After Effects for Beginners: Mastering Typography

1. Course Overview: Hi and welcome to this class, After Effects for Beginners mastering typography. My name is Lucas Ridley and I'll be your instructor with over ten years of professional After Effects experience. This course is for new users of After Effects who want to improve their skills and gain a deeper knowledge of After Effects. These are some of the 11 projects we'll be creating together throughout the course to provide structure and goals for your learning, none of which require the use of any special plugins. Everything we make will use out of the box After Effects, which includes Cinema 4-D light that comes with After Effects. The course begins with more simple projects like lower thirds and animating your name, but each project introduces more and more advanced material so that by the end of the course you'll be creating 3-D animated type and have mastered all aspects of using typography in After Effects. We will learn not just about type, but about how to think about animation and creating appealing motion with words and letters. What you learn in this class will be useful to all of your After Effects projects. I've included the project files so you can download them and follow along. I look forward to seeing you in class. 2. Quick Text Animation: Welcome to the first lesson of this course. Before we get started, I just want to emphasize this course is the continuation of the After Effects for beginners course, series of courses. If you haven't watch mastering the basics yet, then I encourage you to go watch that less than one hour long course or if you have opened After Effects before or you've already watched that course, you're in the right place. Let's get started. In this lesson, we're going to get started with a brand new composition and create our first text inside of After Effects, and we'll begin with the background. Let's create a new composition. The defaults are fine, by me. I'm going to create a background by right-clicking and saying "New Solid". I'm going to accept the defaults because I'm going to create a gradient on this solid. I want to go to the effects panel here, which is a new way to add effects. Instead of clicking and dragging from over here, you can also right-click in this window. If you don't have this window, you can create it or enable it by going down here to the effects controls checkbox. I'll right-click here, and it'll also give you the most recent used effect at the second option here. But let me show you where it is. I won't take the shortcut here. It's the first time you have seen it. I'm going to choose Gradient Ramp under Generate. Now we have this black white gradient ramp, which I can use my handy dandy little color libraries that I've just shown you how to use those as well. I also want to increase the ramps scatter because when we export this file as an 8-bit movie file, which we are probably bound to do at some point to compress it and have it be a decent file size. It's going to create banding, but if we introduce some scatter, it will not band as bad. The other thing you can do is under project window, you can click on the 8-bit and change that to 16 to 32, and that will reduce banding. But again, the final delivery most likely is going to be an 8-bit version, so I'd like to introduce the scatter into any color gradient that I'm using in After Effects. I want to select the layer, hit "Enter" and type in VG for background. I'm going to lock it because I don't want to affect it. Now, let's text. I'm going to right-click "New" and go to Text. I'm going to type in my name. [inaudible] focus center in the composition. To de-select it, I just select de-select the layer down here anywhere, just click in an empty space. Now I have my name, I can change everything about this after the fact as well. If we go to the character tab here, we get all the attributes related to text. If I double-click this again, I could change the font by selecting this. I could press up and down on the arrow key to cycle through and preview all the different types of fonts that we have installed. You can also install fonts, and have those accessible here. Also type something in, I know the name of the font, I can start typing it in and it'll hone in on that font and choose ultralight. You can also isolate, even though this is one layer, you could change different aspects of text. I want to change my last name to actually be bold. You can have mix and match different fonts. I don't encourage you to mix fonts like that. Normally what I do is change these secondary attributes to a font. You can also increase it. Basically anything you can mix and match, even though it's on the same layer. Of course, you could always "Control D", duplicate this, and have one name on a layer, and that could be helpful if you want to animate things specifically to that. We also have the font size. You can notice, as I scale this up, we're not getting any pixelation here. We can see the ramp scatter a little bit maybe you can see that noise, but we're not getting any pixelation because again, like I mentioned in one of the earlier lessons, of course, fonts and text is a vector graphic. No matter how big you scale this, you'll never see pixels, it being rasterized, the more you scale it up. I'm going to shift and question mark to get it fit the window and scale it up. I'm going to expand this layer. You can see this is a new category that we haven't had before on an image or a solid text has its own category. There's all different options will get into here at a later date. But I just want to show you that's where that lives. Let's quickly add an animation to this. The quickest way to do that is to add it from the effects and presets. If we scroll down the animation presets and go to text, we actually have a whole library of options available to us. The only problem with this is it's a little difficult to tell what the effect is going to be without having to try each one. We could say, "Fade Out Slow", that is self-explanatory. Wherever we have our timeline scrubber, that is where the key frames are going to be added. We can see here there are these tiny little circles and that's because that indicates there are key frames, but we don't have that category expanded or that attribute expanded in this layer stack here. If we expand it out, we could maybe find it or of course, the other shortcut that we can use is hit Hue. Now I'll go straight to that range selector. If we double hit hue, it'll open up any attribute that has been changed. Now we can see we have this quick animation. We didn't have to do anything, just knowing what we know already. If we wanted to happen over a shorter or longer period of time, we can just click and drag this key frame and we can have it occur over a longer time. The shortcut for visualizing and previewing these effects, lets say this isn't the one we wanted, we could just delete this animator. Now we're back to the normal text. If we wanted to browse all of these different animations, the way to do that is to open Adobe Bridge. This is basically the only thing I use Adobe Bridge for is just to visualize these text animations if I'm an After Effects and I need to do a lot of text animation. What we can do, because we don't know where these files are kept, we have to have something selected, let's just select this folder and choose an option here, and left-click and go "Reveal an Explorer". That will open the explorer window and it gives us the path. I'm going to copy this path, I'm going to jump back over to bridge and I'm going to select this area here to be able to paste that path in. I'll hit "Enter". Now we have a preview of all this. I'm going to go back up a few levels to the presets folder and you can just right-click and say, "Add to Favorites". I've already added it, so it's over here so I can just very quickly click it and get into this folder structure, but let's go to the animate in. Now we can see previews of each one of these effects. If I select one, I actually have a little preview video that auto plays over here. I can just scroll through these and find which one I want to do even just pressing up and down and side to side on the keyboard, and find what type of animation I want to use in my After Effects project. These are just preset animations. In another lesson, I'm going to show you how to make these from scratch, so you have greater control and understand how these are made. Even if you want to start with one of these in your animation, you will understand how they're made and how you can change these presets even. There are a great starting point and they're a great way to get animation straight out of the box by just clicking and dragging onto your text and hit "Play". There we go. We have animated text in After Effects. In the next lesson we're going to dive a little deeper into these topics. I want to show you how to create this kind of character by character animation for yourself, and how all that's done under the hood. Thanks for watching. I will see you in the next lesson. 3. Precision With Guides And Grids: An important aspect of any design or animation is precision and insight of after effects, there are several different tools we can use to make sure we're being precise. One of the first ones is the ruler, if we click the "Composition Window" to make sure it's selected and then "Control R," we can bring up the rulers. We can also do it from the View tab if we go to Show Rulers and we can see the hotkeys for all of the different types of guides and we're Rulers that we're about to explore. With a ruler up, we can actually click the Ruler and dragged down a guide. If we let go of it, we can right-click and choose Edit position, and because we know that our composition is 1920 by 1080, we can just divide those numbers by half, so going down, we have 1080 and half of that is going to be 540, hit Enter, we can see that this is precisely halfway down. Same way We can choose a vertical guide and place it in the center. Right-click and say Edit position 960. We can also check that's the center by going down to this little icon here, choose Gridding Guide options. You actually turn on what's called a tidal action safe. By selecting this, we can see crosshairs on the center of the composition, as well as these other rectangular guides.These hearken back to an older system. There are different sizes of TVs and to ensure that the action you want it to be seen and the titles that you wanted to be seen had the fall within these two rectangles. The larger rectangle is the action safe area, everything within that is most likely safe. Everything within this inner rectangle is the tidal safe area. We never want text to go beyond this area. Now, in the age of the Internet and phones and all of that, this is a less important consideration since most media isn't necessarily going to be displayed on TV, it's usually going on the Internet, and this is less of concern. But it is also a way to standardize spacing and it's just also another guide to have inside of after effects, like seeing the center with these cross hairs. But we have these guides laid out so we don't necessarily need this tidal action safe. We can also temporary hide the guides, let's say we have some animation occurring and they're distracting the seeing the preview animation with our cursor selected here, we can actually do Control and semicolon on the keyboard to temporarily toggle it on and off. We can also clear the guides by clicking and dragging them up, or we can go to View and go down to Clear Guides and now we have a clean space. The other thing is if we had a red color, those guides or red, which actually changed because I think the default is very similar to this purple color I have, we can go to Edit Preferences and Grids and Guides, and we can change the color of the guides. You can see if we change it to that purple, we're not gonna be able to see it that well, so we want to make sure that our guides are a color, we can actually see. The other attributes in here are for the grid, let me just change this back to our red and just be aware that if you want to adjust the grid size, you can do that from this same Preferences Menu. Let's go down to grid, and this is also another good way to help organize your designs, as well as the proportional grid is a little larger. I believe it's evenly spaced basically between these lines. The other things we have at our disposal are the aligned tools on the right hand side here. Let's say we have our text and it gets off centered a little bit and we wanted to get it back centered. We could actually just use these align buttons to center them horizontally and vertically. The other thing we can do is if we have multiple objects, let's just create a duplicate by hitting "Control B" or I hold down "Shift" and click and drag a copy down, I'm going to make another one and hit "Shift" and drag it up somewhere. I want these evenly distributed, so I'll have to do is select all of them, and then now we have what was grayed out is now active and we can distribute layers evenly between each other. If I was to change the distance again, here, all I have to do is just select all of them again and redistribute them to make sure they are equidistant from each other. Those are some of the tools we have at our disposal to make sure we're being precise, and you can access a lot of these preferences here as well, for example, if we have a grid, the default is going to snap to that grid, as we get close to it, it'll pop to it. We don't want that to occur, all we have to do is just turn those preferences off snappy guides, and then this is of course, the toggle shortcut that we've already seen and used. This is a great way to make sure that your designs are precise and exactly where you want them to be. If you're doing Grid layouts or some type of other design theory or concept, you can use these to your advantage. Thanks for watching. In the next lesson, we're going to jump back in to creating more text animation. Thanks for watching. 4. Custom Text Animation: Welcome back. Now that we've learned where the presets are, how to use the preset animations from the effects panel, let's create our own from scratch and start to begin to understand how those presets are made. So if we use a preset, we know how to customize it for our own usage. Let's go over to our text layer and twirl down the layer with the little arrows here. Let's go to the text layer here, and we can see to the right of that there's this little area that says animate, and there's another arrow in a circle. Click that Circle, and you get a menu here. These are all the animatable attributes that we can use. So let's just pick a couple and start to animate our text. I'm going to click Scale for this. You can see that there are a few more options that have shown up down here. So under text now let's twirl Text down. We can see the animator category. We have a range selector and now we have scale because that's the attribute that we chose. Now, if we wanted to affect more attributes in the range that we're going to choose, we just need to have the animator selected and keep adding to it either here or here. So we can keep adding properties to this single range selector. What a range selector is, is if you watch these two red lines here, they're hard to see because they're at either end of the text right now. But as soon as I change the starter end values, you can see them jump in from either side. That's selecting a range of texts that the attribute we're changing is going to affect. The easiest way to understand that is to see it. So let's change the scale to something very small. So let's scale everything down and that's going to be our starting value. We want it fairly small, so we can not even see it. We scrub the timeline, nothing happens because we haven't animated anything yet. So we can either choose to animate the start and end, but what I tend to like to do, if I'm not having to target individual letters, is I like to animate the offset because it's just more efficient instead of having to animate two different attributes, you can just animate one. That can also be the case here, if we were to animate this one, it'll go from left to right. But if we'd use offset, we can go from left to right or right to left with one attribute. So I tend to like to use offset a little more frequently than the start and end values. I will say the positive thing about start an end values is, if you want to target a certain area, you can do that here. You can go in and hone in and maybe come from either side. But because we're going to go from left to right, let's just use offset. So we click the Stop Watch here, we've set a key frame at the first frame of our timeline, I'm going to move the Current Time Indicator down to two seconds in time. I'm just going to drag this to a 100 percent. Now when I play this back, you can see it's animating and by character, then we have our first custom animation that we've made ourself. This is how the presets are made. If you apply some of these texts presets, you can go into the text layer by hitting U and find where those key frames have been made. So you can use these presets as a starting point and then adjust them for the length of your text or change the speed at which they happen. Let's dive a little deeper into this, so we can understand what's really happening because right now as a basic of an animation, we just have two key frames, but let's say we want to begin to build on this. We want some overshoot like we've done before in the Quick-start After Effects lessons, because each letter stops so abruptly, we could adjust that by the Advanced tab down here and create ease in and ease out. So under the Advanced tab, you can say based on characters, based on words, we could go word by word. It's that intelligent that it would know where spaces are and it divides words by those spaces, so we can adjust those attributes here. But one of the animation attributes that I'm interested in, to stop it from being so abrupt when it hits the top of a letter, it's an even spacing, it's a linear interpolation. I wanted to have a little ease in at the top, so I'm going to choose a place in my timeline, one frame before that a letter hits its final position. I'm going to just hold down Alt and middle mouse scroll so I get a little closer and I'm going to hold down middle click on my Mouse, and I can pan around. So it gets a little bit easier to pop between key frames when you're zoomed in like this. So I want to go to a frame right before the S ends, just so I can see how this change is going to affect it when I take ease low and I scale it up to a 100. What that is going to do is going to ease in at the top, see how there's many more steps to it, stopping at the top. There's one right there, and it's going to pop on a little more. We could create more time, so it has more time to interpolate between the letters. So you just click and drag this Key Frame out. So it will slow down at the top for us now that we've created that ease low attribute. Now it's a lot softer ending, and it just feels a lot better. I want to add to this animation though, so I'm just going to turn this off for now. When I go back to zero on ease low, and I want to add an overshoot. So how do we add more animations? Because we only have one key frame to animate. So how do we create some animation for this as it's going character by character? Well, we can actually duplicate this animator and then offset it. So let me show you what I mean. First, I want to rename this animator so we can keep track and organized what we're doing. So I'm going to call this scale 1, and I'm hitting Enter on my keyboard to rename this. I'm just going to duplicate it with Control D. Now we have scale 2. So I'm going to twirl that down and I'm going to instead on scale of going to two, let me go to the end of the animation, so we can see it take effect. Let's change the range selector so that we turn this off. I'm just going to hit the stopwatch there and turn that back to zero, so we're resetting these attributes. I want the overshoot to go past 100 percent because an overshoot is going past where it's going to stop, so we have a little subtle in our animation. Let's go past 100. I'm just watching right now, I don't want the overshoots to go past where they could intersect with letters. So I'm looking between the D and the L just from a design standpoint, I don't want things overlapping. I'm going to go as far as I can without letters starting to intersect with each other. So that's about 124 for this font and font size. So now, when I go back to this key frame that we match up with this range selector, I'm going to turn on the offset again and go back here, and turn this key frame on. I'm going to click this little button to Add or Remove key frame right now we are adding one, and then I'm going to hit K on my keyboard to jump forward to the end key frame, and I'm just going to bring that to a 100 percent. Let's turn this scale off to remind ourselves what we're doing. I'm just going to hit this little Eye icon right here, so now we're just watching the first effector. The animation is scaling up the text because we're starting from a 2 percent. The second scale, we're going beyond 100 percent, so we're going much higher. These two values are going to be combating each other when these keyframes are on the same frame range. What we can do, let's turn on scale two now, let's offset these keys by as much as we want the overshoot to occur. Let's go maybe three keyframes or four keyframes down, and that's how much of an overshoot we're going to get. That difference in time between these key frames for each letter is where we're going to go from 2 percent to 124. As it finishes going through the offset, we are going to go back to a 100 percent because we're basically turning off offset, we're just scrubbing through the text with these effects. Because one is happening after the other, it appears as though it's being overshoot and it is overshooting the animation. I'm going to maybe bring back the animation, the keyframes a little bit because the overshoot is a little slow right now, so I think I'm looking at maybe three frames difference. Now we have the animation overshooting with two different customizable effector s. Let's keep adding to it, you don't have to stop here, you can just keep adding effects to this. Let's add another animatable attribute let's add rotation now. Now we have another animator, and I'm going to rename that to Rotation by hitting, "Enter" and typing in, "Rotation", and hit "Enter" again to confirm that change. I want to go to the end of the timeline because I want to be able to see the change that's going to happen when I click and drag the rotation values. We're basically picking the starting position. Let's pick something not all the way 90 degrees because again, I don't want the letters to begin to intersect with each other. Now that we've picked the start position, let's do the same thing we've done before, go to the range selector, keyframe, this offset, and then we'll go down to match this other keyframe. The first one we did, so we have the same amount of time that each of these is occurring and go to a 100 percent. Again, these are occurring at the same time, but that's okay because it's a different attribute. They can actually happen at the same time and they're not combating each other like two different scale attributes would be combating each other because that's the same attribute. But because we're introducing a new attribute, the rotation attribute, we could do that over the same length of keyframes here or we could offset it if we want the rotation to happen for longer, we could delay this. Let's just bring it back a few keyframes maybe in line with the second scale. We're seeing more of the rotation for longer, the more we delay that keyframe. We could even go past the second scale if we want the rotation to happen after all the scaling is done. But, I like it to be in conjunction with the overshoot, that's part of the settle in that motion. I like this, but I think we also need a settle on the rotation, so let's do the same thing we did before. Let's select the rotation attribute here, "Control", B, duplicate it. Then instead of going plus 31, I just want to go to other side of the range. We're going to go negative and to something very small, negative ten because we were at positive 30, so let's go like negative ten. Then we need to offset this same way that we did with the scale. I'm going to toggle down the range selector for this, and I'm just going to click and drag these three frames to the right so it's going to be delayed. Now we have a settle in the scale and in the rotation, and there's a lot of attributes here. I'm just going to hit the Tilde key, which is the keyboard button to the left of the number one, to maximize the screen. You can see there's a lot of things going on here and why it's important to rename these attributes so we can keep track of which one is which. Another way to organize this again is to use the shortcut, "U" so it'll only bring up the attributes that have been animated. We can also double-tap, "U", and it will bring up all of the attributes that had been changed, even the ones that don't have keys on them. Now we can see which one is which. I'm just going to grab the rotations I want to hit the tilde key again, and I'm going to delay this a little bit and play with the animation. Now, one of the great things about this is we have this animation completed, let's scroll down the text, let's change the text and see what happens. Still works. This is something that would be considered procedural animation. We're not having to go back and recreate this every time if we want to change the text.Now what this also means is we could duplicate this layer with, "Control", "D". I'm going to hit "P" on the keyboard to pull up position, drag this down and make some more text. We can, "Copy" and "Paste" this in other texts later so we only need to make these animations once. Because I duplicated this, it's already going to have these attributes animated, but let me just delete those to show you that it will still work if you "Copy" and "Paste". I'm going to scroll this down and drop these down so we can see it a little more organized. I'm going to click the first one and then "Shift", click the last one, hit, "Control", "C", and then select the top texts layer and hit, "Control", "V". Now, it will paste the keyframes wherever your scrub head is, so I'm going to undo that and go where the welcome sign is done, and then I'm going to hit paste on this text layer. It's going to insert those keyframes wherever the current timeline indicator is resting. Now we have, "Welcome Students". Again, it's very easy to just adjust the animation. If we select both of these Layers, press, "U" one time, we can grab these keyframes by click dragging, Select, I'm going to shift and click drag those as well. We can see they're both blue. I'm just going to click and drag this down so that everything happens a little bit faster. Then now, because we created a gap between these two words, I'm just going to click and drag these keyframes and drag them down somewhere closer to the first word. Now you can see how you can quickly create your own custom text animation that you can use between all of your projects. Your assignment for this lesson is to create your own custom animation using these new tools by clicking "Animate" and choosing which one of these attributes that you want to begin to animate. Set keyframes and create something that you can use again and again, and I look forward to seeing your work. Thanks for sharing, and I will see you in the next lesson. 5. Lower Third Template: Now let's tie everything together in a lower third project. Let's begin with a new composition and call this lower third, 920 by 1080 is fine. [inaudible] second, and 20 seconds is fine. What we're going to do is create a lower third, which is what is normally below a person speaking. Here I have a little temp project and premier and I want to create a lower third for it and imagine that I'm going to have many more people speaking. I want something that's basically a template that I can use over and over again and change the names in Premier. I want to make it in after effects so that I can use it in Premier. Let's turn on our black background just so we can see our texts. Let's go to a new text. I'm going to again, type my name and then I'm going to make another text layer and type in instructor. Instead of hitting "Enter", I'm just going to click over here to finish typing. I'm going to drop this below by hitting "p" on the layer selected, drop it down and we'll select both layers. I'm going to turn on title actions safe so I can see where I'm going. Typically, you don't want to move text beyond this innermost long rectangle. That is another TV standard. The further one out is called the action safe. When TVs were of different sizes, you used to have to abide by these norms, so that any text that you want it to be seen on screen, you knew would fit on most every TV, if it was in the title safe area. This is the action safe area out here, meaning that's where action can take place and you should be able to still see it. I like my lower thirds now where the action safe is. Just because I think that's a little more realistic in this day and age to expect that people are probably going to be watching this online anyways. These are archaic hold over from trying to make things for television but if you are making things for television, just know that that's what that is. Right now I'm just using it as a guide to help me organize my lower thirds here. I'm going to create a quick little background for this with a solid. Right-clicking new solid, that's fine. I'm going to call this BG and hit "Okay". Instead of creating a ramp, I just wanted to show you another way by creating a layer style. I go into Gradient overlay and I can get to the settings here by toggling down-gradient Overlay. I'm going to use. The top row is opacity, the bottom row is the colors. I just need to select the other color here and select the picker again, select that, hit "Okay". Because this is set to align with layers, that means it is going to stretch the whole width of the layer. Might hit "V" to pull up the selection tool and just scale this down. I'm going to toggle down this layer so I can see it and put it at the bottom. Now I'm just going to click and drag that down and we are also holding shift for it to snap to the y-axis and control plus the zoom in. I'm just going to scale this down a little bit more. Then I'm also going to hit control article by rulers and add just a little ruler in between my two names, because that's where I want to center on and click, shift and drag it to the ruler and then pull that off. Now we have a lower third with a background. I'm going to pull up my background a little bit and add some animation to it. When we create a mask, I'm going to start way up here because I know I'm going to feather this mask and I don't want the feather to effect this edge. I want this edge to be sharp. I want to click away over here so that the feather of the mask rather, is not going to affect this edge. When I hit "MM", it should pull up all of the mass properties, might have looked twice like I just had to do if it's not open at all. I'm just going to click and drag the feather aspect attribute that is, and then hit "V" to pull up the selection tool, shift, click these two vertices of this, and then just drag this down. This is how I want it to end up looking, I'm going to drag it back out just a little bit because I don't know how long peoples' names are going to be. I'm going to animate this mask. I'm going to set a key-frame on mass path and want to drag it out maybe two seconds and that's going to be the end position. Now because my scrubber is still on frame 0, I'm going to set the start position. I'm just going to drag this just over off screen because remember it's feathering, so we still have a little bit of that purple. We need to drag it further until we no longer see the portion that's feathered. Maybe just a little bit more for safety and then I want to ease that and also right-click, go to key-frame velocity, and maybe do something fairly strong like 75. So that it eases is in very slowly at the end of that animation. The next thing to do is to animate the text. Just for speed's sake, I'm going to choose one of our presets down here. I'm going to fade out by character on each of these and I'm going to select both of them hit "U". I want us to go a little faster than two seconds, so I'm going to drag them down to two. I want the instructor just for OCD's sake, I'm going to put this below because that's how it's arranged in the composition. I'm going to click drag these two key-frames and have them start just after this one is almost done. The other thing I want to do is change the color of this text, so it's not all white. I'm just going to toggle down the effects and preset so it's easier to see everything. Click and drag down here and the name is going to be that color. I need to add the fill. "Fill color", and I need to add RGB here. We can add this later on. Let me actually select the color from that and so now we have a little bit of animation. I want to delay the text because I want it to start after the fade-on has almost had the chance to come on first, then I just click and drag this to wherever looks appropriate, so it has a background to animate on to. I'm also just going to do a quick little animation on the scale of the background. Just to add a little more animation. In most projects, or animations, or motion graphics, it's just a matter of layering animation on. We have the mask animating on but I wanted to do something a little more interesting so I'm going to animate the scale on the y axis, so I need to check off this key chain here for the scale, which I got at by hitting "S" on this layer. I'm going to hit a key-frame here just because again, I want that to be my end position. I want to start fairly low, and I want these to be done by the time the letters have started to come on, so round and there is reasonable. I want that to overshoot twice so I'm going to hit two more key-frames or I could copy-paste that key-frame. I wanted to overshoot so I'm going to hit "J" to toggle between these key frames. The first one to go above this, I want it to go past, I'm holding down "Control", click drag. Then the next one, I want it to go below in position. Then I'm going to easy ease these. I'm also going to add a little key-frame velocity to one of these, so that's the in and out point. Now, we have a little bit of animation, it's more interesting. This is a little aggressive so I'm just going to take these key-frames, and spread them out a little bit. Now, we have something that's just adding a little more visual interest than it just wiping on. It's actually scaling up, and wiping on at the same time. Now we have our Lower Third. To create a template that Premiere is going to understand what attributes of this Lower Third that we want to be able to edit, we need to tell it that now. Let's toggle down one of these layers and right-click on the text attribute and go to "Open in Essential Graphics". Now we can name this. This is going to be the Lower Third, and I'm just going to give it a version 1, just so we have something else that tells us what it is. I'm going to "Solo the Supporter Properties" and you can tell in the attributes down here that is toggled down what we can actually include in our template. I'm going to drag this up so we can see more of it. I want to be able to change the source text, because that's what the name is loaded into so if I just click and drag that in, you can see it has "Lucas Ridley" here. I want to be able to do that to the other texts here as well. This first one is going to be called "Name", and then the one below it is going to be called "Title". I'm also going to include the "Fill Color", just so we can add other things besides just changing the text and like I said, just by clicking this you'll be able to see what all other properties you can click and drag to template here. I'm going to save this project first before I export the motion graphics template, because that is a part of this process. Now that we have this project saved, we can export the motion graphics template. I'm going to send it to the local Templates folder, but you can choose somewhere else if you'd like. You might get this error that's just warning you about having After Effects installed on any other computer that you use for this motion graphics template. Also if you use any special fonts. Again, if you're going from computer to computer, you might get another warning like that. Now if we jump over to Premiere and open our "Essential Graphics" window right here, and it should pop up over here. I'll use the "Search" window here just to find my template. There it is. I'm just going to click and drag it into this project on a new layer. It's going to sync very quickly, and now we have our Lower Third. If I click on this item, now we can see that we actually have attributes we can edit. If I change the name, we can also change the title, and you can see it dynamically update in Premiere. That is how you create Lower Thirds that you can use in Premiere as templates. Now the animation you apply to this can be more complicated, of course, and you can add more attributes here, but you get the gist of it. It's a pretty powerful tool to help your pipeline and to work within a team that's dependent on being efficient with creating and using assets. If we want to use this in After Effects, we could do that as well. Let's rename this to include the suffix template. Now I have that same kind of video here. You could use whatever video that you're working with interviews, or yourself; like me in front of camera. We have this new composition called "Promo" and I want to include this Lower Third. Let's imagine my name is something more exciting like Tom Cruise. Let's change it to that. I'm going to use the left open bracket to jump it to the "CTI", which is the Current Time Indicator then I'm just going to scrub it back after the animation is done playing so we can see the changes. Where this change occurs is if we toggle this layer down, we now have "Master Properties", because this is a decomposition of this, we're basically nesting this inside and so this allows us to have access to those attributes that are basically templated, that we decided we wanted to be templated. What we need to do is do not go back to the "Essential Graphics" window, we're done with that once we've created the template, and where we need to make these changes is by right-clicking. You right-click here and say "Edit Value". Let's say, "Tom Cruise", and I'll hit "Okay". Now we have that change and if we go back to the original composition, that change does not exist here because it's a template and we've only affected the "Master Properties" of this pre-composition. We could do this over and over again, keep dragging this into new compositions with new interviews, new people, and change their name every time by right-clicking and adding the value, changing the color, changing the title, all these kinds of fun things so that's also how you can use it inside of After Effects. Thanks for watching, and I'll see you in the next lesson. 6. Custom Shape Animation 1: In this lesson, I want to show you how to have complete control over your animated letters. How we do that is after we create text, we can right-click on the text and choose Create either Shapes from Text or Masks from Text. First, I want to do masks to show you what that looks like. So now you can see that there are masks that are now creating the letters of this. It has created a new layer as well that these outlines live on, which are the masks for this, basically a solid. If I hit M, it will pull up all of the masks of this layer. If i click the first one and then scroll down and Shift click that one, it will collapse all of these at the same time, if I collapse them. You can see there's a mask for each letter of the name. Also keep in mind here, where there are holes in letters, there's going to be two, so you can see two Ds here. Now, this is kind of a personal preference and depends on what actually you are trying to achieve when doing this. But the general idea is that now you have these masks that you can manipulate. But before you start to manipulate them, you want to make sure that you set a keyframe on the paths for this. I'm going to hit M one more time on the keyboard to bring up just the mask path. I'm going to again scroll to the bottom, Shift click the bottom one. I'm going to bring the scrubber out and then hit the stopwatch to create a keyframe on all of these masks. So that'll be the end position. When we scrub back to frame zero, we can freely kind of affect these paths and start to animate them in whatever way that we want to. We can make these changes, and when we start to scrub, we'll be able to see these changes occur. Now again, this is the mask version. That is the animation I've created very quickly. But again, it gives you complete control over what the text is. We have the end position, so we know we're staying true to whatever font we're using, and that's going to be accurate to that font. But before or after that point, now we have complete control over what the shapes of those letters are going to be. The other way to do that again is if we right-click on the text again, after deleting that first example, and go back to Create, and then Shapes from Text, so that'll create a Shapes layer. It isn't white because it's actually having a fill that it's taking from the fonts, so it's a little more intelligent of an operation, and there's a lot more you can do just in general with shapes. Again, we see the contents of this Shapes layer is all of the letters. If we toggle down L for example, we have everything that you would expect, and it's named correctly. We have the path. Though one thing that you don't need is the stroke since it is actually just a filled object. So if we delete the stroke, nothing will happen because it's the fill that matters for this. So we can go through the exact same thing, and I want you to, in this assignment, create your name, and then get creative about how you're going to morph your letters from a start position to this end position. Or this could be your start position and you animate a morph out of these letters. So I'm going to take a few minutes and actually animate this just so that you get to see a little bit of a demonstration of me actually working and doing it in real time and talking a little bit through my work. Thanks for watching, and I'll see you in the next lesson. 