After Effects Advanced Effects

1. Intro: A Hello, everyone. I'm March Molgic, and welcome to this course in Ab After Effects. This is going to be advanced techniques in After Effects. I hope you enjoyed laying with me on the other courses like introduction course fundamentals. In this course, we're going to start working on projects, which will involve more advanced techniques, more advanced effects as well. We're going to look at effects like creating rain and snow and animated bars with animated values. And much much more. So I welcome you to this course. I hope you're going to enjoy it and follow along and create your projects. Feel free to share your projects. If you create something that you want to share. Let's all get feedback. Let's all share together. And if you have any questions, let me know. And once again, I welcome you to this course. Thank you for joining me. Let's start creating some content. Let's start working together and progress through more advanced techniques inside a Dobby after effects. So I'm Mark Mogi and thank you for joining me and let's get started. 2. Scale and Fit on Screen: Let's have a look at placing videos or images onto screens as an example, and using a cap in effect at the same time. I'm going to import some more content here. So from a desktop, I'll import these three videos in here, and I'm going to put them into a bin as well. This will be say Corner pin as an example, and we'll start with this Corner laptop first. I'm going to make a new composition from this video. Make a new composition here. Corner laptop, that's fine. And let's see want to place a video or an image animation on top of this video. So take this content aware video, I'll drop it into the comp. It's much bigger, needs to be scaled down. If you go to the timeline and open the transform properties or scale. So just need to press S on a keyboard for scale or keep it key it proportions, make it smaller F now, I'll just try to place it roughly. I needs to be a little bit smaller. Say something like that. I I zoom a bit closer here in the composition window. This can go a little bit lower. We just lock the background. There we go. This could be a little bit bigger. Maybe 31%. There we go. It's about well, it's a bit too wide. It doesn't really fit exactly. So let's say 30. And I guess what I would need to do here. I I'm just a lower is make it a little bit wider, but actually distorting it. I'm going to break the chain, and I'll make it a bit wider. Because just a little bit, you wouldn't see difference in quality. So I I zoom out. Let's say this looks okay. There's a video on the screen of this monitor here. DVs appears at the end because this composition is a bit longer. I would just shorten the work area even shorter. So the video stays there. And that's not too difficult. That's worked quite well, but what about this video here? The Quality VA movie. If I make a new composition from this video, Again, I'm going to lock this layer, and I'll drop the same video, the video called content aware in here and I'll make it smaller, S for scale, or scale it down. We'll move it here. Now, the challenge we have in here is the perspective. Because this doesn't fit at all. So we need another solution for this example in here. 3. Corner Pin Effect: So we can do in this case is we can use a orapin effect on this video here. So I'll go to the effects panel on the right hand side. God be just quicker. I'm going to do a search for Corner. Hg. We got a corner pin thetort, and we'll apply this effect onto this layer. Now, because I have this layer already selected, I'll just double on effect to apply it to apply it to the layer. And the corner pin appears in the control panel. If a control panel opens automatically. Now, got this corners, upper left upper right, lower left, lower right. If you want to adjust them in a more easier way, is you can click on these icons to set the con pins. I can say, click here and move that where the corn is supposed to be maybe there. Oh, what I do is, I'll just move these circles in the corners. So this goes say, this goes down. Of course, we're distorting the video in here, but we're trying to make it fit on the screen. So we'll have to be slightly distorted anyway. Something like that. And if we just shorten the work area, we'll have the video playing on a TV screen. I guess we could could make here. Just to make it look a bit more realistic is make this video start a bit later when she's pressing the remote. I'm going to move this entire layer to start maybe later nt. Is black initially. Maybe a little bit more. And we can make this longer now as well. Not technique we can use. If we don't want to distort this video, not technique can use with masking. This is a different approach. I'm going to keep this one for now. And I'm going to just hide it and lock it. Actually, let me just rename this one. This is the cont corner, so I know what this one is. I'll lock it for now and I'll drop the same video once again, the