Futuristic HUD Animations in After Effects

1. Introduction: Hi, I'm Sam Deseo professional and award winning video editor and motion graphics artist I've put together. Of course, that breaks down the techniques used to create a futuristic hut, animations that are used in the major blockbusters such as Iron Man, Star Wars, Hunger Games or really any other action movie. Now, in a comprehensive class with over two hours of educational content, I'll walk you through how to make an animation just like this, and we'll do it all in after no third party plug ins, no pre made elements that could drag and drop. But you can't actually customize. We'll be making everything from scratch, and by the end of the course, you'll be able to know exactly how to design any style hut animations for yourself. So here's some of the specific things that we're gonna be going over. I'll show you how to take a boring shape and turn it into something visually interesting. We'll also be talking about simple expressions and how a small piece of code can save you hours of animating time. I'll also be talking about adding cameras and taking flat objects into a three D environment and creating that wow factor with a couple style izing tricks and techniques. So this classes for you of your semi familiar with after effects, but you're ready to learn a really high demand skill within after effects. Thank you so much for your interest in the future. HUD animations within after Effects I'm so excited for this course because once you dive in , once you learn the techniques of some of the basic shapes and basic movements, the limits is basically your imagination. There there really is no limit to what you could do. So if you're interested, go ahead and hit that roll button and we will see you inside. 2. Class Project: So in this class we're gonna be making HUD animations, and I encourage you to try something a little bit different than what I'm making. Of course, you can just make a copy of what I'm making. Your definitely allowed to do that. The beauty with Hud animations is they can be very random. The point is to kind of just make them look busy, like there's a lot of data. There's a lot going on. You will most likely get the look that you're going for. So really, you could put this number stuff over here or these bars down here or this bar over here or even not do such a main circle thing. But more make this one this element prominent, you know, whatever. But I encourage you to try new things, something that's a little bit different than what I have here. And throughout the course, I'm gonna be asking you to post screenshots of what you've made. And of course, I would love to see your final product as well 3. Main Circle HUD: Part 1: All right, so let's get started by making just the main circle. So this is, like, the main thing that I want to make right now. So I'm going to delete my composition and footage here, and I'm just want to start with a clean slate. So I'm gonna add a new composition by the create new composition button. Click that and we're gonna make this 10 80 by 10. 80. So we're gonna make this a perfect square, and we're gonna fit our circle animation within that square. And I'm gonna make this about a minute. It doesn't need to be that long, but I want to make sure that I have enough room to animate and they can always trim down if I need to. So I'm gonna call this main circle element. All right, so here's our canvas. So I'm gonna come up to the top here and hit our shapes tool and click and drag down to hit the Ellipse stool. So now I have the Ellipse tool selected, and I'm going to go to this button right here and turn on title and safe action. So that kind of tells me where the title in action safe areas are, and I'm gonna fit this to the window here. But it kind of also tells me where the center of this is now. I'm obviously not gonna be dead on, but I want to make this circle be right in the center. So I'm going to try to make it in the center before we do anything else. So I'm gonna start in the center and click and drag out. Now, when I hold command or control command on a Mac and control on a PC, you can see it starts scaling from the center now also going to hit shift, and that makes it a perfect circle. So the main thing I want to make first is the outside dashes. So I'm going to scale it up to about this size. So we'll go up to fill and hit the actual word, Phil, and we will say I don't want any fill in this, so I'll hit. Okay, And we will go up to my stroke and kind of increase the strokes. You can just click and drag on the stroke, so I kind of want to make it. We'll go with, like, 40 ish All right. So what I want to do is kind of make this a dash to circle and real quick, I'm going to add in the final animation again just so I can point things out in reference it So this is what I'm making right here, this dashed circle. So first things first, we need to make this actually dashed, and then we can kind of take out those chunks. So if it's not open already, you want to go to shape layer one and open this up with the arrow and then under contents. Open that up and then you see your lips. Open that up and then you want to go to stroke and open that up. So now we scroll down and we see dashes. So if I click once, you can see that we have dashes starting. But if we click again, it will bring our dashes. And we can now control the amount of gap in between each dash So the dash is one will give us the width of the dash. But then the gap obviously will control the gap. So the dashes I probably want to be around. We'll just say 100 and then the gaps. We don't want to big, so let's just bring it down to about their 27 ish. But this thing to also look at is this top eso I'm scrolling in and that's what zooms in. And then if I hit space and click and drag, that's what moves around my composition here. But we want to look at the top. And when we start scrolling on our gap and adjusting the gap size that you can see what's happening up here at the top, it can make a much longer lines. We want to make that look natural. And I think I headed on 27. So yeah, that looks pretty close to the rest of the gap. So you want to keep that in mind so it doesn't look like this top one. This top dashes much longer than the other one, because that looks a little unnatural. So I'll go ahead and fit to the window again. All right, so now what we want to do is kind of cut those chunks out, as you can see in our original one, where this one is kind of cut out in this one and this one. So we'll go back into her main element and what we want to do is come up to our rectangle tools. So I'm clicking and dragging on this tool to select it. And what we want to do is kind of make rectangles that cover up some of these. So I'm gonna click and drag to make a rectangle. It doesn't need to be a perfect rectangle or anything. We just need to cover up. I don't want to stroke, So I'm gonna pull that all the way down and then click here and add a fill. It doesn't matter what color. Let's make it red, so we can easily see it. So now it's covering up here on this corner and covering up here. It's going to cut that off. We don't want to do that. So we'll go up to the rotate tool and rotate this thing right here. So it only covers up one of them, so I'll scale this up just a little bit. So one thing that I kind of have a pet peeve about is when my anchor point is not in the center of the shape. So what? I'll do is I'll go up to this tool here. I like to hit. Why on my keyboard to select that and I will click and drag bring into the middle and I hit command or control on the keyboard that snaps into place there. So it's snap since in the middle. All right, so we want to duplicate this and make a couple of these going around this circle here. So I'm gonna click the square and hit, Enter and call it, um, mask square one. Now, if I duplicate this by doing commander control, de or you can go to edit and duplicate. Now we have mask or two, and I'm going to get my selection tool and pull this to any other square. So I'm gonna pull this up to this one, and I'm gonna do this a couple more times, so I'm going to do command d to duplicate. And now I'll duplicate one more time and move it over to this side, and I could go symmetrical. So it's like each corner is getting something, but I don't want it to look so formal or so polished. I wanted to kind of look random. Um, so I'll put it on one of these. Let's just put it right here. I'm so hit W to rotate, rotate this guy a little bit, had V to select and move this just in the place. All right, so I'll fit toe window again. So now what I want to do is, um, pre compose or basically group all of these square layers together. So I'm gonna click one and then shift, click the top and now it selects all of those When I'll do is go to layer Pretty composed. And then we'll move all attributes to a new composition and then I'll call this masking dash line squares. We will hit, OK, And it brings us to our new composition where you can see our dash line is not in this anymore. That is in our main circle element. And you can see that's all of our A mask. Layers are squares are on one layer here. When we go to our shape, layer and weaken, Rename this by hitting enter and calling it dashes. If we go to our track Matte, if you don't see that you can hit toggle switches and modes and to go under track matte on our dashes layer and do Alfa inverted Matt. So what that does is it takes what's above it and cuts it out of that layer. And of course, we can always go into our square composition. So what we want to do is kind of make these go back and forth in terms of their transparency. So we want them to, like, turn on and turn off So it makes the cut out seem a little more random, like these will show up here and there, as you can see in our final HUD animation, where you can see this one in particular turning on and turning back off. So to do that and to make that loop, we want to use what's called an expression. So expressions are basically the coding inside of after effects so it can get a little bit technical. But just follow along with the code that I'm using here and make sure you're typing everything incorrectly. So with my opacity selected, the stopwatch is going to normally add key frames. But if I all to click on the stopwatch, hit Ault and click it, it allows me to put in some code so we wanted to do is kind of wiggle back