Transcripts
1. Welcome: Welcome to animating morphing icons in After Effects. One of the things I love about animation is that you start with a blank canvas and you can create anything you can imagine. You can have things happen on screen that can never happen in real life. Like a suitcase morphing into an airplane, morphing into a spinning globe. It's basically magic. Hi, I'm Megan Freest, a motion designer and illustrator from Boulder, Colorado. In this class, I'll teach you how to replicate my travel icon morphing animation. But even better, you'll learn how to use the same logic and techniques on any set of icons or graphics to create your own unique morphing animations. Morphing animations can be a great way to transition from one scene to the next in an explainer video. Or you can use them to show a progression of events or a list of items, or even a mini story. In this class will need to be familiar with Adobe After Effects. If you're just starting out, check out my class, Easy Animated Icons to get you up to speed. If you want to create your own icons or graphics, if you want to be familiar with Adobe Illustrator, briefly go over illustrator in my class, Easy Animated Icons. Check that out if you need a quick refresher. If you're ready to make some magical morphing animation, let's get started.
2. Class Project: For the class project, you can choose to either replicate my travel icons animation or create your own unique morphing animation. It's okay to copy my animation exactly for learning purposes, but please always give credit where credit is due. If you decide to post your project outside of Skillshare, you'll find the downloadable zip file with all the illustrator icon files below this video in the projects and resources tab. If you want to jump right into animation, but want to challenge yourself by not doing the same animation as me, you could download the icon from my class, easy animated icons and use those or ask a designer friend to make some icons for you or find some online. Of course, you can always create your very own icons. I encourage you to start a class project and post your progress along the way as you plan out your animation, create graphics, and start animating. If you get stuck or want feedback at any point, reached out in the community tab. I can't wait to see what you create.
3. Examples: The morphing transition techniques I'll be showing you throughout this course, can make fun eye-catching animations that stand alone. But it can also be a good way to animate a list of items within an explainer video or to transition between scenes. This is a fun little example that I made that can be used to show all of the different kinds of ice cream than an ice cream shop sells. You can also use morphing transitions to show a progression of events or steps, or to tell many story. That was the goal for the travel icons animation I'll be demonstrating in this class. It shows the progression of going on a trip from getting your tickets and passport, packing your suitcase, flying around the world, navigating to your destination, and taking photographs. Since it loops, you could even go as far to say that photos of cool places inspire you to buy a tickets and it's cyclical. Here's another example of a list of steps to create an animation. In both the travel icons, in this one I was striving for continuous movement. There's always something to look at and then transitions flow from one icon to the next. It's almost as if you're trying to hide the fact that one thing turned into something completely different, because it seems to flow so naturally. Here's another example of a GIF I made of my father and most favorite hobbies, golf and running.This was part of a project I did called Christmas GIFs without the T, where I made a GIF for everyone in my family for Christmas. This morphing style animation isn't exclusively for icons. But the reason that I chose icons for this class, is that they can be quick and easy to make, so we can spend more time focusing on animation. We also may make the animation process a little easier if you use a similar style of icons as I did. With these icons, you don't have to deal with a lot of colors and you get to work with primarily basic shapes, which can make some of the morphing transitions easier. But here's an example of a morphing transition animation I did about a morning routine that uses fat cell illustrations. Hopefully, those examples have inspired you and you're starting to think of ideas about what you want to create. In the next video, we'll start the planning process.
4. Create a Plan: Planning out what you will animate can save a lot of time in frustration later. Now if you're planning on replicating my animation, don't skip this video just yet. I want to show you my thought process for how I started. I started with the theme of travel. Then I made a list of all the icons I could think of in that category. Since I knew I wanted to show a series of steps I [inaudible] in on my list and figured out which icons would make sense and in which order. Then I started making my icons and Illustrator. Depending on how you like to work, you may want to draw out your icons on paper first. Sometimes this helps me get my ideas out, even though I'm really terrible at drawing on paper before my icons are perfect, I like to start planning out how to get from one icon to the next. All get pieces that could potentially transition from one to another and start drawing up arrow. I have a plan to follow when I start animating. For example, on this ticket and passport, I have the passport as the same color as this inner part of the suitcase. I did this on purpose so that I could rotate both of these, get the ticket to line up with the suitcase and then get the passport to line up with the inner part of the suitcase. Obviously these chips are exactly the same size and shape as the ones in the suitcase, but that's okay because I can animate them to be the same shape. Then some of these extra pieces like the handle and the phi in the corners, I can just animate those on separately. Not every aspect of the first icon has to transition into the second icon. You can have pieces of the second icon that are a part of the first icon. Then another example on the suitcase, I realized that this big main part of the suitcase doesn't match up exactly with any of these layered. But what if I were to shrink this suitcase vertically? It's just a straight line and that would make it so it [inaudible] up with these wings here. Then I could take the suitcase name plate and scale that up to be the same size as this main plain layer. It's easy to make a square or rectangle into a circle or an oval in after effects. I know I can animate this name tag into this rounded shape of the plane. The reason I chose this suitcase name tag layer is because it's the same color as the plane. Whereas if I would've done the suitcase inner than I would've had to color my plane main layer the same color with this darker fill. Then I actually ended up not using these clouds in my animation because none of the other icons had anything that was separate like this. I just decided to keep a consistent and get rid of these clouds. Once I have a rough idea of what my icons are going to look like and how I can transition from one to the other. I like to start drawing out arrows so I have a plan to follow. First I know that I want this passport and ticket to rotate 90 degrees clockwise. The inner part of the suitcase is coming from the passport and the main part of the suitcase is coming from the ticket. Then in the next transition, I have the suitcase main layer shrinking down, so it's collapsing in