7. Custom Shape Animation 2: I'm going to use the paths option here. I'm just going to stick with this. I've already made a couple of guide layers here. Now I just need to access the paths here. I'm just going to type in "path", and that's the quickest way to access all these paths. Unfortunately, there is not a shortcut for this, but I'm going to click and drag. If you click and drag, you can actually do more than one. I'm going to hit the tilde key to expand this out temporarily. Just click and drag this down. Now, I'm going to click the tilde key again to minimize that. I have the N position. Now I go free-form and just do my thing and not worry about messing up the final artwork of these letters. I'm going to work quick. I'm not going to be completely exact here. But I'm going to do my best to create fairly uniform squares here. Bring this down [inaudible]. This guide is popping in between these two, so I'm going to type it in manually. Now I have more accurate guide. You can see how before it was popping in between and it was really annoying. Actually I don't need one for that. All of these are going to go up. Very quickly drag all this up, doesn't have to be very pretty right now. I'll snap because I have my snapping options on, and I'm also just going to change this to different colors so I can actually see these while I'm working on them. I'm going to pull up the pen tool as well, writing G and hold down Alt and click these to make them no tangents. Excuse me, and those tangents will be animated just like anything else during this process. Just hold them and try to get them in line with that square. Now we can just quickly see what this process is doing for us already. We already have this animation. A little slow right now, but of course we can change that later, and do want to see. I think probably the easiest way would be doing this like that. Just holding down Shift and then holding Alt to get those to square off. Again, holding shift, I'm going to square it off before I do that, so it's a little easier. Just clicking multiple times finally gets it, and let's do this again. You can see it's fairly repetitive and this is basically what working in After Effects is like. You will have to do things over and over, and this is just part of the work. Some of this is not as glamorous as it seems. Especially if you consider the fact that this is for a couple of seconds of animation. You're going to work on this thing for maybe a couple of hours. Hopefully this lesson is not that long. This is why I try not to do demonstrations that often just because I don't like very long tutorials. I'm annoyed by them. I try not to do them in my teaching either. But sometimes I'll get feedback that students want to see the whole process, which I can understand. But I think for the majority of people, I've certainly grabbing the thing. Let me hit control, click away and then click again. I think for most people, they want quick solutions, and if they keep it straight over, just to deal with this small discrepancy. I'm going to drag these far away because I'm also thinking they're going to go on a linear line. I don't want them to be here. I guess they could. It's up to whatever you want. Whatever you want to do. You know what, I might actually do that because this one is really going to be the trouble-maker because it needs to go pass that one. You think about this stuff on the fly. I haven't actually done this before doing this lesson, so I wanted to actually show what it was working in real time and solving problems because that is the majority of animation. I keep double-clicking things and so it'll bring up the free transform, and because I have all these guides and I'm working on a square. The free transform is hidden visually. I'm having to select off of select back on, and that's just me being clumsy with the [inaudible] I think did it again, oh no, I just hit G twice. All right, fellow tool. Again, I'm just holding Alt E little manipulator one and still up there. It's him [inaudible] As I do it learning. The one thing you don't want to do is with the timeline or forget where you were, like one letter and then have the timeline over here. You could move it back, but you definitely don't want to be here. Then, lose your final pose. Always be double-checking that you're down here. For these letters. I'm probably just going to scale down to zeroish, and that should be enough, I think. I got the pen tool and G too many times, so it's pulling up the feather pen tool. I'll drag this down and get a little more sloppy here, just for speed sake. We're going to move fast. Double-click that. I'm going to control click off. That's a lot of back and forth, me being clumsy with the. Hold Alt and shift. Sorry, control and shift. It's me being clumsy with the tools. Because it is a lot to deal with. I'm just going to scale that to zero. Let's see if that's enough. Again, you can click this little mask path. It'll work for shapes as well. You can see, you can't see that thing. That works great. Then for this one might be a little more tricky because it's as curvy as you can get and it has a lot of negative space. Let's do this very quickly. That G, and start. I was hitting control instead of Alt [inaudible]. It's not necessary for me to really take the tangents out of these. I feel more safe doing it that way. It gives me a little more space there that tangent was there I'd be intersecting down there. It just prevents me from having to click and drag and make the tangents all nice for the edge. It's also a speed consideration. This is just way faster to just get rid of those tangents on these key-frames and guides here. Go around here somewhere. It's also making it fast that I can snap this to the guides. Click to kill the tangents. I'll click again. This is the pen tool which the shortcut G. I'll click this one down. That down. Kill these tangents. Snap. I think we have the first letter. I'm going to hit Control and colon. Now, I think this looks pretty cool. What I'm going to do is easy ease. I tilde. Let's see, it's down to this one. Just drop these down. It's this F 9, right-click Keyframe Velocity, I'm going to do 66. Tilde key. Now, interesting that S won't [inaudible] and the other ones. Let's lay this S key-frame. You know what? It's because I left that out of the easy ease moment here that's why it's going so much quicker. All right. Now, everything should be animating together. Then of course, if you didn't like how something is looking here, you could do and what would be called like an in-between, you'd go outside of 50 percent and then repose basically these tangents however you want them to look. For example this is not looking great. I could do an in-between pose here and clean this up a little bit to make it look better. Let's try to aid in that animation. I think the A can also benefit from it if we went halfway. Maybe start these tangents a little earlier. Something like that around. Make this a little softer. You can go through and set in-between key-frames like that. If you wanted to affect what the image is looking like. But I'm going to do my last name. The other thing you could do is just offset all of these. To click and drag and just go one by one, offset them by a few frames a piece. But I'm going to leave you to do your last name by yourself. What I'm going to do is basically just way more simple than what we just did. Just click and drag all of the vertices or the points above a certain line and drag them up. Basically animating in reverse. It will look like big streaks of lines come down and then the top finishes off. That's the plan. I'm going to speed that up really quickly just so you get a quick overview, but that's the plan. Do this for yourself, do it for your own name or some other texts as the assignment for this lesson. I will see you in the next one. Thanks for watching. 8. Morph Learn 1: Welcome to morphing letters, and we're also going to morph a word. We're going to morph fail and to learn. If you open up this project file, just make sure you have the chunk five font installed on your machine. It's included in the project files as well. I've created a little starting point for us where we're going to change the word fail into the word learn. Let me just enable both of these visibilities. I'm going to drag this word down just we can take a look at both of them. The first thing that strikes me is the fact that learn has one more letter than fail, but, there is similar letters here we have an A and an A and they're both in the center, and we have an L and an L. The way I'm thinking about this is we take the L and we slide it to the left, and we morph the F into an E, and we morph the I into an R, and the N could pop out when the L is sliding over, so the L could reveal the N behind it. That could also morph in. There's like a duplicate version of the L here or something like that. We could just see how it looks as we go along here. That's the first thing I notice. When I approach something like this, I know I'm going to need to separate the letters out and that these texts layers are actually just going to be used for reference points. Let's get started. I'm going to undo what I just did so they're roughly in the same area. I'm going to change the mode to "Difference" so I can start to line these up a little bit better. What that does is I can see wherever it's turning black, there's overlapping color there, so I can just move one or the other words, into position so that at least the A's match up. Then we can work with the other letters a little easier. Now we want to convert these into paths so I can select, "Learn" go to "Layer" "Create" convert shapes from texts. I want to do the same thing for fail. "Layer" "Create" "Shapes from text." The first thing I want to do is deal with the fact that the L needs to come over here and match this L on the left side. To do that, it needs to get either around these letters or these letters need to pop up this way. I think it would be better if these letters popped up. What I'm going to do is toggle into the contents. You can see that we have a group for each one of the letters. Now what I can do is actually animate the transform of each one of these. I'm going to go through and add a key frame here and I'm going to add a key frame on the I. Hit key frame on the I. Let's not forget the F as well on the position and on the L. Let's get the general movement down. Now I can select this and hit "View" and have a more convinced view of what I'm going to be animating. I'm going to go forward to maybe the first, second or maybe even two seconds in to I have a little more time. Because anytime you're doing animation, the eyes need to rest and read what's going on before any movement happens so we need a little buffer zone first. Then I'm going to jump forward here, so let's move all three of these up. I can just grab the first one and find a good spot for it here and then take that value, copy and paste it in y values below. Now we have the L which can go to the left. That's when we want to pull up this lower layer so we can see where it's going to be going and it can be transported to the right area. We can actually just move this one above it so we can see it on the difference mode a little bit easier. That looks pretty close. Now we have one letter already done. But we need to make it look a little more interesting. Let's anticipate this motion by doing the opposite of the direction it's going to be going. I'm going to turn off this reference part. I'm going to go back a few frames, one, two, three, four, and I'm going to copy paste this start positions and then jump back to this frame and just move everything in the opposite direction it's going to be going. Twenty on the y, 20 on the y for that one and then the L is going to be going in the opposite direction this way so maybe 20 as well, but in the x. Now when we animate this, and I'm going to easy, ease these, we have a little anticipation before they start moving. Compress the time here so everything moves a bit quicker. I'm going to wait to do the L, until everything else is finished. I'm going to compress the time on these so they will be out of the way by the time the L gets there. I'm just going to copy and paste those in frames and also overshoot them. I'm going to go negative 320 and copy and paste that here. Now we have a bit of an overshoot and a settle here on these as they get bumped up and the L slides over. We can overshoot the end of the L as well before the few frames. Copy paste that position back, and then do the overshoot so I can go to the left just a little bit. I want to it easy, ease that as well. Then we can bring these letters back down. We can actually copy all of the existing key frames, paste them, go to "Keyframe assistant" "Time-reverse keyframes." Now we can use the animation we've already done and it can be used again to get back into the original position. Let's do that right after the L is about to finish,and its positioned. Let's just bring that over a little bit more. Now we're almost there. We need to add a new letter. So let's grab the learn outlines, toggle this down. We're going to toggle down to the N. For this, I want to set a key frame here because I want this path. So I'm going to copy this key frame and twirl this back down. Now, I want to duplicate the L because I want the N to transform out of the L here, a duplicate of the L. While that L is moving over, we can have one morph here out. Maybe you can morph out before the L starts moving or it can get thrown out to the side. So let's twirl this down so we can get to the L group and duplicate it. Here's the L group, Control B. Then we have L2. Am going to call this N by hitting Enter. I could also just drag it down if I wanted to be even more organized. So I can go to this stroke path and I can key frame it. Then I can go forward a few frames and paste the N. So the N is very much spacing out, and we need to delete the transformation animation we have here. So I'm just going to click the stop watch. We can grab the N back into place. That should be on the reference outline here. We have the path. I'm going to double-click the outline with the selection tool Shift, left arrow it into position here. Now, still going to be a very odd morph. We can just turn off this reference layer here from this one to this one. Now I'm going to turn off all these other ones so we can focus on just these letters for now. So what's happening is we have a very bizarre morph happening on this path. If we take a look at the actual path, can see if I adjust the color of this to, let's say maybe do a red. If I select this path, you can see that of all of these points, this one stands out right here. That means that's the first point. If we scrub forward to the end, you can see that the first point for the N is this point. So what we want to do is adjust that so that the first point matches closer to this. So let's toggle this down so we're going to use the shortcuts J and K to toggle between them. What we want to do is select this point, right-click, mask and shape path, and go to set first vertex. I'll go to that again, just so you don't miss that Set First Vertex. Now you can see that the square moved over to the left side, and now it's matching the point in the L. So now when I scrub, this should look a little bit better. We still have a lot of clean up to do. If I drag this key frame out, we can see what is morphing into what a little bit better. We can set the in-between key frames to morph in a better way. Let's go in-between, about halfway between and start to adjust these paths. Now, It's a bit confusing now, so we need to toggle back and forth. So I'm going to set a key frame and then use J and K to see which path goes to where. If I select one, it should show me where it ends up. So that one is in the corner and it is in the corner here. Keep this down and move this up. As I scrub, you can see the other areas that are going to be a bit of trouble. So what we can do is move these out of the way so that they're not overlapping each other when this morphs. The main issue I'm finding is this point here is going way far down, so we need to bring this back so it's more of a straight line and we can even try to keep this line going here. Almost looks like a boot. Now you can start to see how we can slowly clean this up. Anywhere that there's overlap between key frames, we can try to move them further apart from each other so that they don't interact. Now, I'm going to hit G and then hold down Alt. Then I can start to affect also the tangents in case I wanted to make them a little more soft. I also need to clean up this area and possibly move this down further so that these aren't going at a higher angle down towards this area. So now they're passing beneath the points that are going to be above it. This point will be above the ones to the left of it, so maybe I can move it more out of the way to the right. So this is just playing with these shapes and seeing what works, and every letter is going to be a little bit different. So now you can see we've gone just far enough that now these two vertices pass each other, and now we can adjust the left side here. So let's jump over here and see where they're intersecting. The point I'm watching is this one, and it's going from the corner up through the shape. We need to pull it down so it misses all of these points. Now we can clean this area up and we want this point to be far enough to the right that it doesn't hit any of these other vertices as they transition. So now we have a much cleaner morph transition here. All this is about is just now adjusting and smoothing these out. Right now we only have two key frames, and of course, you could create many, many more, but you want to start with as few as possible and then build them up. I'm going to re-sharpen these points because with this font it looks a bit odd for it to have curved areas to it. Now, I'm going to take this final point, I'm going to copy it, I'm going to forward a few frames and paste it. I want to overshoot this morph as well. I'm going to take the selection tool, click a point, and then click drag some here. I'm just going to move these up by clicking one of them, then I can hold Shift, and it will lock this in a direction. I want to go up so it overshoots above it. Now, I'm going to hit F9 on these last two key frames. You can see that morph happens quicker here, we can get through this bad area. We can also go through and start setting individual key frames here so that this transition is a bit more clean. There's a few more right angles occurring which work with the style of this font, and I just want to get rid of these being easy ease keyframes, so I'm just control clicking those twice except for this last one. I do want that to be a bit easy eased, and I'm going to push these points to the right so they overshoot this way a little bit and also down. I'm going to click drag these. I'm just going to bring these down a little bit, and I'm just going to increase the time it can settle here and I want this to lean as well. I'm going to shift those over five and include this one, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. They all go at the same amount and move it over one keyframe so it has a little more time to do that. In addition to moving this keyframe up for these points, I'm also going to move these over. I'm going to select off and then select back on, and then select all the ones that I want, then I'm going to shift, move this over a little bit. What else we can do is affect the transform animation that we had going on. Now what I can do is on this last keyframe, I want to set the anchor point here to grab the y shortcut or the pan behind tool here. We're just going to click and drag this over to the corner of the letter. Not necessarily the corner of the bounds. Now what will happen is I can rotate this from that point. While it settles here, it will also rotate. I'm going to set a keyframe on rotation 1, 2, 3, 4. Rotate it just slightly before, and I'm going to go past zero, just a touch, and then come back up to zero. If the first one is linear because it's already going to be moving, and then let's watch what happens. A little settle on a rotation here. Now let's go back to looking at the big picture. These turned off, we need to just turn these back on. You can click and drag them to enable all the visibility again. Let's back up a little bit. Shift question mark. The n is being animated a bit prematurely. We can just toggle that down and then slide the keyframes for this wherever makes sense for this l. I want it to happen on that anticipation, so let's move all of this over here, and the other thing we're going to do is change the fill for this so that we can differentiate between the two. We can actually put a keyframe on the color, drag this forward, and we can just reduce the brightness here. We can differentiate between the two. Now it almost looks like a shadow, and it's coming out from behind the L. Now it looks like we still need to move this over a little bit. Let's make sure we're grabbing all of the keyframes for this. You can also to tilde key to open that up, of course. Let's just keep moving this over until like where it's going to play it in real time, because that's the true test. I think we need to have it move a little sooner because the two ls are kind of fighting each other right now. Now they're a bit more in sync. We won't go in and change the color to be even darker or even the purple color. We can color pick this so it transitions from the actual background color. What I'm going to do is also kind of ease this first few frames. I'm going to go to this frame, and I'm just going to affect this path because it's popping pretty hard. If we go in and help these SFrame user, just moving a bit hard, so I'm going to hit V to get the selection tool, and I want to bring me back down so they're easing out of this lower position. We keep them down a little bit longer, and the motion is maybe getting caused by the tip over here up smooth that transition since it's a bit difficult to ease all of the vertices in a complex shape in exactly the same way that you want them to occur. So to me drop this down a little bit just to favor the bottom. Now we look at this shift question mark. Now all we have to do is do the transition we've done for n, for the letters E and I as well. I'll see you in the next lesson. Thanks for watching. 9. Morph Learn 2: Welcome back to this lesson. Now, let's transform F into E and then I into R. Let's start with F because that's going to be the easier one. Let's do the morph after all of this stuff is done just so we can see it in a static motion and that way we can visualize the transformation a little bit easier. Let's go back to the learn outlines, and let's toggle down to the E. Set a key frame on this path for the E, and copy that. Go back to the other word, fail and go to the F, hit path key frame on the F, drag that out of the way so when we paste it in, there will be room for the E. Now let's take a look at what the transitions we've got. Zoom in on this letter and it appears that this transition area isn't sticking the way I would expect it to, because it isn't really didn't move anywhere. We're getting all these extra vertices coming from the first. Let's try to see if we can match the first point up here and right-click it, mask path, set first vertex, and then jump forward. Select that point again, right-click and go to set first vertex. Now we have a much smoother transition and both of these top and bottom left sides are sticking where I would expect them to be. Now all we have to do is resolve this kick out here and then move up of those, and that's it. Let's zoom in and out of these. I'm going to F9 that and then, I mean, it's pretty good. I'm just going to do a little bit of an overshoot and then do one in-between. Go back to the overshoot key frame and I want to see where the momentum is going. Is kicking out here, so I'm going to control click all so that I can select individual points. Shift clicking these. Now I'm going to hit v and then double-click them. Now I get a free transform tool and because I want this to kick up. I'm going to have the pivot back here and then rotate this up and then pull these points out and enter. Let's see if that doesn't have a bit of a kick to it. We have a little bit of a kick and I think needs to extend maybe a little more to the right, but we're running into so to let other letter. We only have so much room we can go. I'm just going to drag this overshoot one out and that looks a lot better. I mean, that's pretty much good. Except for how this gets a little bit messy. I'm just going to click this one, drag it over a little bit with holding down the shift key to drag it directly to the right and then drag this over and give these a little bit more room so they're not right on top of each other. I'm going to control click this twice to have put up roving key in. Now just cleaned up that area. I'm pretty happy with this. Now all we need to do is decide when do we want that morph to happen? Do we want it to happen during this animation here? We can have it kick into an E on top of this overshoot here, which I think would make sense. Let's click and drag these over and just time this now with that kick, that overshoot rather. I'm going to drag this back a little bit so we go up and vary it back one or two frames. Drag this over just a little bit because it's still a little poppy. I think that works pretty good. We're not really going to see it that well doing that. If you want to see the E transformation, then I would recommend putting it somewhere else but for now let's just leave that. Let's go over to the original learn and we need to grab the R now. Let's grab the R path. We have two paths here and we need to set a key frame on both of them. Control copy. Now we can go back to the I layer here, toggle this down and we need to duplicate this because we have two key frames that need to go somewhere. We're going to set a key frame on both of these. Drag these out of the way so that when we paste, now we have somewhere for them to go. Now we just need to fix this offset here that occurred from doing the other animation. I'm just going to grab both of these paths and then I'm going to turn back on the outlines here for this, and I'm going to double-click actually not even these outlines. I'm going turn the one that has a difference mode. We could turn this one to difference as well, but this is a little bit easier. I'm going to double-click the letter R paths, drag it up and over. I can match up these and the goal here is to see, and it's fully black. I can turn off the paths here so I can see behind it while I'm moving this. Now we have these key frames and that's what we want and not this bad ones. Now we can deal with the transformation, the morph there. I'm just going to slide this down so it's happening after all that animations occurring. Turn off the difference mode layer there and now we can go in and start to deal with this morph. Thanks for watching, and I'll see you in the next lesson. 10. Morph Learn 3: Again, the first thing we want to do is to see if we can't identify where the first vertex is and move that someone turned the outlines and go to each one of these paths and see where the first vertex is for these key frames. So I'm looking at the top left corner here and where it is, and there it is again. It appears that one is going to be fine.But again, similar to the F to the E, this morph that we just did, the lower left portion is not morphing very well. So I want to grab that point and set this as the first vertices. I'm going to hit G, so I can select the single point, right-click, and mask and shape path set first vertex, and I'm making sure I'm on this key frame here. I'm going to go back to this original key frame. Now, what I'm a little worried about is accidentally selecting this interior one and then scrub backward. Maybe here, and I just want to scale this down and just have this live inside of the other path. I'm going to delete the first path, so now we'll just hide inside of that. Now I'm also not in threat of accidentally selecting the left corner. This as a first vertex. Although it looks like we will need to adjust that as well for that one because it's flipping inside out. Let's tilt the first one here, we have, let's hit G, so I can grab this, set that is the first vertex. Now that's working a little bit better. We do have a little bit of wonkiness here, but it's mainly because there's just so many points, it's hiding in the crevices to make this our shape, so we're just going to have to deal with that as best we can for this morph. The trick to this stuff is, if it's happening fast, people only see the settle. If you can sell the settle really well, then people you can forgive a lot that's happening in the middle. People just won't see it to be honest. Let's sell the settle first, and then we can deal with the transition area in between the first two key frames. Let's see where this is going to. It's popping here, the R. I'm just going to see what's the original motion, because we're going to overshoot that in this overshoot. That's why it's called an overshoot. I'm going to select these, then I'm going to double-click them, and then bring the pivot down here. Just rotate these down, so it accentuates and overshoots that motion. I'm going to offset this a little more and have these. I'm going to have that key frame actually happen after I'm going to manually brute force this overshoot. What I mean by that is I'm just going to, brute force is what it sounds like. You're just forcing things to look the way you want it to. I want that overshoot to happen, this to be the last thing that's moving on the overshoot, so I need to have that on its own key frame. So this overshoot is going to have several keys that are just manually getting brute forced. I'm going to Shift left arrow on this key frame and then when I come to this one, I'm just going to 1, 2, 3, 4, That way, I know that it's actually settling from here to there, and if I easy ease these, that'll help sell the prints hill in for the final position. I could do a double overshoot of course I could overshoot the other direction as well, so I could grab these, double-click, pull this pivot down here again, and then just rotate this in a little bit. We'll have this longer settle on that. Another thing we do is of course, do the transform rotation that we did on the other one, so I think I might leave this for now and then just make this transition a little bit more pretty. So in here, I want to fix all this. I'm going to hit G, and then I'm going to pull these away, all clicking to get rid of these tangents, so I'm not fighting the tangents as well, and get these in line. I'll click this up here, I'll click that one. Because I just do not want to be fighting these tangents if I don't have to. Here's, this is the example of brute-forcing it. It still doesn't look good. It somewhere and hopefully makes it look a little bit better. I'm going to click all of these that are very difficult to see right now, and make sure that they're in the right order, getting put in the right place as they go down. Double-click and get a little bit of a rotation as well here, so it settles. Then I'm going to deal with comps. I'm taking a piece by piece I'll look at one part of the animation, another part of the letter rather and see that everything is starting to move in the way it should, and clean up these shapes so that they're not ugly shapes in these transition areas. Now what we have to deal with, is this cutout. What I'm going to do. I'm just going to take this final shape. There's no reason why it has to act as an I, because it is hiding in the center anyway.So I can just delete this I. I need to select the key frame and delete. Then what we can do is on a few frames before, I'm going to hit G, double-click it, and then just scale this down, I'm on Shift, and I'm just going to scale it down smaller than a pixel that way it actually won't show up at all. Zoom in really close, Control Plus to zoom in, and then shift clicking basically into nothing. Now if I take the mask outline off, you can see there's no outline occurring there. Then that'll come from nothing, and we could easy ease that, and of course we need an overshoot for that. Take at one-off has a little more time, easy ease this into the final frame, and scale it out and hit Enter. I'm going to hit G Control A. Now against like this one point, maybe that up a little bit. Now that can easy ease back into itself. I am going to translate the whole thing. I think doesn't look, it shouldn't be moving. The whole thing stopping. Doesn't make as much sense and maybe I can rotate it a little bit. Now, a pivot from that top corner on that rotation. We have essentially morph one word to another word. Now we just need to decide where we want the R to be animated. If we want it at the top here, which I think if we do it the same as the E, that would be where we do it. There you have it. I have morphed one word into another, and hopefully you did not fail and that you learned something in this little project. I encourage you to take a look at my project files if you're having any trouble, and before we go, let me just do one more thing which will boost up this animation. I always take it in After Effect. Offsetting things is very important. The F and the I move together, so what I want to do is click here, hit U, and I want to go through each one of these and offset the path. I want the I to go first, then I want the A and then F. Because the L will be making this be a domino effect. Basically, it'll be what's motivating them to move up, so I think it's only natural to delay them that direction. The I can stay where it at, let's grab the A and let's grab those key frames. It's all of these, and let's just move these over. As this is coming through, this is still down here. The same thing for the F. So that there's this domino effect happening instead of it all occurring at the same time. That's one little final trick, and of course you can apply the turbulent display so you can make this look like it's handwritten. You could do all these other types of things you've learned so far, but that is one way to do a morph transition of letters and words, so I hope you've learned something and I will see you in the next lesson. Thanks for watching. 11. Animate Along Path: After the last few lessons that were a bit longer, let's do a shorter one now and learn how to animate text along a path. I'm going to add my background. [NOISE] Because this background image is larger than 1920 by 1080, I'm going to make a new composition this way and make sure my settings are how I want them then I'll hit okay. Now I'm going to click and drag the background image in and I'm just going to scale it up a little bit to fit the composition. I'm then going to add my text by right-clicking and going to new text. I'm just going to toggle through and find a more appropriate font. The font is selected. I'm going to increase the font here. I'm also going to increase the tracking. I'm just going to click and drag that just a little bit because this font, the letters are right on top of each other, and I'm going to center the text so I can see a little bit better and I'm going to change the color to something maybe in the scene, to match the scene and which can ramp this up a little bit. It's a little more visible. Now that I have my text, I'm going to select that layer, I'm going to hit G to pull up the pen tool, and I'm just going to click and drag along this path that I want the text to follow. I'm start in the top left and I'm going to go down to the right. I'm going to hold down the space bar and I get to move that even though I haven't let go of my mouse yet, and just make a bit of a curvy line here down out of frame. What I'm going to do is toggle this down and go to Text path options and then choose mask one.That's the default name it's going to give to any mask that you create. Now we have our text on a path. We can quickly animate this by using this first and last margins. I'm just going to hold down shift to go a little bit faster, and there. I will Keyframe in the first margin, Scrub forward in time a little bit, maybe 10 seconds and I'm just going to Shift click drag this out of frame. Now we have our text follow our nice smooth little path. On second thought, I might just reverse this path. I'm going to click and drag these and go to key frame assistant, time-reverse key frames, and just because I want to be able to read, I think, the first word first, that makes sense. Then after the fact, I can also, of course, change the path and it can update in real time. You can adjust this if it's, you're not seeing the text very well because it's going across the sky, we can lower that, and now you can see the text even better. That is how you animate text on a path. 12. Dream - Background: Welcome to this lesson where we will create a light on effect for some custom text that I hand wrote in Procreate. I exported it as a PST file into Photoshop. So if I jump over to Photo-shop, you can see that we have this file and we can bring this in with its layers inside of After Effects. So let's jump back to After Effects and let's get started. We can import Photoshop files just like any other file. By right-clicking on file, I can open this up. Import as doesn't matter as much because it's going to ask us again as soon as we hit import. Now for these options, I do not want footage. Footage will compress all of the Photoshop layers down into one layer. It's going to keep this as a composition and hit okay. This will create a composition for us with the layers, but will also separate the layers out. Because this composition is and these assets are larger and have a different aspect ratio than 1920 by 1080 or HD, I need to create my own composition first. I'm going to click the new composition button and I'm going to keep these settings. I'm going to change this to 15 seconds and hit okay. I'm going to rename that real quick as the text animation so that we're staying organized. There's nothing in here right now, so I need to select one, shift, select the other, and click and drag them into the composition. Now, like I said, there are two big, so I'm going to hit this and get scale and then scale them down just a little bit. I'm going to hold down control to get a little finer, finer control. I'm also going to take dream by itself and just scale that down, so it's not as large in the frame. As a creative artist and as a motion graphics artists or whatever your role may be, you just have to always find ways to pump up what you're given, always try to plus it as they say. Whenever I'm given these static elements, I need to try to find some way to have them move or have some visual interest in them and so let's create a little bit of movement in the background. Feel like we're zooming in to the frame a little bit. With scale up and position, I'm going to hold down Shift P to also bring into position. I'm going to set a beginning key-frame at the first frame by click and dragging the stopwatches, then go to the last key-frame and I'm going to zoom in a little bit and I'm also going to bring the composition down because if you look here, you can see that horizon line is exactly in the dead center, so if we scrub through the zoom, the horizon line stays where it is. like I said, with static elements, I also need to think about what else is being static. Even though I'm scaling in, the horizon line is static. So, let me move that, let me animate that a little bit. Now if I bring the image down a little bit, now we're also getting some vertical movement. I'm thinking at all dimensions, scaling in vertically, horizontally, what's going on, color, speed, all these different elements and motion graphics, you always want to start to play with them and question what's happening with that? What's happening vertically? What is happening horizontally? These are the type of questions you need to ask yourself and in this next series of lessons, we're going to take this like a little project that we've been given. We're going to learn much broader concepts than we have already that go a little beyond text, but it'll be fun. Let's create something more interesting for the background for the ride on effect to play with and be a part of this idea, dream and this ethereal feeling. What I came up with after experimenting a little bit was just having some graphic elements come at the screen like we have with the image, which will also do a little bit of warping later on to help sell that like we're going into this frame. To sell that even more, I came to the idea of having a rectangle, so I click the rectangle tool and I want to Shift click and just make a little rectangle here. Now it's not centered, and I can easily do that by going to the go window over here and go align horizontal and align vertical. Now if you notice the pivot still isn't in the center, so the easiest way to get that in the center, is to hold down Control Alt and hit home. It's also on the cheat sheet that you can download in the project files. Now that we have this in the center, I know if I ever want to rotate it, it'll be. 13. Dream - Write On 1: Welcome back. Let's begin with the right on effect. Now there's two ways to do it that I know of or that I like to use. I want to show you the one that I don't prefer as much now. Then right after that, I'll show you the way that we're going to do it in the way I prefer. The reason I'm showing you both ways is because again, I want you to understand the way I'm thinking about things and why the why behind my decisions. Because I think you'll learn a lot more if you understand the thought process as much as what button to click. Because that'll only get you so far. You need to understand how to make decisions and why I'm making the decisions I'm making. Why else are you taking the class? That's my opinion. Some instructors don't share this stuff, but I do, anyway. There's an effect called right on. You'd think, let me just type it in here. Find the right on effect because honestly, I don't know where a lot of these effects are. I just know what they're called now that I've used them enough. I'm going click and drag it. You can either drop it on here or I know I have this layer selected, so I'm gonna drop it in the effect window. The way this effect works is basically you animate a position of a brush over time, and that is going to reveal the letter. Now what we're going to do this just for the first letter and I'm going to show you why I don't like it. So very quickly, we're going to leave the settings as they are. But I want to set a key frame at the beginning on the brush position, and with this selected, I also want to remember I earlier in the last lesson I had hid all of the helper outlines. To unhide those I need to control shift H. Now I get those back. With this effects selected, I can see the brush position is here, so I'm just clicking it and dragging it. I'm going to zoom in to the letter D is what we're going to work with first. It's not super obvious what's going on until we start key framing it because there's no brushstrokes yet, I don't really understand what's going on, so let's just get started and you'll figure it out. We have set a key frame on a brush position. I'm just going to hit U on the layer here so we can see where we're setting key frames in the layer. I'm also going to turn off these shape layers, so they're not distracting us as we're working. I'm going to move forward in time, maybe one second. You may have noticed we've lost the little cursor, the brushstroke thing that we're moving. Well, it's because even though we have the sight we don't have the effects selected. Once we select the effect, and that comes back. If you ever get worried and you think you've lost something, then just take a step back and think about what you have selected, that stuff. Clicking and dragging is you can see these dotted lines forming. Of course, if I go outside of the bounds of this layer, disappears because it's only affecting this layer. But now you get the idea of what it's doing. But only problem is that brushstroke is so tiny we can't really see it, so I want to increase the brush size. I'm going click and drag that. I still can't see it because, guess what? The colors white, I'm doing it on white. Let's select a different color, something like red. Now we can see what's going on. Between these two key frames, we can see it's just animating this linear path between these key frames. I'm going hit J and K to jump between them. Basically what you're going to do is draw O through time this little moment. I'm just going to click and drag key frames around, and the first problem I encounter, and why I don't like this tool is because I'm going to have to go through time and draw this curve with linear lines. That means a lot of key frames. The other thing with this is, if I want the timing of this curve to be smooth and even I need to make the distance between these key frames the same number of frames. Now I also got to start keeping track of how many key frames is it. How many frames are between these? 