and forth on the transparency. So what I'm going to do is type in wiggle and then a open Prentice E. And then we're gonna type in one comma, 100 then closed parentheses. So the first number is basically how fast this animation is going to move, and then the last number is the range in which it will move. So we wanted to be able to move from 100% to 0% so the range is going to be 100. If I said this first number 2 100 instead of one, it will move very fast. But instead we can see what the animation is doing. So if I play it, you can see that this animation isn't moving too fast. It's just kind of bobbing up and down. And what that looks like for a main circle element is right here, things start to flash on and off. So what we want to do is basically duplicate this for all of our other squares. So I'm going to select all of these by selecting one anything shift and hitting the bottom and then hit tea. And then we have all of our opacity is hit Ault and hit the stopwatch. And now I just want to copy this and paste. So I'm going to do that on the other ones. Copy and paste. So now all of these air animating independently of one another in a totally random way. So now how that looks over here on the main circle element is things are just kind of popping on and off. All right, so that is our first circle. And of this main circle elements, this is probably one of the most complicated, so it does get easier. So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna select both of these layers, and then I'm gonna pretty composed this. So I'm gonna go to layer pre compose and just call this dash circles hit, enter. So now we just have one layer for our one circle here. So before we do anything else, I want to make sure that this circle is completely centered that way, when we do start turning it, it doesn't look like it's off center. So to fix that, go into my dash circle and make sure my dashes are selected and I'm going to go to a line. If you don't see the align panel, go up to window and a line and I'm going to make sure this composition is selected and just center this on both the X and Y axis. Now, if I go over to my main circle elements and start to spin, we can see that it's completely in the center, which is definitely important. 4. Main Circle HUD: Part 2: So now what I want to do is start making the other circles. Like I said, the dash is is one of the most complicated. So this part should go by much more smoothly and quickly. So I'm going to go up to grab my ellipse tool to make some circles, and I'm going to start at the center, pull out and hits command or control to scale from the center and also hit shift to make a perfect circle. And I'm gonna make this one a little bit smaller. So it's kind of our center main circle, and I'm going to get rid of our fill by hitting Phil and saying Nope, no Phil and scaling up our stroke just a little bit. So that looks pretty good. And I also want to make sure that this is center. So I'm going to go up to my pan behind our anchor point tool and grab my anchor point hit command to make sure that this snaps to the center of that hit my selection tool again and make sure that this is in center of the composition, um, with the align panel. So I'm gonna make a couple more easy ones just to kind of mitt lay the foundation of the rest of this. So I'm going to call this by hitting enter center circle and hitting Enter again. And now I'm going to command de control de to duplicate and I want to scale this up, so I'm going to double click and scale up our shape, so I'm gonna make it about here. But our stroke is also getting bigger, so I want to scale this down. So it's not overwhelming. Probably about one. And then I want to make another one some in a command D and scale this up. Okay, so now I want to make a couple more dash elements. So I'm going to rename these real quick and then let's command d I just like to name these , so I know exactly what I'm selecting. So I'm gonna double click that and scale it up just a little bit more now for this one. I want to increase the stroke, so I'm going to increase it to about there, and we're gonna adds a lot of dashes on here, so these are gonna be kind of taller dashes, but really skinny. So I'm going to drop down my arrow on our middle dashed layer and open up contents a lips and stroke. And again we're gonna add dashes like we did earlier and go to dashes, Hit it twice so we can open up dash and gap options. Now I'm going to decrease the size of our dash is quite a bit. So once we start getting really close to, like one and zero, you really want toe have refined options. As you can see, when I start scrolling this, that only moves by whole numbers. Well, to get really refined, If you hold down command or control, you can start to get really refined like now you can see I'm getting like 0.3 and 0.4, and it gets much more detailed because you're moving a lot slower. So I'm going to do like a point eight is probably fine. And I'm gonna bring our gap down quite a bit. So probably about three, actually. I'm gonna hold command down and get a little bit more refined. So also, one of the nice things about duplicating all of these layers is once you center this main circle and you start duplicating and you're only scaling from the center. You will know that the rest of these will be center as well inside the composition and your rotation. So if I were to go up and grab the rotation tool, start turning this you can see it is turning perfectly because it is in the exact center of the composition and the anchor point is in the center. So what I'm going to do next is just, um, hit our middle, dashed and duplicated and scale this up to you about their and I want to increase the stroke with a little bit, so it'll make it a little bit taller and let's scale it up just a little bit more. And now I'm gonna go into my dashes again. The theme that you're seeing here is just a lot of dashes, especially inside the circle. You'll see that a lot. So I'm gonna open up my stroke, go down two dashes again, open that up. But this time I want my dashes to be much bigger and the gap much bigger as well. So I just basically want to make too big dashes on each side. So let's increase the dash to about there. Actually, that that looks pretty good. So these air actually both very equal. And the nice thing about this dashes, what we haven't talked about yet is the offset. So weaken, adjust where this starts. So we'll put these kind of on each the right and the left side, and that will be our circle right there. And I think we'll do one or two more dashes. So I'm gonna go to my center circle, and I'm going to duplicate that, and we're gonna make something here in the center. So I'm going to duplicate, and we will scale this guy up to about there, and we're gonna increase the size. And then I'm going to again go into dashes and open up contents, ellipse, stroke and click dashes once and twice because our center circle didn't originally have dashes. So we're adding them here, and, um and let's make it about about their But I'm thinking these are a little too tall, so I'm gonna bring down our stroke just a little bit. Maybe about there is good and we'll bring it out closer to the edge, so I'll scroll out this. This is getting a little too busy for me. I want to be careful with that. So what I want to do is I'm going to select the Centre Circle to which is actually should be renamed. This is getting rough naming these things and I want to add I'm mask. So what I'm going to do to do that is grab Arpin tool. Now, the pen tool can either be used to do one of two things, make a shape or make a mask, so to decide what we want to do, we go up here by default. When you are selecting a shape and your layers, it's going to make a new shape. But I want to make a mask on top of that shape. So I'm going to hit, create mask button, and I'm gonna started the center here and click there and then kind of outline the dashes I want and you can see that Onley These are showing up, which is exactly what we want. But now we want to do that to the other side. So with this center dashes layer selected, I'm gonna hit em and you can see that this is set to add if I were to set it to subtract. What it would do is cut out that area, but just real quick. I wanna set it to none, So it's not doing anything. So now what I want to do is basically the same thing to the other side. So I'm gonna make sure my pen tool selected I have mask and what I'm going to do is just select these four. So I'm going to go around and they're Now we see that we have these four selected. So now I'm gonna go back to my mask, one in layers. It's it's a nun, and I'm gonna make it set to add. So now we see that we only have eight of these dashes instead of all of them. 5. Main Circle HUD: Part 3: All right, so we've created the basics of our circle. So now we want to do is kind of make it move. We wanted to rotate and scale up, so that's the next thing we're gonna do. So what I decided when I was making my original is that some of these elements I want them to move faster than others. And I don't want them all to look so uniforms. But some of them I want to move at the same speed. So the best way to do that is to make no objects. So if you're unfamiliar with no objects, no objects or something in after effects, that will not render out. So I'll goto layer new and no object. So we have one no object, and I'm going to call this rotation one. So now you can see are null object here. It's basically nothing. It's not gonna render out as anything. You won't see it in the animation, but it also acts like everything else. Like we can scale this up. We can rotate it and you'll see why that's important. So what, We're gonna do it to this and all objects, and we're gonna make it turn and then we're gonna link some of these circles to that knoll object. So then they will turn at the exact same speed. And what we want to do is kind of make this rotate forever way don't want to ever stop now . We could add key frames and a lot of them and make them go into infinity. But that doesn't really make sense for what we're trying to do because we wanted to go forever. So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna hit are on my rotation, and again we're gonna add what's called an expression. And if you didn't watch the other lesson expression is basically the coating inside of after effects. So I'm gonna hit Ault in this