co blue contin here we go. Make it smaller because it's too big again, so scale. I'll put it on top of the TV and make it just a little bit bigger. Let me just undo. I forgot about the shift key. Here we go. Keep proportions for now, maybe something like that. Maybe just a little bit narrower, not too much, just a bit because we actually distorting it here. Just a little bit. Another technique will be to use a mask for this video here. 4. Corner Masking: With the mask, what you do is if we move this video behind the TV. So we need to move it underneath the Cort V video, or unlock the corn TV because we're going to make a mask on this cont V video. With the ity V layer selected. We need to create a mask. When you keep the layer selected and use one of the shape tools, they create a mask automatically. Make sure you have the layer selected because this is not a straight rectangle, I won't be using any of these tools in here. I'll just use the pento instead. And with the pentol, I just in a little bit. We'll just click in each corner, line this and here as well. And go back here. It's like using penol in photoshop. When you go back to where you start that you see a circle next to your cursor, so you click to close the path. Now, by the default, it's going to make the mask visible and hide anything else. So if you go to your layer properties and open the mask properties here, we've got this at mode. We actually want to do is we want to subtract instead. What's going to do is is going to hide the mask. And what we can see here is what's behind it. So if I play it, you get a similar effect. It's just at this time. Just move this layer again. Just at this time. You see the video behind and it's not in perspective. Oh, I move the wrong layer. Just do this layer here. I'm also not getting this black anymore. Yes, because we've masked out the screen on the TV, we've removed it. You may be getting different kinds of colors because what you see here is what's behind the Corner TV video, which is nothing. And what this is is your composition background color. If I go to composition menu, composition settings, I'll just need to change the background color to be black. And I click. Okay. So it's initially black, and then it shows the video. What you could also do with the video here is we could make it fade in. On this video, this one at the bottom. If I press T four pasit Is the key frame initially make it 0%. And then a moment later, make it 100%. The video will actually fade in instead of just appearing. The way the image would appear when you turn on your TV or just fade in just really quickly. So I did this animation, which is about half a second maybe just looking at timeline in here. So you get these different techniques. Different ways you can create content, and you can drop the content on something like on a TV screen, for example. In a similar way, you could add multiple masks on the same videos on this corner TV video. We could do more masks here on the window, for example in here. So say I could drop another video here, anything. So I could import something. Say if I go to my folder here. Let's see. For example, tracking, we have lots of videos in here to choose from. I I drop, say maybe this one, for example, and I'll import it. I'll drop it behind the video in the background, drop it maybe here. It's probably too big, so I need to scale it scale. And I'm just going to hide Cat V for a second. Here we go. That's the video. It's definitely way too big. I want it to be somewhere on the right hand side, somewhere. This will do for now. And then turning the background back on CorVV file. And with the layer selected. I'll create some additional masks in here. So I'll switch back to the pen. G if you like key but shortcuts. I'll create a mask. Normally, you just create a mask for each window pane. Again, doesn't do anything by default. So we're going to go here, we're going to change to subtract, and you can see the video behind it. Then I'll do another one. So click here. Every time you create a new shape of the pen, you're creating a new mask. And again, subtract. If I do one more. Sathing the bar in mind is when you use the penol If you get too close to any of the other anchor points, you can't create a new one because this allows you to move them or readjust them. That. Usually start on a far side like far right in this case. You can always adjust it as another mask. And again, we'll change the mote to subtract. When change the mode to the mask, you can also do it for multiple mask the same layer, you can select all the masks and change them all. But because we create masks one by one, I'm just doing it for each of them one by one, and then I can just take the video behind tracking cars and reposition it. I'll probably use the position property in the timeline here and just reposition it or scale it if it needs to be even smaller, and then just moving it into place. Maybe something like this. Again, this will just play because the