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. That's probably enough. I'll put two here. I forgot I got to start counting again. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. Now I'm just the distance between the key frames, but the distance between these lines, because if I want this to be the same speed throughout it needs to be the same distance and the same time. So I'll go 1, 2, 3, 4 ,5, 6. Basically just keep doing this for sake of speed. I'm not going to be as precious with this, because we're not going to use this anyways, but I want to show you how this tool works and doing the right on effect, you're going to think we're going to use the right on effect the actual effect of that name. But let me show you just the limitations of it, I guess is the best way to say it. The most polite way to say it. Let's just get this and you can see how it's a little bit tedious and how the other thing is like, hey, we're not covering this whole thing up. We can do that with a bigger brush stroke. The reason why I like to keep the brush stroke thinner is so I can see where I'm going and where I've been. Then we can just increase this after the fact and then make tweaks,so almost done. Now I can go to the brush size and crank that up until I don't see any more white. Now, one problem with this is, well, we'll find out what some more problems are. But the first one is we're overlapping. We want the line to start just where the base of this stroke starts. We don't want it to overlap with something else if we can help that. Let's start it exactly there. That way, when we switch over to instead of paint style on original image, let's do reveal original image. Now we can see it's made everything disappear. It's going to only show what's being revealed by the brushstroke. If I just play this back, you can see it's going to be a little inconsistent, well, and it's not that bad. I was going to say is going to be a little inconsistent, but, we just going quickly with it actually worked okay. A couple of things we can see that are going to be issues are this little T area. We don't want it to look like a T. We want it to be a solid stroke until we get around to this loop. We can make a mask around that. We'll have to animate it. Let's get to the point in time where we're going to need to start animating it,so maybe here. What I want to do is I'm going to make a mask with this layer selected. I need to go to the pen tool or hit G and simply just draw out a mask. Now it's made everything else disappear. I want to bring up that mask, and change this to subtract. Now, you can see there's still a little bit so we could keep tweaking this or change the feather amount here. If I toggle the feather amount down, we change the feather amount by a tiny mountain, get that exactly perfect. But when you're looking at something at 400 percent, you can see right here, you can lose sight of the big picture. You're not going to see that kind of one pixel fade out there. I tend not to worry about that too much, especially when something's happening in motion. This will only be on screen for a few seconds. You want to think about how efficient your being and where you're spending your time. I don't want to spend my time messing with something no one's ever going to see. Let me hit a keyframe on this mask path and let me make another one for this, I don't want to affect the kind of roundness of that brushstroke. I'm going to make the mass curve, up until that frame, it will respect that curve. I held on shift by the way to get a straight line up. Then I can just connect that, and let's go to subtract as well. Let's toggle this down and set a key frame on this as well. I'm just going to hit ''U'' here, so I can condense the view of where all my key frames are. I'm going to go forward one frame with control arrow, and I want to get rid of this mask altogether. I'm just going to double-click it and I'm going to drag it out of the way of everything. Now, I want to go forward one more frame. Because we're working in one frame increments, it's hard to see in the timeline, I'm going to hit ''Plus'' on my keyboard to zoom in on the timeline. I want this key frame to be right before we're going to move it. I move that key frame forward. Now that change will happen over one frame. Here is this climb doesn't really catch up as much, you have to think about that as well. Let's think of it is moving at this speed we might need to delay when this moves, maybe one more frame. Another thing you need to take into account when you're doing this is before you start doing these masks, is this the timing I want, because it's going to be affected by basically the timing of when the mask are animated off. For example, let's say this is way too slow, this D is moving too slow. Even though we're not going to use this write on effect, all of these things I'm saying applies to the one we are going to use. Let's say this is too slow. When I click and drag this, and then hold ''Alt'' and scale all these keys down, it'll speed up this animation and go much faster. Now, the problem is, we spent time animating those masks and now they don't work with the timing that we changed, so that's why there is an order of operations to some of these things. Otherwise, you're going to be giving yourself double the amount of work, you don't want to do that. You got to think about what am I going to do? How am I doing it? Make the decisions you need to make before we move on to the next step. That is the write on effect. I think you can maybe understand why I don't like it right now. The mask thing is, we're going to have to deal with that and do that on the other one as well. That's not really the reason, it's basically, we can all these freaking key frames. Look at all of these and then we have to figure out the distance, and the time and make sure that's consistent, if you want a smooth motion and we can't do curves. It's just too much for me, I'm not a fun. Let's go to the way we are going to do it. That's with a shape layer. I'm going to click the pental again with no layer selected, and with no layer selected, it'll automatically create a shape layer for me. I'm going to go through this process, but with pental. I'm going to click and drag the first one, so that it will be a bit of an arc, I'm going to hold on shifts, so it's a straight line. I'm going to make a bit of an arc here, I'm going to make a bit of an arc here to really try to follow the path. You can already see how much quicker this is then the write on effect. That's mainly because we have these handles that we can create curved shapes, not having to use a linear tool to go around a curve, it just doesn't make sense. Especially with handwriting that you're going to run into that in quite a bit with the write effect, you might as well use one that accommodates that a little bit better. Now, we have that, let's also get this sorted out so that we have a curved shape, because again, we're going to animate this on, and we don't want these what they call bug caps. We want a bug cap and we want a rounded cap. If I toggled on the shape layer, let me just hit the layer to type and write on. Now, which layer are we doing, we could rename this, but we're only going to have this one shape layer, it's not going to get too complicated in this composition. Now, we toggle this down, we want to get rid of this bug cap and also want to delete the fill because we're not going to be using it. As the stroke toggled down, we hit this little drop-down menu for the line cap, we can say instead of a bug cab and went around cap, and now you can see we get these rounded caps. I'm just going to drag this up to the edge of that stroke, I want to do the same thing for the end position as well. The next step in the process is to animate this thing, and we're going to do this for each letter. Let's stay organized and instead of shape 1, let's call this D. I'm hitting ''Enter'' again to rename it. With that selected, I want to go to add and go to trim path and you're going to use this one a lot, it's the most common effect I use on strokes and shape layers. With that added, we can toggle it down and still we have a start and end position. Let me just zoom out real quick. Basically what we're going to do is animate the start and end position. Well, it's fully on right now, we know we don't want it to be end, just start ending with 100 percent. Let's bring that back down and set a key frame and then let's go forward maybe one second and then go to 100 percent. Already again, you can see how much quicker this is and how fewer key frames we have. Then the other method we have two key frames to deal with instead of 30 or whatever we did on the other one. Let's do a little bit ease on this F9, let's see how that animates on. It's a little quick. You also have to think about when you're doing handwriting, the speed, when things slow down. If you're going to turn 90 degree corner right here at the top of the D, you're going to have your pen slow down when you do that. We don't want it to be at its fastest point, if we look at the graph editor and just click this button with these selected, it's going to show us, it's moving at a pretty quick rate right here. We can actually slow that down by just setting another key frame by scrubbing to where it is in the time. Let's create another key frame here and go back to the graph editor. Now, nothing's changed in this slope, the rate of motion here. Let me just zoom in by hitting ''Plus'' on the keyboard, scrubbing over and re-centering these, I'm bringing this up a little bit. Now, this is time over value change, so time as a course across the bottom as we scrub through time, we see a value change. If we want it to slow down, what do you think we need to do? We need to flatten this out. You want this to go flat, but you see if I just click and drag this, it breaks the tangent, so what I need to do under that first and then hold ''Alt'', you can see the tool change when you over the tangent. I can also drag it in, it's not as long. Now, flat would be no motion, there's no value change over time. We don't want it to be completely flat, we just want to slow down, so let's go a little bit off of horizontal. Now, when we play this back, it should slow down just a little bit, it's not slowing down a lot, let's drag this tangent handled back out. Over a longer period of time, it will change value over a slower rate. Let me just do that here as well, try to tangent a handle out, this curve is flatter for longer. It's a little hard to see at one second, but it is there. If we wanted to make this a little more exaggerated, we do what we did earlier, select all these, hold on all, and drag this out, make it longer. Again, that's a little bit clearer. Let me just flatten this out completely and it'll be very obvious. By bringing this down, now you can really see it, that makes sense for writing. When you think about what are we doing here, we're not just moving buttons and clicking buttons around, you have to think about the why and how this actually would work. It will give more authenticity to your animations, to your motion graphics, to everything that you're doing, if you deliberately think about these things a little bit. I think I want to slowdown the beginning and end a little bit, I'm going to click these, and drag these handles out while I'm holding shift will keep the tangents flat, because I don't want to change those, I want those to come in nice and smooth. Let's see that, that makes sense to me, I might speed up the whole thing just a little bit. I'm going to hold down Alt and drag all these key frames down just a little bit, maybe 1.5 second, that feels right to me. In the next lesson we're going to continue on with this method and finish out the whole word and actually achieve the write on effect. Then finish out the whole animation so that the entire thing comes together. Thanks for watching. I'll see you in the next lesson. 14. Dream - Write On 2: Welcome back. Let's continue with the write-on effect. We've done the letter D and I want to call something out. When we made the trim paths for this letter, notice where the trim paths is in this hierarchy. It's under the D letter. You could have it outside of this. If I hit Contents and I go to add the trim paths, look where this lives outside of the letter D. That could be affecting every layer in the contents. If I were to make more letters, which we're going to do, and I animate this one trim paths, it would affect every layer the same. But it's not what we want. We want to affect and have the write-on affect like your handwriting. So you do one letter at a time, not that you would have to have five hands for this word to write them all at once. We want them to go one at a time. If your trim paths is outside of this letter D, you can just simply click and drag it in there and then it will only affect that letter. I'm going to delete that because we already have our trim paths one right here. With this layer selected, I'm going to create the letter R, and then I'm going to speed up the lesson so you can create E, A, and M. But there was a few of the points I wanted to cover before we continue on with speeding it up, and then I'll come back after that and finish out the lesson with how to actually achieve the effect. You could create a layer for each letter, but it would make it harder later on, and I'll show you why later on. But just understand that it's not just an organizational thing, but it's also a practical thing of why we're going to keep all the shapes in this layer instead of doing a bunch of these and this gets a little crowded. With this layer selected, if I have the pen tool, it'll just add a new shape to the contents. When I click here, watch here, it'll add it. Now you can see shape 1 is added down there. The other thing I want to say is I'm starting with the pen up here because I want to follow the path of the natural riding motion. Again, why am I doing what I'm doing? Why did I put it up here and not down here. It's because just by looking at this, I can tell that the person started here, they went down and then back up. That's what I want my drawing to do, my writing to do. I want it to look authentic to the style of the handwriting that I am animating. That's why I'm doing that. I'm going to click down here, just a very small curve one. I am going to go back up, and it's a little hard to see. I could lower this down while I'm doing it, and then just continue on. I'm just going to do. Well, I continue on, it will start to create a new shape. If you do something like that, you want to select the last point you are at, and then you can continue with your shape. That's one important thing to remember. Let's get rid of this butt cap again. Let's delete the fill because we don't need it. Go to the stroke, set butt cap. We have a round cap. Let's increase the stroke. It covers everything. Let's move this down, and I might just have to increase the width of this just a little bit more. After doing that, I want to make sure that I'm not overdoing these rounded caps because I want the ease in and ease out to happen exactly at the edge of the ink of the letter. I want this to match that. Everywhere else on the letter, it can be much bigger obviously than the letter itself but what I wanted to do is to go exactly where the end is. Now, notice when I hover my pen tool over this, you get a little circle here next to the cursor. That means you are about to close the loop. I don't want to do that. I just want to move this point because it's the endpoint and I had the beginning selected. It thinks I'm trying to close this loop here, and I'm not. I'm going to change to the selection tool and now you can see that circle went away, and now I can move this. Someone did this to the bottom as well. It looks like that's pretty good. I can see a little white here, so I'm going to move this down. I'm just going to increase this a little bit more. With that, we can add a new trim paths just to this shape, and I'm going to rename it R. You can also order them. I'm going to click and drag it down below, if you're OCD like me and you wanted to be a little more organized. This selected, I'm going to go to Add trim paths and I'm going to toggle that down. I'm going to click the in-frame and drag that to zero. Now, I want it to occur after the D letter is finished. That D letter needs to finish, and there needs to be a few frames if you're thinking, the person has to pick up their pen and move it here. That's at least two frames. Give it three just for safety. To me, I feel like natural handwriting. I'm just clicking and dragging this start key frame there. Let's go forward in time a little bit, I'll just finish this out. We may need to do a little masking like we did if we want this to look correct, as far as there's double strokes here where you can see this one comes down, meets that one that came up from the bottom. If you want, you can go through and create strokes on this. I'm going to show you how to do on the letter D after we're done with this one. Let's just finish this up because I think this isn't too bad of an example. It's not as clear as the D is. Let's create the actual effect and then we can finish the other letters. But those are the couple of little points I wanted to cover before moving on. To create the actual effect of this revealing the text, there's two different ways to do it and in our case, there's only one way. When I say our case, I mean, with the assets we have. Let me show you the two ways. The first way that's not going to work, again, it could work in some circumstances, but because we don't have compositions that match each other like the shape layer could this composition settings and the dream word, you can see the balance of it here are much smaller and it's scaled down. There's these discrepancies between these two. I've typed in set matte, and I can click and drag it onto the text layer. What that basically does is say, hey, use this other layer as a matte. What a matte is just saying, block that thing out, that's a matte. We want to use the write-on layer and when you do that, you can see it might not be appearing the way you think it would. What is all this mess here? Well, let's turn on composite matte and you can see what's going on. There's a big difference between these two layers. You can see at first it's stretching to matte to fit, so we turn that off. That's a little bit better. But there's this inconsistency between the scale. If you have compositions that are exactly the same, then this would work just fine. It's actually nice because then you can have this layer down here and it doesn't matter. You can have it anywhere. But the method we're going to use, you have to have the layer above it. Let's just get rid of this map and just know that for future use that might come up into play and be very useful for you. But for this project, we're going to use the track mattes. Same language, this is a matte. There's also mattes over here, so it's the same thing. It's just different ways to do it. You can see it all. It says track matte right here. If we click this, there's a couple different options. There's alpha, which we have because for the write-on layer, the only thing visible is what we've drawn. Everything else has an alpha, meaning you can see through it. We can use the alpha matte or the alpha matte inverted, the opposite of that. If we did black and white, we could use a luma, which means luminance, the light, what's light and what's dark. Those are basically, even though there's four options, there's basically two. You have alpha, alpha luma, luma. One's the opposite of each other, and then this one is black and white and this is, if you have alpha, if something is non-existent or existing. Hope that makes sense. It will when choose alpha matte. So boom, we did it. We chose alpha matte and now we have the same effect with way less key frames. It took less time and we don't have to worry about the speed and the distance between key frames and all that stuff. You can tell we still have that same problem where we have this D happening before it should be appearing. We do have to do that same operation that we did before to solve those problems. That's what I was describing about the R. When R goes down, generally we see that knob right here. This line should continue straight through because on this stroke it just goes down. This part comes on the stroke back up, that goes through to make the end of the R. It's that attention to detail that will take your animation to the next level when you get very deliberate in particular about what you're doing, and what's going on. Let's make those masks because also for the shape layers, it's particular about where you do them. Again, the first question we want to answer is, is the timing right? For me, I like this timing. If we have to make changes later, we're going to have to change the timing of the mask animation. You can actually create the masks now on either the shape layer or the actual text layer. In this example, I want to go through doing it on the shape layer just because there's an added little got you, catch you moment that might trip some people up that I want to go over, and because it'll keep all the animation on one layer. If we need to re-time anything, we won't have key frames on separate layers that we're having to remember, a key frame from the shape layer, and a key frame from this other layer. If I want to change timing on anything, I go through two layers. That's the why behind the decision of why I'm doing this, and why I'm making that decision. Let's go through here and do the same thing we did before. Make quick little mask. The problem is we're making another shape. See, I'll just started clicking. We have another mask here. If I turn this layer on, you can see I've made another shape that is. So if I want to make a mask, let me just do this. I need to do this is the gotcha moment. You got click this little button up here. So tool creates mask or tool creates shape. When you're on a shape layer, you have to let it know. What am I doing? Am I make another shape or am I making a mask of this layer? So this is the little area little button, and that's specific to shapes. If I click on something else, that'll go away. Now it's grayed out. So this is just for shape layers. So you have to remember which one you're doing. So I'm going to click the mask one. So now when I start clicking, it's going to be a mask. If I'm on this layer, you can see indeed we have one mask and I want to go to subtract. I'm going go to where in time this actually matters to the key frame on the path. Go forward one frame and I want to move the path away. It's going to go to the selection tool writing V, double-click this, and just move it out of the way, anywhere that this effect doesn't happen. So we have that side. Now, let's do the other side. Again, hit G, make sure this is on. So G is the Pen tool. This is making sure the mask is on. So we can just make this very quickly, and hit the mask path here. Go forward one frame, hit V, look at the selection tool, double-click it, move it over here. Now that annoying looking key that shouldn't have been there, and begins to animate on. We still do because I didn't change this to subtract. Now if we go to subtract, that'll be gone. Great. So now what we need to do is to do this for each of the letters. So I'm going to just turn off this track part for now. So that we can actually see the letters. Turn this layer back on, and go through the same process that we did for the contents here. D-r, let's go through e-a-m. The way I'm seeing it is it starts here, goes that way. So it ends here. This one starts here, goes this way, comes up and then down. This one starts here and finishes at the end. So I'm going to speed this up. You go through and do it yourself as well. Then we'll meet back afterwards to finish up this lesson. We're back and we have finished this together.So let's turn the track matte back on. So go to the text layer, go to a Track Matte column for that. Go to Alpha Matte. Let's just scroll back through. I'm going to hit Shifts question mark to frame the whole composition. If I could back all the way out. Now what I'm going to do between this lesson and the next lesson is to clean up these little areas. This little jagged part here. The stroke of the pen should just be this curve. So I'm going go through the same way that we did with the masks over here. With this, I'm just going to go through and do that for each one of the letters, and I encourage you to do the same so it's nice and clean. Now again, I want to emphasize that before you do that, you will make sure that the timing is how you want it. So let's just play through it a couple times, and make sure it's the right timing. That feels pretty good to me. Let's look at the total thing with the rectangles on, because what we're going to need to do next is to actually move all the animation. Again, that's one of the advantages of putting all the animation on one layer is that we can move them altogether. So I don't want this to begin animating on until after there's a little white space in the center here. So it frames the word. So I'm going to take this, I'm going to hit you. I want to click and drag everything and just move it down. So I don't really want it to start until somewhere in here. I want to overlap a little bit. But I think that these needs overlap a little more. So it's not totally empty for very long, but the time. Yeah, that feels about right. Again, you can move all these together. But when I say, make sure the timing is done, it's not this global movement of everything, it's the timing of each letter. So these key frames, so if you wanted this letter to be faster, now it means you created a gap between these two key frames. Now you need to move everything over the same amount. So if you move one key frame, you probably need to be grabbed everything, and then slide it down and do the same thing here if you're trying to speed up each letter or slow them down. So you want to do that before you get into the masks, doing the masks that we've already learned about twice already. So I'm not going to go over that again. But these guys is down here. You saw how we did that on the letter D. So just go through that and clean up each one of the letters. I will see you in the next lesson where we will finish out this project. Thanks for watching. 15. Dream - Write On 3: Welcome back to the final lesson on this project of the course. After this we'll move on to other projects, but this will be the last one we're working on the right on effect. For this, I just want to show you what I came up with for finishing out doing the masks on the lettering. So everything hopefully looks a little bit cleaner. Now what I want to apply is a bit of a hand drawn effect to it. I want a little bit of noise and wiggling to the edges of the lines. We're going to use an effect I like a lot called roughen edges. We're going to customize it. I'm going to add it to the text tool here, because our write-on will actually cover bigger than the edges of this, so we don't need to worry about this one anymore. What we can actually do as well before we move on, is to parent the write-on effect to this layer. Let's parent this write-on effect, the write-on matte to the text. The reason why I'm doing that is because if I move this around, I want the matte to follow it. If I don't move it around, we're going to mess up all the work we did. So we want to go ahead and parent it just for safety sake. If later on we want to scale this up, or move it, or do whatever animate it, the transformation of it, we want the matte to follow it. Now it's parented, it's going to follow. Let's get to the roughen edges effect. So you can already tell what it's doing. A few edges that are not as clean as they were before. So I can turn this on and off, and you can see how distorted that gets. Now, there's a lot of different options here and they're pretty self-explanatory, so I won't beat that stuff on that. The main thing we're worried about is we wanted to animate. If I scrub through the timeline right here, it's not wiggling, it's just rough on the edges up and they're not moving. I want to create animation on the evolution here. If I scrub through this, you can see the edges wiggling a little bit. I need to figure out how to key frame that. I don't want to just set a key frame here at the beginning and a key frame at the end. Let's do something a little more sophisticated and learn a few more tricks. If I toggle the layer down and go into the effects, you can see I can get to the roughen edges stopwatch here. Now if I hold Alt and I click this, I can write an expression here. You can see the values turn red because they're going to be driven by the expression we're about to write. The expression is going to be time times, let's just say a 1000. I need to click, don't hit enter, it'll just go down and make a paragraph. Click anywhere outside. Now we have this expression driving it and you can see it's red here as well. When we scrub through the timeline, it's actually doing the animation for us. Now, if we want to take this to an even more sophisticated level, and basically make our own rig for this, let's go and create a slider control. So I'll go slider, slider control, and this is basically an empty thing that does nothing. It's just a control that we've created, currently does nothing. What we're going to do is we go back to this expression because instead of having to, let's say we start animating or like, "You know what? I want to change the speed, this is kind of slow. I want it to wiggle a little faster." Every time we want to do that, we'll have to go down here, click here, type in a number. It's slow, I don't like it. What we're going to do is delete the number, and use the pick whip to go to this slider value. Now, when we deselect it, we can close all this down and not have to go back there again to affect this. So currently it's set at zero. If we wanted to go back to what we were at, we need to go to a 100, sorry it was at a 1000. Now we're back to where we started. Let's say I want to speed it up. All I have to do is drag this and now it'll go faster. That's how quick and easy that is, and we made our own rig, very little expression language. We just set time, basically it's taking this number and then multiplying it by whatever value this is. That's what evolution it'll set at. So that'll just give it a random number to generate some movement here, and make it look a little more hand-drawn. Now, one of the other attributes that I like especially for this effect of dream, is increasing the border. Watch what happens if I increase the border, it almost makes it turn into a cloud. Let's use this to actually animate it off because we have an animation on, the write-on effect. How does this animate off? Let's actually animate the border as well. You can discover happy accidents like this by applying effects, experimenting, I really want to encourage that. There's no right or wrong way to do a lot of things. There's just different ways to do it. You can use tools in ways and effects in ways that they're not intended for. That's really the heart of After Effects, is getting creative with the tools that you have and using them in unexpected ways to your advantage. Let's go to the end here, where the animation will kind of be done. Let's key frame the border at eight. Let's go forward. Let's give it maybe like a half a second to finish out. Let's animate it all the way up to something like that. This is where we can see the write-on shape layer is affecting it. We might want to copy paste it after we're done because we can see these hard edges, on something that should be fairly soft. We can actually copy paste this effect on after the fact that we wanted to. I'm going to hit U with this layer up so I can easy ease this first one, I think. I just want to have a slow start. I'm going to drag this out, maybe closer to the end. All right, so instead of it totally fading off, it looks like there's also maybe like a little glitch here and After Effects for its stopping the evolution, before it should. If we just move the evolution a little bit, maybe we can get it to keep going yet. It's a little weird bug. You'll run into random stuff like this every once in a while, but let's also fade out the opacity. So I'll hit T on this layer and a key frame at a 100, and I'll go forward. Let me hit U so I can see where this is timed out. I want it to run in line with the border being increased. I'll just bring this down to zero. Alt F9 to easy ease the beginning. Then the other thing I want do is have this float up a little bit. I'll hit P, bring up position, hit a key frame and then bring this straight up. I'll just drag that key frame out, so that it extends the whole length, and then of course set an easy ease here. I might go to key frame velocity and make that even more. I want to make that even slower. I'm actually going to go back to Key-frame Velocity and make this something like 80. Yeah, that feels a lot better. Now, another thing we could do to have a more global effect of this is go to Distort, Turbulent Displace, and that'll work on the whole thing. Now, one problem you'd already tell is the fact that the math isn't getting turbulent displaced as well. We're missing chunks of it here. There's two different things we could do. We could apply the same effect on both layers, or we could pre-compose this and then apply it to the pre-composition. Let's delete that. We'll move everything into a precomposition by selecting them, going to right-click Pre-compose. I will call this DreamFade. Okay. Now, if we add Turbulent Displace, the math and the text will follow each other because they're nested inside this pre-composition. If I want to add some global movement, not just to the edge of the text, I can use this. I need to dial the amount way down, and then it can also affect the size. If I click and drag the size, we can have something wobbly or something that just feels a bit hand drawn. Now, we have the same issue with the evolution. We can tests the animation is going to look like, just by clicking and dragging that about what the size should be. The size is basically of the resolution of the texture that we can't see. Turbulent Displace is using a, well, you can pick different ones here, but these are basically fractal textures that are visible to us here, but that are acting on it behind the scenes. I can keep dialing this down until I'm finding an overall general amount that's pretty good. Let's bring this evolution here. For this one, I'm not going to go the trouble of setting the slider. I'm just going to set of maybe 10 evolution-s here and see where that gets us. The other thing about a hand-drawn things are, they're typically animated at 12 frames a second, and that goes back to old animations. When animations first starting, they had to be very thrifty and making 24 drawings or 24 frames a second, for every second is very expensive, so they ended up having that. That's where that hand-drawn look comes from, is that they held one frame twice. Every frame actually held up two frames. There's a little bit of the staccato feeling to it, and you can actually get that inside of aftereffects as well. Even though we've done this nice smooth animation that changes every single frame after the fact we can make it change to be on every two frames. What we can do is use Posterize Time and I'll you guys flux with this effect to see what the amount is and the size. All that kind of good stuff. But that's a low-level granular stuff and the rough edges, and then you can use Turbulent Displace to do bigger stuff. I'll just turn that back down. Now what we can do is go to Posterize time. Let's go to Time, Posterize Time. Basically, we can set the frame rate after the fact. Let's set it to 12 instead of 24. Now, we playback. It'll actually hold every two frames. If we zoom in here, very subtle effects. This is kind of more advanced level stuff. You can call the course for beginners, and you're not a beginner after you learn this stuff. If I frame through, every two frames are the same. This is the same as that one. I don't know if you can hear me typing back and forth. That frame is basically held. Every two frames is being held for one frame or every one frame is being held for two frames, I guess I should say. That makes it feel a bit more hand-drawn. If we're doing handwritten thing that would make sense. We want to try to make it feel a bit more hand written. That's one way to do it with Posterize Time. Now, we have the text written on, we use, [inaudible] cool way. We have expressions, we've done granular rough edges, we've done big level stuff with Turbulent Displays. We posterize the time, we've used echo to make this cool little graphic thing occur before, and now we have a pretty sweet animation. Now, I want to finish this out with a bit of a little kind of chefs kiss of a thing to do. Let's right-click down here, go to new Adjustment layer, and this is going to be the warp or the distort, rename that. An Adjustment Layer is simply that, it just adjusts everything beneath it. It's not like a solid, there is nothing there actually. It's only the kind of hold effects basically. We need to add an effect. Let's go to the Distort and let's go to the Optics Compensation. What this does is, it basically takes the warp out of lenses, but we can use it and animate our own effects in our own animation. If I scrub this, you can see it warps the image, but I want to go the other way because we're zooming into the image. I want to zoom in with this kind of warped edges effect. It's going to reverse the lens distortion. So I'm going to set a key frame at the beginning here, on the field of view. I'm going to go to the end and I'm going to ramp this up. Because it's an adjustment layer, it's going to affect everything beneath it. That means the graphics, the texts, the background, and it marries everything together. It makes this a little bit more dreamlike, if you will. Again, we're layering effects on. We got one cool thing and we're like, how can we take this a little bit further? How can we take this another step further? You just kind of keep doing that until you have an effect that you're happy with, an animation that you're happy with. The one thing that I don't like is how quick the D goes off of the screen and in. I want that to hang on up until it's about to fade out. So I want to take the distortion and I want to just hang on just for a little bit and then it'll speed up right at the end. There we go. The D moving is a little better. The other thing that we can do is scale in or do something here that because we have this point where nothing is happening, we could scale up really quickly. Let's go to the background. Let's say you bring up all the key-frames, and let's hit scale here. Let's move forward and scale up. We have a little bit more movement. We don't have this dead zone here in the center that's not doing anything. I'm going to do a little F9 on that, so it's not as an abrupt change on the scale. Same thing on the distort. Are you here. Go here, hit F9. I want to go into the graph editor because I don't want this to go totally flat. I'm going to click and drag this, and we just kind of slow down a little bit like we were doing earlier. Do that same thing for the scale. I'm going to click and drag that. I don't want it to go totally flat. I'll just take it just off the horizontal. Now, it should just going to slow down and speed up. I want this to go even faster at the end. Let's bring these key-frames in a little bit. This transition still isn't working as well. I'm just going to keep tweaking this and make sure this isn't as flat. I think that's the issue. Let me zoom in here. I don't want it to go flat as it's going. We'll bringing this tangent, because I wanted to overshoot the bottom here. Let's tweak that. Now for this, I might actually bring this up even more. Holding Shift and I'm going to do is extend this out. It's slower and then it speeds up at the end, and I'm going to hit this down here to get a tangent. I'm going to drag this down so I get a nice sharp curve. That doesn't make sense, not a sharp curve. You get a nice increase right at the end. Let me just exaggerate that even more. Now, we have our final animation of the write on effect with a little added fun stuff in there. Thanks for watching. I'll see you in the next lesson. 