frames, and set the number of copies to zero. Let's do the same thing on the shadow. Number of copies is going to be 30 at four seconds and then zero at four seconds, 20 frames. You can see that this is shrinking the depth up to the letter and I want it to be going the other direction, so I wanted to be looking like it's collapsing into the page and where it's touching the page is at the bottom of this depth, so it needs to be moving the other way. What I need to do is just animate the position. I am going to go into the position on this depth, set a keyframe, and then go to four second 20 frames and I need to move it to where the depth was. I am going to bring up my rulers by hitting command R. Then I'm going to drag out some guidelines from my rulers, where the depth ends. Then one here at the bottom. Now I know where I need to move the nine to. I'm just going to bring the depth down to these guidelines. This should probably be a whole number, so let's just go for 38 because it's like almost in between these numbers,then let us do the same thing for the shadow. The shadow actually needs to be going to zero because it's parented to the depth and we want it to exactly line up with the depth. That is looking good except for you can actually see the depth really going away,and that's because we need to animate the face of the nine going towards the depth, so it is going into the page, down to the bottom right. Let us set a position keyframe on the nine, then at four seconds, 20 frames will bring this down. So this needs to be above 580. Now we need to do the same thing on the outline and on the outline depth.We are still seeing this dark blue, looks like depth behind the nine and that is because of this nine right on and this was actually just for the ride on effect to animate the depth in,so we don't need it after this point when the depth comes in.I am just going to cut the layer right there, then here,it won't be on my way. The next thing I'm going to do is animate the number of copies on the depth outline, to be going down so that animates out.We will just set the number of copies for both of these two copies.One is for the outline depth and one is for the shadow, then here I will set these down to zero. Let that easing on all these keyframes we've just set,so I am going to hit 'U' on my keyboard,until I see all my keyframes just to make sure that I get them all.Then I will select all of these, then I'm going to apply the slow, fast preset.Let us take a look at that, looks good. From here, let's animate everything out with trim paths.I am just going to go in to all the layers that have trimmed paths and set an end key frame, then I will go to six seconds and then bring these en queue friends down to 0. If you look at this, you'll see that not all of our term path animations are showing up in knots because I cut some of the layers so let us check out which ones are cut.This right onto is cut,so I am just going to need to duplicate this right on two and the mask. Then it's automatically on a piece that is on top, then what I can do is just drag this layer so it covers the whole timeline and then just cut it again at my play head,so now, you'll see that animation out,but this is not in the right position now, so we need to move it into the right position. I am going to move the 9.3 layer, the mask layer, into place because the right on his parented to that layer. That looks good and I can actually just delete any other key-frames. I have loaded for the position. If I wanted, I could trim it here so that I don't get confused about what it's doing later and now we have this animation out. Now need to get that right on effect back on our depth mask. So, we animated the number of copies down to 0. That's why we're not seeing anything.Let us just enumerate the number of copies down to one instead of 0,and now you will see that in animation but we want to keep the number of copies 0 on the shadow because we don't need to see that here. Now let's play this whole thing back and that's the complete animation, including the animation out of the nine. 31. Bonus: Copy Effects Onto Other Letters: What if you've created an effect on one of your letters or numbers, and you want to make another letter or number, like to spell a word with the same exact effect. Do you have to do all the work again on a new letter? Well, maybe not. In this video, I'm going to show you a little shortcut. Have a new composition with a zero, and this is converted into a shape layer. What I'm going to do is go into my nine, which is the style that I want to copy onto my zero. I'm just going to select all of these layers, starting with the top layer, and then selecting down to the bottom layer. Then copy these layers, and paste them into the zero. Now the order that you selected the layers does matter when you paste them. That's why I started at the top, and then went to the bottom. The next thing we need to do is go into the zero. It's made two paths, so this path and this path and it's also added this merge paths, which usually makes like cutouts of shapes. Like it would make sense that this zero has one shape, that's the outside and then the inside is a cutout. But actually the merge path is just showing merge. If we delete it, nothing happens. It's just the two paths work normal still. I don't know why After Effects decided to add that. What I'm going to do is just copy these two paths, "Command C" and then let's go up to our main nine layer, which is hidden right now because it's a mask. But let's just make it visible, and turn on the solo. Then I'm going to go to where this is all animated on, so I know it everything is finished animating at two seconds. Then I'm going to toggle down, and go into the nine and then just paste those two paths from the O. For some reason it's assigned to paste them way up here in the sky. Let's just drag them down holding "Shift" to make sure that they stay aligned. That looks about right to me, and then we can just move them above the fill so that they'll be filled in. Now we have this wonky shape, but let's just delete path one and path two because those make up the nine and we don't need that anymore. Now we have our zero. Let's un-solo this, and turn off the visibility. It didn't fix everything, but we're getting there. You can see that that O has all those key frames, that the nine had. The next step is parenting some of these other paths that make the shape of a nine to these paths that make a shape of a zero. I can just go into the outline depth, toggle down, find the path on the depth. In path one here, I'm just going to parent to path three. You can see that that already has changed that. Then path two on the depth, I'm just going to parent what is named path four. You can see that that's made that line depth, the shape of the zero. We also need to do that with the shadow, and with the outline. We're getting closer, let's do the depth, so I close that one. Let's also do the shadow. I also need to parent some of the masks for these trim path animations to the shape of the nine, so let's do that now. Okay, we should have everything parented that needs to be parented. The last thing to do is just update those trimmed paths. I'm going to go into the write on effect on this first nine. Then just with