video in the background. As if the street is behind this window. So. There's just a number of techniques we can use with corner pin and maskin as well, depends what you want. It may look okay, depends on the perspective. If the T was turned even more sideways, Corner pin would be the best choice because just maskin wouldn't do it unless you apply corner pin to this video anyway, tracking cars or content aware. Cause you can. You can apply corner pin to layer at any time. 5. Linear Wipe Effect: L et's have a look at some of the effects we can apply when animating logos in after effects. So I've imports for there called logos with a few logos in here. Okay. Let's say if we start maybe with maybe this one. So I'm going to make a new composition from this logo. It doesn't matter what the dimensions are right now because we're just looking at the logo animations and effects. And we know we can make the logo fade in fade out, that's easy, but we can also apply some animated effects. So for example, we've got to ft spanel, and search for wipe. We're not looking at the animation presets, we're just looking for the actual effects, and we have in the transition, we have quite a few of them, but what I want to show you here is the linear wipe. And the radial wipe. These two in here. So I I apply linear wipe first, I'll drag and drop it onto the logo. I linear wipe effect appears in effect control spanel here, and we can we can make the logo or the NE image show appear in the linear way from one side to the other. What is transition completion here, which is set to zero, F start changing it. You get this like a curtain in here. So I could animate from 100% to zero. So say I could go to 100%, set the key frame. Move the current time indicator. Let's say I'll give it maybe one half seconds and then set the transitional pent to zero. If I shorten this comp, it's going to make the logo appear from one side to the other. If you want it faster, we can always just reveal the key frames here, on a keyboard and move the keyframs closer together, so it's faster. What I would also do here is add some favor to make it softer on the edge, make a bit more blurry, quite a lot of favor. If you wanted to animate from left to right, not from right to left, you can change the i angle. Instead of 90 degrees, we'll have it -90, this side. So do -90 degrees. It goes from left to right instead. So the linear wipe can be used to reveal a video an animation, a logo. You can obviously change wipe and goo to anything you want. You could actually run like this. S -45, for example, to reveal from the corner. A Alternative would be to use the radial wipe int. 6. Radial Wipe Effect: With radial wipe, it will run around a circle. I'll use the same logos. I'm just going to disable linear wipe effect by clicking on the FX pattern here for disable it. It's still there, but it's just not playing anymore. I hit space bah in happens. Instead, I'll apply radial wipe. I'll just double click because I have they already selected. Let me just collapse this here for a second. And the sections are very similar. The main thing is the wipe, they want to be clockwise or counter clockwise. You get the same transition completion. It goes like this. Say again, I'll do 100% at the beginning, or key frame it. Then I'll go by a second and set it to zero. I'll do some favors. If I move back a little bit, and then add more fervor to make it nice and smooth. Again, I probably want it to be counter clockwise, not clockwise. I goes this side from like a clock in a way. Another thing I want to draw your attention to here is the wipe center. It's always in the center of the composition by default. But if you have something which is not in the center of your composition, you can move the wipe center. So you could click on this icon here and then click where you want the wipe center to be. So it doesn't run around the center of your composition, but somewhere on the side. That's something you get in here as well. Radial wipe. 7. Light Wipe Effect: Another interesting effect we can apply is the light wipe. I'm show something interesting about the light wipe. So I've turned off the radial wipe and linear wipe, so they disabled at the moment, so there's nothing here. If I apply light wipe. One of the features we have in here, we can make this image, this logo animation open through the. So I can sell it to doors instead of round a round by default. So what it does, it just gives you this circle, so you could do something like this. Which is quite nice, but it's also a one for dose, and it does this. But what I'm going to do is, I'm going to change the direction to 90 degrees. I looks like really the dose, and you can do this for the animation. Secret key frame it from the beginning, completion 100%, and say just over a second later, completion zero. You could reveal a video, an animation or a logo, as well with a light wipe, as well. 8. Ball Action Effect: It's another interesting effect it can apply to a logo