stopwatch, and I'm going to type time T I m e and then the Astra. So time times, and I'm going to say 50. So this number is going to tell after effects how fast you want this to move. So if we kind of move here in our timeline, you can see that this starts to rotate around it, its anchor point, and it will never stop. So now what we want to do is parents some of these circles to rotation one. So I'm going to just kind of select these at random, so I'm gonna hit that one and that one. So now, over under, parent, I'm going to pick Whip. If you don't see parent, you can right click and hit columns and parents. So I'm gonna pick Whip one of my layers onto rotation one, and that will affect all of these. So by parenting, they will all use the rotation properties that this rotation one no layer is using, so they all start rotating. So let's play that. So you can see this rotating here and the other one's unfortunately, are not dashed. So you don't really see them rotating, so it really just looks like one of these is rotating. So now I'm going to duplicate this for a rotation, too, and I'm gonna open up my rotation properties by hitting our and we can see that our our expression is still in here. But I actually want to slow this rotation null down. So I'm going to change this from 50 to 20 and click off. So that will set that in, and you can see that this No layer is actually moving slower than the other one. So if we go all the way to the beginning of our animation, add zero and select the circles that were not selected for the other one, and I'm going to link that 12 rotation notation to that is now, if we play this, all these start to look a little bit more random. But speaking of random, it doesn't look as random as I would like, So I'm going to actually add one more rotation. So I'm gonna do command D and hit our for our rotation. Three. Bring that down and I'm actually going to delete this time, and I'm actually going to type in wiggle and then my speed, I want to do open Princey hit two comma and we'll do 100 and closed Princey. Now we'll click off and we can see that this one's kind of going desert. It's a little bit more random, and I want to make this center dashes. One followed that. So center Dash is actually going to parents to rotation three instead of its original, which was Rotation one. Now you can see that this one acts totally independently of the others. And the last thing that we want to do is make these all scale up real nicely. So I'm going to hit you on my keyboard to close all of the, um, open areas here. Just a kind of tidy things up. And I'm going to select all of our circles and hits s for scale, and I'm going to add a couple of key frames. So I'm going to zoom in here and now I want to add a key frame here just to save the scale that we have here. So I'm going to hit the stopwatch then that adds a key frame. All of these. And now I'm going to move forward or backward in time. Excuse me and hit zero Select that hit zero. So that changes that for all of these. And I'll hit the space bar to play, and we can see that these kind of scale up from the center. So what I want to do to change that, to select all of the key frame. So I'll make sure I can see all these here and select them and now hit F nine on my keyboard. So Also, what you could do is right Click and go to key frame assistant and hit Eazy e's. So what that does is it gives it a little bit of a nicer fluid motion. All right, so the very last thing that I want to do to this is make this three D and give it a little bit of depth. So I'm going to hit towel switches and mode so I can see my three d box and make sure all of these air selected and make all of these three d. So I'll hit you on my keyboard to close all that up. So now what we want to do is kind of pushed some of these back and see space, and it's kind of hard to see. But now there's an arrow that is blue right here, and that is yours. YB depth. So I can actually push this back in disease space, and it's kind of hard to see. So what I'm gonna do is go to active camera right here. It's set on active camera, but I'm gonna go to custom view, and now we can kind of see the side angle of this so I'm going to actually push this back in the space. You can see that I'm pulling it forward and pushing it back. I'm gonna push it back just a little bit and kind of randomized it. So I'm gonna select this one and pull that one out farther and maybe this one, maybe out just a little bit. Um, I want to my big dashes to probably be out just a little bit farther than the rest of them . So now you can see that these air all a little bit on a different Z axis, so it gives it a little bit of depth. When you go into your active camera or the front view, it really doesn't show much. You can't tell, but you will definitely see a difference in a later lesson here coming up when we start to add a camera. And we can actually see the side of this thing and will definitely make a difference. Trust me. All right. So we've officially gotten through the most complicated part in this entire course this hut animation. This there was a lot to go through, including adding Knowles with expressions and parenting them and adding dashes and adding masks and track mats and everything. So we went through a lot in that. So if you made it this far, I want to give you my congratulations and ask you to go ahead and share what you have made so far. Please go ahead and make a screenshot and post it in the class project section. I want to see where you're at so far in this process. And of course, don't feel like it has to look anything like mine. In fact, I would love for it not to, and you to make your own designs as well. So now what we're gonna tackle is making our grid in the background here. 6. The Final Comp and Some Spring Cleaning: All right, So now we've completed probably the most complicated part in this entire scene, so we're going to start moving on. So now the next thing we want to do is start creating this background grid thing. And this is actually probably one of the most easy parts of this entire course. But before we do that, we need to actually make the final composition. We have our circle composition, and we have our sub compositions are Preet umps, as they call it, But we don't actually have a final one. So that's what we need to do real quick right now. So we're gonna make a new composition and let's say, make it 1920 by 10 80. We'll make it 30 frames a second. And let's make this about, Ah, I don't know. Let's just say 10 seconds and we'll call this final comp and hit OK, All right, so here is our final composition. So now what we want to do is drag our main circle element. It's dragged that, actually, let's drag it into our timeline so it will automatically snap to the center. So if we play this, we can see our main circle element. And before we go any farther, let's organize just a little bit with a folder. So I'm gonna create a new folder and call it pre cops. So that will give me Ah folder for all the yeast like sub composition. Someone had dashed circle and hit Commander Control do hits masking dash line squares. We'll put that in our pre comes holder just to tidy this up a little bit. So now all we have showing is our final composition in our main circle element, and this will kind of just make it so All of our main pieces are in this main area right here. 7. A Digital Grid: Okay, so now let's make the grid. So what we want to do is make a new composition will make it 1920 by 10. 80 which it already is. And let's just make the duration a little bit longer, just to ensure if we were to make our final animation a little longer than this one would fit. So let's make it the same length is our circle and go 60 seconds. And we need to rename this grid and hit enter or okay. All right. So now we have a new composition, and the first thing we need to do is actually add a grid. So I'm going to go to layer new and solid. You can also do command or control why you can create any color solid. It really doesn't matter. Um, so we're gonna hit OK on this green solid and just rename this to cred? All right, So the reason this doesn't matter is because we're gonna add an effect on here the grid effect, and you can actually choose a color within that effect. So that's why the initial color of the solid does not matter. So we're gonna go up to our effects and presets and type in grid. So now under generate you see grid and just drag and drop that on top of our layer. So now we see our great effect. So it's kind of inter lapping with our title safe area. So I'm gonna turn that off by hitting right here and going title safe. So now we can really see this. So now when we have this grid effects selected, we see two points right here, and this is actually what to determines the size of our grids. So 0.1 and 0.2. So if I dragged this around, you can see how this is affecting our grid. So I'm gonna undo, and we need to kind of determine how big we want these squares. So I'm going to just kind of scale down. I kind of want not too small but kind of small squares kind of meeting in the middle. So that's kind of what I want to go with. And we can always change this later. So I'm going to actually go into my final comp and then go into my projects and drag and drop the grid under my main circle element so I can just start to get an idea of how big this is in comparison to my circle element. So I'm going to turn my safe title action off so we can see this a little bit better. And actually, I'm thinking I actually want those grid a little bit smaller, so I'm going to hit my grid goto effect controls, make sure that selected and make thes just a little bit smaller and go back to my final camp. And I think that's kind of the size that I'm going for, All right. So go back into my grid composition and I will hit my layer grid hit T for opacity. And let's bring that down to about 10%. Okay, so I know I I kind of want this to be pretty much see through, but that might be a little bit too much. So, actually, let's bring this up to 20. All right, so that's a little bit better. I can still see the lines, but it is pretty see through, so we'll leave that at about 20%. So the next thing I want to do is kind of make four or five rectangles randomly spaced within this grid. Kind of like you see, in our final HUD composition, where these kind of are flashing on and off randomly throughout here. So I'm gonna go back into my