16. Import Illustrator Files: Welcome back, and let's begin learning how to do a little bit more of an advanced Write-on effect with an Illustrator file. The previous few lessons, we were working with a Photoshop file, so in these next few lessons, we're going to use an Illustrator file and show you how to do that as well. Because a lot of times you'll have another designer make the logo, or you'll get a logo from a client that is sometimes in Illustrator file, and they can be a little more complicated. This is a bit of a step up from the last one we did, even though the effect is similar, we're going to add another bit of animation to make it look like it's a little more dynamic as it's being written. Let's jump over into Illustrator, and learn about what we need to do to prepare an Illustrator file to use in After Effects. Let's imagine we've received this from a client, and they now want us to animate this in a dynamic way to make it feel like it's being written on, and like we've seen the final animation to be. When we first look at this, we can see that everything is on one layer, and that's not how we need it for using it in After Effects. We need everything on its own layer. When we toggle this down, we can see there's a lot of different elements nested inside of this one layer, when we actually need everything within this layer to be on its own layer. The quickest way to do that is to make sure we have the Click to target selected here, and on this layer, and go to the three-bar menu up here, and go down to Release to Layers. Now you can see we have a little drop-down menu for each one of these, and it's renamed each 1, 2 Layer, whatever number. We need to take some time and rename each of these layers to what actually was before it was converted so that we can keep track of it inside of After Effects, and know which layer is which. The other thing we need to do is pull these outside of this apparent layer. I'm just going to shift select everything and just pull them out above it. Now we can delete this layer. I've already cleaned up a file for us to use, and this is going to be the one that is included in the project file. I've already gone through and renamed each element on its own layer. Let's jump over on After Effects, and learn how to import it. As usual, we want to right-click in the project window here, and go to Import File. We can go to the Cola_Topography_Animate_2020, and hit Import. We're going get this prompt. It's going to ask us a similar thing that it did with Photoshop. Don't we want it to import as a composition or a footage? We don't want footage, the same thing like in Photoshop. We didn't want footage. We want composition, and let's choose Layer Size. Now we have a composition that also will include all of our layers. If we open that composition, so for our purposes, we could leave these as the illustrator-type layers. It just doesn't give us as much to work with as if these were shape layers. We can actually convert these into shape layers by Shift-selecting all of them, right-clicking, and going to Create Shapes from Vector Layer. When we click that, you can see each layer has a new outline layer associated with it, but it's between every other one of these, and it's hidden the visibility of the original illustrator layers. To organize this, I can just click Drag any one of these, and just go to one layer above it. When I release, it will have pulled all of them above the Illustrator files. I could keep these here, or I could make them short layers. I could shift select all of these, toggle switches and modes, and click Shy, and now when we click this little Shy button, it will get rid of all those. Now all we're left with are the outline layers. I could also organize these by colors if I wanted the highlights, and the shadows to be in different colors, I could do that, and I can also find out which one is which by soloing them, and helping to understand what are these layers, and how I need to be working with them. We're going to start with the letter C in the next lesson, and perform the Write-on effect, and add a little more animation to it than we did before in the previous project. I'll see you in the next lesson. Thanks for watching. 17. Cola - Animate Letter C Matte: Now that we have the file imported, we can go ahead and start animating the first letter C. Let's grab everything that has to do with C and we can do that by finding everything in the layers that have C_ so that we know are grabbing all of those layers. Now, the one thing you also want to keep in mind is, once we start precomposing these, we need to be aware that we are going to be limited by this length of animation. You might want to go bigger than smaller, because once you start making many layers of precompositions, it'll take longer to update all of them and go through each precomposition and update their length. It's a lot easier to cut time away than it is to add time. Let's go to this composition and just increase this to 25 seconds instead of 15. I hit Okay and before I do any precompositions, I'm just going to hit the Title key to open this up, hit the Minus key, next to the Plus key on the keyboard. Now I can see everything and click and drag all these layers to 25 seconds. I make sure I have enough time, I could go one minute, but just to make it reasonable I hit the Title key to minimize that again. Let's go back and select all the C layers that we can find. There's C there, there's C here, here, and here. I'm going to right-click on any one of these and go to precompose and I'm just going to type in C, you can name that the letter C. Now we have this by itself. [inaudible] solo that. We can see we've missed a few things, there's some highlights here we've missed. I can toggle visibility, there's one and there's another, and there's another. We can very easily add things to precompositions by control, cutting them apart away from this and going into this composition and pasting them in. Don't worry too much if you didn't select everything right the first time, you can always update that. It looks like we missed one more highlight over here so we can find that by toggling visibility, there it is. We can hit Control-X and cut it and go into this precomposition, hit Control-V to paste it. Now we have everything we need for the C layer. If you noticed, these white areas are going to be meant for masks and we can worry about that after the fact and do that once the C letter's completed animating. We don't need to worry about that too much right now, we can revisit that after we are done animating the letter C. When you get more and more complicated animations and files, you'll want to break everything down into smaller chunks and not get too worried about everything all at once. It is important to think about how you're going to organize the work but for this purpose, we don't really need to worry about that right now. Let's just focus on animating the letter C and with this artwork. We're going to do the exact same thing that we've done before and animate a Matte turning on. I want to bring this into its own composition so that we can make a Matte over one layer instead of all of these layers because I don't want to draw a shape in here of a path and then have to apply it each one to each one of these layers. That's the advantage of using precompositions. I'm going to click and drag C into a new composition here. Now it's thereby itself. I'm going to name this C Matte. Now this is the matted version that we're going to animate to. Just like the last project, we're going to create a new shape layer or we can just start drawing and it will make a new shape layer for us. But with this shape layer selected, I'm going to go through and do what we did last time very quickly and make our own Matte for this with a path. I'm not worrying too much about this overlap right now, we can address that with masks like we did in the last project as well. Again, don't get too bogged down and just address each issue as they arise. Let's go and name this the Matte, sitting in on that layer allows me to change the name. Let's go to the contents of that shape, I'm going to delete the film just because I don't need it, go to stroke and do a round cap. Just like before, we're going to increase the stroke width. We're going to have to go pretty big to be able to get the thickest part here so it might mean a little more work with masks later on, I'm going to hit V to get the selection tool just to move this stuff around. Make sure it looks like we might need it to be a little bit thicker so I'm going to hold down Control and click and drag this, and then move all of these away from whatever edge is closest that is going to overlap with it because I don't want it to overlap as much as possible. I'm going to make sure I can't see any red here, bring this down so these don't overlap if they don't have to. If you think about the time too, we're going to start here and end over here so it doesn't really matter if this one covers that one. It only matters if the beginning covers part of the end because it will reveal this piece, but won't have gotten there yet. But if we reveal part of the beginning towards the end, that doesn't matter because the beginning has already been revealed by that point of the path. That one doesn't matter as much as the beginning one does. I was just pulling this up just so I could see, I couldn't see the red part because that mask was there, that shape was there, excuse me, that path was there. That's why I was pulling that up, now doesn't really matter for those intersect. I hope that makes sense. Of course, always ask questions if you have them. If something isn't making sense, I'm happy to answer them. Cool. Now we have our path and we're going to do the same thing that we did before with the adding a trim paths and we can set a keyframe on the end and go forward, maybe two seconds. We can ease this, I'm going to add a little more influence on the beginning and end keys. Now if we look at our tangents they are a little bit flatter, than if we hadn't done the 66%. That's 33% and that's 66% and now you know precisely that they both match the beginning and end of the ease in and ease out. That's why I like to use the keyframe velocity. Of course, the next thing we need to do is just add the track Matte here so I can go toggle switches and modes to get to this option and go Alpha Matte. Now we have the base animation for this and this is something you've already done in the previous project. Now, with a little more complicated with this is not only do we have this T thing happening again, but we have a shadow that we don't want to be appearing until we get to the point that this part of the path is going over top of it. Because of this highlight, we can't do like we just did before and have one mass cover it all. We need to jump down into this precomposition and address that in that precomposition. But if you remember in the last project, you don't want to do that type of work until you've nailed down the timing and made sure that this is the timing that you want for this animation. For me, it goes a little fast through this loop here, that's a little fast for me. I want to address that because anytime you're changing direction, you always have to think of the whatever principle of motion, that anything in motion tends to stay in motion unless a force is acted on it. It's going to take a lot more force, aka time for something to change directions, which means things tend to slow down a little bit if they change direction. I want to make sure when we're doing this big loop where it's just constantly changing direction here that that slows down. I'm going to go back into the animation here. I'm going to slow this down maybe right in here, I'm going to set a keyframe and I'm going to jump into the graph editor hit Plus to zoom in on this, rollover so I can see it, frame it up. Then I'm just going to hold down Alt and click so they both move together and now I can release Alt as well. If I hold down Shift, it goes totally horizontal so I can do that and then just let go of Shift and then pull it back just a little bit so it doesn't totally stop through there. It's a little too slow maybe. Extend this tangent out and maybe raise that up. Just extend this tangent because I do want it to speed up a little bit in between the end of this curve and the end here. That means I want this line to be steeper than it is. Because that means the rate of value change will increase if that line is steeper. To do that, I need to pull these tangent handles to increase this slope basically. Here we go. I'm going to pull this one back because it's a little too much. Let me pull this up. It's roughly where I want it to be. I always come back and make more changes to this. I pulled this last keyframe forward a little bit. That's another way to increase the rate between these, is just reduce the amount of time. That was better. Everything doesn't fill super consistent. It's not like a straight line where you ease out of the start position and ease into the end position, this has a lot of curves and a lot of loops, so it's a little more dynamic of a motion and you want to have that reflected in the keyframes and in the animation. Now that we have that done, let's jump into the precomposition of the letter and on the frames that we need this to be off. Let's focus on that now. Let's go to this frame and keep in mind now, if we double-click and go into this precomposition, our current time indicator should show up at the exact same point as this. If we make changes here, you can notice we're at 23, almost one second here, and we're still at 23 here if we jump back and forth. We know if we make changes here to this precomposition, it will get reflected into the composition that it's nested into that where we made the map. You can see it updates here as well. When I went back down there to frame zero, it updated this one as well. Let's get back to this frame and let's actually find the frame where those should turn on, I guess is the better thing to do. It'll be this frame is when they turn on. We need to jump into the precomposition of this letter, find the outliner. We can also hover over this, you can see where this gets highlighted in the view port if I'm just hovering over the layers here. If I hold down Alt, I'm going to hit left open bracket, that will make the endpoint for that layer. Now, I can also find that for this piece, you can see that I've actually separated that out because I knew that was going to be the over piece. I can open bracket that, and let's scrub back. Now you can see that all we have to do is the shadow now. I'll grab the shadow and I'll do Alt left open bracket. Anytime before this, it's going to be just plain Jane red. The function of this red piece that's going over it you can see, is it's actually just hiding that part of the red shadow for that piece. That's why that piece is important there. The highlight has something red to go on top of before the shadow. That's just how that was arranged in the Illustrator file. Now we have it turning on, on the frame where we need it to in the C matte animation. Now the only problem here we're left with is the fact that we have the masks that still need to be drawn. Let me select the matte, hit G to pull up the pen tool and make sure I go to the Tool Creates Masks. Now we can zoom in here and draw a mask around this area, and hit M to pull up the mask, go to subtract and also draw one here. Now, what I'm looking at is trying to get this point to intersect exactly where these two intersect so you won't be able to tell that there's a difference there. I'm also going to go down here and go to subtract, and I'm going to hit a keyframe on these, want to select this and hit you just so we can condense down just to the keyframes. I'm going to go back a frame, and this second one, I'm going to put here, then move it off here once the path reaches the point that it's going to be going over, and on the next frame, I'm going to do the same thing for this path. We can even maybe do it on the frame before so they both pop off. Let's see if that makes sense. It doesn't as much because you can see that we're missing the rounded part. If we turn on the matte, you can see what the path is actually doing. It's still rounded here. We can see the path itself is not gone all the way through yet. I am going to leave this one there for one more frame. Now we should have a rounded looking end of the path of the ink. In this lesson, we've done a more complicated version of what we've done in the previous project. But we still have our work cut out for us because we need to add a little more dynamic animation to it, and we need to deal with these overlapping areas with the L as well. There's a few more house cleaning things we need to do now that we've animated the letter C, we can see in our main composition, which has been named the name of the Illustrator file, there's nothing going on, and that's because that is just the letter composition, it's not the actual animation. Animation is happening on the matte. If we click and drag the matte one down and delete the C, we can see that the animation is occurring now. Let's also rename this main composition to main so it's clear which one is which, and we'll also take a look at this animation. You can see because our stroke width is so thick to be able to capture this thickness here of the letter, the first part of the letter pops on and we don't want that to happen. Let's go into the matte animation and let's just animate the stroke width. Instead of it popping on, maybe by here, it'll be as wide as it needs to be. Let's go to the matte and twirl down the contents, and go to these stroke and go to stroke width and set a keyframe by hitting the stopwatch. Let's go back to the first frame, and let's just drag this down to maybe like 10, I'm just going to type that in. Now we can see that it expands out. But because we've made the stroke width so much smaller, it's not actually starting at the very tip of the letter anymore. This first one is just a circle, but we need it to be right at the tip. Let's drag this down until we find where the tip is right about here, and let's drag this over and make sure that that's capturing the entire letter. Now we've cleaned that up and everything should be working much better. Now it expands on at the beginning, our comp is named correctly, and in the next few lessons, we will address this issue of the matte and these little white squares. That's not going to come into play until we animate the OLA or really just the L. We're going to address that later so don't worry too much about this until that stage. In the next lesson, we're going to do a little bit more of an advanced animation to add some dynamic movement to this right on affect. Thanks for watching. 18. Cola - Advanced Bouncy Animation: Welcome back. In this lesson, we're going to do some advanced animation. But before we do that, let's purge the cache. If you've watched the mastering the basics portion of this course series, you'll understand what that is. We'll go here and purge everything. The more you do that from time to time, the more work you do, just so you're not maxing out your available cache. Let's begin animating with the Puppet tool. What we're going to do is create a little more dynamic animation. As the letter is getting written on, we want the actual type to move more often, get a little wobbly. Like it's maybe wet paint or rubber or something. We're going to use the Puppet tool and the first thing we need to do is set the control points. I'm going to scrub to a point in time where we can see the whole thing and select the layer and go to this little icon up here, which is the Puppet position Pin tool. If I click that, I get a new little cursor here. I want to go through and set pins on where I want to have control. As soon as I click it, it's going to create a mesh. That mesh is what's going to be what deforms the geometry. We can't deform it with just one pin, we need more. What I'm going to do is create pins on the extreme points of the shape of this. It's going to be at the tops of curves and the furthest point of our curves go. Just go through here quickly with some controls, like so. The more points that you put down, the more animation work you're creating for yourself. Just be aware of that because this can take some time to actually animate. If I look now at the layer, we can see that we have this new attribute called puppet. I can scroll down mesh and deform. I can see all the pins that we've created. If I move my CTI, I can see that there are key frames there. As soon as we create a pin, it also creates a key frame. If we make any adjustments to any of these, it will create a new key frame for that layer, and you can see the first one has a new key frame. If we toggle it down, we can get the full view of what that is, what the position is in all that stuff. Of course, the easier way to do this is to go back up to the top level of the layer, hit View, and now, we have all of the key frames that we can see. I hit the Tilde key just to maximize the Window. I'm going to delete that one that I just did for an example. Now, I'm going to click Drag, select everything, and copy paste them at the beginning. I'm also going to copy paste them out here just for safety because if you've noticed, the pin is not at 00 for each one of these, it's the absolute position in the frame. If we wanted to reset these pins, you can't just type in zero and it'll go back to the default position of where we wanted it to be. That's why I'm copying and pasting some key frames over here just to save them basically in case I mess up over here. Let's hit the Tilde key to make that go down. The way to think about the animation and approach this is basically like a series of dominoes. We want one pin to start and then, this one to get delayed, and then, this one to get delayed after this one, and so on because it's going to be affected and animated based on when it is getting written on. Let's begin. Let's start with Pin 1. I'm going to zoom in here so I can see a little bit better. I want this to have a streak start. I want it to start further down here. I'm going to delete this first pin, drag that over. I want the second pin to start after it. I want to position this, so it's supporting that direction a little bit more, so I'm going to drag it out to the side for a starting position. Now, this can start to go up. I want to ping-pong back and forth between the in position. That's called an overshoot animation. I want to overshoot several times, and every overshoot should be smaller than the distance of the previous one. For example, for this pin, I should not drag it further than the distance from here and end position, I shouldn't go up here. It should always be maybe even half the distance of where it came from. We have the first one and I'll just drag the time forward. I'm not too worried about the timing yet, we can move the key frames later. Now, notice, I went maybe half as far again and then drag forward a little bit and maybe go half as far again. Now, we can scrub forward a little bit more and copy and paste this in-frame. I'm going to select all the key frames here and hit F9 for easy ease and see where that gets us. That's in the neighborhood. It's a little slow. I'm going to speed up especially this. The distance of the key frames are a little more reasonable. I want one more overshoot. I'm going to set a key frame again. That's the final end position. I'll jump back to what was then Position, and I'm going to drag this. Let's see which direction, I'm going to go a little past this, like there. Now, it will have one extra little overshoot there. Now, the idea is to continue to do this in a domino fashion with each successive pin. If you notice the start of the second pin is a few frames after the first one, so the same thing for the second pin should be a few frames after the second, just as a general rule because we want this first one to be the domino that affects the series here. I'm going to bring this up. Scrub forward, maybe go in-between these two key frames just as a general, to make sure that I'm delaying the next key frame enough from the previous Puppet Pin tool. Let me just zoom in here, make sure I'm going half of these on the distance here and go a little bit past just a little bit, and then, we'll copy paste this. Now, I'm not going to easy ease the first key frame because this is going to be a domino of motion that's already occurring. We don't want to ease into this. It's passing the baton and erase. That baton, once it's passed, is already going to be in motion. There's two runners, they're running and they're passing the baton between each other. Now, baton is moving. It's not starting from zero and easing into motion, it's already moving as the baton is being passed between the two runners. That's why I'm not easing that first key frame on the second pin tool or really any of these. We're seeing F9 on the one after the first key frame for that. Let's zoom out and we can see what those two puppet pin tools look like. They're working together now. They're both a little bit slow, I'll say. What I would do, I think is I'm going to select all of these. I'll hold down Alt and grab the last one in the series. With Alt being held down, I'm going to click and drag these down, and they will scale down based on the first position of the first one. Obviously, it's moving, so everything is getting scaled down just a little bit. That way, everything will speed up. I like that a lot better. Basically, this whole next little bit is going to just be continuing that process of the next domino in the chain here. I'm going to go in-between the previous layer for the next key frame. I'm just going to keep pulling these in positions that are in the direction of motion of the path and do the bounce back and forth here for the overshoots. I might speed this up here unless I have something to say. Just follow along with this sped-up version because it's just going to be repeating the same actions over and over again. It will take a little time to understand this and get the hang of it, but I think that the metaphor of dominoes, they're probably the most helpful. Then, understand how each one of these puppet pins will relate to the next one. Now, you can see we have that whole curve working and it's working relative to the timing of the ride on. We want to make sure that we're not getting too far behind where that is taking place. We've begun the process and I'm going to now speed up the class to finish out the letter C and continue the process of creating this domino waterfall effect of the key frames and the overshoots for each one of these pins. All right, now let's take a look at the animation we've done so far. If you've followed along, you're probably a little bit exhausted, but welcome to animation this takes some time. We've done a little first pass here and now it's time to adjust the timing of everything and make sure we're not missing some stuff here. We're going to make sure that domino effect is actually taking place and that it's following the timing of the ride on effect. I think for the most part working pretty good. I think that, we might also be missing some directional stuff. We want to make sure things are going in the direction they're supposed to be going and the speed they're supposed to be going in based on how fast the writing is coming on. I'm just kind of watching this through a bunch of times. I hit N, I can reduce my workspace so it'll loop a little bit quicker so it doesn't go all the way to the end of the timeline here. So, I'm just looking to see if there's anywhere that catches my eye that I think needs some more work. I think the tail could be delayed a little bit. I'm just going to delay the start of those a little bit and I'm going to probably push the distance that this final pin covers. I think it can go much further and add a little more attention to the end. [inaudible] go back and key frames. Then let's see if that one, this start to go not just in a straight line. The other thing we can do is change the spatial interpolation. I'm going to hit plus to zoom in on the timeline, go down to this key-frame and actually let's just do all of these key-frames. I'm going to select all of them. Right-click, go to key-frame interpolation and change the spatial interpolation, meaning the space it covers, which is that brown line with little knots along it. Each knot is a frame and the bigger squares are key-frames. What would happen when we change it to auto bezier. Well, it's hard to see because the mesh is in the way, but it's not straight lines anymore. If we take the tangent, we can actually stretch the tangent a little bit. So, the path emotion isn't just in a straight line anymore. That's what I want to try to see if we can go in that first one. So, it's just going up in a straight line. It starts from the left and then comes into the right and that works. Now the second one I think needs to, all that left to right trajectory, especially because the right on effect is going in that direction. Let's take a look at this path and same for this, I will right-click curing interpolation auto bezier and now when I look at this position, I can see the rounded that arc at the top of this and I can accentuate that by pulling the tangent a little bit and do that on the next key-frame as well. But for the most part I like where this is at and the only thing that I think we could do is maybe have some more left to right motion in this puppet pin tool. When the line crosses back over itself, I think we need some more left to right motion. So, I'm going to select this puppet pin tool so I can find it down here. It's number nine. I'm going to zoom in on that and find that layer of key-frames. So, I make sure to, right about here, I'm going to set a key-frame. I want this motion to interrupt what we're doing so I'm going to make this linear. [inaudible] Basically, it's like getting hit by something. I'm going to delete that one. Now I'm going to pull this over here, whatever it was doing now It's like being dragged over this way. Let's see if just even setting those two key frames. Yeah, makes it feel like, it's actually like interacting itself. I like how that feels. The general idea behind that, it makes it feel a little more [inaudible] even push it a little more. Do the same with this one. Let's find that one in the layer stack here, it's this one. As you get pulled from this point forward, you should get pulled, see where this is coming from. It's cool. Maybe here. Drag this one in. Instead of that going up, let's have it go to the right a little more. We're looking at the path of motion, timing of how the curve is getting written on, and animating the puppet pen tool to reflect that motion. Though, in this lesson, we learned about the puppet pen tool, how we could use it to our advantage to do some kind of bespoke, right on effects animation. In the next lesson, we'll continue on doing the rest of the word. We will resolve this issue with the L and that as well. Then we'll wrap up this project by doing a half tone effect for background. Thanks for watching. 19. Cola - Preparing O: I challenge you if you're feeling pretty confident right now, that you just skip this lesson and try to do it yourself, because it is a repeat of a lot of the same information that you already know. But if you're a little unsure, then hang with me and follow along. I'm going to move a little bit faster just because we've already covered this territory. Let's get started and animate the rest of this word together. We need to organize this, the same way that we organized this letter here, the C letter. Let's first get rid and just ignore these little dots here. Those are a little fizzy bubbly dots up here, we can just ignore those. Let's grab these highlights and drag them down to help organize before we precompose everything. Let's select the top one, and then select the bottom and we can go to precompose. We can just say, OLA, its own precomp. We need to put the OLA into a Matte comp. Let's drag and drop this in to a Matte comp, nest this in a new comp again, same thing that we did. Rename this heading, enter, and say Matte. If we go back to the main comp, this isn't the precomp that we want here, we want the Matte comp here, just like the C. We can click and drag this one here, so it's ready for when we actually need it. We can go ahead and just close some of these down because we're not going to need them right now. Let's get started drawing the shape of the reveal. Make sure that we have no layer selected, and we have the pen tool. Now, when we click and drag, it will make a shape layer force. Now again, if I click and drag, and I don't like where it's at, I'm holding down Spacebar, so I can move this before I let go. I can move this around, and then continue to move the tangent handles. I'm not too concerned where the first click is going to be, because I know I can move that around, shift it around by holding down the Spacebar. For this section, I want to follow the path of motion, like you are writing. If I was writing this, I'd go up, and then I'd retrace my steps and go back up to the top of here, and then finish it out. We want to do the same thing in our path here. Let me click the Insert key here, we want to continue the path. Let's click away somewhere out, and then we can hold down Spacebar around that area. We can go and do our little tricks on the stroke itself. Delete the fill, open up a stroke, increase the stroke width here, so it covers all the red. We don't want to see any more red, and then we can change this to round cap, and then we need to adjust this, it's actually bring the stroke. Let's adjust the point, which we can't really see right here. We can just drag this one out of the way, and then do this one and drag this one back. Now, let's apply the antrum paths. We can set a key frame on the end position here. Go forward, say maybe six seconds and twirl this down. Go to track Matte, Alpha, and play that back. First thing I think of, is obviously this is slow, but also we want to ease this. Now, it's speeded up by just clicking and dragging the key frame. The other thing we need to think about it, of course, is like we did on the C, where things change direction and how we want to handle that. Let's start to Insert Key frames where there are direction changes, like at the top of curves, including the bottom of curves. Here it's going to change the direction. That way when we go into the graph editor, we have the key frames that we need to work with. Zoom in here and I'm just going to click on these with the selection tool written B, pull the tangent handles. I'm going to go and not hold to make sure they move together Alt Shift. Flatten that out on all of them real quick, just to get them to a baseline of no motion whatsoever. Then we can dial this back, can be holding Alt Shift. We can just go one by one and just tweak them just off of horizontal, and see how that plays out. Feels like a little more natural, like someone's actually writing this. I think there's a little too much time between the first two key frames. I'm going to select all of those, drag them down, and feels like there's something behind that. There is some motion there that makes sense. I like that motion. It's time to clean up all of these shadows and overlaps and highlights and stuff, I guess not the highlights, just the shadows. We need to clean this area up. Let's start with that. We're not going to see the shadow until this loop kind of finishes here. I can scrub to the point in time, where I want this to turn on and jump into that precomp, find that shadow, and hold down Alt, left open bracket. Let's jump back to the Matte comp and see that that pops on. If we don't want it to pop on, we could of course animate that. Let me give it maybe one more key frame. Alt, left open bracket plus the zoom in. Let's go to the contents of this, and let's go to the path instead of key frame. Let's drag that key frame out, so that's the end position. Let's go maybe two frames out. I'll zoom in a little bit, and now let's zoom in to the view port. We can drag these vertices and drag this because it looks like there's multiple ones there. Try to keep that roughly the same as the edge up here. Drag to make sure I'm getting both of those. It just kind of does whatever it wants to make the path work. We should have some a little bit of motion here, so it's not just going to pop on. I think that'll help sell that transition a little bit. It's a lot better than popping on, of course, I could tweak it a little bit more. The next thing we want to do is to animate the masks here. Let's go to the point in time where we want this to turn on, maybe or move the Matte. Let's go here. Go to the Shape layer. Remember to hit G to get the pen tool, but also remember to choose mask. We don't create a new shape, want to mask out the shape. Let's follow the edge of this, so that we're kind of matching that. Now we have our mask and we can hit M to pull the mask and subtract that. We'd also hit a key frame on the path and move that back. The frame we want it to disappear, so we can just pull this out. I'm happy with that. We just need to do it for the top part. Let's go to that frame. We want it to disappear. Might have to do a little bit more animating on this to sell that because it is slowing down here. Let's go here and hit G to pull up the pen tool. Let's track that and help that along. We're dividing that and following the current timing of the animation. I like to try to use as few points as possible so that I have nice, gentle curves. We seem to subtract it rather and hit a key frame here. Let's go forward, and then move it. I'm noticing this one probably needs a little bit more help there, so let's go to that key frame and adjust that mask. We could always add another one. You can see the little plus pop up. I'm going to add one that's in line with what's currently there,and just make that get rid of that little edge there. The frame before this, I need to get rid of this little extra bit. I just need to do a little more animating. Grab this mask, hit the select that point, select off, select on. Sometimes you have to do that to, toggle on and off to get the tangents to pop up with the selection tool. That's looking good. We've seem to do the same thing for this T here, and the A has its own fun thing going on. In the next lesson, we're going to finish this out. I just wanted to reiterate, if you feel comfortable now to finish this out, I encourage you to do that because you're going to learn the most by making mistakes, trying this for yourself, coming back to this lesson, redoing it back and forth. Don't think you're going to get this stuff on the first try. You're going to make mistakes and that's okay. The quickest way to make mistakes is to just try this for yourself. If you want to skip this lesson or try to finish the L and the A on your own and skip the next lesson where we will do that, that's fine. Use that as reference if you run into trouble. Thanks for watching, and I will see you in that lesson. 