animation to make it a PR or disappear. I'm going to use a different logo this time. Let's see, maybe this one, Me logo. I'm going to make a new composition from this logo. We go. This logo is a PNG file with no background behind, so work perfectly. Actually, in this case, I'm going to clear the effect filter in here, and I'll go for the menu because now what I'm looking for in this case, I'll go effect. It's all grayed out because the lanes to be selected here we go, and then effect, remember it's all context sensitive. And if we go to simulation, we could do something like a ball action, which gives you these balls. What we can do is we could say scatter them. So I could do like an explosion no way. I I set it to zero initially, and I'll put a keyframe for scatter, and then say 2 seconds later, just shorten the work area as well. Actually, let me just make it short as I go to composition composition settings, and I'll make the duration say 5 seconds. And at 2 seconds will increase the scatter a lot. We can do rotation on both axis x and y. We can also add some twist a bit as well. We can change the bowl sizes, so we can make them bigger or smaller, make them a bit bigger. Actually, this could be key from it as well. Let me just leave it for now. And then if I just play it, you get this logo almost exploded in a way. O, obviously, you could play it in reverse. You can make it appear out of these balls. Mm hmm. So initially, it could be like this, and then the logger would appear. If you want to do something like that, I'm show how we can do it really quickly and easily. I'm going to duplicate this slab because I want to keep it. So go edit, duplicate. I'll hight one of them and lock it, on this one, if I press U to reveal the key frames with the properties. Basically, what I want to do here is one to swap these keyframes. That's easy. You can just click on the words cutter in this case, which highlights both keyframes. Right click one of them doesn't matter which one. Key from assistant, and time reverse keyframes. This will swap them over. Now it's going to make the logo appear, like that. Mm hmm. I've seen this kind of animation sometimes at start of some films where they reveal the logo of a company did some special effects, for example. Something similar like this, a? So this was the effect simulation and bowl action. You also go bubble babbles here as well, a? 9. Pixel Polly Effect: It's another example. So I'm going to again, duplicate this layer. Go add it duplicate. I'll height and lock the other one. This one, actually I want to remove this effect, so the layer selected. I just actually I'm going to delete CCB action. Instead, I'll go to effect also simulation and pixel poly, which is nice for explosions in a way with pixel ply. E. W Pixel poly. This is actually animated automatically. It does this. It's exploding. And we can customize the way it's been exploded. So for example, we can customize the force of the gravity. I can make it say a bit higher, to make it go lower or lower to make it go higher. So travel a longer or shorter distance. We can also adjust the force as well. So make it a bit higher when it's exploding. You can change the shapes in here as well. But textured polygonis is quite nice. We could just make the spacing maybe a bit smaller. Put them closer together. As just the randomness of the direction. So it's a bit more random. Here we go. And this can be key from S its maybe initially as it is. Here, put a key frame. And then a moment later, I increase direction randomness. Here we go. It is actually more random. If you want create in fact as if something is exploding, typically, you wouldn't a key frame direction randomness. You set it back to, I think it was ten by default. This is just mo explosion in a way. And you could make it spinning if you wanted to. And you can change the center of the force. It's always in the center of decomposition by default again. You can always change it if you want it to be on the side if you have an object, not in the center again. 10. Creating Realistic Rain: It's one more effect, making things rain and snow, animating, obviously. If I go back to our Corn open videos, I'll take this to do continual video. I'll make a new composition from this video. Shot of Paris. Under effect menu and simulation, we have the CC rainfall and CC snowfall. We can make it rain or snow. I'm going to use rainfall in this case. It's the both animated. So just by applying it, you'll see some rain or snow. Then obviously, you can customize it. So for example, you can customize number of drops or decisive drops. So let's say, initially, I'll leave it as maybe there are there are no drops at all, and I'm going to key frame it. And then say a moment later, I may be here. There will be lots of them. I'm also going to key frame the wind. Once it starts raining, a moment later, the rain will go at an angle as if it's windy. It doesn't rain straight, more like this. If I play it from the beginning, starts