grid composition, go up to my, uh, rectangle tool and zoom in and we'll start to create a rectangle. All right, so you see what I did here? I messed up, but I'm glad I did, because it's an easy mistake to make. When I'm selected to my grid and I start to make a shape, what I'm actually starting to do is make a mask, and I don't want that to happen. So what I need to make sure of and I'm gonna induce so we can get rid of that. What I need to make sure of is nothing is selected and then automatically it will start to create a shape. So I'm going to now make sure this is not selected and click and drag to make a shape, and now we can see that we have a shape layer. All right, so I don't really want to stroke, so I'm gonna bring that all the way down, and then my Phil, I'm just gonna sit toe white and hit, OK? All right. So now I'm gonna click off of this so I make another shape layer, we'll drag out and move. Let's see somewhere random Somewhere over here. So I'm gonna click and drag. All right, That's good. De. Select that layer and let's go somewhere somewhere else. Let's say over here and then let's make a couple more click and drag de Select Go over here , zoom out And we've got five rectangles here. So remember, in the previous lessons when we talked about the wiggle expression that's what we're going to do here with our opacity. So with nothing selected, I'm gonna hit T and it brings up the opacity for all of the layers. So I'm gonna bring this up just to make sure that I can see my layers. And before we do anything else with the wiggle, I want to bring the opacity of all of these rectangles down to about 10%. So I'm gonna click the top one, hold shift and click the bottom one that will select all of these. And I'm gonna change the opacity of one of these 2 10%. And that affects all of these. So select off and you can see that that changed all of these. So now I want to do is add that wiggle expression. So I'm gonna ault hold all and click to stop watching one of these and type in wiggle and then open parentheses, one comma, 40 closed parentheses. Now, I want you to know that I have written down my expressions from the original composition. That's why I know what numbers to use. But it didn't start that way. I'm just trying to save you time and not have me, you know, be experimenting. But there was a lot of experimenting when I was making the original animation. So if you don't like the numbers that I'm using here, do what I did and just trial and error. Try a number. And if it's too fast, too slow, If the opacity is changing too much, you know that's up to you. Start to just experiments with these numbers because honestly, that's the best way to learn is to be experimenting. Anyway, If we start to play this, you can see how that effects this rectangle right here. And we want to make that happen to all of these. So I'm just gonna copy this by doing command, See? And all its clicking on another stopwatch command V to paste and doing that over and over. All right, so let's play this back, and that's what we it. So playing this in our final composition, that's what we have so far. Okay, so things are coming along nicely. This is the animation that we have so far. I would love to see what you were doing. If you're following along with this class and animating one for your own, so please render it out. Send a screenshot whatever added to the class project section, I want to see where you're at in this process. 8. Animated Circle Graphs: Part 1: Okay, So the next thing we want to make is make this circle graphs over here. I don't know what else to call it. They don't really mean anything. Um, other than they look cool and they look like they're presenting data. And that's kind of the cool thing with this is you can really get detailed and make them mean something. Um, but in this case, I didn't really know what they could mean. So they just arbitrary numbers. But depending on the thing you're animating, it could really relate. Teoh seen that it's in or the reason that is being made. But these numbers don't have to be arbitrary. They really could mean something. And that's that's what I'm saying is just cool part about this. So let's make those graphs right now. So the first thing I want to do is make a new composition like always and make this, let's say, ah, 900 by 900. So we want this to be a square, and we're gonna fit one circle in this where? So I'm going to say circle wrath element and will make this a minute as well. So I'm going to hit, okay, So now, Obviously, the first thing we want to do in a circle graph is make a circle. So I'm going to click and drag down to my lips tool, click and drag out by hitting it command and shift to scale proportions and scale from the center and we'll snap, do about their next. We want to make sure our anger point is in the center. So the quick way to do that would be command or control plus salt and then the home button . But I'm working on a laptop and I don't have the home button. So what I'm gonna do is go to layer and transform and go to center anchor points in layer content. And now the anchor point is centered. So I'll go to my align panel goto window in a line if you don't see it. And, ah, Linus to the center of the composition. All right, so now we've got it started, and I'm actually going to scale this down a little bit because we're gonna have a stroke that might go outside the composition. So we're going to scale this down, and I want to get rid of our fill. So this is going to kind of be our base circle. So I'm gonna get rid of the filled by hitting the word Phil and then saying No Phil hitting okay and dragging up our stroke just a little bit. We wanted really thin stroke here. All right, so now I'm gonna rename this by clicking and hitting Enter to Base Circle. Okay, so now I want to duplicate this by selecting it and doing Commander Control D that will duplicate. And I want to scale up the stroke, so we'll make this pretty thick. So let's go like 130. All right, so now the next thing I want to do is kind of start to cut this off and have thea stroke move around. So I'm gonna open up our property is I'll close the base Circle properties. And actually, let's rename this real quick Teoh graph and hit, OK, we'll open this up and go to add and then trim pads. So we haven't talked about trim pads yet, so I'm gonna open that up and you can see that this actually just trims our path. So our path is of the circle, and this just trims it, and we can do it from both sides here, and we can also affect the offset where it starts and where it ends. So undo and what we want to do is affect the end. So I'm bringing this all the way down and we will key frame to start at the beginning and go to about here ish. So I'll bring that all the way down to zero, and I'll start this at about a couple seconds. We'll zoom into our timeline here by scrolling, so I'll start this in about one second. I'll have a key frame on our end and then I'll move forward in time to about three seconds . And let's say this goes to about 30. It's bringing to about 37 and let's see what we got here. There we go. That's moving a little too slow for me, so I'm gonna bring this into about two seconds to make this a one second animation that works. Um, it's a little too robotic. I want to give it a little bit of an ease, so I'm gonna select both those key frames and hit F nine on my keyboard. Or you can right click and go to key frame assistant Eazy e's. And you can see that that animation looks a little less robotic. So now I want to do something else we haven't done. I want to use the graph editor, so that really helps us take control of the movement and are seen. So I'm gonna hit the graph editor right here. And if we select end, just have that selected. We can see the speed at which is this happening over time. So when it zero, there is no movement. But towards the middle is where the movement really gets the fastest, and then it starts to slow down again. Well, what we want to do is kind of customize this. So I'm gonna hit one of these points and drag our handle out. So what that's doing is it's making it so at the beginning, this is really slow. And then towards about here is where our animation is the fastest. So let's play that back and see what this looks like. Yeah, I kind of like that. But what I want to actually do is bring our other handle in, so it kind of comes to a stop. A little bit nicer, too. All right, so we're getting close, but it might be a little bit too fast in the middle, so I'm going to bring back our handle. Let's try that. Yeah, that's kind of what I'm looking for right there. So that just allows us to kind of customize the movement a little bit more. 9. Animated Circle Graphs: Part 2: So I'm gonna go out of our graph editor by hitting the graph editor button again, and we want to make another one of these graphs were one to duplicate this. So I'm going to select Graf again and do command d the duplicate. And I want to open up graft to so open up contents, go to trim pads, and now we want to affect the offset. So I want this one to start where the other one ends. So I'm dragging the offset and you can see where this one starts. Now, right here. And I'm gonna drag this to where the other one ends, so they kind of connect. So I'm gonna bring the stroke down on this one to about there. So where it's noticeable that this one is smaller, so maybe a little bit lower, we'll go about their and I want to change the end. I don't want it to go so far. So I'm gonna go to my last key frame, and I'm a little bit past my key friend, but I want to make sure I'm selected on that key frame. So I'll hit this button right here, and it will snap to my last key frame and a click and drag to affect the end, and that will automatically update the key for him that it's sitting on. So I will go to out there, okay? And we want to do that one more time by selecting graph command D to duplicate. Open that up and contents and trim paths. It'll move are offset to click toothy end of that one. Bring our stroke down and we'll leave it about their and make sure we're on our last key frame and click and drag to about there. So we're about 14 at that point. All right, So what we need to do is kind of off said the animation, so that's gonna end up happening like this, and we don't want that. So now we want to tell it when all of these layers are gonna come on. So I'm gonna hits graph three and shift