my shape selected, I can either adjust the anchor points, since nine and zero are close in shape, I could just move these around. Or if you want to, you can just delete this path, and draw a whole new path. But it's going to be hard to draw when it's all skewed at this angle. Let's just go to two seconds where everything's nice and flat, and then we'll show the shape of the nine and solo it and then also solo the write on two, and let's drag this layer out just temporarily so we can see it. I'm just going to delete this path and redraw a new path. Since I'm working with a zero here, I can actually use the ellipse tool to draw this out. If you're not using a shape like the zero, you can just draw it with the pen tool. But I'm going to use the ellipse tool, so click and hold the rectangle tool to get to the ellipse tool. Then just draw out an ellipse, and drag that into the center of the zero, and I'm going to need to adjust the sizing. I think that looks pretty good, but if you realize that your shape wasn't a perfect ellipse, or a circle, or rectangle, or whatever. What you can do is just right-click on the ellipse path, and do a convert to Bezier path, and that way you will have access to the path and you can adjust the anchor points. What I'm going to do is just copy this path into the shape one, and drag it to the top. Then I can just delete this ellipse one, because I know that this has my stroke and everything I need. Let's make sure that the trim path animation is playing correctly. You just need to un-solo this nine that's on top of this layer, and that looks good. Let's un-solo this, and then let's parent the path of the other write ons, to this path that we just made, that's actually this shape of the zero. Then we need to turn off the visibility on this nine layer, and also on the original zero layer. Let's trim this nine write on layer that we extended, back to where it belongs. Now we should be ready to play this back. That looks good, but I'm noticing one little issue right here. Something is going on with the mask of the outline depth. I'm going to go to that line depth mask and yes. I forgot to parent the path to the path of the nine which is now in a shape of zero, so I should really go in and rename all these layers. But let's just go in right now, and go down to the paths, and then parent these. That's fixed that issue. Let's check. Cool, looks good. That was a pretty quick way considering all the work it took to make the first effect on the nine, to get the zero looking exactly like the nine. 32. Bonus: Responsive Keyframes: If you're super observant, you might have noticed that when I flip back to my finished animations, I have these blue bars across parts of the animation. In this video, I'm going to show you what those are and how they can be useful. What if you are using your letters or numbers in another composition or even reusing them in multiple compositions to spell out different words. You might want the animation to last a different amount of time. Say I have my nine and I put it in a new comp, and then I want it to animate in. Then I want it to stick around just being the nine for more than these two seconds because something else is happening in my comp and I need this to stay here. But then I wanted to animate out, say at like 10 seconds. How can I do that without going into the actual nine composition and adjusting the key frames. What if I had multiple copies of this nine composition in this comp or within multiple different compositions? I wanted the nine to animate it at the same time, but then I want one of them to stick around before animating out. The other one animates out sooner. The hard way to do this would be to duplicate the nine in the project panel, go into the duplicate and adjust the key frame so that they animate out later in time. But then you're going to have multiple versions of the nine and pretty quickly things can get pretty messy. There's actually a better way. What you can do is use protective regions. You could also think of it kind of like responsive key frames. I'm going to go into my nine composition. On the far right of your timeline, you have this little icon and that's a marker. If you drag that onto your timeline, you can kind of keep notes on your timeline. If you wanted to mark something like this animates in here, you could go in, double-click the marker and add your notes here, and it would show up on your timeline. What I'm going to do is just call this in, and that's where my animation starts animating in. Then I'm going to make the duration take two seconds because that's how long the animation in takes. I'm also going to check this button right here that says protected region. That's going to make that nice blue bar. I'm going to do the same thing at the end of my animation. I'm going to drag out a marker at four seconds, double-click, [inaudible] out, make this last two seconds and check the protected region button and hit OK. Now when I go back into my comp that I just made a second ago, it's called protected regions. It looks like nothing has changed. What we need to do is select these two compositions, go up to layer, markers, and then up these markers from source. Now we can’t see all protected regions that we had inside our compositions, but we can see them outside our compositions. Now what we can do is stretch or shrink the layer and it's going to update the length of time in-between these two protected regions. The animation in and out won't be affected. but the time that it sticks around on screen will be either shorten or lengthen, depending on which way we drag the layer. Let's play this back and see what it looks like. Pretty cool. If you want to look at what after-effects is doing behind the scenes, if you click this little button down here, on this top layer that I've shrunk, you can see that the stretch is set to 82 percent and on this one it set to a 100 percent. I can also stretch it so if I make my composition longer, I can take the second layer and stretch it out. Now the time that the nine just sits around between the inner and outer animations is going to be longer. It's stretched. But the animation out still happened as usual just later in time. This is a great way to re-use your letters or numbers in the same composition or in different compositions, but still be able to adjust the timing of when the animation in and out happens. Super cool stuff for after-effects nerds like us. 33. What's Next: Thanks so much for watching. I hope you've learned a lot, sharpen those After Effects skills and are having fun exploring different ways to make 3D looking animated letters. I'm excited to see what you create, so make sure you post your project in the class projects and if there's anything that you struggled with or want specific feedback on, please let me know so I can help. If you post your work on Instagram, tag me at explanimated that so I can see it there. Then click on my name either above or below this video to go to my profile, where you can see other classes that I'm teaching on Skillshare and also find links to connect with me on social media. Also, while you're there, be sure to follow me on Skillshare. You'll be the first to know it when I have a new class for you. Until next time, happy animating.