20. Cola - Finish O, L, A: Welcome back. We've finished preparing this first part and now we're going to do the rest. I'm going to work as quick as I can because you've already learned everything you need to know to do this yourself. Which means you can also skip this lesson if you don't want to follow every single thing I'm doing. There might be a couple of good things or ideas in here but for the most part, it's going to be a repeat of the last lesson just for this intersection, this intersection, this intersection. The idea of the fact that the stroke is going to go here and then back around and then the tail. It's maybe five or six things we need to correct with masks on the shape layer. Let's get started. I'm going at GL, my keyboard to pull pen tool. I want to make sure that I am on the mask part of this. I'm going to scrub to where this is an issue and this begins to be connected. I draw this path out because I want to help that connection on this one frame, and then I'm going to animate this off. Click here, go to ''Mask'', key frame it, go forward one frame, not two. Zooming with plus, make sure I'm on the right key frame. Go forward one frame. Now I can just move this out of the way. ''Control Minus'' to back out, ''Control Plus'' to zoom back in. Now let's do the next one and that's the subtract. Hit "G", make sure that's still a mask. Continue. Maybe, I don't know if the next frame, we may need to help this one through and we have a little piece right there that needs to be included here, so I'm just going to bring these two up, grab that. I'm going to turn the outline off here, make sure there's no little pixel there getting stuck. I'm going to drag this out to make sure it captures the whole thing, set a key frame, middle mouse so I can pan down on these layers, hit ''Subtract''. Now, it comes through. Instead of scaling away, I'm going to double up on this one and use it again. Do the one frame forward so I capture the whole issue of this. There we go. Make sure I get that piece and just going to I'm going to delete this one, copy-paste this one back here. I'm going to scrub forward and figure out when this L is going to come back through. The shadow needs to turn on here on this frame. When I jump down to OLA, I'm going to find the L shadow, ''Alt Left Bracket''. Now you can see we toggle left frame, right-frame, it turns on-off. Go back to the animation. Let's do this top part and then jump to its frame G. This layer, make sure I mask, we weren't, so that's a good check to always do. Holding down ''Space'' to move this piece, move that point rather and then draw this out. Make sure I'm capturing this. I'm going to draw this in an arc, so when it does intersect, it will be a nice curved shape on the next frame. Middle mouse panned down here, set a key frame, ''Control'', ''Right Arrow'', move forward one frame. That's fine, so I'm going to drag this frame forward one frame, and I'm going to pull this out of way. I'm going to ''Subtract''. Soften, this situation here, G. I'm going to ''Control'' click outside here so I can then go select an individual point. Now, remember on the frame before [inaudible] the minimum it has to be as here. Although we're going to see the red, so I might actually just chip this and shorten this a bit just so I can bring this up and round that out just a little bit. Bring this tangent in. When I rotate this out, it's not going go too far over here. For this one, ''Mask 4'' master the key frame here. ''Control'' click out so I can select an individual frame, which can round this out just a little bit. Now pull that one out of the way. There. Let's just play that through. Make sure that's all working. Have the L shadow popping on. It's going so quick, I think it's fine. Forward to pop on. Now let's address the letter A. I'm going to give you a couple of things that I know are for sure. Let me for sure lock in this getting rid of this thing until we know we need it and I'll probably help out the other shapes we're going to make here. We get a straight line through here, which can draw a straight line. I'm going to use another mask to deal with that. I'm putting this on the wrong layer, I need to make sure I'm on the shape layer and I'm going to that again, make sure the mask is selected. Now I can cut through this. Set that to ''Subtract''. Let's leave it on ''Add'', that way we can see what key frame it's actually going to come in through here on. This frame, we can see that little corner popping out right there, so let's set a key, move forward to that frame and then I'm going to sculpt ''Control'' click out here with the pen tool selected. That way I can sculpt to this coming out. I can deal with the shadow as well, if I want which is going to be popping on maybe here or there. Go to "Ola," grab the "A-shadow Outlines" Alt left open bracket. Now it'll pop on, go the back to the animation. There it goes. Now, I'll turn this to subtract, so we know it's out of the way. Now, I'm going to mask out this little bit. That's what I'm going to do. I'm going to add maybe a little more masks than I normally would just to inform this a little bit. I'll fake this animation. Even though the stroke width is too fat on the reveal. It could do it itself. I'm going to do it with masks. So it should do something simple like that just to help indicate the stroke is going to be coming back. So let's see what frame that is. That ends here, here, there. So I'm going to set a keyframe on this mask, move forward one frame, I will start peeling this back. I don't want to double-click that with G , So I'm going to control click outside here, to deselect this stuff. Should select these two and just drag them up. Just a little bit on the first frame and the next one will be bigger. Next one's probably going to be all the way off. Now I must subtract. Let me sense there. I'm going to continue this motion. Maybe even here. Now I think that's enough to indicate, but it is a little weird and we're going to miss it getting bigger here. So I might add, you're basically painting with these masks. It might seem like an odd way to go about doing this. But it is very common to use masks in this way. You're probably asking, but isn't there a better way? I wish there was, but there really isn't. So I'm going to make a path here and move forward one frame and pull this out, so we're not worrying about it. So then it carries over this animation here. Then we'll just keyframe it frame by frame, G control-click but here so that I can grab a single point. Just brig this up. Next frame, probably the whole way to its final. We see this edge. So we have got to kinda respect that edge. That is as far as you can probably take that one. We can on the next one here, carry, that animation around. So let's trim just a little piece off of this. Then we can carry this around as well and animate the subtraction off. So I'll set a keyframe here. Let me make sure that's correct. So we go boom, and it should continue there. So next frame should be, these guys control-click out so I can just select individual shift L1. Now I'm just going to pull these out a little bit. Pull this one. What I'm going to do is actually Alt and Alt, and then I can just bring this tangent out. That way we're not affecting this tangent line. Now on the next frame, we can just take this whole thing off. Now may look like a mess of masks, but we get is the suggestion that the stroke is coming back around. Of course I need to set this one to subtract for that to actually take effect. So it suggests that the stroke is coming back around, if we have that little bit, that little piece that's a bit of a harsh edge there. So I'm going to adjust this keyframe and control-click away from it. Then I can select this point, hold on Alt. Then I can just bring this down so that rounds that off. Then I can also go to this mask. When I select a point and then I can find it here it's mask six. So I go. I think that's fine really. I'm not too bothered by that. Now we can deal with this piece. So with this layer selected again. Make sure we are on map. Pen tool, we can go through here and help shape this. I'm going to go ahead and let me go back one frame and make sure I'm capturing this whole thing. Middle mouse holding down and dragging, click mask path go forward one frame, and then control click off, so I can select an individual point. I'm just going to use the tangent handles to adjust this. Holding down Alt. Just getting this line so I can kind of see the arc I'm making here. Subtract it. Let's get rid of this chunk hold down [inaudible] click G and start drawing this one here. I'm going to back out just to make sure I have mask on. Now, I round that piece out. Then I want to protect this shape. I'm actually put there, I put more points than normal there. It's safe area around this. Toggle it down ahead of the path, keyframe. I'm just going to animate these control-click Alt to [inaudible] and to single click this and to drag, maybe this in the line. So it's just a straight line. That way it comes back down. I'll set a keyframe here, goes back down and protected, control-click Alt so I can get to one frame, click that one shift click that one and drag this down. Drag this down, I'm going to alt and click and drag this to grab the tangents. Control right arrow. Then do the same here. Try to mimic this shape around and just drag it off. Some practice. Now, I've used an army of masks to deal with the handwriting. This is an awkward shape. There are awkward things here. So I'm going to go through and clean this up. That should be connected there. There should be a gap. Now, I'm going to make a brand new shape. The nice thing about this is, you can adjust things as you go with even more shapes. It can get a bit cluttered. Of course I'm doing this on the wrong layer. Layer, mask. Just help these transition areas. You could do brand new masks just so you don't have to mess with the animation you already have. So let's pick keyframe here. Mask, move forward one frame and just pull this away. Subtract this and now we should have cleaned that little area up. That feels a lot better. There we go. Thanks for watching this lesson. We've finished creating the o, l, and a. In the next lesson, we're going to deal with this whole area and the c and put it all together. Thanks for watching. 21. Cola - Bouncy Animate O, L, A: All right, we've finished doing the OLA right on effect. Now, let's put it all together in the main comp. Now, if we go back to the main comp, we can see they're both going on at the same time. Let's drag the OLA Matte back in time until the C is done animating there. Maybe around in here. That can be the beginning of the OLA. Also, it's going to drag the work area out a little bit. Now, we can see the O, L and A begin to animate. Now, the other thing we need to do is bring in the Mattes into the main comp for the white area. I'm going to jump into the OLA composition. Now, we can click both of these Control C to copy. Let's hide them in this comp, bring them in here, Control V paste. Let's go back to the original artwork to make sure we're doing it right. We need the right one under the C. The right one under the C, and the left one is going to be on top of the C. Now, if we take the Track Mattes, we can do a Alpha inverted Matte and do the same for this one, Alpha inverted. Now, we have the original artwork and of course we'll have to either do a pop on for this one, or we can animate the path itself. It looks we'll probably have to animate it because of the transition here. I'm just going to have it pop on [inaudible] , ALT left open bracket. We can animate that if we want at a later time just to get it in the right place, and now let's run through the puppet tool pretty quickly for the OLA. I'm going to make it a lot more simple on this one. I'm just going to basically do squash and stretch on this. I'm going to have a pin here, a pin here, a pin here, a pin here, a pin here, a pin here. This is going to be a lot more basic. If you want to take it further, I totally encourage that. But this is what I'm going to do to help speed things up a little bit. When it gets to where it's all written on, until we see the entire animation play out. Then we can select that layer, go to the public pin tool up here and now we can set our two pins for each letter. Actually, I'm going to do three on this one. I might want to mess with the little endpoint here. Let me drag that to C. Yeah, that can work. We hit you on this layer. We're going to pull up all of our hitting the tilde key. We're going to have all of our points here and if you remember, the copy and paste and keep safety ones further away. Just so I know I'm saving those end positions and I'm not messing anything up. Now, let's jump into animation. I'm going to drag first by clicking this layer, going to the form. I'm going to drag this one up. I'm going to pull this up too, so I can see my layers. Hold on, middle mouse and drag so I can get to the keyframe, I'm looking down here and scrub down, and just do the zigzag thing that we've always done. Zoom-in, three, forth and I'll pull this over a little bit here, and down, and try to follow the motion on the path. There's a very free form animating. Now, I'm going to go back and forth here. Free styling it. Do a little back and forth settle here. I'm going to click and drag this one, copy, paste it, click all of these and F9 that. Now, let's back out and see if that actually works. Works. Little stiff because we haven't done the bottom one yet. I'm just going to jump to that one. The Matte for this, we can adjust this later, so we're probably going to go outside of it and see what we're getting outside of it and that's okay. I like this, I want to last so we effect here. I'm going to go pretty far outside of it and just bring this first keyframe closer to it. We have more of a throne factor maybe even bring this back, so it has more distance to travel on that first key frame, then come back. Let's jump back in with J, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and then I'm going to do my little settle now. Zooming in, this zigzag this back and forth. 1, 2, 3, 4. Let's do this one. I'm going to have this, maybe start a little higher to have somewhere to go on this one on the next few keyframes here. Let's see. Pull this back, and do maybe a few keyframes, and then do a little settle here and we'll go back and forth, same as we've done. We're going to move this one keyframe over just so that these aren't moving on the same keyframes, just so all the animation is just slightly offset. 1, 2, 3, 4. You don't want them ping-ponging at the same time, it's not ideal as the final keyframe here. We zoom out. Oops, Control minus. I just need to hit minus, copy paste our final position here. Now, I have my bearings of where were my ping-ponging between. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, drag this keyframe here, go past this; 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. Select all F9, back out, minus, zoom out. Let's try. Some of the stuff we'll take some time and this isn't perfect by any means. But I think it's a pretty good start. Let's find this frame. I pull this up, 1, 2, 3, 4, or bring this back. I animated in reverse a little bit there if you caught that. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. There we go. Now, let's do the bottom one. Just going to pop on here. Delay that, it's starting too soon needs to be pushed by the stroke, it doesn't need to lead it. So it probably needs to be delayed one more frame, want it to get pulled by the stroke, and then we'll do a little settle here. All right. Let's take a look at this. We are probably going to need to minus and control minus. I should be doing the other one. Adding plus to zoom in. Now, hitting "Space-bar" to play. That looks good. This is your first time learning with puppet pin tool.If you follow these general rules of the four frames kind of settle, five frames settle. Offset them so that everything's not key-framed on the same frame. You'll generally have a good starting point. It can be frustrating. This is animation. It is known to be frustrating, especially when you're learning, so don't feel like you're alone in that frustration that is common and expected. Let me find this one. I'm turning on the white outline so that we can animate the path of this matte or even just drag it out. We don't really need to animate it. I'm just going to hit "G", and with that, let's select this point. It shifts like that one. I'm just going to drag this out to make sure we're covering that area. Then we need to make sure we're covering the extreme, meaning as far as it goes here, we need to do that there. Now, we may need to animate this because I don't want this matting the front side of this L, which it will if we pull it to the extreme position. So I am going to set a keyframe here. I need to go to the path of this stroke at a keyframe. I'm going to keyframe here, it looks like we probably need to extend this out as well. It's extreme [inaudible] we're just missing when I "Control" click away from it. Then I can select this point by itself. Now, but the extreme position here, furthest distance it gets away. Double-click to pull up the transform, "Shift arrow" these over, go up one time over. We should be good here and should always cover it, and not connect with the front. Because if we did, if we pull this thing over, we're going to start block in the front and we don't want that. That'll destroy the illusion that this is going behind and then in front. Now, we can turn the visibility off. Check that work. Then the same thing for this matte. We're going to probably need to animate this anyways because it is not following correctly. I'm going to turn this off, the visibility, just so that we can see through it. I'm going to find the path untense here, and set a keyframe. I'm going to drag that keyframe at the end position. So we save that kind of end position that is accurate to the artwork we've been given. The client gives you an Illustrator file like that. They want to know that you've nailed it exactly. That you're not messing around and their brand manager is not gonna be bothering you like, "Hey, you've messed with our brand, and that's not how it looks.". You don't want that. Let's just "Shift", drag this over. Might hit "G" here. I'm going to add a point because we need this starting to introduce itself through the C. We need to round that front edge. I'm going to even bring this back one frame and then double-click it, and then just kind of free transform it into space here. Then we can copy-paste this one now that we're out of the woods as far as that curved piece, now we can just free transform, "Shift" this back and forth as it goes. What I'm going to do is actually set a keyframe here and delete the previous one. Just so we can take advantage of a little animation. I'm going to hit "G", control-click off, double-click this, now we get the free transform back. I'll rotate this slightly so it's in-line. Find the extreme pose here, do the same thing. Now, I'm going to hit "F9" these because I know that's what the pin tool is doing. So it should roughly track. We didn't have to keyframe on every frame for that. Again, go to the end position here, and then "Shift arrow" this over hit in line "F9". Copy-paste that end position to make sure we are matching the final artwork. The little bit of a discrepancy here, I think from the bottom animating, so it doesn't exactly match. We may need to bring this keyframe back. I think that was it. I am just going to do one more little in-between here. It does a nice settle over a couple of frames. We have a very subtle settle so it matches a little bit with the L. I'm going to "Shift question mark". Now, we have the animated Coca-Cola with the puppet pin tool to make it look like a write-on effect. We also dealt with Illustrator files and a more complicated image than the previous project. I hope you have fun with this. It's a little bit tedious, but I want to begin to introduce you to that concept because that's what animation is. It's tedious. If this scares you off, at least you'll have some appreciation for it. But this is what animation is. I know you might have a little frustration, you might have a little feeling overwhelmed. If you didn't necessarily hit this exact overshoots that I did. But, slow down, re-watch lessons, follow exactly what I did and the distances. Start to analyze what you're doing is what I'm doing. If you're not seeing the same results, and compare and contrast those too. The next lesson, we're going to create a more motion graphicey background. You're going to learn a new skill set; how to create a half-tone effect. I believe the half-tone effect is a good stylistic choice for this graphic. Because it implies the idea of fuzzy bubbles that you find in Cola. I will see you in the next lesson to create that very interesting and animatable half-tone background. Thanks for watching. 22. Cola - Halftone Background: Welcome back. Now that we have finished the Cola animation, we're going to create a really cool half tone background effect. Let's get started by right-clicking going to "New" "Solid", name, this Halftone. This is going to be where the effect is going to live. It doesn't matter what color it is right now, because we're going to create a gradient ramp. We need to go to generate either use a four color gradient or a gradient ramp. The third way we could do this, is use a black solid or white solid, and then create a mask over the top one and feather that mask and then recompose those two layers so that we'd have one layer with some type of a gradient on it. That's the general idea. Instead of doing that, we're going to just use the four color gradient effect and then move everything to either being white or black. Then we're going to add the main effect, which is going to be CC ball action. I'm going to adjust this so we can see what's occurring a little bit easier, and settle this layer as well as drag it to the bottom because it is going to be the background. Now, the ball action basically fakes three spheres by putting a ramp, a radial ramp on circles. We need to crush the levels of that, so we get rid of that gradient and we're left with balls. But because it's happening on a ramp, we are going to get a falloff effect. The spheres gets smaller and smaller according to the gradient. You'll understand that as soon as we apply a color correction levels and we can crush the input white point and you can see, we're getting rid of that ramp that's in the center of all these spheres. Then we can bring back the Gamma, something like 0.01. Now we have this slow gradient effect occurring that we can control with these positions of the points from the four-color gradient up here. Now let's un-solid this layer and create a new solid, and pick the shadow red there and hit "Okay." We're going to drag this to the very bottom. Now let's create another one called new solid and make this white. That's going to be the see-through background. We're going to have red and we're going to have white. We're going to use this half tone effect. I'm just going to drag the white to the bottom. We're going to click the red and go to Lumi Matte. We're basically using the half-tones effect as a Matte on whatever color we want. Now all we have to do is go in and adjust these values. I'm going to use five for the, excuse me, grid spacing and something like 86 on the ball size. Of course, you can adjust that if you don't want it to totally be solid, you can just tweak that until you like the effect. Now, we can set a key frame on all of the point positions here, hit you on half tone here, and we can animate this however we like. I'm going to leave that up to you. I'm just going to move these around for now. After clicking the "Four-color gradient", I want to make sure they have the toggle, mask and shape, path and visibility on. That way we can see these target points that represent where the gradient is being controlled from. Now, you may notice some slight banding here and that's controlled in one of two ways. We could increase the Jitter from the ramp, and the more you go, the more noisy it gets. You have this noisy pattern at the edge and it's not as clean. Or you could increase the Gamma. As I increase the Gamma, and when I say ramping you see how this is a bit sectioned off. If I crush the Gamma to zero, they get even more pronounced. There these very subtle bands occurring in the half tone and to get rid of that, we just need to tweak the Gamma up just a little bit. Now you can see that fade away and everything is a much smoother gradient in the half-tones. Let's go back to the four-color gradient and continue to move these around in some an interesting way. Again, I'm not going to get too complicated with this. I'll leave that up to you. I'm just going to flip these around. Have this be in the diagonals a little bit. I might mess with this a little bit after the lesson is over. Just we're not wasting time here fiddling with things too much, and we're actually learning tools, as opposed to just watching me try to make up my mind what I want this to look like. Now, I'm going to bring the Gamma back down because I don't like how this is fading out as much. I'm going to go to something like level two, and that'll make it a bit harder edge. The other thing we could do, of course, is add a turbulent displays especially if you wanted a bit of staccato movement. You go to "Distort", and "Turbulent displace." Now that warps everything so we need to reduce the size by quite a lot. Now you can see if we zoom in here, that the end is a little distorted, so it's not perfectly clean. We can just keep tweaking these values so that the edges of the spheres aren't perfectly around and it adds a little bit of noise there. That's another thing you could do. You could just constantly click this until you have it exactly the way you want it. [inaudible] a little quicker. During this section, and now contract down a little bit. Ease that in the center. I'm just going continue this motion around toward the end. I'm also going to ease these key-frames. I'm just going to offset everything just a little bit so not everything is moving at the exact same time. Now that we have that done, let's not forget these little pieces of the illustration that we had up here, which was these little bubbles. We have these little bubbles and I think what I would like to see happen is, they can animated off of the sea. I'm going to set a position for all of these at P, key-frame them, and then they're going to go forward. I'm going to drag this back a little bit and now they're just going to keep going forward a little bit and then also up. Drag and click all of these and change the key-frame interpolation to Auto Bezier so it'll round this path a little bit. I'm going to keep them linear. Now I just need to compress the key-frames to match the speed of this C being animated on. Then I can offset everything. Zoom into the timeline, drag these over. I can also hit S to pop a scale or just animate the scale of all of these on to be full on, just a few frames in, J and then just scale them from zero. Now all we have to do is, select all of them, hit U and then offset the timing of them just a little bit. I can either just offset the timing of the entire layer or I could do the key-frames. We're just going to do the entire layer. Now I can select all of them and get the first one can be timed correctly to the C. It's going to drag all of them down to the first layers, start as the C passes. I'm just going to speed all of these first key-frames up. Feels like it's getting shot out. Now I can also go in here and individually grab all of these because I have all of these key-frames selected so you can also as a group, just shift everything up if you don't like where it's going. I'm just going to adjust them globally there as well. You do the same thing here. Now the last thing I can do is actually just add some more half tone by duplicating these two layers. By selecting them, hitting Control D, I'm going to drag them to the bottom. Now, I'm going to change the color of this because right now they're just duplicates of each other and go to right-click, "Generate fill" and I'm going to change the color to something more noticeable so that now when I go into the half tone of this one, I can just call this the blue one. I want to go into half tone that's being mattered. I can just adjust the levels here, the input white to the left here, and just bring in a new color. I can add layers of this effect, even with just the same animation, as long as I lock in the animation that I want, and then I can duplicate it, put it underneath, adjust the levels and now I have even more complex animation almost for free. Then I can go in here and tweak the colors as I see fit. Now we've created a really cool ride on effects. We've learned a lot of new skills and how to handle complex Illustrator files and how to animate them in appealing ways. Your assignment is to now do this yourself. Use the project files to your advantage and have fun with them. Follow along with the lessons, create your own animation, share them with me and the class. The next series of lessons are going to be on more about how to animate text in aftereffects. There's so many different ways and fun ways to do it. Let's keep going. 23. 3D Quote 1: Let's get started with a new project and learn how to easily create 3D text animation. I'm going to bring in a new file. In this project we're going to create a quote animation. You could also do a lyric video, you could do any number of things with this technique, but for this little project we're going to create a quote. I'm going to create a new composition to get started. Let me call this Quote and hit ''Enter'', and just accept all the default values that we always use and I'll drag this image in. This is Richard Feynman, he's a Nobel Prize winning physicist. If you're interested in learning how to create this low poly portrait effect for yourself with your own images, I have a separate course that walks you through how to create this image in Illustrator. I'm going to hit a New texts layer here by right-clicking and then I'm going to type in the quote, ''I'm smart enough to know that I'm dumb,'' and that is his quote. I'm going to change this from Lobster to something a little more basic, Arial, and now I'm going to separate this out. Just design wise what I like to do typically if I have something like this and I don't know what to do with it. That doesn't look very interesting right now, so my default is, let me start and see if I can arrange these words in a way that are more interesting. I'm going to separate them out. I'm going to duplicate these, and I'm going to double-click them and start to separate each of the words out. You can solo them in case it's hard to see what you're deleting. In general, I already know what I want to do, so I'm not experimenting as much right now. But, the general idea of this quote and the joke behind it is centered around the contrast of using smart and dumb in the same sentence, to describe yourself. I want those to be the biggest words and that's why I'm deleting what I am right now because I've already made that decision, that I want smart and dumb to be really big. That's why I'm keeping those separate and the filler words are going to be lumped together. Now what I can do, is just hide the original one, V on the keyboard. Let's zoom in and start to arrange these in a way, where we don't have to be super precious with how they are getting laid out, we just need to get them in the right order and then we can align them the way that we need. Let's get these arranged. What I want to do is use these rulers that I've pulled out and make the biggest words at least, extend the entire length of this area. To make that a little bit easier, I'm going to hit ''Y'', grab the pivot, I'm going to hold down Control to snap it over here. That way when I scale by hitting ''B'' again and clicking and dragging with the Shift held down, that it will scale from that pivot. I can easily set one side to the ruler, and then move this pivot over here and scale it up. For the filler words, I'm not too worried about them being really big, I just want smart and dumb to be the biggest so I am going to just focus on those for now. I'm going to Shift and scale this up, and drag that down. Now what I can do is just grab the other words. If they're too small, I'm just going hold down Shift and use the arrow keys. What I'm going do now is Shift, select all of these and go down here to align or you can get to it from Window, Align, and I'm going to align the layers. You can do composition. If we want to center it to the composition, we could use this one, or if we want to do it to the selection, we could do that, which is what I want. Now those are going to be centered and I can mess with these filler words. I think maybe I do want enough to know, because there's three words. The words themselves aren't going to be as big, so all in a line. I think I can get away with scaling that went up, and because now I know it's centered with the other ones, I can leave that pivot point in the middle because it's going to scale it from the center. I may scale these two words so they're a little more readable, and I'm going do them at the same time. Then what I'd like to do a lot is to use a new solid and with a mask, make a little ruler here. I'm just going to pick some thickness here of a ruler, hit ''V'' on the keyboard, double-click it to get the free transform, and then I can use this as a ruler, lay out my text. I can drag it around it, and I'm going to just move this up with the arrow keys to make sure it's accurate and drag this down and make sure the next line is that same distance, so everything is consistent. Attention to detail is what separates inner work from more advanced work and being diligent about that. This is just my little hacky way instead of using a ruler, which you can't move two at the same time, these guides, so that's why I use a mask on a solid. I get a consistent thickness of spacing between whatever I'm moving around. Now I can just delete that, get rid of it and I know they're all evenly spaced based on that mask. Now, the other way you could do that as of course distribute them with the distribute layers function over here, but that tends to mess things up for me if you're using different sized text so I like to do it manually. Now that we have our quote, let's create our 3D animation. I'm going get rid of my rulers by hitting CTRL+Colon and hitting Shift+Question mark to fit the Window. Now, I'm going to hit ''Dumb'' here, and I'm going to just focus on this one. Now if you look over here, there's a little 3D cube here and hovering over it it says 3D layer. Just by clicking that makes all of these layers 3D. If we hit P, we can see instead of just x and y values now we have a z-value. The same is true for rotations. I'm not going to get into the weeds on why there's orientation and rotations separated. It's basically something called gimble lock and it's a way to help protect from things spinning out of control. But just know that if you hit W on your keyboard, you have the rotation tool, and that's going to set those values on the orientation. I like to use the x rotation y and z, that way they're separate and if I go on the graph editor, everything is nice and separated and I can see those curves separated. I don't really tend to use orientation as much. Now, what I want to do is do a little rotation animation. I want to rotate from the top. I'm going to grab the pivot by hitting Y on the keyboard and then click and dragging that holding down Control and it's going to snap to the top of that text layer. Now, what I can do is find the rotation I'm want to rotate from. For me, it's going to be the x, so I'm going to go to x. I want to rotate down from 90. I'm going to type in 90 and I'm going to set a keyframe. I want to go forward six frames, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 and I'm going to go to 0. I'm just going to drag that a little past 0, so in the negatives, maybe something like negative 20 and then go forward 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and then the positive 10, and then 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 or 4. I'm just going to do less and less, do negative 5, 1, 2, 3, 4 and do positive 1, 1, 2, 3, 4, and 0. Now I'm going to select all those keyframes and easy is that with F_9. Now I have a three animated texts, and we can copy and paste this on any other 3D layer that we have. Let's finish this quote out by actually adding his name here, I'm going to right-click. Actually, I'm just going to duplicate this layer and drag it to the bottom. I'm going to separate out the Nobel Prize winner to be one, and the other one I'm going to duplicate this one out is going to be his name. You can see how I'm spelling that. Richard Feynman, because he has a bit of an odd spelling of the last name, or I've ever heard that name before besides him. I'm going to bring this down and separate this out. Now, I'm not too worried about these two because they're doing their own thing since it's the guy's name. I'm just going to scale these down together and move this one. Now what we can do is also hit Y on the keyboard again and grab the pivot, hit Control. Is the same thing for this one. Grab the pivot, hit Control and now we can copy and paste this animation on these two. We have our animation. We can change the timing of this later on, so you have an introductory animation. The other thing to remember is we're building on skills we already have. You know how to do custom text with the text animators. For example, if you remember in a previous early lesson, we learned how to use these animated features. If I click this, and let's say I want to animate the position of this. Now, you might get frustrated at first because I only have X and Y, but this is a 3D layer. Where is the z coordinate here? Well, the tricky thing is you have to enable it. Click that button again, go to the very top, enable per character 3D and watch the z-axis pop up right here. Now all of the skills you've learned up to this point, using these you can also do on 3D layers. I'm going to undo that and toggle that down. Now, the next thing is very popular with any type of text. Lyric video is using a lot of parenting techniques. I'm also going to introduce you to a null object. I'm going to right-click new null object. Now, these will not render at render time. Even though you can see them here, you can't see them in the render. Now if you want to hide these, you can hit Control Shift H and now hide all the outlines. I'm going to hit it again to bring a back up. I want this to snap to the center of one of these words. I also need to make this a 3D layer. Don't forget to do that because we also want to hold down Control, and if this wasn't a 3D layer then it can snap to these other ones. I'm just going to let it snap to the center of that one, and now what I can do is parent all of these to that null object. Instead of having to move each one of these layers individually, now I have one control to control them all. Now I can move them altogether and animate them together and individually if I wanted, I can still do that. But what I want to show you is how a lot of people use this effect is by layering up different null parents. I'm going to make another one, and I'm going to start naming these because these can get out of hand. I'm going to call this QuoteNull, and I'm going to call this top one Main. Of course, you can also start to organize things by recoloring them. Let's say all of your nulls are going to be yellow, so it's easy to spot here. What I want to do is rotate everything in. This is just for the sake of learning. We're not actually going to do this in this project, but just to show you how you could use it. I'm going to put this down on the corner, I want to turn the 3D on for that. I'm going to parent this null to this null. Now the entire quote follows that, and I'm going to do the background. When I rotate this, hit R and the whole thing can rotate in. I'm going to set a keyframe here on Y, and I want to start off screen. I'm going to go just off the screen. Let's imagine I have some other text here that we just started from. Let's say beginning text, or some lyric video that we're doing lyrics on or something. Now if I make that 3D, I can parent it to this main null as well, and it can be along for the ride of the keyframes we've already made. So watch this and scrub, and now that's going to get rotated off screen as well. That's pretty cool. That's how a lot of these are made, are just layering up these kinds of animations and these parented nulls. I'm going to undo all that because we're not going to use that for the one we're doing. In the next lesson, what we are going to do is jump into using 3D cameras. Thanks for watching, and I'll see you in that lesson where we will dive in deeper into learning 3D. Thanks for watching. 