click Graft to and hit you. So that tells me when um are key frames are and I'm going to do Ault open bracket. And what that does is it trims the beginning of this animation so the layers don't even begin until where the play head was. So it trims it up to the plate head. So now I'm gonna move forward in time and we're gonna determine win the graph to should start playing so well say about there and I'm gonna move both of these to the beginning actually will go about their. So now, if we play this, we can see the graph to does not begin until Graf won gets to its end point. So now we need to move graph three. So we'll wait until this end of graft to is about to hit graphs three and we'll say about their So now we only select graph three and move that back in time to about there. So now if I goto the beginning of this, actually, let's go to the end. I'm gonna hit in on my keyboard to close up our work area here, and I'm gonna go to about here and hit B to make that the beginning of our work area. So that way, when we preview this, it will kind of loop and weaken watches over and over to make sure that we like the animation. I think I think that'll work. That's I liked where that's going 10. Animated Circle Graphs: Part 3: Okay, So the next thing we need to do is add some numbers in here, So I'm gonna go up, and it's like my textual, and we will type in just 00 I'm just gonna keep it simple. Make it 00 Drag it to the middle. Actually, let's align this to the middle. Make sure where exactly? In the middle and scale is up. So the number looks how we want it to look. And we can always change the font and stuff. You know you can style is this to do whatever you want to do. But I like this fun. I'm just going to stick with this front for the time being. So now we need to have a way for this to animate from zero up to, you know, whatever number I think. In my example, I had 67 43 59. So what we need to do is animate the source text. So the best way that I found to do that is go to layer new and no object, and we're gonna add an effect on this no object and link the source of this text to that effect. So that doesn't make any sense to you. Let's just do it. And it'll make plenty of sense. I promise. So let's go into our effects and presets and type in slider control. Now, I'm gonna add that on top of our Noel object. So now this is what's going to be what effects are text. So you can see this is 00 right now. So I'm gonna basically he framed this from 00 to 67 or whatever number. So our number Texas basically going to say whatever is in this slider control, so we'll bring this back to zero. So we'll decide the point in time where we want this start and we'll say about there and hit the key frame on slider and I'll hit you so I can see it in my timeline. So I dragged to the end of my animation. So about there, and we'll say, just for the sake of being consistent with the original will say 67. Now, if I start to drag in my timeline, you can see that this changes over time until we get to 67. So what we want to do is go to our text layer, open that up and go to text. And now source text is where it's referencing what what the text should say. So I'm going to all click this and make this an expression is that this is probably one of the most easy expressions, because what we want to do is parent this to our slider, so make sure your slider is visible under your null and basically all you need to do is pick whip onto the slider and then select off. So now you can see that this is changing. And now it's not exactly changing how we want, but at the end, it does, in fact, say 67 if we change our last key frame here to anything, it will change it here as well. So the problem you're seeing here is that in the middle of all the of these animations, you're seeing decimal points. So it's going in between zero and 67 quite literally, with all the decimal points in between. Like you can see right here it's 16.75 So we really only wanted to say whole numbers, and there's a way for us to tell the slider. Hey, I only want you to use whole numbers. I don't want any decimal points. So the way to do that is on Slider Go, Teoh The stopwatch hit Ault and hit it. So we want to make an expression. And this is the expression to tell it on Lee. Use whole numbers. So you're gonna type in math points round, open parentheses, e value and then closed fantasy. And that's all it ISS. So now you can see we're on Lee getting whole numbers all the way up to 67. All right, so we're almost done with our graph here. But the last thing I want to do is stylized this a little bit. So I'm going to select all three of our graph elements and do command D. So I'm going to click and drag to make thes 45 and six separate from 12 and three, and I'm going to bring down the stroke a little bit. So what I'm going for here? We'll go back to our original Is kind of this green area within here, So I'm gonna go to, um, our graph circle element and I want to change the color of our stroke so we can see what we're doing. So I'm going to go up to our stroke with all of these selected and just make this 1/2 Wake Ray ish color and you can see in our original that this is green, but we're gonna make it gray. So once we get to the style izing lesson in this course, you'll see that weaken. Use this great to make it any other color. So what do we want? To make things a different color, such as Green. We're going to start by using gray. I know that's a little confusing, but it'll make more sense later in the course when we get to style, izing and colorizing are seen. So now that we see that this is great, we can see a little differentiation between the original 12 and three and 45 and six. So I'm gonna select number four and bring our stroke down to about there so we can see kind of a stroke outside of our stroke. So now I want to do that with number five. Bring that down to about there and number six will bring that down as well so we see a stroke. Okay, so now we have our main circle graph, But there was three of them in our original animation. So what we want to do is select our circle graph element and duplicated twice by doing command D. So we'll open up a circle graph element to and what we want to do is change the text. So I'm gonna go into no, open up our slider by hitting you and making sure we're on our last key frame. So I'm going to click these arrows to make sure I'm on the last key frame. We're just gonna change this number. So I'm gonna change this to 73. So now the animation will end at 73 and we're going to do that with Circle graph Element three as well. We will open up no. Two and change this to let's say 54. And now our animation ends at 54. So now we have three different graph elements, and now we could drag all of these into our main final composition. But what I like to do is actually make another composition. Just to hold these three graphs, we will make the with 1000 and the height, Let's say 10 80 because that's the heights of our main composition. And we'll say all circle graph elements and hit OK, so I will click our circle graph elements shift click circle graph Element three and dragged these in here. So now we have all three within this composition. So I'm gonna scale these down, and we will lay these out a little bit nicer. So we'll drag one up to about their drag number three down, and I will select all of these and scale them down. So they all fit nicely. And to make sure these air all distributed nicely, I'm going to use our align panels because you can see there's a little bit more of a gap on this between these two than there is between these two. So I'm gonna select all of these and use my distribute layers button hit the middle one, and now we can see that these air all distributed perfectly, but I kind of want a little bit more space in between that. So I'm gonna separate these out just a little bit. Make sure they're still distributed. There we go. So this is the animation that we have now we can offset this by just bringing the number two and number three out just a little bit. So we have number one start first, and then number two comes in. And then number three and the last thing we want to go to final composition Add all of our circle graph elements. Move this to the side and there we are. 11. Adding a Status Bar: in this lesson, we're we're going to be looking at doing this bottom elements here with the status bars, I guess, is what you call it. So of course do that. We need to make a new composition. So we're gonna make a new composition that's really long and skinny, not too tall. So we're gonna go and make a new composition and make it 1000 by, let's say, 200 we'll call this status bar because I'm not sure what else to call it. We will make it a minute long and hit. OK, so one trick that I like to do and this is just what I do I like to add a new layer and a new solid, make it any color and hit OK, And what I like to do is I like to drag it into my final comp, so I'll drag my status bar in here and drag it down. This was what tells me what size the comp should be. So if I think you know what, that's gonna be way too tall. I would like to know that before I do all this animation and then find that out. But I'm gonna actually make it about right there. And I'm gonna go to my main circle of elements and we're going to scale that down and bring it up. And I'm hitting shift right now. So it only goes straight up or left and right, So I'm gonna hit, shift and just drag it straight up to about there, and I'll bring my status bar up just a little bit. All right? So we'll go back into our status bar. Obviously, I don't need this green, but that was just kind of a reference. So we know that it's going to end up right here, and it's just gonna get kind of gives us an idea of scale a little bit better. Okay, so let's go back into the status bar, and I'm going to grab a rounded rectangle so under my squares, I could grab a rectangle, or I can grab a rounded rectangle and that's what I want to grab. So I'm going to click and drag to make a shape about that big the strokes a little bit big for me, So I'm gonna bring that down to about there, and I want to make this pure white by hitting the stroke color bringing that up toe white hitting. Okay, so that's our border. That's pretty simple. I want to make sure that this is in the center by heading our selection tool and making sure that that's directly in the centre using our ah line