raining, and then the wind picks up. Maybe we can make the raindrops actually bigger. So we can see them better. Say maybe five. And maybe we can keyframe the d d in size as well. And then towards the end, we'll make it really big. And even more drops. So it's pouring down. 11. Creating Realistic Snow: I'll be very similar with the snow. If I disable rainfall, and a snowfall instead, infect simulation snowfall. Again, this will be similar, it's going to be animated automatically, and then we can just key frame it. So say at the beginning, I'll put a key frame for number of flakes and the size, and I'll set number of flakes to be down to say just 1,000. And then a moment later, I'll change the number of flakes to say 20,000 and make them bigger. So you can actually see them better. Here we go. And it starts snowing. This is a very popular effect, very often used or both rain and snow. If you look on any films, we can see like a rainy scene on a snowy scene. If you see that the rain or the snow doesn't bounce off someone's body, for example, it's effect in after effects. Because it looks very realistic, it looks very good. You can obviously make it wiggle as well. You could change the color if you wanted to, you can add the wind like we do the rain as well. Is the wind here as well. And you can k frame all of these different properties. You could even change the blend bat as well, but lightning is just fine. 12. Create a Bar Chart: Let's create an animated graph, an animated bar chart, and an animated pie chart as well. We don't need any content for this. I'm going to make a new composition. I'll call it animated chart or bar chart. It doesn't matter what size we use. I'll make it a standard full HD, HDTV 1080 $0.24 per second. Square pix $0.24 per second, 5 seconds is enough, actually 5 seconds fine. Maybe a lighter background, maybe we can sample something here. That's fine. We'll put some text here. So say this will be the headline, say I know. Do you agree with put three dots or leave it finer, okay? Put it right here is the line panel to align it right in the center. That's fine. Now, for animated bar, we're going to have two, one for yes, one for no. I'll draw rectangles with shaped tool. Just make sure you don't have any layers selected, so it creates a shape layer. So dislike the layer already, I clicked away on the pasteboard, I'll draw rectangle. I'll put it here aside because I'm going to show you an animated pit as well on the right hand side or a bit more. So I'm going to draw it here for now. I don't worry about the fill color and stroke for now. I can always change it. I I draw it here. Quite a big one. Then I'll switch back to selection tool, select it and change it. I'm going to change the fill to something different. And stroke. I'll put it back to one pix sur. It's just a tiny stroke here. And we want to make sure that the anchor point is right in the center of the shape. I'll go to layer menu, transform center cha point in layer content. And I'm going the anchor point tool to move the anchor point to the bottom. So this doesn't come up, so I'm going to click away, click on the shape again and as the anchor point. I'll drag it right to the bottom because we want to scale this bar vertically. Now let's animate it. On the timeline here, open the transform section here, and I want this to be the end of the animation. So say it 1 second. Is the key frame four scale. Then at the beginning of zero. Going to disable the link between width and height, and we just want to change the height to be just 1%. Need to do this when it's animated. I will just grow, it will rise. I'll do one more for the other one like no, I'm going to dis select all the layers or d rectangle again. Actually, just make it easier. We could duplicate this layer, add it duplicate. Okay. I'm just going to remove the key frames, so press U and I'll delete key frames. Then I'll move the layer, so press P for position, and I'll just move it horizontally and change the color. So a different color. Little different and I want it to be shorter, press S for scale and make it shorter. Maybe something like that, for example, and I will animate it. Say at 2 seconds. This will be the final state for the scale. At 1 second, it will be just 1% for the height. At the moment here, we get this. Because the second bar is shorter, shod animate in a short amount of time because otherwise it will be slower. We need to move the second k f closer to the first one to speed up a bit. You can always change the speed of the animation. Now want some text for the numbers. So put some text here. We have percentages separately. So just type in percentage as a separate layer. Let me just mean maybe should be a bit bigger. Character. Put it somewhere. Let's see how big its to be some way to put another text here. Let's say 60, for example, and I'll move that. I'll aligned them both with the aligned panel. I think this looks okay. Just to make things easier, I'll duplicate this as well. Add