24. 3D Quote 2: Now let's create our 3D camera. I'm going to right-click, go to new camera. There's two different cameras we can create, a one-node or a two-node camera. The easiest thing to do is just show you the difference. I'm going to create a two-node camera and I'm going to hit P and then Shift A to bring up the position and point of interest. The easiest way to deal with any 3D camera, the One-Node or the two-node is to go on a two-view horizontal. That way you can get a top-down view and the composition view. We're looking at top-down and if I click and drag the X value here, you can see that the rotation of the camera is also following the point of interest. If I move the point of interest, it will also rotate the camera. Now what's tricky about this, this is the gotcha moment for me with this camera and I can mess up on sometimes. If I set a key frame on the position and I like where this is that and I move forward in time, and instead of clicking and dragging the X value, if I do it from the viewer, it's going to move the point of interest as well. Because I haven't set a keyframe on that, it's going to mess up the first keyframe and composition I had over here. Let's demonstrate this mess up. If I click and drag this over, it's moving the point of interest as well. But the point of interest is not keyframe, now it stays over there. Now we've messed up that keyframe. That is the gotcha moment that can screw you up with a two-node camera. Now, you can always reset this camera by this handy little button, and if we have keyframes, of course is going to keyframe that. But that's the thing to look out for with the two-node camera. For us we're not going to use that. We're going to do very simple camera move, just backing it out. I'm going to create a new camera, that's a one-node camera, and I'm going to choose 24 millimeters. That's the focal length of the camera. This is wider and this is longer. This is like a telephoto lens and this is like a fisheye lens up here. I'm going to choose something in between, all these other stuff you can change after the fact. I'm going to hit okay, and also rename this null. To sell the effect of something in 3D means we need things in Z space, which is this direction. It's forward and back. Right now, both of our layers are in the same Z space, so we need to remedy that. I'm going to take the fineman image, then hit P. I'm going to push this back in Z space. I'm going to hit Shift R. I'm going to rotate it as well. Now, not only is this back further in space, but the plane itself is going back in space. I want to hit Shift S to bring up scale as well. I'm going to scale this back up. Now I'm going to push this over to the side and I'm going to rotate it down. Now because we've rotated it in one direction, if we do these other ones, it can become a little bit wonky, maybe unpredictable based on what you're expecting. You can also hit W on the keyboard and constrain based on the view here and what I'm looking at doing is getting rid of that shirt on the edge. Now, have the end the camera position of this composition. I'm going to go to maybe somewhere in here and hit P, keyframe on position. Now, when I come back and I want to go forward, I have the rotation tool selected so I'm going to hit V on the keyboard. Now we can move in and the camera's basically just going to back out. I want to move the text closer to the camera. Let's move the texts closer to the camera, and we can scale it down to fit the composition again. Anytime you're moving things forward and back, you can use scale as a way to counteract that resizing of it in the frame, if there's a certain composition you want to achieve. We're using scale to do that, maybe move it forward a little bit more. Because what I'm also going to do is enable depth of field. Now if you have a DSLR or a camera, or familiar with depth of field is basically what makes things blurry. We can turn that on and the camera as well. I'm going to turn that on by toggling it down. We don't need the transform right now. We need the camera options. If I hit depth of field on, not much is going to happen. I'm going to go back to the one camera view so we can see this a little bit bigger. You might say, not much has happened. Well, the text is blurring a little bit. That's because it is so close to camera. We have given ourself a bit of an advantage by separating these layers out because we want one to be blurred and the other not to be blurred. That'll give also the sense of depth and in 3D motion. You also want to make sure for depth of field to work that you have the classic 3D render on. You can choose that between these two options. Depth of field will not work on the cinema 4D render, we'll touch on that in later lessons. But for now, if you wanted the field in classic 3D. If we go back into the two-view horizontal, we can also see the focus distance here. If we drag this in, if you look here, you can see the text is here, the focus distances here. We want to drag this in to where the text is, and that makes the background of him go blurry. Let's make sure we are at our last key frame here. Now, we can see that this is going to be slightly blurry just by the fact that it's moving through the space of the camera. It's going to go from blurry to in focus. We haven't had to animate anything on the depth of field, which is nice. We can animate the focus distance or any of these attributes as well. The blur level can also crank up this effect quite a bit. We can increase that by a little bit, and then we can also animate the focus distance. I'm going to go to the end, I'm going to click focus distance, I'm going to move forward a little bit, and I'm going to look in this view and drag the focus distance closer to the plane of this image so we can see him in focus. Now when we're transitioning, we should see the focus change from him to the text. Now we have easy stuffs, so that's why it's a pretty sharp, not pleasant animation right now. Let's attend to that. Let's hit the camera, hit U and then we can maybe drag this out a little bit more. Right-click keyframe easy ease and then also set the velocity to be a little higher so it will end slower. Now when we play it back, it will be a much smoother transition between these two. Also I think he's getting blurred out too much, so we could also keyframe the blur level here and here, and if I do something like this after effect, it is going to make sure that these easy ease are matching because you don't want one finishing before the other. They should all go at the same time. That's why I like using numbers instead of going into the graph editor and pulling these curves around because I don't know the exact number. That's why I like to use the keyframe velocity. Now on this keyframe, we can adjust this maybe back down a little bit, so he stays in focus just a little bit more. The one thing I don't like about this effect, is the fact that the time between where we see the text and when it finishes is not a ton of time. I'm actually going to push the text back in space a little bit so that we have a little more time to see it. Let's grab the null. When I click the null and actually push this back in space instead. Now that also means I'm going to need to scale this up and change the key frames that we have here. I going to hit P and I'm going to animate the position of this, because I also want to control where we're going through the text. I'm going to hit Shift S. I'm going to scale this up and move it over. I'm going to go where the camera is in line with it. I'm just going to drag it over the camera and zoom out here and I want to move this down and Y. We get a little more of an extreme, a closeness to the quote. Now I'm going to easy ease that and also do 75. Now that we have this effect on, we can return the animation of the dumb and that one. I'm going to grab the whole layers because I don't want them to appear at all until they start to rotate. I'm going to give you the opportunity to read, I'm smart enough to know, and then I want the dumb to rotate down. I'm smart enough to know that I'm dumb. Then swap these because that one's on top because we're going to offset these just a little bit. Now, we can grab both of these and just drag them down even more, so the joke lands a little bit. Now, let's finish this out with some more motion graphic key touches. Let's make this look cool basically. What I'm going to do is create a background, so a new solid. I'm going to use some colors that I've gotten from the library and I've already talked about how to do that, so I'm just going to color pick those. We're going to have a green background. I encourage you to go to that website, take advantage of that stuff going to add a tent to him, so color correction tent. I'm going to map the blacks to the darker green here and the whites to the lighter green. We can also experiment with maybe having his name be red so that it stands out a little bit. It's a little hard to read on that green, so I might just leave that there or do the yellow color to help differentiate one from the other. Now that's cool. This too is, we could add more animation after the fact because it's all parented. I'm even going to easy ease this first one as well, so it stays in our view longer before it starts moving. I'm going to key frame velocity rather 75. Now I'm going to move the position a little bit because I think it's jumping over, so I what that distance not to be as big. The other thing we could do is just like we did with the background for him. We could hit our rotate this a little bit, so we also can fill this negative space that we have on this side and it creates a bit tension between, they're angled towards each other, so connects everything together a little bit more. If you notice, the depth of field slowly goes from one end to the other. This is sharper and this gets more, so the fact that it's not on the same plane really helps cells that 3D effect. Now that rotated, I can move that back even more. I think these velocities are maybe a little much, we'd go to 60 on these. Now the other thing we could do with this rotation is turn on motion blur. We can also fix this first frame, so let's jump over to that. Hit R, and then we can rotate this towards inline with the camera view, so we don't see the top of it as much. Then we can also turn on motion blur and see how that helps sell the effect. I'm going to push this whole thing up, so this is why I like to have everything on our null because you're not having to go change like ten different key frames. This is two key frames. It's pretty easy and you can add to it. That's really nice. Now if we wanted to also update this to include maybe some big quotes or something like that, we can duplicate this. Because we are duplicating, it's going to maintain that hierarchy with the null and follow along with this animation. We could double-click that, make a little quote mark here, and then we can move this around even though it's parented so that we have these little quotation marks. I can duplicate this, move it below, and even rotate it on 180 degrees. We're are going to be 180 here, and then I move it over. We have our little quotation marks. Again, even though you have animation, you can go back in and change things and it will follow the animation. I'm going to just adjust those little more. We can also continue this animation on the camera and I want to easy ease this a little bit more. I'm going to set a key frame on position, and just move this just a little bit more. I'm going to go to this key frame and go to key frame interpolation, auto BCA. Now, I can effect this ending portion a little bit, so it's not totally staying still for the end. I can also set this to a roving key, so if you watch how these keys bunch up, each one of these little dots is a frame. If I double-click this twice, it's going to be a roving key, so now we'll just smoothly go through this key frame into this one. It just gives us a little more time on this animation cells, the 3D effect a little bit that we have like a little bit more camera move at the end. After finishing this lesson, I kept messing with the camera because this is the stuff I don't spend a tones of time on, and just have you sitting watching me work. Even though I know some students might like that, others might not. I just want to show you the key frames and I'll save this file out so you can open it up and see what it basically just offsetting some rotations on the camera at the end. I also want to add an adjustment layer. We haven't added one of these yet, but I want to add it to the top and this way we can add some effects to this. What we could do is we could do the post rise time, which we've done before. We could also do the wiggle effect on everything, we could do turbulent and displace, rough and the edges. I also want to add a little bit of noise. I'm going to go to add noise and I don't want color noise, I don't think. I'm just going to crank this up a little bit and just to give it a little bit of texture to it. I think that will help sell this handmade feel. Now if I play this back, it has a bit more of a handmade feel with all this noise and the staccato effect of the post rise time. If you feel like we're watching it on a TV or something now. Another thing we want to do is add up vignette. I'm going to add another adjustment layer and I'm going to call this one VG for vignette, and I'm going to add a color correction and curves, and just bring down the middle of this curve. Now I'm going to click and hold to pull up all the shapes. I'm going to choose the Ellipse tool and then double-click it, and then I'm going to set it to subtract and feather it out. Now we have a nice little vignette and that way, we don't have a solid color on this side, at least. I may just double-click this and bring this in a little bit and hold down control to bring in the edges a little bit and hit Enter. Now I'm going to just reduce the opacity a little bit, it's not so strong of an effect. Now we just have like a slight little adjustment there. Now we could also go through in rough and the edges on the text. I'm not going to go through that again because we've already been through it. But just be aware because some of this text has different thicknesses you may need to adjust for each one. The reason why we can't put it on the adjustment layer is because rough and the edges effect will just roughen edges of the composition. So we need to add it to each layer, copy-paste it after we set it up, and remember to animate the evolution if you want the little squiggle edges. Thanks for watching, and I will see you in the next lesson where we're going to take 3D animated text even further. Thanks for watching. 25. 3D Monogram Letters 1: Welcome to this class where we will start to combine some of the skills you already have in new ways. So let's get started and in this little project we're going to create a kind of monogram of our initials. I'm going to do just one letter, and then the assignment at the end of this lesson is to finish out the other two letters of your name or the other one letter. So let's get started with the new composition. I'm going to accept the default values here and hit OK. I'm going to create a new solid and hit OK. I'm going to use some of the colors I have in my library over here. I'm just going to hit Enter and rename that to be BG for background. Then I'm going to create a shape layer. I'm going to hit G on my keyboard with no layer selected, and I'm just going to start drawing a letter. If you need outlines to draw your letter, I'd recommend first creating a new text layer and typing out the one that you want and use that as a outline. But for me my first letter of my name is very simple as L, and it's a right angle. So I don't need help so I'm not going to use that as a guide. So I'm going to hit G on my keyboard, and I'm going to click once and then twice to finish out the letter. Now after the fact, I can adjust this. With this point selected, I can shift left arrow back to the left. I want to change the stroke color to something else. So I'm going to pick something over here and hit OK. Now that I have this letter, I can animate it. Up to this point we've only used shape layers to reveal the other write on effects. But you can actually use shape layers to draw your own letters and then animate those. So that's what we're going to do here. So let's tweak the stroke width a little bit, of a bit of a thicker letter. I want to go in and tweak the contents of the path. So I want to delete the fill because we are not going to need that and toggle down stroke. Then on the line join, we've only dealt with but caps so far. So those are just the end caps. I want those to be right angles. I want to see if this would look better with the rounded curve on that and just to make it look a little bit more interesting. You have that option, and of course you could always add a mask to this as well on top of this as we've done for the write on effect. So I think I'm going to use that for now. We can always go back and change it, but that's the plan. So the next step is to add trim paths. This is how the letter is going to be animated on. We can go to Add Trim Paths. We can animate this like we've done for the write on effect. We're going to eventually make this 3D. That's how we're going to combine some of the skills we've learned at this point. But for now we're just going to get started with this one. So we need to decide which direction it's going to be written on. I think I'm going to choose to go this way. So I'm going to time-reverse these, right-click Keyframe Assist Time Reverse. So now it'll animate on from here, just want to make sure that starts at 0 and 0. Now we have our animation. So I'm going to easy ease these. The shortcut for the keyframe velocity is Control+Shift K. So we're going to have to right-click every time to type in 66. Now we have our animation. I'm going to select the layer, hit U and then just compress this down a little bit. Now we can actually take the contents of this shape. You can see that the trim paths is living outside of this shape. We want it to live inside because we're going to duplicate this shape. So I'm going to drag and drop it in there. So now it's grouped within that shape. If we twirl this down, now we can see the trim paths. That way if I duplicate this shape, being Control V, now I can see that this has its own trim paths that I can adjust the keyframes of separate from the first one. The reason why I'm doing this is because let's say a want to duplicate this animation, and I want to add a different color. So let's toggle that down, drag this beneath it so it'll live underneath the brighter green. I'm just going to hit U on the keyboard to pull up the keyframes. I'm going to drag the top keyframes to be a bit later. That way we can see that we're getting this kind of more subtle write on effect. We can do that for as many colors as we want to have. So I'm going to cut all these back down, and I'm going to also change the stroke. Before we get too far, I'm not really dig in this bevel. So I'm going to change this back to around Join. Now I'm going to duplicate this again. I'm going to change this color as well. I'm going to hit U, and I'm going to delay this one not as much. So now we have three different colors animating on. Now we can always separate these if we wanted to do each one in a different layer and have this be three-dimensional. We could do that, we could duplicate this two more times. Then we can just go through and even just turn off the visibility of the ones that we don't want. But I do want to mimic the layer stack here. So if I'm going to turn the visibility off with the lowest one, it needs to be of the top two because we want to see the lower one. The same is true for the contents of this one. This should reveal the middle one, and this one should be the top one. So now if we turn these to be 3D by clicking and dragging here, now we can sort these in the Z space a little bit. So I'm going to pull that one back quite a bit. I'm going to split the difference on this middle one. So now I have this really cool effect, and they all live on their own three-dimensional plane. Now we don't really get this effect until we either rotate the text or we insert a new camera and adjust the view with the camera. I'm going to use a two-node camera, I'm going to hit OK, and I'm going to pull up the two-view horizontal. I want this side to not be top-down but from a left or right side. I'm going to pull up the position here of the camera, and I'm going to move it down. Now we can see some three-dimensionality to this letter. I want to go back to the one-view and hit Play. You might also notice that the quality here isn't that great. That's because I set it manually to third. I also have turned on drafts. So I can turn that off and see the final quality. I can see that there's some separation between these, and it looks much more three-dimensional. Now in the next lesson, we're going to take this a little bit further and learn about new ways that we can use these animatable attributes on shape layers. Thanks for watching. 26. 3D Monogram Letters 2: Welcome back. In this lesson, let's create two paths around the letter. I have discovered a way we can do this inside of After Effects with no other program needed. Now, normally you need Illustrator. For example, if you do have Illustrator and you want to use the Illustrator method, you can make your letters in here and then go to object, expand, and have it fill and stroke selected, and hit Okay, and that makes an outline around a stroke. So if you had a pin tool in here and you are making some letters and they had a stroke on it and not just to fill. You could make the stroke the fill and have an outline around that stroke. So just as a quick example from scratch is to go back to object, expand, and hit Okay. Now we have an outline that we can take into After Effects. But if we want to do it all in After Effects and not depend on any other program, we can do that. I'm going to turn off the visibility of the camera just so I get a nice clean view of this while we are still working. I'm going to take any one of these and I'm going to go to layer, auto trace. These should be the default values and I encourage you to play around with them so that you get the cleanest lines. Now you can also notice that there is a preview going on, so you can see where there might be rough edges. Let me zoom in a little bit and we can see that a bit better here. I'm going to seal this layer as well, so we do not see anything behind it and we can see the edges very clearly. So we go to auto trace, and now you can see there might be some rough edges around the corner, so I might bring up the roundness a little bit and see if that doesn't help. Now, I'm going to hit Okay, and what it does is create an auto trace layer here. Now we have basically a solid with a mask and we need to get this back onto a shape layer. So I'm going to go to the mask and it's created a key frame already on the mask path and I'm going to turn on the toggle option here so we can see the mask path itself and we can see that it is pretty close to the original. So there is very rough edges that we need to clean up, but you may need becoming here and adjust some of this. If you see that, I do not want this rounded edge here. So you could go to the pen tool, by hitting G on your keyboard, all the clicking and making right angles where there were rounded ones and clean up this path. You could do this after this step as well, but just to show you what kind of clean up you can do. Also go in here and delete these vertices to create straighter edges where they are needed and adjust as you need. So we can see there is a little bit of an issue down here, I struggled with figuring out this, anti-erase the edge. So when I hit G, holdout all the click, and then I'm just going to move this to the right. That is more in line with the vertex above. I'm going to click this one so it's a right angle and I'm going to back out, Shift Question mark. Now, I have this mass path, I'm going click Select that key frame, copy it. You can see it right here. I'm going to copy that and I'm going to toggle this down and I'm going to create a new shape layer and toggle it down and there is no contents right now, so we need to just click anywhere to create a new path. Let us go into the path, set a key frame, and now we can just select that key frame and Control V, paste, and now we have that path as animatable path shape and a new layer. I'm going to call this L outline. Now what we can do is change the stroke width to be something much smaller. We can actually see around the letter and we could even get rid of this mask solid here. So we just use that so that we could create the path around the outline. I do want to also, of course, change the color because you can't really see it that well. So I'm going to go in here and select something a little more differentiating. Once we do that, we can start to see if there's any other issues we need to be cleaned up along the path. That looks pretty good. I'm going to Shift Question mark that fit the window and I can add a trim path to this as well. Now we have a trim path. We are already familiar with trim path, so we could set this as an offset here. So there is a bit of a gap and then we can just animate only the offset. So we could have it cycle around the letter as it's getting built out. We could have something like that. We can also do the two paths. That's a bit of a more unique technique. To create that, all you do is go to add, offset paths, and we do need to adjust the stroke and bring the stroke width down. Now we can see that there's a gap occurring and it does matter that this order of the layers that the offset paths is happening after trim paths. Now we have a two path that is a different style of accent that we could animate and whichever way we see fit. What I'm going to do is wait until this starts animating on, and I'm going to animate both of these. I'm going to cascade this effect from the top down, following along. I'm just going to take the start and end points and I'm just going to create a little gap here. I'm going to rotate this offset to be towards the end of the letter. Because what I'm going to do is take both of these and go to 50 percent, and I'm going to set key frames and drag those away back toward the start and now all I need to do is animate to a 100 percent and 0 percent and they will connect to the bottom. We can also adjust the offset now that we have the 50 percent starting, we can see where we can get the starting point, maybe if we want it like right on the corner or something like that, we can just adjust the offset now. I'm going to easy ease these and then pull the key frames out so they have a little more time. Select both of them, Control Shift K and do something like 66 again. Now we have something a little bit smoother. Now, keep in mind there is an issue with using the offset here as it does create a little bit of an artifact. We could mask that out, once these become connected here. If we wanted to leave this on, we could create a little mask here that cut that out. I could go to the Mask button here and then just draw something around this, I that can pop on and we need to hide that and go to M on the keyboard, you subtract, and then we have cleaned up that little artifact. What's happening here is because we have that offset, is trying to figure out how to connect the two paths and the issue here is the fact that we have used the offset and notice what happens if we do not use any offset. I'm going to trim paths and go to zero. Now, you can see not only we do not have the artifact, we do not have the outline anymore of the tube shape, and that' because we are set at zero and 100 percent. So there is nothing to offset the paths from if they're connected like that. So just keep that in mind if you are having trouble, getting the tube shape, you can do that. Now, we could also, of course, just turn off offset paths and then just have this as an outline, and that could work as well. It's going to undo that, just a little bit to turn back on the offset paths and bring back that mask shape. Now, I'm going to make this a 3D layer, and I want to move this in Z space that makes sense for the camera position. I'm going to turn on the visibility of the camera and a move this possibly even back, because I think if I have it in front, it might be a little strong of an element that's blocking the letter a little too much. I would rather have this is like a strong base to work from, and we could even maybe start this before everything else. I'm going to select everything, hit U, and then I'm going to hit the Tilde key, so I can look at all of the key frames and drag them all down and then I'm going to take the outline animation and bring it forward. That is going to be one of the first things that happens now, hit the Tilde key, and now we can preview this, and see this as the base comes out, and then all of these. We are building up from the bottom. I like that effect. You will also notice that the mask isn't working since we turn this layer 3D, you want to make sure that you have the classic 3D render on if you're doing stuff like this and that will respect the masks. Lets play this back and see how we are doing, I think we just need to adjust the animation and bring the letter animation back a little bit. Now we have a really cool accent and we could also animate off now that we have that done, and I'm going to drag those, and then just animate this off. So instead of going to a 100 percent, I'm going to go to 50 and then go to 50 again. Now I want to add a few more things. Let's grab one of the Ls. I'm going to turn off the camera again to go back to a view that's a bit easier to see the letter and I'm going to duplicate this and call this, Online 1. Now I'm going to hit G on my keyboard and hit G again, because you hit G twice, you're going to pull the feather tool, we just want to pen tool. I'm going to toggle down to the path and we can just get rid of all these other shapes because I know we only need one shape and let's get the path and I'm going to delete that vertex and I'm just going to select this one and then shift drag this down. Now remember if I click this, it's going to close the loop of this. I'm going to hit V to get the selection tool and I didn't want to close the loop on that, I just want to extend this up. That's why you want to make sure that if you have the pen tool and you see the little circle, if you actually don't want to close the path you need to hit V on the keyboard to get the selection tool. That's because that's the first vertex, if you remember when we were doing the morphing letters, that signifies that is the first vertex in a chain in a path. I want to bring this to the front, so I'm going to hit P and I'm going to bring it up so we can see it a little bit better and I'm going to toggle down the contents to get to the stroke and make that much thinner. Now a line cap of a round cap and let's create this as a dash line to have a different visual elements. I'm going to hit plus on dashes, and I will hit plus one more time to get a gap so that way we have more elements than we can control. Now if you watch this, I'm going to just change the color real quick so we can see it a little bit better. I can just adjust these values to create the dash lines that I want to see. Whether or not they're very far apart, or very long dashes, or whatever it may be. We can just animate the offset with also trim paths on it as well. I'm going to set a keyframe on offset just because I know I'm going to want that. I'm going to select this again and hit U, and then I can adjust the trim paths that we already have on here. You can see that that is going to come down with this. I'm just going to turn off the mask and hit Control Shift H so we can actually see the design right now. That's already looking pretty cool. I want this to happen pretty soon so I might just have it start right at the beginning, and then I will animate the offset as well. The offset is at 111 right now. I'm just going to hit 0. I want that to be going the other direction so I'm going to Shift and click that, and right-click to go to time reverse keyframes. Now it's going down and it's just not going very fast, so I'm going to hit K to get to that keyframe. I need to actually go to the first keyframe and increase this by quite a lot. I'm just going to keep increasing that first keyframe until it has the speed that I like. I think it needs to go much quicker, so I'm going to say 4,000, hit space bar, way too fast. If I can even just drag this keyframe out now that it's a little bit easier than changing the value, because I know I'm going to trim pass this off. Now I can accordion this keyframe N to get the right rate of speed. I'm just going to extend this out a little bit. I'm just going to move the long line to the top as well. That way we can kind of keep things a little bit organized here. I'm going to hit U to pull the keyframes, and then just put the tilted key, and then delay all of these just to touch. Because I want these elements to have a chance first to animate on before these accents to. Now, I want to also make sure that I'm animating off the dashed line. I can just take the start keyframe and go to 100, and then I can just offset these two a little bit. It never gets to be the full length of it. If I wanted to get the full length, I needed to lay the start keyframes there. Even just bring this one down like N quicker than it started, adjusting the timing of this. This is a lot of animation is just playing. When I start a project like this, it's not like, I know I want this to be seven frames or N frames long between the keyframes. It just takes noodling stuff. I'm going to hit control click on that because I want to go off at a linear rate. I want it to ease out, I want it to go out with a bang. Now we've created two accents. I'm going to do a third here and just duplicate this one, and rotate it around, so the pivot we can see is not where we want it to be. I'm going to hit Control Shift H, so we can see where the pivot is. I'm going to hit Control Alt Home, center the pivot on it. I rotate it. It'll rotate around the center. I type in negative 90, and move this in line with the bottom one. I'm going to adjust the keyframes on this to happen after, and maybe even a little bit quicker because it should be covering a bit of a smaller distance. I'm just going to shift this over so it has a longer tail, hit P, and then just drag this over. Now if we turn the camera, we can expect to see this in three-dimensional space as well. If you need to adjust the layout of this based on a camera view, we can do that. I want to add a little overshoot to this on the green letters. To do that, I'm just going to get rid of the keyframes on each layer that we don't need, and because we've organized it in the correct order, I know I can just delete them in order. The top one will have only remaining the top keyframes and the middle will have the middle and the bottom will have the bottom. Now what I can do is go to each one. I'm going to go one, two, three, four frames forward, I'm going to set a keyframe here and then go to maybe 98. The same thing for these, so one, two, three, four and then 98, two, three, four and 98. We will have a little bit of an overshoot. It'll help just settle the animation so it doesn't feel so static at the end. In these lessons, we've learned how to use the shape tools in a new way. We've combined it with our knowledge of 3D now, and I encourage you to finish out doing your monogram. If you have a middle name and last name or if you just want to do your first name and your surname, I encourage you to create the other letter and use all of these different techniques and even try new ones. Use a normal and a tube outline. You could do all kinds of things, the possibilities are endless. I just wanted to show you enough tools so you can get started and then apply your own creativity to how to use them. I look forward to seeing your work and seeing your initials monogrammed in three-dimensional animation. Thanks for watching and I will see you in the next lesson. 27. Song Lyric - Extruded 3D Text: In this lesson, we're going to create a new style of 3D text, and it's going to be extruded and truly three-dimensional. Let's get started by creating a new composition and I'll just say okay on the default settings and I need a new texts layer. For this lesson, we're going to be using a song lyric. I'm using song lyric from the Pixies, the song, 'Where is my mind.' I'm just going to type that in. This is the first part of the lyric and we can do the second part later. I'm just going to select the text and choose a different color. I'm going to create a new background as well by right-clicking, making a new solid. I'm going to pick a different blue. I'll just drag that to the bottom. Hit Enter type in BG. Now we have our background. Next, I need to make this layer 3D. I'm going to go over to the 3D layer here, which you can get to by clicking this Toggle button if you don't see it, and we'll hit the little 3D Cube button. Now, if you take a look in the top right, whenever you turn something 3D for the first time, you can see you get the option for the renderer. You can also get to it from the composition settings which the hotkeys Control K. If you hop over to the 3D Renderer tab, this is the same thing as if you click over here. There's only two renderers to choose from and up to this point, we've been using the classic 3D renderer. It works with depth of field with the native camera and aftereffects. But with cinema 4D, we can actually extrude objects now, and that's a pretty cool thing to do. But there are some limitations. You can take note of all of these. You don't have blend modes, track mattes, layer styles, also motion blur, camera depth field. There are quite a few limitations, but it will also give our text a new style. With that turned on and the three layer enabled. Now when we toggle this down, we get some new options. Notice if I turn this back to classic 3D, these options get grayed out. You want Cinema 4D. We're going to jump into these options. There's only a few that we need to be concerned with right now. The main one is Extrusion Depth. If we crank this up, you can see that we start to add some depth to our text. Now it's difficult to see because it's all the same color. Let's make the face of the text a slightly different color of blue. I'm going to go to Animate, and now I can choose Front, and Color, RGB. Now we have our text as a different color just for the front. I'm going to choose something like this. Now we can see the difference between the extrusion and the front face of the text. There's a limitation to this in that the extrusion depth only goes backward. If we want, say, our texts to jump forward, we would have to counter animate the Z translate axis and translate the text forward as we extruded it. That's a little bit much to do. You're having to animate to different things. Instead of doing that, we can create a new equation. Just to demonstrate what I'm referring to, let me just separate these dimensions out so we can see translate Z by itself. Now we have Z position by itself. I'm going to set a key-frame on zero. I'm going to turn this down a little bit. I'm going to set a key-frame there, go forward, extrude this out by 50 more. That would be a 103. Let's make it something more 203. That's a 150 difference. I'm going to go to Z and type in 150. I want to make sure that's a negative 150. It will come forward. Now when I scrub between these two and you can see that it appears as though the text is coming forward. But really it's just a counter animation technique where you can see that we had to animate two attributes as opposed to one so that we can get the text coming forward. Now to me, it makes a little more sense that extrusion would come toward the camera and not away from it. But you can use this technique pretty effectively. You just have to make sure if you're going to move a key-frame, you have to move them both together because they depend on each other, because you're counter animating one against the other. Instead of doing that though for this, I want to introduce the concept of this expression where we could tie the extrusion depth to the position of the z-axis here. I'm going to go down to extrusion. I want to get it to some default here, let's say 150. I want this to be dependent on the z-axis. Let me just pull this up so we can see it all together. I'm going to pick whip the Z position and connect it to Extrusion Depth. Now when we do extrusion depth, you see that everything moves together. But it's going in the wrong direction because the text should be staying where it is and only the extrusion should be occurring. The reason why that is, is because this seems to be going in the other direction, so we just need to multiply it. That's multiply right there, the asterix negative one. If we click off of that and you can see that, now when we extrude that the back of the text is staying in the correct Z position. It's not going backward. Now we have that, but this constrains our motion that we can have on Z position. We can't key-frame it, it'll just pop back to whatever this value is. We just need to add value to the front of this and plus it to the rest of the equation. Now we have value plus this pick whip times negative one. It's pretty simple. Now what we can do is extrude forward as much as we want. We can still adjust the Z depth of the entire layer and it won't pop back to whatever the first value was. That is how you create some 3D extruded text. We're going to go much more in depth in the next few lessons, but that's a great start, and I'll see you in the next lesson. Thanks for watching. 