panel. So now what I want to do is make thes status bars. So I'm going to make a line. So I'm gonna go to my pin tool and just click at one point and then click the other points . Now, before you do that, make sure that, um, your first layer is not selected, So that's kind of off center. I don't love that. So I'm going to just bring that up. It doesn't need to be quite perfect. And I'm not gonna click this other side because they don't close up that path and I don't want that. So I'm gonna hit my selection tool and drive this down just to kind of make this look a little bit more, um, flat, not diagonal. So that will work. I want to bring up my scale of the stroke to about there, so now that that's a little bit bigger we can kind of get a better idea of what this is gonna look like, and I think that looks pretty good. So now we want to do is add dashes. And if you made it through all of the circle graph elements, the main circle we use dashes a lot. So you're pretty familiar with this by this point, So I'm going to click down and go under contents, shape one and stroke and add a couple dashes, so we'll click that twice. So now weaken. Effect are dashes and our gap, so we'll click and drag to make. Our dash is a little bit larger here, and I want to go to maybe about there. And of course, you can affect the gap as well. But I kind of like the default gap. There may be a little bit bigger. I think that's what I'm going to go with. So next I want to cut out to the middle. So if we see in the beginning or the original animation here, you can see that's the The middle is cut out. So I want to go back into my status bar, and I want to make sure that I'm cutting out the middle, so I'm gonna go to my title in action safe, and that shows me right where the middle is. At some. It doesn't have to be exact, but I want to make sure my shape layer is selected. Grab a rectangle tool and I want to make this a mask. I don't want to make another shape. I want to make a mask. So I want to go up in here and hit this button and we know where the middle's at. So I'm gonna get out a couple of these middle one. So let's say we'll start here and get four of these middle ones. So now it's set toe. Add eso is only showing the things in this box, but we actually want the opposite of that. So instead of add, um, under mask, if you click your layer and hit him, we can set this to subtract. So now it's attracting that area. So the next thing we want to do is it's kind of settle in the original, so I don't know if you actually ever really noticed. But in the original, the status bar is kind of loading on both the left and right side, so you might not have noticed that. But now I'm pointing it out, so it obviously seems a little bit more obvious, but that's what we want to do. So I want to go back into my status bar, and I want to make that make these lines kind of reveal themselves, so there's a couple ways to do that. But what I want to do is make a new solid layer, and I'm gonna use track matte to kind of reveal this. So go layer new solid and green is fine. And we will kind of make this the beginning size. So we'll make this about here. And if I hold down shift, I can move this around. So I'm gonna go up to the top here, drag this down so we'll make this the size that it is in the beginning. This will make it about their. So now we have a mask on top of our solid, so we see our mask. If you don't select your solid here and hit him, that'll bring your mask up and drop down your mask properties, and we're gonna crank up the feather a little bit. So we're gonna crank it up to about there. So now, on our shape layer to which is actually our dashes I'm gonna rename that two dashes. So on that layer, I'm gonna go to track Matte If you don't see that troublesome switches and modes down at the bottom and you will see that and I'm gonna go to Alfa Matt. So now it only shows what is in the area of our green layer here and automatically it shuts off our green liar so we don't see that, but everything within where the green layers at you will see. So now what we need to do is just key frame our green solid layer. So I'll key frame the mask path at the beginning of this animation, I'll zoom into my timeline so I can get a better idea of the size of this and will go to about six seconds. And now I want to select both of these rights handles. So I'm going to just click off of our mask path so not all of these are selected. Maybe I'll click, mask, feather and select one of these shift select. The other will drag this towards the end here and now. I want to do the same thing to the other side. So click and then shift click the other and dragged that more towards this end. So now if we move on our timeline, we can see what this is doing. And I'll say I want to make this animation a little bit faster by moving this towards the beginning of the animation, so it moves a little bit faster. Okay, so now if we go into our final competence, we already added this to our composition. We can see that it is sitting in there, and it's a little bit big for me. So I want to bring this down and to about there is kind of the size that I want maybe a little bit smaller. Actually, we'll go about their perfect. All right, so we're getting to the point where we're only gonna make one more element in this scene. We're gonna make the graph elements here on the side, and then we gotta add a camera and Sile eyes this up a little bit. But we're getting pretty close to the finish of this scene, so let me know how you're doing Cinda Screenshots. Render out what that put it to YouTube or video are uploaded. Whatever you got to do, I want to see where you're at in this project. 12. Reactive Line Graphs: Okay, so it's time to make the last element in this scene. And of course, after that, we needed to stylized this up a little bit and make a camera and all that jazz. But this is actually the last element in our scene. So if you made it this far, Congratulations. This is been a lot of work, but it's been a lot of fun. And I hope you are producing something pretty cool like this as well. So now it's time to add the graph on the right side of this scene. So what we want to do, of course, like we do always is add a new composition. So we're gonna add a new composition. I'm not sure how big we want it, so I'm just gonna make it 1000 by 1000. And we're gonna do what we did in the last lesson. So I'm gonna add a new solid by doing commander Control. Why, that's the keyboard shortcut for that, Um, it can be any color. We're gonna say Green and I should have renamed this. So actually, I'm going to do command K. That's a shortcut to bring up our properties of the composition. Um, and we're gonna call this line graph and build our final composition, Drag our line graph on top. So now it kind of gives us an idea of the size of our line graph. So let's scale this down. Or maybe just bring in the with a little bit more. So I'm going to go to my line graph and do command K and drag our with down to maybe about there and we'll hit. Okay, go to our final comp. And I think that's a little bit better of a width for what we're going for here. So we'll leave it at that, so we'll go back into our line graph Delete are solid. So that's the size we want to go with. So we want to make the bounding box of our graph here. So we want to go to our rectangle tool and click and drag to make a bounding box. So we've got kind of a thick stroke here, and we can easily just bring that down. So that's what we'll do. We'll bring it down to about there, and now I want to add another rectangle, and we can just leave it in the same shape layer two shapes inside one shape layer and will make it to about there. And I'm gonna hold shift to kind of move this around while I'm still clicking on my mouse and we will set it to about they're so on my second ranked rectangle under contents on my shape. Layer one. I'm going to select that and bring down my scale just a little bit, So that looks like what I'm going for. Okay, so now we need to make some more rectangles, and that's kind of kind of be our graphs. So I'm gonna make sure my shape lawyer one is not selected go up to my rectangle to will make sure that selected and we'll draw our first graph. So we'll make it about this height. We don't want to stroke, so we'll bring that all the way down and go to fill, and we'll just make it a gray color. So I'm gonna hit OK, and now we have our first rectangle. So what we want to do is we're gonna basically be scaling this from the bottom. So what I want to make sure we have is our anchor point at the bottom because if I go into scale biting s and start scaling this, it's going to be scaling from our current anchor point position. But we wanted to be scaling from the bottom, so that means we need to be moving our anchor point to the bottom of our rectangle. So I'll undo and go up to our anchor point tools. And click and drag are anchor points. So let's at the bottom of this. So hold command on a macro control on a PC and it'll snap to the bottom and I'll let go right there. So now if we scale, it is scaling from the bottom. And now it's also scaling our X and R y, so I'm going to unlinked Rx and R wise. So now, if we only scale, are why it's only scaling on the Y axis. So I'll bring that down to about 68 or whatever. We want this to be kind of random, so I'll bring this to the beginning. We'll zoom into our timeline here to get a little bit more precise, and I'll set a key frame. We'll move forward in time a little bit to bring this up forward in time, bring it down. And this is gonna be totally random, unless you wanted to be a little bit more precise for something you're doing. But there's nothing that I'm going off of on this. So I'm just making this kind of random movements here, and I'm going to select all of these and hit F nine. See what we got so far Make it more of an ease movement. And I kind of like, what? What we're getting there. So what we can do is, once we've got a handful of these, we can just copy all of these by selecting all of them, moving a little bit forward in time and pasting. So now this will go along a longer period of time and we can pay sees again and paste these again. And there we go. And that's basically the workflow of what you need to do for a couple of these graphs. So I'm gonna make a couple more. So we get about four of these graphs, but it's the same workflow. You just kind of want them to