it duplicate, these two duplicates, which I'll move to the right and down actually using the roches on the keyboard to make it easier to move them. There we go. And this is going to be remaining or even say f. And this belongs to this layer and this belongs to this layer here. We put these separately because these will animate. The percentages want. We don't want them to appear at the beginning. They want them to appear later. So the 60% may start after half a second, maybe. Same with the percentages. And then 35 maybe after a second. So these two layers, select it together, make them both start later. So don't appear here yet. Now I want to animate them, and we're going to use in effect to animate them in here. 13. Animate a Bar Chart: Now we'll do here is on the layer which we want to animate, so this 60 here. We're going to add, this is the layer. I'm going to add an effect called slider control. If I go to effects panel, and just type in slide got a slider control. I'll apply to the effect. It's got one option for slider with the numbers in here. Now we need to apply it to this layer. No change anything here yet. We'll open the layer properties. We're looking for the source text, which is here, source text. We're going to hold old key and click on the stopwatch next to Sauce text. Old click, as we call it. You got these expressions in here. But don't worry I won't be typing anything in here. Are going to do is, we're going to take this, it's called a pick whip, and we'll drag and drop it onto the slider property in effect control spanel. We'll just drag this and drop it here onto the slider control. And then we'll just click away. Don't press a because ana will just move to a new line here. And now if we change the value, this is changing. So we could set it to think mine was 60, and we'll key from the slider control. If I go back to the end of this animation, which will be here, I'll set a key frame, and here because this is the beginning of this layer, I'll set it to zero to make it animate 0-60, as the bar is rising. Now, when we play it, I will just play. There we go. And the same for the other one in here. So sl the layer at slider control. Open the layer properties, looking for source text. Old click on the stopwatch, and then drag the pick whip to the slider control here, click away. It's there. Now, at the end of the animation, this should be 45, and I'll key frame it. Then at the beginning, I'll set it two, zero, zero. Now, this is supposed to happen. That's normal. If you get that, what you're going to do is here in your expression in here, going to put a cursor at the end in there. I will add dot value. Looking for value dot two fixed. You get a job down so you don't have to type everything to fixed, no put a zero between the brackets. This will give you just integers, full numbers. Or the same for the other. Collapse this layer, go to 60, and here, type at the end, dot value dot two fixed, and then zero between the brackets. And click a way to accept it. Gives you integers full numbers. If you want to have a decimal point, you can set the value here to say one for one decimal point, two for two decimal points, and so on. But that's how you can make a nice animated bar chart with numbers, animating. O the percentage symbol, you could just make it appear, fad in, fade out. You know what to do here. 14. Animate a Radial Chart: Here's another idea for animated charts, animated results. If you want to do like a circle, example, I'm going to dissect all the layers. I'll draw an oval or circle of the lip tool. What I want to do here is for this example, I want to have no fell. So click on the word fill, and I'll set it to no fill. But I want to have a really big stroke. No sure how big yet. I'm going to draw a circle first. You know, much bigger, truly fi one. You know, and then you can have a value inside in here. So it just a bit bigger. Go. Switch back to selection tool. And I want to reveal the circle. So we know you know what we're going to use here. We're going to use our radial y. No animation preset, radar wipe from transition. Got the layer selected. I'm going to double click and no transition completion. This is supposed to happen because as you know, the wipe center is always in the center of the comp. Oh, this one of you and I forgot to mention. So first of all, wipe center, we need to go to the center of the shape here. This is running from the center this, and we want it to animate counter clocki from 100 to certain values. I'll set 100 in here. Then a moment later I s. Let's say if you want it to be say 65%, you just do 45. 45 will give you 55%. It is animated. Bar. H here. Just a different way of animating a bar chart in here. D. And we can have, you know, a text in here. So this could be say 55. I'm just going to type it in this case, 55% selection to. I'll just put it right in the middle. And this will appear towards the end. That's another approach for animating statistics info graphics for the clients.