28. Song Lyric - Animate Extruded Text 1: Let's begin creating the animation we're going to use in this project. I like to separate each of my little words out. Of course, you could always use this, make sure you enable per-character 3D. But I like to have finer control over the animation and see it in actual key frames as opposed to something procedural like animating an offset or something. So I'm going to separate these out so I need to duplicate this layer. Now, that we having the expression, if we duplicate it we won't have to repeat that operation again because it'll be in all the duplicated layers so I need one, two, three, four, five, six. I need six duplicates but the first thing I want to do is fix this, the lyric is actually with your feet on the air and the second half is and your head on the ground. Those are the two lyrics we're going to animate and hopefully are somewhat creative way so I'm going to duplicate this six times one, two, three, four, five, six. So I'm going to use this layer as a guide and I'm going to turn all of these off and one by one I'm going to change the text to just have one word on each layer. So I'm going to move this over, and I'm just using the guide that we have here of the existing text and of course you can always hold down "Control" to go slower or hold down "Shift" to speed up, and it doesn't have to be perfect. I'm going to speed up this next section because it's pretty straightforward and stuff we've done before, just separate each of the words out and then we can animate them individually. So now that we have each of the words separated out, I want to make sure that I'm going to be able to control them altogether still so I'm going to create a new null and I'm going to title that "Lyric01_NULL", and I'm also just going to recolor this just so I can keep track of where it is visually and I'm going to select all of these, and before I do I want to make this a 3D null, and I'm going to grab all these and parent them here and I'm going to turn off this reference 1, and just put it below my background. I'm also going to add a ramp to the background just to make it a little more interesting, it's going to go to generate gradient ramp and instead of using a linear ramp I want to use a radial ramp, and I'm going to turn it off just so I can pick with the color I had here and I'm going to select the white and pick up this color and then just make it a little bit darker. This is a way to make a vignette effect and I'm just going to increase the ramp scatter and maybe bring this color down a little bit more. Just we add a little bit of dimensionality to this. So the next thing I'm going to do is animate the extrusion depth so I'm going to select all of these and double hit you, and I'm hit the tilde key to pop this up so I can see all of these text layers. I'm going to twirl down the ones I don't need for now and we're just going to leave the geometry options the only one's open. I'm going to set a keyframe on extrusion depth for all of these and then I'm going to pull these keyframes out so they're out here. So maybe we'll start at one second and I will set another keyframe here which is going to pull these way back. I want them to have a little bit of depth to the middle, I don't want it to be at zero and then they'll pop up. So now in the last frame I just want to go pass that five frames one, two, thee, four, five, hold the "Control" and right arrow. I'm going to set another keyframe here and then jump back again. Now, this is going to be the overshoot frame because it needs to overshoot and then come back. So I'm going to extend these out past the end point then I'm going to jump to the end and do that again one, two, three, four, five, set a keyframe, hit j to jump back and then I'm going to come past the stopping point here a little bit. I'm going to easy ease all of these so I'm going to do a tilde key to maximize that window and now I can hit F9, and hit tilde again to minimize that and now we can watch the animation. Now will take a little more time to render the cinema 4D render is notoriously a lot slower, and I'm in after effects 2020, and sometimes I will get a bug where I can no longer wander preview and it even actually goes back one frame you can see. So if that happens to you just restart after effects and is what I'm going to do right now so I will see you in two seconds. I'm back. In addition to restarting, sometimes you may also need to purge all memory in disk cache, I'm going to hit "Okay. " The other thing we can do is just drop the quality so instead of full, we could do something like a third, then we could also drop final quality down to draft and it will really pixelate what you're seeing but it will speed up your render quite a bit. So just to see the motion of the animation, I would recommend setting those settings just so you can work a little quicker. I can see that that's very slow so I'm going to select all of these keyframes and I'm going to move them way back in time. I'm going to move them even further back in time, I want it to pop out and now what we'll have to do is offset each one of these so I'm going to take them one by one and offset them. So I'm going to minimize all of them and then hit "U" just so I can see only those keyframes and I might offset by maybe four frames. Now, I want to play it back, it will have a bit more of a dynamic feel as each of the words are animated on instead of them all animating together, they'll animate as you would read them. Now, the next thing I want to do is put these on the ground. Also, whenever you're taking a song lyric, if you're using this one or another one, try to think of creative ways to instill it with some other significance and for me it's going to be mimicking what the words are saying so "With your feet on the air" so that's what we're going to do with the scene is create a scene, and a little diorama that reflects that phrase. 29. Song Lyric - Animate Extruded Text 2: To get the words on the ground, we can rotate the null by 90 degrees. I'm going to pull up the rotation and rotate in the x axis, I rotate that down by 90 degrees. I need a camera as well. One node camera is going to work because I'm going to make my own secondary node. I'm going to create another New, Null. I want to make that 3D. I'm going to call this the camera pivot. I want to turn that green as well. Now, I want this to be the rotation of where the camera pivots around. We'll still be able to control the camera, but it'll be able to pivot around this point that we can also move. I'm just going to parent and pick whip this to that camera pivot. Now if we bring up the rotation of this, we can very easily rotate the camera into position. The next thing I want to do is create some ground. In After Effects, any shape that you draw out, you can actually extrude. I want to create a ground with the Rectangle tool. I'm just going to draw a rectangle out. Before I do, I need to deselect this layer so it doesn't think I'm trying to draw a mask on it. I'm just going to deselect it by hitting V to get to the Selection tool. Deselect anywhere off here with the left mouse, then select this. Now we get the shape properties that we can effect. I want to turn the stroke off because we don't need a stroke for this. Even though you can extrude a stroke as well. I'm going to just pick a ground color from my categories over here. I'm also just going to update the text a little bit. I'm going to grab maybe a lighter blue. Remember to again deselect before I use the Shape tool otherwise, it's going to start drawing a mask if I have any layers selected. But now that I don't, and I turn the 3D options on here. I can extrude this out under Geometry options just like the text. I'm going to pivot the camera so I can see what I'm making and how much it's extruding. It's a bit difficult to see again because it's all the same color. I want to create a side color adjustment. But I'm going to get an error here. Basically it means we need to have this selected before we do that, so it knows where to put it. I'm going to go to side color. Now that works under there. If you get that little warning, that just means you haven't selected the rectangle group. Now I can select a different color here, maybe something a little darker. I can rotate the camera back into the negative. I'm just rotating the camera back to where I can see something that resembles the view we're going to have. I just want to bring the y value down on the Shape Layer and bring that down and I want to rotate this as well. It also needs to be in line with the text. The text is going to be coming out of the ground. I need to rotate the ground down, negative 90 as well. I can just extend the bounds of this as much as I need and also move it back in place. The next thing I need to do is add some lights. I'm also going to back up this camera. I'm just going to hit C on the keyboard a couple times until I get the Zoom tool. I can still zoom out and even rotate around but I mainly just want the zoom and use the camera pivot as rotation control. If I also move the pivot of this camera pivot, it will change the camera position. I'm going to pull up two views and I can just hit V on the keyboard. I can move the null of the camera closer in line with the ground plane, which is this one right here. Now the other thing I could do is if I want the null to match where the ground plane, so that the camera pivot is centered on that or it's centered on the text, we can hold down shift and parent the null to whatever layer that we want to snap to. If you notice now it just snapped to the same size and orientation as the ground layer. Now I can just go to none and it's going to stay there. That gives me a point of reference that now I know I'm centered on the ground. From here I can back the camera up and I'm just going to bring this forward in time so we can see relative to the text where we are. But holding down Shift and then parenting is a really cool technique to have a little more control. Now we are pivoting from the center of the ground instead of the top of the text, which is what I want. Let's jump into lights. Let's create some new lights. There are a few different types of lights. I encourage you to experiment with all of them because they all do something a little different. Parallel is a directional light. It doesn't matter where you position it. All that matters is rotation and it has a point of interest that you can move around and that's going to rotate the direction of the light. Spotlight is also directional, but it's more focused on a spot. Point light has shadows, but it shoots in all directions. All the light shoots everywhere and ambient doesn't really have shadows, and it also shoots all around. What we can do is start with a point light and I'm going to take the default settings and you can see everything became much more black. We can drag the light around and see how it affects the scene. I can look through the left view here and position it relative to the text and come right over the text. If I hit T on the point light, I can increase the intensity. If we toggle down the other light options, I can increase the radius and the falloff. It makes a bit of a smoother transition. The fall of distance does, and then the radius is just how much of an area this effects. It's going to bring the intensity back down. None of the words have their materials set the way I want them to. I want them to have material options here with the cast shadows on. Now you can see that they're casting shadows. You can also set it to be only so you only see their shadows. That's not as useful to me, but that's an option. There's a lot of other settings here that we're going to play with. I also want to adjust the shadows of the light. If we troll down the light options, we can go down to the shadow darkness and just reduce that so it's not as dark and we fake this lighting effect a little bit. I'm just going to pull this slide up because it's really close to the front and that's going to affect the lights, the roof shadows rather as well. You can direct the shadows where you want them to based on the position of the light. Now, I'm also going to create two directional lights. I'm going to go to new light. And I call parallel directional lights because that's the 3-D term.And I'm going to hit P on the keyboard, and then just pull this up. As I pull this up, you can see it's aimed at this point of interest. I can also move this point of interest around and it will affect the light, and let me just twirl down the light options here and increase the intensity of this one as well. I want basically two directional lights that are going to be pointing in opposite directions. One pointing from right to left. It's a little too strong on the light intensity so I'm just going to bring that down a little bit. I'm going to toggle this on and off to see how it affects it. You can also use the snapshot feature where if you click a snapshot, you can toggle between what you just did and the snapshot you took. You can click and hold that toggle between the snapshot. I'm going to duplicate this parallel light, and then I'm going to move this to be pointing in the other direction. I might push the point light to cast shadows toward the camera instead of away. I'm also going to adjust the intensity of that so it's not as intense. Then I'm going to increase the intensity of the directional or the parallel lights. I want them to be doing a little more work than the point light. Now I can also increase the radius of these. We get rid of this little dark spot we have in the center there. If you saw that, you just increase the radius of influence of that light and get rid of any little dark areas that you might have. I'm also going to increase the falloff just so it's a little bit smoother over transition between them. I'm going to twirl those down and also rename the ground here. Ground. Now we have R, let's pull up the rotation. Now we have a bit of a cool little animation which has a ground plane. It has lights, it's casting shadows, and it's coming out of the ground. Now we just need to adjust the amount of the extrusion here so it works with the composition. I'm going to scrub to the end here so we can see it, and I want to grab the lyric null, hit P and then just bring that forward and Z just a little bit. I'm going to select all of the words here, and I'm going to hit U. I'm going to select all of these and go to the graph editor. Now what I can do is just select all of these and then globally move them down by holding down shift. They go down in a straight line. I'm going to use that as a way to globally shift this so it gets to the right height on all of these animations. Because I want to fit this in the composition. Something like this because I'm going to have a few things in the background here, that's why I'm adjusting that extrusion depth globally on my animation. Now, we have something like that. I'm also going to create a little cloud here. I'm going to grab the pen tool, I'm going to click and then shift click to create a flat bottom, and then I'm just going to click and drag. Click once, click and drag. Click once, click and drag, because I want those sharp points where they meet, and now I'm going to change the fill to something that's just a little off white. Almost all the way white. Hit Okay. Now I'm going to clean up these paths a little bit. I'm going to control click away from this, and then now the G-tool I can come in here and clean up these tangents a little bit. I want to make it feel like it has a bit of a direction here. I want to push everything to the right, like the wind is blowing it. Now I can go to this and rename it, hitting Enter. I'm going to turn this 3D. As we've done before, I'm going to go the geometry options and extrude this out. Now, I can also still come back to the shape and just resize this. I'm going to hold down shift so it resizes globally, and then I'm going to move this into place and rotate it. If you notice the pivot is way far away from where we are. What I can do is hit Control Alt and Home. It's going to center the pivot. Now, when we rotate it around the Y, it'll pivot around itself. I'm just going to shift that toward camera a little bit, so it's not just straight on. I'm going to go to the point light and instead of a point light, I think I've changed my mind. I'm going to use more of these parallel lights hitting T, pull up the intensity and I'm going to crank up the intensity on the parallels and see how far that gets me. Now, I'm going to twirl these down again and just increase the radius. Then I'm going to increase the falloff distance and then bring the intensity back down. You're playing a little bit of back and forth game with these. Also I want to go to this shadow darkness and go to 50, so that we don't have these super dark shadows on the ground. Now, I'm going to readjust I think the text a little bit to be just back in space, just a little bit more. In the next lesson, I'm basically going to show you how to cheat a 3D model of a foot sticking out of the ground. Thanks for watching. 30. Song Lyric - Shoe "3D Modeling": In this lesson, we're going to learn how to creatively use the tools that we have now, that we know about, to actually model a sneaker attached to a leg sticking out of this ground. The reason why I'm doing this is because it says with your feet on the air. The cloud indicates where the air is in this horizon line, and I want a leg sticking out of the ground and having it break the horizon line here and be in a little bit of three-quarter profile so we can see it's a sneaker. If you're interested in 3D, there are ways you can do this in Autodesk Maya. I teach 3D modeling, I teach 3D animation and Autodesk Maya, which is what I use professionally on films like Avengers, Infinity War, The Last Night, Ready Player One, Ad Astra, Predator, The Last of Us Part 2, and LEGO Star Wars. I've used it on all of those projects. If you are interested in 3D, let me just encourage you to go check out my other courses in Autodesk Maya, which is the main 3D software that the animation industry uses for a 3D. But because we're in After Effects, I want to use everything to our advantage and show you how you can do 3D modeling for the lack of better term in After Effects. What we're basically going to do is create several planes with shape layers, and then we're going to bevel some of them, and then we're going to build that up to create the sneaker. Let's get started with the pen tool. I just want to draw a rough outline of what the bottom part of a shoe would look like. This can be cartoony. At the top I'm drawing the toe box area, and then the bottom is going to be the heel. I just need to mirror this silhouette shape now on both sides and end that path. Now, that's pretty good. I think that will indicate what we want. Now, all we have to do is first, I want to change the fill to something red. Now we have that. I want to name this ShoeUpper because we're going to have several elements to the shoe, I don't want to get them confused. It's important to start naming all of your layers. I'm going to make that 3D. I'm going to just double-click this and shift-scale this down a little bit. I'm going to go to the geometry options and extrude this out. Then I'm going to use the bevel style, and I'm going to do something like convex. Actually, I get those two confused. I'm a bit dyslexic when it comes to that. I'm going to go to the two view, and then an easy way to figure this out is to jump in the side and increase the resolution here so we can see it, and then choose one and then crank up the bevel depth. Concave is not the one we want, we want convex. Concave is like taking a chunk out of it, convex will make it a bit rounded, and that's what I want. I'm going to crank this up. The bevel depth stops at 10, but you can type in a number here. I'm going to do something like, maybe 50, and then I'm going to select this and hit the "G key" here, double-click the outline, Shift and drag it down to make this much smaller. Then I'm going to rotate this. Before I do that, I want to go to Control-Alt-Home, because I want it to be rotating from the center, and I'm going to hit "R", and then rotate this down, negative 90. Now, I can adjust the extrusion depth so it's much less. Maybe in here, something that's shoe-like. Instead of looking at the heel, I'm going to be looking at the toe coming at us. I'm going to hit "W", grab the Z, and then just rotate that around. I want this pointing off to the side a little bit. Then what we can do is just duplicate this. I'm going to call this ShoeLower, and this is going to be like the sole. We can take the bevel way down, and we can even take it all the way off if we wanted, I'm just going to take the bevel way down, and I'm also going to change the fill to something that's slightly off white, maybe something that's slightly off white in the blue area. Hit "Okay", then I'm going to hit "P". Now, I want to bring this up, V on the keyboard to get the selection tool, and now I can drag this up. I want to hit "G". I'm going to zoom in here, hit "G", and then double-click on one of these points, and then just Shift Control, holding the Shift Control, click and drag this so it expands from the center and basically create the sole of the shoe. Don't space so I can pen over. Move down control so it will expand from the center on both sides, and then the same here. Just double-click that again and then scale this whole thing down holding Shift and Control. It's not an exact science, especially when you can't see everything. That's why it's good to have these multiple views here so you can see what each areas' doing and what you need to affect. Of course, we can always come in here with the pen tool. When I hit "Enter" to get off the free transform, have the G key, Control-click out, and then grab the single point, and then just pull it out a little bit. I'm looking at this area right here, and I just didn't want that to be intersecting. Now, we have the sole of the shoe and I think we can bring the extrusion depth down a little bit, something more sole-like. You can make this as complicated as you want by adding different layers onto this. I double-click this again and just bring this in by holding Control and Shift again, and just bringing that down just a little bit, and then maybe extending the back out again. It's looking pretty good. Now, this is just crazy to me that you can do this in After Effects. Now, I want to create the leg and the sock. I'm going to grab the ellipse tool, click and drag it. Holding down Shift will make it a perfect cylinder. I'm going to pick the skin color. I'm going to do maybe something like yellowish and hit "Okay", something Bart Simpsony. Now, we can make this 3D. Go to Geometry options, and we can do the extrusion depth up. I want to Control, Alt, and Home to center the pivot, and hit "R" to get rotation, and rotate this down negative 90 degrees. Then I'm just going to move this in line with the shoe. Now, I'm going to zoom back in. To get to the path of this, I'm going to toggle down the ellipse path and just adjust the size until it is going to fit in the ankle area here. I'm going to go down to a top-down view over here, and that'll make this much easier. Then we can go back to the side view, something like the left view, holding down the Space. Then I can see how far I need to extrude this thing to get it on the ground. I'm going go back to the Geometry Options here. Go to the Extrusion Depth, and just crank that up. I don't want it to go all the way through the ground, if you can see the thickness of the ground right here. I don't want to go past that. But I know I'm also going to probably bring this whole thing up a little bit because I want it to be sticking out of the ground a lot more so we can have more leg. I'm going to first do that. I'm going to grab all of the shoe and then drag it all up. Now I can determine how much of the leg I want to be seeing. The other thing I can do now instead of having to grab all of this stuff, just going to type in leg, is I can start parenting the shoe to the leg. Now that will follow. I could also hot shy these so that when I hit the Shy layer those will go away. I can now deal with one layer instead of multiple layers when I'm positioning this moving around. Especially the main one with rotation now it'll all rotate from that center point of the leg so I can position the foot where I want it. I think accidentally hit Space Bar that's why the words are starting to come up now. But I mean, it's a good point relative to the words. This needs to be back over here in the corner. I'm going to go to a top-down view, on the left side, shift the question mark to frame it up. Then I'm just going to drag this over where I want it. The main thing for me in this composition is I want the feet to be breaking the horizon line right here. I want to make sure that they're far enough back that we get a clean profile or a clean silhouette of the leg. Now that we've done that, I'm going to duplicate the leg. I'm going to call this Sock, and I'm going to zoom in here. I'm going to twirl this down, also just change the fill to something more white. Hit Okay, and on the contents, I want to increase the size of the ellipse path. Overtake the leg just a little bit. Then I can take the extrusion depth down to where, somewhere in here we can start to see the leg. Now under Material Options, we can start to mess with some of these. We can even turn off the lights so the lights don't affect it, if we wanted a flat color, which I like. We could keep the light on, but then turn down the specular intensity so it's not so bright right there. Or at least bring it down by half, maybe something like 20 percent. It started out at 50. We can take this specular sharpness. If we crank that up, it feels a little bit better and rounded. We could go through do the same thing for the attributes on the Sock. Remember we did a shy layer on this. If we wanted to mess with the shoe lower because it's so white, there's really no detail to it. We could turn specular intensity down on this one as well. Now we're getting some details back in these beveled areas and we could do the same thing on the sock. These are the tweaky things to do if you're not getting the look that you want. Is to go into the material options and start playing around. Now we have a bit more dimensionality to these pieces. I'm liking how that's looking. I think the shoe upper could be a slightly darker shade of red or let me just click this one. We'll take some of the saturation out. Hit Okay. Now we have a foot sticking out of the ground. What we can do, is simply duplicate this. Some I'm going to hit Control D after selecting all of them. Then select any one of these layers and click and drag them to the top and it'll bring all of them above that layer. Now everything's named too. I can also just give this a different color. I know that this is one shoe and that is the other. Let's do something like that. We can see that it's also respected the parents that we had done there. But keep in mind that we did not do that for the socks so just make sure the sock is also there. Maybe we shied the sock layer on both of them. Now that that's organized and we hide the shy layer, we just have our two legs and I can just move one out from the other and maybe offset it so the white part isn't bleeding onto each other here. I'm just going to crank this over. Now we have our two legs sticking out when I hit R is rotate these. Choose maybe the best angle. I'm looking at the white part of these souls and I don't really want them to be overlapping a ton. I might just move this shoe over just a little bit. I'm just having both selected. I tilt this shoe over just a little bit there and then maybe rotate them back. I don't want the white touching right there, is where I'm looking right here. Now we have faked modeling feet in there. Now when we look with these in context of this, it looks like we could probably bring both of these forward. I'm going to hit P and then just bring them forward and Z, and just see how far I can bring them forward and have this still read. I'm going to hit Control Shift H to get rid of everything so I can see the composition. I think that's probably a little too far forward. Whoops, wrong direction. See if we can bring these up and then we can always extrude the legs back down. Now we need to go into the extrusion of the leg. I'm just going to pop into view horizontal here and to make sure I'm not going through the ground because what we're going to do after this in the next lesson, you'll understand why. We're basically going to be rotating the the whole camera move upside down. We're going to look at the other side of the ground. It makes sense with the lyrics. Now I'm going to turn on shadows for both of those. I think that can help sell the effect a little more when you have shadows. Sometimes it can look wonky. I'm just going to do this only on the shoe upper as well. The shadows can sometimes get a little wonky. But for the most part that helps sell the fact that they're in the scene and makes it feel a part of the scene as well. In the next lesson, we're going to do a little camera rotation. We're going to finish this out and make the other side of this. I look forward to seeing you there. Thanks for watching. 31. Song Lyric - Finish: Now, lets finish out this animation. But before we get onto the underside of this, in the camera move, I want to animate the legs a little bit, so that there may be kicking a little bit. I'm going to create a null for the left leg, null. I'm going to duplicate that, and bring it up and call it the right leg. I'm going to leave the two on there, just so it makes sense. What I want to do, is the same thing I did before, where I hold down shift and then pick up this. It will snap to the leg. Do the same thing here. But the issue, first is I need to make these 3D. It will move in three-dimensions, and I want to hit control shift H because I can't see them right now. I had hidden everything before. Now, when I hit shift and pick up this to like two, it's going to snap over there. Then the same thing here. I'm going to shift and snap that. Then I'm going to click the drop-down menu and turn it to none, so that it maintains that position, but it's no longer parented. I want to move those down to a pivot point, where it would make sense for the legs to be kicking somewhere around where the ground meets the leg. Let's go to a side view here, and pull these down, until they meet basically with the ground or maybe just below it. Then I'm going to go to a top view. I just want to confirm that the pivots, the axes rather of this are going in the right way, because I want to rotate in the direction of the shoe, so they're not pointing in the way I want them to. Let's see if I rotate on Y, it's at a diagonal, it's not straight. I'm going to hit W, and then grab the Z, and then just pull this around so that the X axis, the red one is pointing inline with the shoes. Then when I rotate by Y, it'll kick the legs back and forth. Now I can parent the leg, to the null and this leg to this null. Then if I go back to the left view, and grab both of these R and I'm going to be rotating from the Y rotation. I should be able to now animate those feet kicking. What I'm going to do is, set a keyframe on how far back I want them to go. I don't want them to be moving a ton. Then go one second forward, and then maybe go negative eight. We're going to go the same distance, and the other way. Then just going to copy and paste these keyframes here. Then I'm going to select all of them, and then easy ease. Now that we've made these keyframes, I want to offset them. I want one to be kicking forward and one to be kicking back. I'm going to go into the Y rotation here. I'm just going to flip these around. I'm going to drag these down, holding down shift, and that be in line with that one. Then I'm going to bring this one way up. The other thing I'm going to do is instead of doing that, I can just say negative eight here. Then go forward positive eight. Then do that again here. I want these to be going in opposite directions. It makes it feel like it's kicking a little bit more. I'm just going to also control shift K and take these something like 66. I'm going to alt click the stopwatch. This is also a new thing. We've seen this kind of a button before when we add stuff to the shape layers. But here we're going to add an expression to loop out the animation. We're just going to select a loop out, and select anywhere else off of that area. Then do the same thing down here, "Alt" click, click the little arrow button, and then go to property, loop out, and then click anywhere to de-select that. That way, the legs will continue to kick back and forth no matter how far out we go in time. They will keep updating and animating and kicking, even though we've set only a few key frames. That's a very helpful expression and property, to add to animations you want to loop. Now, let's take the camera move and start to deal with that. Let's drop the resolution way down on this, and bring in the quality to draft. Now let's find our camera pivot which is here. I'll bring up R, and I'm going to set a keyframe here, just so we can remember this position, because I want to hang out here for a second. But I want to start a little higher up maybe somewhere in here. Then let's see this come down. I'm just watching the timing of all this. I want this to hang out here for a minute. I'm going to drift the camera. It's just chilling here for a minute. Then let's see, that's only one second. The animation hasn't even finished yet. I'm going to drag this out to at least maybe a second, after the animation on the text has finished animating up. You can read it. Maybe in here, and of course we can always come back and adjust these later. Then I'm just going to sweep the camera around. Maybe another two seconds, maybe even less, maybe a second, and keep going with it. Then we can look at the bottom. Now you may notice, this is all black, we can also add a new light. That is an ambient light. It'll just bring all of the lights up in the scene,and so we'll just brighten the entire scene up. We may need to come in here, and reduce the intensity on the parallel lights. I'm going to hit T and then just drag this down. It's back in line with what we wanted compensating for the new ambient light. When we come down here, it's not totally dark. We could add two more directional lights down here. But I'm going to leave this for now. What I want to focus on, is creating the other phrase. I'm going to copy and duplicate all of these. I'm going to bring them to the top. After duplicating, I haven't done anything so that they're all still selected. Then I'm going to change each one of these words. Width becomes and, and I want to select all these, so I can see I'm making the correct changes and your head. I want to rename the layer where we had in the sky. We've just swap these out with different words. Now we just need to adjust how these are arranged. If we wanted to make it perfect, we would of course type the whole phrase out first. But then we would have to reanimate all this by hand, set up the extrusion depth expression. Instead of that, we can just eyeball it and we're going to get pretty darn close, anyways. Now we can create a new null for this. I'm going to go "Right-click" New, Null Object. I'm going to "Shift click" this to the ground. I'm going to tilt the key so we can see everything. I'm going to rename this Lyric02_NULL. Notice how I'm trying to stay organized and consistent with how I'm naming things. All my Nulls are all capitals, so they stand out a little more, and they're all green. We see Lyric01, so then I'm going to name this Lyrical02, so it makes sense. I'm going to drag it to the top of the stack of everything. I know it's ordered in the way that the parent is going to be on top of everything. The first thing I want to do is turn this into a three layer so that when I "Shift click" the pick whip tool to the ground, it's going to match the ground. Then I can go to None and then go back to printing this to the new null. Now I can hit the "Tilde key" to come back and then unsolo those layers. Scrubbed when the camera is under the ground. Then select the new null, hit "R," and rotate this down something like 90 degrees. Now will it be twice that, so it'd be 180. Now I just need to drag it forward. I want to go into a two view so I can make sure that it's not going through the ground, on the top side of it. I need to just pull this down. If we wanted to be very specific, we can to make sure it's in line with the other one. I'm not as concerned with that as I am that I want this to work with the camera composition. We need to go back to the camera, and start to make this work a little bit better. I'm going to hit U, and then hit J to jump to that key frame, and then just rotate this around. That makes sense until you can see it better. Now I'm going to add, duplicate these parallel lights. I going to bring them up. Then what I can do is instead of being on the left, I'm going to go to the front. I want these to be pointing up. Now remember the position of these parallel lights don't matter. All that matters is the direction. Now if we bring these to be pointing up, they're going to point at what was the underground. We're going to hit the intensity on these, and just bring this down just a touch. The other thing we could do is we can maybe add grass in here. Sorry, head in the sky. That's head on the ground. I don't know why I didn't catch that. Head on the ground, that's what the Lyric is, sorry. That'll change our composition quite a bit. I'm going to hit "P" and just drag that over, head on the ground. We may need to adjust the scale of that null. I'm going to hit "S" and then just scale this down. Then we can pull this over, in this other view because we are still in the front view here. I'm going to hit "V" on the keyboard, and then we can get this centered on the camera view. We could always cheat this as well. If we didn't want to go 90 degrees, it's not the end of the world. If we cheated this a little bit and rotated it towards the camera, just going to hit "R" on the NULL. Then just rotate this, and maybe cheat it towards camera just a touch. Then I'm going to go into the left view, and then I'm going to probably bring this back up. Because the rotation is pivoting from, has brought it off the surface of the ground. Now I'll just need to bring it back up and compensate for that change. Then I can move it back and space. Then by a cheat in this a little bit, I can possibly not have to move the camera so far to get a good view at these words. Now maybe I can bring the camera back. I'm just going to rotate the camera back this way a little bit, and I'm going to easy ease the center ones, as well as this one, and we're just going to drift this camera moved just a touch, and easy ease these two as well. Now when I go into the graph editor here, I can adjust these by zooming in. Now I'm going to just point this tangent handle at this key frame. Just point them at each other, so that it's just drifting camera motion. I'm going to hold down "Alt," and then I'm going with the Pen tool selected, so I'm hitting "G," and then holding down "Alt." Then both tangent handles will move, and I'm going to do that for this one as well. Let me just turn the auto zoom on, and then turn it off. I'm holding down Control and I'm mouse wheeling in. That way I can get a better look at this transition area. Hold down "Alt" with the "Pin tool". Now since I've already held on "Alt" once, I don't need to do it again. I can just move both of the tangent handles with just selecting it. Now these are pointed at each other and this camera will drift in this camera move here. I just want to do that to the other one as well. I'm holding down control and mouse wheeling on this transition and just make sure that is a good transition as well. Now I've already touched these tangents with pen tool. We're going to move together and just make this transition be a little bit smoother here, up and to the next keyframe. Now to really get a sense for the camera move, I'm going to need to render preview this and keep tweaking and coming back to these. I'm not sure if these tangents are really going to work super well, but it'll give me a good start. Now that we have the camera move somewhat in the right spot. I can offset the animation of these words because you can see they're already existing. But if you remember, because we duplicated these, now we actually still have that animation which is going tell the key to get to them. I'm going to "Shift select" all of those second lines and hit "You". That way I can see