be random, so they're all not moving the same. So I'm just gonna quickly run through that real quick. So you don't have to watch me sit through what I just went through because it's the same process, and I'll see you on the other side. All right, so here we are. We have five different graph animations. They're all moving randomly. You can see all the key frames that I've added. This is all just totally random. And I will say one thing that I didn't do in the original that I probably should have is I was going to put some numbers here. Cem, um, words or data or something, but I completely forgot, actually. So what we can do is just make some numbers here. So I'm gonna hit my text tool, and I'm gonna make a bounding box that's just inside here, and I'm just gonna type one, enter two, enter three enter for under five under six. But these air too big. So I'm gonna select all by doing command a and bring the scale downs. We can actually see these numbers, so we'll make it about their You know, I want to adjust my letting, so I'm going to scale that down so we can fit Maurin here. So Now I've got 56789 10 11. And let's actually just make it to 10. So select all of these. Bring the leading up to about 10. There we go. So now we've got one through 10 on there. I don't really know what that means, but we're scaling up to 10. And actually, one should probably be at the bottom in 10. Should be at the top. But, you know, whatever you get the idea. So now we go into a final composition and we have all of our elements. So we have officially made it to this point. So now we get to the exciting part. We get to add a camera, we get to stylized this up a little bit, adds a color, um, at some depth of field, a little bit of blur. So now we're putting the icing on the cake. So let's jump into that 13. Making the 3D World: Animating 3D Cameras: Okay, so now it's time to add a camera and start working with some three D layers. So first things first, we need to make all of these layers three d. So I'm going to toggle switches and modes until I see my three layer box, select all of these babies and hit three d. So now all of our layers are three D. So I'm gonna start moving these back and forth and Z space. Um, but before I do that, I want to add a new camera. So I'm going to go to layer new and camera, and we're gonna make this will say 24 millimeters, probably fine. So we'll hit. Okay, so now we can you start using our camera tool, which is up here at the top. And if I start moving this camera, we can see, um, the rotation of our camera. Now everything looks very flat because we haven't moved anything in the space. So I'm going to set this to about here and select my grid, and that's the biggest thing. I want to move backwards. So I'm going to get my selection tool and move that backwards just so it's not so much on the same layer and making everything look so static. All right, so now if we go back to our camera tool, start moving around, we can see that we're getting a little bit more depth. So we're getting somewhere. We're seeing some depth now, if you remember this, my this was a little while ago, but we made our circle graph with, um, a little bit of three D. So if we go back into our, um, main circle elements, it doesn't look three d. But again, if we go into, um instead of active camera, go to custom view, we can see a little bit of depth that we added. But we're not seeing that in our final comp. And the reason for that is because it's just one composition. It's almost acting as if it's footage, but we don't want that. We want to go under our main circle, um, and hit this star looking button right here, and that will bring back all of our three d nous of our main circle helmet circle elements . So if we start panning around this, we can see that we're getting three d back of our circle so now it's really starting to look a little bit more three D and nice. Okay, so when you're using the camera tool, one thing to know is when you're using a mouse, your left mouse button is going to orbit your middle mouse button your scroll wheel. When you press that down, it's going to pan on your X and Y axis, and when you use your right mouse button, it's going to go on the Z axis. So it's moving the camera in an outward. It's not zooming in. It's actually moving the camera in and out. So that's what I'll be doing when I'm moving this camera around, I'm using those three buttons. So I'm going to use my middle mouse middle mouse button and moved down to about there and then start toe orbits around to about there because what I'm going for here is I want this main circle element to be kind of the focus of our scene. But I want to see these other elements as well. So now we can see that our grid, it's in the background, but it's kind of being cut off, so all I'm going to do is select my grid layer hit scale RS for scale. Excuse me and scale this up. So it's, um you can't see the edges and I'll actually move this up, so I'm gonna get my selection tool, Move it up. So about there. So when I started zoom out. I still I'm not gonna be able to see the edges because I will move this camera outs, and I just don't want that to be a problem. I don't want to see the edges, so I'm gonna scale this down just a little bit more so about there. Okay, So now I'll select my camera, go to the beginning of this scene, so about there, and I'll drop down, dropped about, drop down, transform, and I'm going to drop down. And I'm going to key frame my position because I'm going to move this camera just out slightly. So I'm gonna keep for in my position and move. Let's say five seconds in time, maybe 4.5 ish, and I'm gonna use my right mouse button to pull outwards just slightly. We don't want this to be anything crazy. We wanted to just be slight, and I'm gonna select these and hit F nine for Eazy E's. And if we ran preview that, I think that that is looking pretty good. So I'll go to the end of my little animation here and hit in on my keyboard, and that's going to close up my work area. All right, so I'm thinking this is looking pretty good. The only complaint that I have is our to left and right. Elements here are a little bit too far out, and what we can do is select our element in the safest way. To do that without selecting something else is going down into our layers and hitting like our line graph. And when we move this, we want to use these arrows to make sure we're only moving on one axis. Because if I just click and drag, I feel like I'm only moving this on the X axis. But I'm also kind of moving in on the Z axis is well on, and I don't want that, so I'm just gonna click and drag towards the middle. But one thing I like to do is gets the whole view of what I'm working with. So instead of going under active camera, which is the camera that we have here in the scene. I'm going to go to custom view our excuse me front. That's where I'm going, and so that's going to bring us back to our original view. So I'm going to go and look for are all circle graph elements and kind of bring that in just slightly. So now I can go instead of front, go to active camera, and I think that that looks a little bit better. All right, so now it's time to really pretty this up. Add some color, add some blur kind of add some reflections like I have in our final HUD. You can see how there's, like, reflections on all of these elements really gonna pretty this up, um, and really put our money where our mouth is with this animation. So I want to see where you're at so far in this animation, so render it out, send me a screenshot. Whatever you want to do, I want to see where you're at. Please go ahead and leave it down in the class projects I want to see and I want to respond how you're doing so far 14. Creating that WOW Factor: All right. So it's time to start style. Izing this and before I really dive in, I want to apologize. I made a mistake, and I'm gonna fix this, But I want to admittedly say that before we go any farther. So, um, we're going to start changing the color of this and adding a hue to this composition and kind of making it a green color. And what I said earlier in this class is if we make these gray, they will turn green or whatever color we want. But I found in doing some testing before I hit record that that wasn't totally the case. I I honestly thought it was, um so I made a mistake, and I will show you have to fix that here in just a second. So what, I'm gonna start out by saying what I was going to do was going to layer new and solid. Now I want to make this a green color, so I'm going to make this a really dark green color and you'll see why it needs to be so dark. Um, if we make it to light, it'll make the background pop way more than we want it to. So I'm gonna make this a really dark green color. Just select maybe about their ish and even a little bit darker. Okay, We'll go to about their head, okay? And hit. OK, so now, under my modes And if you don't see that hit toggle switches and modes But I want to make this a hue. So we have all these options. I'm gonna go to Hugh and click that. So now it's giving our entire seen this kind of green tent to it. So as you can see, it did not affect our graphs and are gray areas here, as I expected it to, which is totally my fault. Turns out you need to add some sort of color to this, so I'm going to go into my line graph. So that's one of the areas that we have. Great. And I'm just select all of these grey shapes and go up to my fill. And I'm just gonna make this any color, so I'm just gonna make this read. It could be blue. It could be green. It could be yellow. Whatever. So I'm gonna make this red and I'm a hit. Okay? Now, If we go back into our final composition, we can see them turn green. So, really, all that this layer needed to see was some sort of color. And gray, I guess, to after effects is not considered a color. So it did not affect that layer as I thought it would. So now last thing I want to do is go into my all circle graph elements. Open up our circle graph element and we need to kind of change the graph 45 and six to any sort of color. So I'm gonna select those change my color to read going to my final composition, and we can see how that changed our graph here. So I'm gonna do that on my other two real quick and fix that up, Fix up my mistake. I apologize for that mistake. I honestly thought that's how it worked. And we should be good to go. All right, so now we've got the tent that we