where the key-frames are. I'm just going to drag the layers and just not even worry about dragging the keyframes themselves. Just a little bit easier. That way I can start to animate based on the position of the camera. Maybe, right in here I can start the animation. I'm just going to drag the first keyframe over there. The other thing to take into account is the fact that because we're cheating it, it looks like it's rotating out of the ground just a little bit. You can see in the left-hand view, we're just getting a little piece of the text probably. I just want to go to the null and just bring that back up. I'm going to go to the Y Position here in the center of the positions. That's X, Y, Z. Y straight up. I'm looking right here and I want to make sure all this red is above the ground plane, which is this purple. Now that it is,, when a middle mouse over here and then shift question mark. Now I know that this animation will pop out around the time the camera's moving there. That's for the most part, the whole effect. We could also take the cloud and duplicate it. We could rotate this upside down. I'm just going to zero all the rotations and I'm going to rotate this upside down via a 180. I'm going to hit "Shift P" to pull the position. I'm just going to move this down. I'm going to jump in time to wherever this camera is. I'm just going to move this cloud over and down until we see it's somewhere where I want it to be. To move it back and space a little bit, then maybe back up and then to the right. Okay. Now, the last piece of this puzzle for me is trying to figure out what's the equivalent of the feet we have, with your feet on the air. The feet are kicking in the air here and then end your head in the ground. What we could do quickly, is create a 2D head. Because we can't create spheres per say. That'll be a much harder thing to try to model. You could, if you have the time to try to do the same thing that we did with the shoe. Instead of doing, like this is a leg, that could be a nose and just use the same techniques we've used to create shoes and create kind of a three-dimensional face. Crank up the bevel on the circle of the face. Then you have a rounded effect and then pin the tail on the donkey, if you will, of eyes and a nose and a mouth and extrude those shapes out. I'm going to leave that for you to do. Because you have all the tools to do it now, hope you can resolve it. The other thing you could do is just use simple shape. You don't have to extrude it. For example, just to kick you off real quick, on the rest of this, just start making and drawing a path here. Let me unselect everything so that it's not trying to draw a mask on any other layer. That when I start drawing, it's going to be a 2D shape layer. What we could do is simply just take ahead and then start drawing all on this one shape layer. You can see these ellipses are starting to pop up. I'm just drawing eyes, and then a nose, and then we can draw a mouth, and then hair. Then we could make other hair to help with the sideburns. Now you have a face. All you have to do is just change the color of each one of these ellipses by toggling down and "Affecting the fill" and make your own face. Then you could turn this layer 3D, put it where you want to so that the head is on the ground. There you go. But that is your assignment. You can take this project file and just finish this out. I encourage you to push yourself to try something new and maybe even fail a little bit so you learn even more. That's the best way to learn is to make mistakes and get an idea and see if you can implement it. When I started this class, I had no idea I was going to make shoes out of 3D shapes. But once you start working in it, more ideas will come. Just start working and playing around and you'll get even more ideas. That's the assignment for these lessons. Thanks for watching and we're going to start to wrap up the typography section of this course series. We're going to jump into Cinema 4D light in the next few lessons to take it to an another advanced level and to cap out your experience because you might have started this course as a beginner, but if you've made it this far, you are no longer a beginner. Congratulations on that and I hope to see you in the next lesson where we will continue our journey. Thanks for watching. Bye. 32. Song Lyric Extra - Smooth Camera Animation: Before we move on, I want to cover how to animate the camera to make it a little bit more smooth. I want to make sure that I'm on quarter resolution and I have the draft mode on so that we can preview this a lot quicker. I'm going to hit Control-Shift-H to hide everything just so we can see only what's going to be rendered and when I play back, we can see that the camera stops a little bit abruptly and then begins even more abruptly and as well when it ends. Everything's a little too sharp and sudden like it's hitting a wall. I want to be able to smooth that out and I'll walk you through the process of how I'm going to do that. I'm going to click on the rotation that's controlling the camera animation. I want to first ease and drift the camera so it's still moving more through this area where people are reading. I may also speed this up because it's happening a little bit slow. I'm going to go into the graph editor here by clicking the graph editor button and I'm going to turn off the auto zoom height and using control and mouse wheel and holding down my space bar, I'm going to navigate to the curve that affects this area right here. Let's address this first. So this shows time on the x-axis down here and the vertical axis is the y-axis, of the value change. We can see that there's a bit of an odd dip here and we can just smooth that out by moving the tangent handles and dragging them. I don't want this to completely stop here, so I'm going to not hold down shift would be making it totally flat. Going to just go just off of it being flat and help round this curve out so that it's easing into this drift a little bit more. If I want it to drift, I can just click the vertex of this curve and then hold down shift and drag it up to increase the value so it'll be moving more and then just readjust the curve so that it is still rounded so that the speed change is a nice transition as opposed to being like a 90 degree angle right here. Let's just preview that very quickly. Now we can see there's a much smoother transition, but there's not as much of a contrast between the motion and the drift. Let's speed up the beginning, I'm going to hold down the space bar so I can drag down, hold control and mouse wheel to adjust the view here and we can see that I want to create a greater difference between this rate right here, the slope of the curve and this one. Let's speed this up by affecting this either start position or how it's easing. I'm going to create an easy ease by clicking the easy ease button over here and then I can just drag this and as I drag it to the right, you can see this curve is going to increase its slope. For example, if I go very extreme, it's going to start very slow and then speed up really fast at the end. We don't want that, but that's the example of flattening the bottom to increase this rate. The other option here, of course, is to reduce the amount of time. I can always just drag this over and then when I'm rendering, instead of having to move everything back to frame zero, I could just start my render from this frame so it's more convenient and instead of having to deal with all the keyframes that I've made up to this point, I could just make the beginning of my composition start here either by hitting B and then going to right-click trim calm to work area or just deal with that and the render queue settings and setting the frame range of the render. I've dragged this end to increase the slope, I'm going to maybe bring this ease out in a little bit more and I'm going to keep dragging this to the right until we have something that is going to be fairly quick. Now, because we've dragged this further to the right, I think we can also increase the distance, so that's the other option here. Now, for example, if we go way down here, this is a much steeper inclined, meaning it's going to move faster. We can just split the difference between that. The only thing we have to consider now is the fact that because we've moved this key frame back, that it's about to where the text animation is starting. What we can do is just like both of these and then drag them back in time. If we want to be closer to the end position by the time the text begins animating. Now, because we affected this key frame, we need to go back to this one and then make this slope a bit more of a transition because this tangent handle is so short, that's why it was such a harsh transition. I can also use this to zoom in if I want to lengthen this out and I can drag this up to get a little more real estate space and just keep dragging this to make this transition nice and smooth, because before I was back here and it's a pretty hard 90 degree turn for a rotation value. That's a fairly extreme curve, but let's see if it works by render previewing. I think that's work pretty well and I think we could even start this further this way because we're going to spend such little time there, I think we can get away with it. That looks pretty good and now I'm just going to delay this a little bit more. The timing works again with, I want the text to begin animating around in the middle of this camera move, so I just need to move the middle of this curve to this first word when this first word pops on. I'm going to try to maintain, when I'm making all these adjustments to the tangent handles that the middle of the curve is around in there so that we have something new to look at while we're finishing this move. Now I think that's looking pretty good. Let's jump to this area where we're getting out of the drift and it just starts from its very linear move and you can see that reflected in this curve, it just goes straight up, there's no gradual slope into that transition. What we could do as well as create a little anticipation in the camera move, meaning we could reverse the motion so we could go in the opposite direction for a few frames. I'm going to take the rotate x and just hold down Control. I have a very slight adjustment to the value and my easy ease this to flatten the curve, and I'm going to control mouse will end and then hold down space bar to get to this tangent handle, which is almost non-existent here. I'm going to zoom in a little bit to spread this out and position it, so I have the best view on a hold and just so I don't affect the other tangent handled that I like right now, I'm going to go to G and then hold down Alt. Now I can independently move this tangent handle around and not affect the one on the left side. That is a bit sensitive because it's such a long tangent handle. I'm going to just ease that into this, and then I'm going to do the same thing over here and I am going to hold shift because I do want this to be totally flat because it's a point of changing direction from going one direction to another. It is going to be flat at some point, I'm going to hold down control and mouse wheel to zoom out a little bit and I'm going to render preview that anticipation and that's looking pretty good. Just gives us a little bit of motion to anticipate the fact that the camera's going to make a bigger move. So I'm going to drag this over, just give it an extra two key frames, because that curve, the slope of this curve was so steep. I didn't want it to be that sharp, so now we have a slight little in this patient before this camera move and then now all we have to do is just ease in this next one. I'm going to control mouse, wheel zoom out and then I'm going to compress this view, and then when a mouse wheel back in space bar, it takes a little getting used to navigating around the graph editor with these different keyboard shortcuts. Now the goal here, again is to make this less of a 90 degree angle. It's almost a 90 degree angle here, so I want to round this out and I'm going to take the curve, the shorter tangent handle and move that first. Let's click and drag this and just pull it out to help soften that edge and then the mouse swill down just to make sure I'm not doing anything too extreme relative to the other curve. I think that that's actually looking pretty good, even just that first little adjustments that we've made. I'm just going to reinspect the change here between these two key frames, so control mouse wheel, which will make sure that looks the way I want it to. It looks pretty smooth and it's being reflected in the in the comp window, what we're watching the preview. The only thing I want to do now is to have the text pop on a little earlier, so I'm going to come out of here and then I'll scroll up to the, now I'm just going to select all the text in this next one. I'm going to get out of the graph editor and I'm just going to drag these layers forward in time until I see the text pop on. Someone maybe start here and then I'll render preview this just to make sure the timing of when the text animating on is happening when I wanted to relative to the camera motion so that we're not looking at just a blank ground for very long. That is how you smooth out camera motion. 33. Cinema 4D Lite - Create Text: Welcome to the last section of this course where this project we're going to create some more 3D text animation, but this time we're going to be using Cinema 4D Lite and that comes free with After Effects. If you have After Effects, you also have this program. To use it, you need to right-click here and go to new Maxon Cinema 4D file. Now, when we open this, we need to save it somewhere. I'm going to save this as adventure and hit "Okay". Now, you'll either get this preference that's trying to ask you to open up the full version of Cinema 4D or you might get a prompt to login, something like this, and you need to do that so you can access the license to use this free software. Just connects with, I think your Adobe account and that way you can open Cinema 4D Lite. Now, we have our little splash window. There's some interesting material that's always popping up here that I recommend taking a look, but it's not always geared towards Cinema 4D Lite. This is a much more trimmed down version of Cinema 4D, but it still can do a lot of amazing things. Let's just take a second to get familiar with it. Hold down Alt and left-click to tumble around, and then middle mouse-click to pan, and then right-click to zoom in and out. Those are the ways to navigate, holding down Alt. The other ways are these little buttons up here. You can click and drag them to do all of those same functions, and you can click this top right one to get a four up view and you can always change this view by going to cameras, and then choose a different camera. The one highlighted is the one with the little blue square, and it's also in the name up here. We can also middle-click to select or deselect a window, and that's an easy way to get in and out of different views. Down here is for later when we're going to be creating materials and this is the timeline. This little blue dot is where we're going to scrub to play the animation. If we hit Spacebar, we're going to play it. This little bottom right area has all the contextual information and attributes that we can adjust. Depending on whatever we have selected, this area down here will change to reflect the values and the attributes of whatever we have selected. Up here is where it's going to be organized basically like the layers or every asset that we have in the scene, is going to be displayed up here so we can select them from up here, and then this will change and reflect what we have selected and all the attributes that we can access for that asset. Let's start creating our text. We can get to it by this little menu. If we click and hold this down, we could either do a spline pin, which is very similar to the Coca-Cola word that we did. The easiest way to do that would be to go to the front view. This way we could actually just write a word on, and then we're just going to do one letter, and then hit Escape to confirm that. Then you can see we have a spline up here. If we dropped down a sweep generator and just click and drag this underneath that, we can begin to create a sweep of this, but we need the silhouette of what the sweep is going to be so we need to take another, either a circle or rectangle. I'm going to take a circle, and then just drag this underneath as well. Now, I'm going to middle mouse-click, and then middle mouse-click back on the perspective, and then zoom out. It's a big mess right now, but what we can do is take the circle, and now that we have the circle selected, we can access the radius. We can just bring down the radius by clicking and dragging on the two arrows over here until we get the size that we want. Now, the other thing we can do in the sweep area is to go to the details, and we can affect the scale of this. You can see that if we wanted the ends of this to have a point, we could just drag this scaled down and adjust this tangent handle so it could do something like that. We can control click and add more points and basically draw our text and then we can just animate this by clicking a little button, and we can move the keyframe, which is this little guy here out to be the end point. Then by clicking the sweep again, we get access to this again, and then we can just bring this down to zero, and then hit Spacebar, and we have an animated letter and write on effect. That's how you could do a sweep of letters and do some handwriting free form on your own. But what we're going to do is use the text feature of Cinema 4D Lite, and it's right here under Text. When we do that, it's going to have a little default text here, just as placeholder, and we can click down here and type in whatever we want. I'm going to type in adventure, and then very familiar different types of font and other controls for the characters, and I need to choose. I had this new font. This should also be in the project files so you can install this font yourself. Now, I want to eventually have the camera be down the middle axis. I want to center this text as well so I'm going to align it to the middle. The next thing I'm going to do is add a extrude generator by clicking that, and then similar to before, we're just going to drop this underneath extrude generator, and now we have some extruded texts. Now, to get a better view of what's going on with the mesh because it's a little gray shaded right now, it's a little hard to see. We could turn on the display and the shading lines one right here, the second one and this menu. We turn that on an we can see how much resolution we're having an each of these letters and some of it's very faceted. What we can do is just go to the angle down here with the text selected, we can go down to the angle, and just click and drag this down and increase that. Now, some of this is going to be limited by the font itself. You might not get more resolution in an area like this corner, isn't adding more resolution by reducing the angle. But if something like the D here was two faceted, you can just drag this down until it's smoother to your liking. You don't want to go overboard with it because the more geometry you add, the more render and intensive it's going to be. Now, one of the biggest features of this compared to just doing 3D text and only an After Effects is the access that you have to all of the extrude bevels and caps. If we select caps here, basically there's a little menu hidden here and each one of these is a part of that menu. You're mainly going to be in these three tabs. To go to the caps, that's basically saying what the bevels are going to be doing. You could turn these off so then it's just hollow piece, but I want to show you some of the presets that come that you can download and it will look like this. If you haven't seen this window yet and been asked to install or download these presets, make sure that your go to help and check for updates and make sure you're using the latest update and that might prompt you to download those presets as well. Back down here with the extrude selected and the caps menu here selected, we can change the bevel shape. I'm going to first increase the size so we can see something happening here and the bevel. Then I need to increase the segments because I want to have a little more resolution here. Right now we only have three segments. As I increase the segments, you can see the wireframe here adding more geometry and that's just going to help support whatever shape that we create and give it a little more resolution. Now, the bevel shape has a couple of presets here. The one if you want to draw your own custom one out is the curve option. Now when we click that, we get another little graph like this, and you can actually hold down Alt and right-mouse click to zoom in and out of it, and then middle-mouse drag to pan around it. We can also Control left-click on the curve to add more curves just as before, and we can adjust the bevel to however we want. Now, if you're having a little difficulty panning around, don't be concerned because it just takes a little bit of practice. It's basically a combination of doing all three of those motions of tumble, pan, and zoom to get where you want to be. Now if we get in a profile view, we can see what the bevel is going to be doing a little better and we could start to draw our own one in here. This is a big difference, with After Effects, you just can't do this. If you want a little more fine control over something like a bevel, then this is going to be the way to go to create your own 3D text. Now, I'm just going to drag this out so that it is a little flat up here, so it will round off when we meet the phase here. Basically we're drawing this profile from this point is down here and this point is the face. We're drawing this kind of a profile and if we need more segments, we can just increase that so there's more resolution to describe whatever crazy shape that we're drawing. If we click "Load Presets", what I was referring to earlier are all of these nice presets where we can just click once and be done with it. I'm just going to do that for now. The other thing that we can do is also increase the face segmentation and the geometry around the faces. If we go down to cap type, we could change this to something like regular grid, and then that will add geometry on the faces. This'll be important if we want to add something like a bend to former. We need more geometry so that it can deform otherwise, things will start intersecting in odd ways and we don't want that. We can also adjust the points here for this and do something uniform. That will also help us deal with issues like this area up here that I referred to earlier where we couldn't add more resolution, and we can just do that right here by increasing the number of the uniform. Again, the more you increase this, the probably slower the render times are going to be, but it might be worth it in case you do have a font like this one that didn't give a good description here on that area. Now, we can add a little more geometry and hopefully smooth that out. It also helps if we're going to do some deformers later to adjust that text. One disadvantage of this is going to be at my remodel areas that you don't want. If you take a look here and we go back to adaptive, you can see this is a nice sharp point here, but if we do uniform, it's going to round that out. Just be aware of those differences depending on what you want and the trade-offs that you might find between those two. In this lesson, we learned how to create text in Cinema 4D Lite in two different ways. In the next lesson, we're going to start to prepare the scene to be animated and learn a few more things that we can do in Cinema 4D Lite. Thanks for watching. I'll see you in the next lesson. 34. Cinema 4D Lite - Animate Text 1: In this lesson, we're going to prepare the texts for animation and I also wanted to just show you how to extend the extrusion here by changing the movement property on the z-value here. I just try to show that last time and that's under the extrude. You need extrude selected to access this on the object part of this menu. There's two different ways to animate in cinema 4D light for texts like this, and to get to the point to do either of those things, we need to add a fracture. Let's click up here, go to fracture, and then we need to click and drag extrude underneath fracture and let go. Now we need to go to fracture and go to the object path and choose mode set a straight. We want to explode segments and connect. You have to click this or nothing else will work from here on out. This is going to be what separates each one of the letters out so we can animate them individually. Let's start with the more procedural way of animation, and I'm going to add a little plain effector here. I'm going to click that, and now because we have fracture selected, it applied it to that fracture, and if nothing happened for you, you can see this jumped up a 100 centimeters or whatever the values are. If your text did not jump up, that means the plain did not apply to that fracture. To double-check that click fracture, go to effectors and you should be able to see that effector are right here with a checkbox. If you don't see that, you can just click and drag it into this window and let go. Let's click on the plain effector and then we can see where it had moved our text up 100 centimeters here, this is the y-value. You can see that's the y-value going up because we also have a little point of reference over here showing y is going up. We can select this and go to zero, and we can do something maybe more interesting and turn rotation, and then we can rotate maybe all the way around. Let's do like negative 180, and so our texts will be, let's go negative 270, our texts will be all the way around and we can rotate them all on. Of course, we could do something as simple as turn the strength down of this and just animate the strength. But that doesn't really take advantage of this tool and this setup. Let's actually add some fall off. We can add a linear field just by clicking that button, and we can increase the length of the field so it has a longer transitionary. You can see as we increase the field, it's creating this more of a gradual fall off, and what we can do to move this is hit E on the keyboard, the oppose the move manipulator, and then click the little red x-axis here, and then as we go through, it will keep the text and wipe it on basically based on whatever attribute that we had changed in the parameters. We can do multiple ones of these. We can add some translation as well, and then when we take the linear field and then move it, it's going to affect all of these. We're going to have a combination of things occur. That's pretty cool, and what we can do to animate this is just take this outside of this area and then scrub to where we want it to begin, then we can go over to the coordinate tab here and then just hit the key frame here on the, and then we can scrub forward maybe 45 frames and then finish this out on the other side, and because we don't have auto key on, we need to go over here and click this button again, and now you can see the path of motion it takes, and by default, it's going to be easy East, where in after effects everything is linear and you have to easy East it. But in cinema 4D, the default is to be easy East. Then I can hit Play and watch the animation occur, and now we have our first animation inside of cinema 4D with text. Now, let me show you the other way that we can do this and the way that I'm going to prefer to do it, and just because I get a little more control over it, and we can get into the graph editor in cinema 4D and really take control of this. I'm going to delete the plane when there, and now we're just left with a fracture. Before I move on, I'm going to control click the extrude and just drag it out here and let go. This is going to be a copy of everything that we have and I'm just going to turn the checkboxes off so we won't be able to see it. The reason why I did that is because from this point forward, I'm not going to able to make any more changes to the bevel because or really any of the letters in a procedural way that we could from this effector. This attribute here, from the text attribute there, we won't be able to change these anymore once we split up each of the letters. With fracture selected to split up all the letters for good. But of course we have little safety copy over here if we need to redo it is, click this little button in the top left that says Make editable. Now you can see that we have a new icon next to fracture. If we toggle this down, we have each polygon, each letter has its own polygon. Now all these triangles are different selection sets that we're going to use later for rendering, and so we can just ignore all that for now. What we also want to do is make sure we go back into model mode, right now we are in polygon mode. If we try to select something, we're going to select the faces. If you're having trouble selecting and moving something, you want to make sure that you're in model mode, which is this button right here. Now that we're in model mode, if we select something, we're going to move the whole object. By hitting E on the keyboard, I can now move this around. Now I want to show you how to move the pivot of something. If we want to rotate this from closer to where the ground plane is, we have a hard time because the pivot is up here. If I hit R on the keyboard upward rotation and it's going to rotate from the center. Let me show you where to change the pivot. It's this little button over here on the left. If I enable axis and I hit E on the keyboard and I move translation, it's not going to move the letter, it's only moving the pivot. If I click on the polygon itself, I can see what the y-value is. That's around eight. I know if I'm going to do this for the other ones, I can select the next polygon, and with this still enabled, I can drag the pivot down and I'm watching over here for this to go to around it. Then all of these letters can have a similar pivot closer to the ground because part of the animation we're going to have is that these are going to rotate as part of their settle. They're going to rotate back and forth like they're pivoting on the ground. I'm just going to get all of these to eight and I'm going to speed this up and see you in a second. Now that I have all the pivots moved, I can click the pivot off. Now with the E, Move Tool selected, now I can actually move from there, and more importantly, what I was referencing is if I hit R, now I'm going to rotate from close to the ground so that they can rotate along their base. Now the other thing to consider when you're changing axis is freezing transformations. If I look at any one of these, I can see there are transforms on here. If I try to zero these out, they're going to move to the zero of the world and I want this pose and position they're in to be zero for them. To be able to do that into toggle down freeze transformation and just click Freeze all. Now it puts all that transform data in a place to just hold it so that what we deal with an animate is going to be zeroed out. I'm going to select all the polygons here and go to Freeze all. Now if I select on any of these, I can see that their transforms are zeroed out. It's going to be a lot easier to animate knowing that their zero position is where they are now. In the next lesson, we're going to start animating these and bringing in a camera, and I will see you there. Thanks for watching. Bye. 35. Cinema 4D Lite - Animate Text 2: Welcome back and let's begin animating this text. My idea is that I'm going to have the letters rotate past the camera, and they're going to settle and the position they're in now. Let's bring in a new camera. I'm going to click up here, hold and choose camera. I'm going to rename this to be render cam so we can easily identify it, and hit "Enter". Now when I move the camera view I'm in, you can see it made the new camera wherever my view was. With that selected, I'm just going to zero everything out, over here. I'm going to middle click to bring up the four pane view. I'm going to just snag the camera and pull it back, and I'm going to switch this camera view, on the top left to the render cam so we can see what we're looking through and make sure that we are going to be centered up on that. I'm just going to pull the camera up in this view just to try to center it straight on the word. I think that's pretty good. I'm going to move this camera back over here to the default camera, I like it out. I think I'm going to use this one on the right as the render cam view. I'm going to drag this down so we can look at these two views together. Now I want to animate adventure flying past camera. To do that, I need to set a key on the home position. Before I set any key frames my project settings need to be in the correct frames per second. Now I've already done this, but I just want to show you where it is. If you go to edit, project settings, you want to make sure that your frames per second are 24, or that there's something that's matching and after effects. If you have 30 and after effects make sure this is 30. This is probably 30 by default for you, so you will need to change this to 24 if you're animating at 24 frames per second in after effects. All right, so now that we have all the polygon selected, let's set a key frame. Let's say on frame 220, on all of these, just clicking and dragging. Now let's go back in time and to frame zero. With E select on the keyboard, I can move all of these back past the camera. Now that we've pulled them back, we still need to set a key frame because auto key is not on, and Cinema 4D. So we need to select all of the polygons again and then click and drag these, and click and drag, while we haven't animated the rotation yet. Let's rotate this by hitting R. Let's see, we're going to constrain in the red axis direction here. I'm trying to think of which direction I want them to spin in from. I think they're going to spin from this way, so we needed to go this way. I'm just going to click all of these again so that I can see, yeah, this one so hit "Enter" and then just make sure all this key framed. Now this should rotate in, and settle there. All right, now the one struggle with this is because we set the pivot at the bottom, is now it's not rotating, so everything goes off the screen here. We probably need to lift up the Y translate and when it's rotated down, so to compensate for that pivot. The pivot will come in handy when we're doing the overshoots and settles. Right now we need to compensate force, when I hit E on the keyboard, I'm going to pull up and try to keep this centered and framed right here, and then I can set a key. I'm going to click all the polygons and set a key here. Now we can see if those are indeed staying where they should be. Yeah, that looks pretty good. I think I just need to maybe start the N a little higher, so I'm going to go to the graph editor in cinema 40 for the first time. It's under window. They call the graph editor in cinema 40, timeline f-curve, so if I open that and I select this letter, I can rename this to be N, and it's going to reflect it here. I know with that selected, I can toggle down and extend this out so I can see which one is which, so I want position Y to isolate that. Now with this view up, I can scrub the timeline and see where that letter is going through the frame. I can simply just click and drag this key frame up and hold down shift, and I want it to go right pass the camera, so I don't want it to go too far above. I can also describe this tangent handle there's a finer tune way to control that. Let's scrub and see if it's still coming past camera pretty good. It is. And I think it could come down sooner, so it's in the middle of the frame. I'm going to just drag this, on a set of key frame I think here. I like this framing, so all I need to do is control left-click, and that will set a key frame, so it will lock that position. Then I can scrub forward, so that has locked that position I like that position. It's mainly just right here. I want to control left-click. Then I can drag this key frame down holding Shift. Then I'm just going to flatten this tangent handle a little bit, and then see how that plays. It drops down a little bit. Am going raise it back up, it's a pretty noticeable drop. But I think that's working pretty good. I wonder if I can't get away with this being just a little bit lower. It does look like it's intersecting there, so I don't think I can, maybe I can just lift that up just a touch, with a tangent. Now that looks like that works pretty good. I'm just going to adjust these as I'm working to see if I can keep that end centered a little bit longer, as it's going right past camera. Now we can work on the settles, so I'm going to go to the end here and I'm first going to deal with the down. I'm going to select all of these polygons, and I'm going to scrub for little bit one, two, three, let's say, something like that. I'm going to set a key frame here, I must scrub back, and then I'm just going to bring this down just a touch. Then I'll set a key frame again. If we play this back, everything's a little bit slow. Let's play this in real time so we can see what's going on. That looks okay. Then everything's pretty slow here. But I think once we offset, so what we're going to do is offset from the center, so the N is going to come in first and then the E, N, T, and then the V, N, U, and then the D and R and A and E are going to be the last letters to come in. I think with those offset, this timing might work. We can always adjust it a little bit later, by scaling the keys down. But for right now I think I'm going to leave this and of course we could always time remap it and after effects as well. Because all this is eventually going to be headed there anyways. Let's leave this for now and then just get the overall settle motion down then we can adjust the timing as needed. I'm going to set another overshoot so it can go past up, overshoot up and then come back down. Let's grab and hit "H" on the keyboard. I'm going to select this key frame and then hit "O". Then I'm going to alt-right-click to zoom in. Then I'm just going to click and drag this to make sure I have this and drag it up just a little bit. It hits pretty hard so am going just to drag this key frame out, these tangent handles rather. Then I'm going to bring this over holding down Shift, and then holding down Control here. Yeah. I'm just going to bring this up a little bit, and back out because this is pretty steep ramp. Now that's pretty good. Now let's deal with the rotation. If we select all of these, go to the rotation. I can even filter this by rotation, so if I select this little button here I go to tracks and in turn off position. Now all I see is rotation. Now we have the rotation on this key frame. I'm going to select all of these. I'm going to go forward a little bit. Am going to set a key frame here, for rotation. Then I'm just going to go back to this key frame here and I'm going to just rotate this back. Actually, I'm going to rotate it forward a little bit and then set a key-frame so that it has some room to settle because it's going to be coming from that direction. Now on the way back, this is going to be a big one. I'm going to click and drag this. We're basically just doing an overshoot and subtle thing as well on rotation. I'm going to click all of these. Because we froze transformations, we can zero this out and know that that's going to be in the original correct position. I'm just going to bring this back up and then go forward a little bit more, and then I'll take this to zero and set a key. Let's play this and see. It works pretty good. My main concern is just how slow everything is. But again, I think that's going to work. I think we pulled this key-frame even further. Let's maybe come forward in time a little bit. We probably just get rid of this one and play that back. I'm just going to drag these out a little bit to give it a little more time and then bring this one in. I actually think that tangent needs to be a little softer. Cool. I think we're in a good spot to begin doing offsets. Like I mentioned before, we want the A and the E to be the last letters to finish. Before we move to the dope sheet and set the offsets, we need to remember to turn back on the position filter so that we see that in the dope sheet. I'm going to do it in the dope sheet just because things can get a little messy here in the curve editor. Let's jump over the dope sheet and we can turn off the filter. Let's offset by the distance of these last two key-frames here, which I think is maybe like 18 frames or so, something like that. Let's Click and Drag or Shift and Control Click all of these except for the N. Let's just drag these down until these lines meet. I'm going to Control Click the ones around the N and then do that again. I didn't get it. I want to make sure I'm only selecting the ones I want. I'm going to deselect, Control Click, and then do that again, and then select the last two, the A and the E. Now let's back up and play that back and see if this offset is sufficient for all of these letters to be coming in. Yeah, I think that looks really good. It's just very, very slow. I'm going to hit H on the keyboard, Click and Drag all of these key frames, and then I'm going to hold down Alt and click the top time slider