want. So the reason that I wanted to do that in the first place, instead of just making everything green to begin with, is now we can go into our green solid layer. And if I do shift command or control. If you're on a PC and hit, why now? It brings up the properties of the solid that were selected on so we can see that right now it's really dark green. But if I wanted to make this a really dark blue instead, you can see how it adjusts everything in our scene. So if we wanted to change the color, we can do that with just a couple clicks. And we're not going into every single element and changing color in the background, color and everything. So I really like this workflow better. So I'm a little bit more flexible if I want to change something. So I'm gonna go back and make this green again. Make it about their hit. Okay? Hit. Okay, so now we have our color. So now I want to add a little bit of a glow effect. So now I want to go to layer new and adjustment layer. So what an adjustment layer is is it's a layer that you can add effects on, and those effects are going to effect everything underneath it. So if I were did move this adjustment layer just above the grid. Every effect that's on the adjustment layer will only affect the grid because it's the only thing under it. But I'm going to bring it up to my right above all of my element. So my line graph status, bar everything, and I might add a glow to this adjustment layer, so it's going to add it to everything. So I'm going to go to my effects and presets and type in glow and stylized glow. We will add that on top of our adjustment layer so you can see that this kind of adds a glow. Looked all of this and I've kind of gone through these settings already, and I know exactly the properties that I want, but you might have to kind of play around with this and see what kind of low effects that work for you. So I'm gonna bring the threshold up to about 68 the radius to 79 and then the intensity to point five. So, like I said, I already know what properties I'm using. But depending on your scene and what you're doing, it might be a little bit different, so I encourage you to play around with these properties and see what works for you and your scene. So the next thing I want to do is add a little bit of blur. So there are a couple ways to do this, and I've tried. I tried it a couple ways when I was making the original, I can make, um, a depth of field effect. With this camera. There is a depth of field setting within the camera. So if I go under camera, transform our excuse me camera options and due to a depth of field currently it's turned off. We can turn that on and what that will do, and you can't really see it right now. Let's bring the aperture up quite a bit. So now you can see that this is blurry. So what this is doing is there's a certain focus area, and we can make that bigger or smaller. But I really want these sides out of focus, which looks good now. But if I move in, you can see that now. Our main circle element is out of focus, and I can key frame the position of our focus distance. Like where, Um, this is focused, but it's a lot of work to make sure that this is always in focus the whole time, even throughout our animation. So it ended up just be making more sense to do this a different way, So I'm going to turn my depth of field off. So that was pretty close to where I wanted to go with this effect. But it was just a little bit too tricky to do it that way. So I'm going to go to layer New and add another adjustment layer. So now there's an effect called camera lens blur. So it kind of virtually does. What's the other depth of field option would do so in the typing camera lens blur and dragged that onto our adjustment Layer two. And we'll drag that on top of the first adjustment layer. So now you can see that this is adding a blur effect to everything. So if I crank that up, it looks like everything is very much out of focus. So now I only want this to affect the sides of this graph, even when we're pushing in. So the best way to do that, I found, is to add a mask, so I'm going to go to my pin tool with my adjustment layer selected, I'm gonna zoom out just a little bit and kind of make a diagonal square mask. So I'm gonna go there maybe about there and there and there and there. So in the end, everything that's within this bounding box will be in focus. And actually, it's the opposite right now. So I'm gonna hit my adjustment layer to hit in to bring up our mass properties and change that tracked instead of add. So now we can see that everything that is outside of this bounding box is out of focus. I'll click open my mass properties and hit and bring up feather quite a bit, so we don't see such a harsh line. All right, so if I turn off this taco mask visibility, we can see that we can see this a little bit better. I'm gonna bring up my feather a little bit more and I'm I think I'm gonna bring down my blur radius. So again, the reason I wanted to do that was even when we moved in and move out our camera. Still, the thing that I want to be in focus isn't focused the entire time, and the things I want to be out of focus are out of focus the entire time. But one thing I do want to warn you about is this camera lens blur does take ah, lot of memories. So when you start to try to play this back, it does take a little bit longer. Just because the your computer will be chugging a little bit harder, trying to give this virtual camera lens blur look. So I wouldn't blame you if, while you're still animating you, turn that off just to save yourself a little bit of time in a little bit of headache, and it's gonna speed your computer up. And you might even be able to hear my computer, my computer's fan running right now, because I had the camera lens blur on and I was trying to render that out. So So the last thing I want to do is add some reflection layers. Like I pointed out in the last lesson, we can see that there's some reflections on each of these layers, so the simplest way to do that is to select all of our elements, so I'm actually going to start with our circle graph elements because that's probably the easiest to see and do command D. So now we have an extra instance of that and go to my Z axis right here and make sure my selection tool is selected, and I'll push this back and Z space just a little bit. So we'll go to about there now on that layer, I'm going to hit t bring the opacity down to will say pretty low. Probably 10% probably looks good, and then we want to add what's called a fast bowler. So under my effects and presets, I'm gonna type in fast blur and drop this on top and we'll crank this up to about. They're five pixels. Good. So now I want to do that one more time. Select and duplicate. That's copy, and we'll move this back a little bit farther in. Z depth will bring down the opacity even more so. It's barely even visible, but it is there. We can see it. We'll bring it to probably like 2%. It's probably good. Bring up our blur just a little bit more. I'm actually gonna bring up probably 23% my capacity. All right, so I think that that looks good. So that look, that gives us a little bit of a reflection. Look, and we'll do the same thing with the others. So I'm going to go to my line graph duplicate, hit my bottom one and move it backwards and space hit t and bring it down to about 10% I think is what the other one was. And then well, at a fast blur to that and then our blurts of five. And then we can do that again. If we want to move that back, bring our rapacity down to three and our blur up. I hit the wrong one. I want to bring that one pushed that one back and our blur up just a little bit. And there we go. That is our animation. Um, so this is looking really good. I like how this is looking. Um, but one thing that is bothering me a little bit is all the empty space over here. Eso I'm going to go into my camera and go to my last key frame and kind of orbit just a little bit. So now I kind of like that just a little bit better. And it also reveals are lying graph a little bit more. Okay, so we'll go into our adjustment layer, make sure our camera lens blur is turned on. And let's bring your this out and see what it looks like. And there we go. I think that looks awesome. So I want to see what years looks like. So please go ahead, render it out at it as a gift or uploaded to vimeo YouTube, whatever you want to do, Um, and submit it down in the class project section below. Only see your creations. And again, I encourage you to not make it exactly like this one. I would love to see you make something look a little bit different. You can use the elements that we use here, or you can create new elements using the techniques that we have shown you in this course. 15. Exporting in After Effects: Okay, So now that we have our animation, the last thing I want to show you is how to export. So once you have this, you will need to set your work area. So move your play head to the beginning of the animation and hit. Be so mine is already there and move your play heads of the end of the animation and hit in . So that's going to snap the end of your work area. So what is in your work area is what's going to be rendered out, so just keep that in mind. So I'm going to go up to composition and add to render queue. So now we have this in our runner Q. And we can click output to click the name. And I'm just going to say, um, final, HUD comp and hit, Enter and under Output module is where you want to use your setting. So I'll click that and go into your quick time and in format options instead of animation. Animation is going to be a really high quality render, and if you want a really high quality render, you can just keep it on. Quick time animation don't change anything but what I actually recommend. If you want to maintain a good file size and it's not too big, it's going to lose a little bit of quality, but not anything too terrible if you're just uploading it to YouTube or something. Um, you want to do that? H 264 her h 0.264 and then hits. Okay. And then hit. Okay, again. Um, right now, we don't have any audio, so this probably won't render any audio, so we don't really have to worry about that, but we can turn it to off, but auto, it will see that there's no auto audio. Excuse me. There's no audio, and it won't render out any audio, so we'll hit. OK, And everything should be good to go. And once you're done with that just hits surrender.