to make the plane wings. Then the name plate is coming out to become the main part of the plane. Then the inner part of the suitcase is going to come in to become the tail of that plane. Overall, the transition from the suitcase to the plane has most of the layers coming in towards each other. I've just labeled that as in. I'll show you why I keep track of the overall movement in a second. The next transition, I have the plane main layer coming out into the globe and then everything else that's part of the plane is just going to hide behind the plane. My main general movement is moving out to get from the Earth to the location pan. I'm going to have the Earth shrink down into this little circle on the inside of the location pin. The main movement is going to be in, and then I'm also going to have the Earth dropped down and then the location pin will bounce to give it a little bit more of an interesting animation. The general movement is in and down. In the next transition, I am going to have the map layer fun out. It looks like it's been like turned upwards and it's going to flatten into this panel of three folds. Then it's going to rotate counterclockwise. Then the folds are going to line up with this camera. You can see that there's three sections in the camera. Those sections are going to come from these three sections in the map. Then the location pin is going to transition into the lens of the camera. I'll animate the shape of the outer part of the location pin. Then the inner part will just need to adjust its size. The general movement on this one is going to be rotate counterclockwise and move up a little bit. Because this map needs to move up to be in the center. In my next transition, I am going to have the camera move in towards the center. Then that'll make the outer part of the photo. Then actually this inner part of the camera is going to make the inner part of the photo. That's also moving in. Then the lens is going to make the sun. That's also a movement in, so the general movement is collapsing in on itself. In the final transition to make the animation loop, I'm going to have the photo come out in general and then from the sun is going to come this globe. The basic general movement is going to be out. Sometimes as I plan out my transitions, I need to adjust a little pieces of my icon. Maybe I didn't have this suitcase named play at the beginning and I realized that I needed something to get to the plane main layer and the suitcase inner wasn't going to work because it has to be this darker fill because it comes from the past for it, but I don't want the plane to be the darker fill, so I need something else. That's why I add in the input. You may have to adjust your icons as you plan out the transitions and that's totally fine. But as you figure out the transitions, you can finalize your icon. This doesn't mean that you can't change your icons later or that you have to execute exactly what you planned. But just getting your ideas out of your head can help you catch any issues where things might not work out as well as they did in the ideal world in your mind. Sometimes I think I have a great idea, but when I go to draw it out and planned it out, it doesn't seem like it's going to work as well.
5. Plan: Take it to the Next Level: Another thing I try to think about when planning is how I can balance the motion throughout my animation. Looking at my animation as a whole, and looking at all of these arrows that I planned out, I can see that I've planned out a balanced animation, and that's because I have a clockwise rotation here. Then later on, I balance that out with a counterclockwise rotation, and then I have the animation moving in, and you don't have to do these right back to back, but that's just how it worked out for me in this animation. Then I have it moving in and down,and then I'm adding an up movement to balance out this downward movement here in the next transition, and then I have another inwards movement, followed by an outward movement in the next transition. Sometimes creating a continuous movement in one direction can be a cool technique, in my morning routine example, every transition rotates in the same direction, and I actually added this in at the end and it was very purposeful. The issue is really with just not having any plan or purpose for the movements. If you don't plan out your transitions, you're animation may feel messy. I also like to make sure that there's continuous motion throughout the animation, so consider the natural movement of the object you're animating. An example of this is the suitcase swinging as if it's being carried, and the plane tilting as if it's flying through the air. I'm trying to just keep the motion continuous throughout the whole animation so nothing just stops in stance still. I can add a balance on the location pin and the globe will be spinning, so that'll keep the motion going. The camera I can just rotate it round like someone's pushing the shutter button and taking a picture. The photos are going to swap places, so the top one will go to the bottom and the bottom one will go to the top, so that'll keep that animation moving. When your animation has purposeful, balanced movements, it makes the animation flow and feel natural. The viewer will subconsciously feel at ease if you make something disappear without having a reason or without having something reappear in its place. It can leave the viewer wondering consciously or unconsciously what happened, and they might be anticipating something coming back and then may distract them from your piece. Now, I realize that's a lot to think about. What's important here is really just to get a loose plan. Leave room to discover things you aren't thinking of now, and for happy accidents. I actually started out with a different plane icon but ended up switching it because the original one wasn't working. I also had to go back and fix a lot of the shapes and my icons when I realized they weren't ideal for what I was trying to do. If you feel like this is happening to you, don't worry, it's totally normal. If this all seems overwhelming, then just focus on replicating my travel icon animation. Once you've finished that, you'll be ready to create your very own. If you'd like feedback on your plan post it in the class project.
6. Prepare for Animation: Let's take a look at how I prepared my graphics. If you're using my icons, I'll explain why things are the way they are. If you're creating your own, you'll want to follow these tips to make animating easier. First of all, I started out with a pretty big artboard. My artboard is 1080 pixels by 1080 pixels. I made my icons bigger than I'll probably want them at the end. I used about 600 by 600 pixels square as a guide and then my stroke width is 21 points. You don't have to use icons or graphics that are this style, but some of the techniques that I will be showing you only will work on this style. The reason that I like to make my icons nice and big for this type of animation is that we're going to be doing a lot of lining things up and then cutting a layer and we want to make sure things are really precisely lined up and it's easier when the icon is big. When you have a really small icon and you zoom in and after-effects, it can get pixelated. You can see this one, the bigger one, would be much easier to work with than this one that's blurry already. Why does this icon look like this and not like the final version that you see in the animation. There are a couple of reasons. If you know you're going to have some of your icons rotated in the animation, it's easier if they start from zero degrees. I have this ticket rotated out to the right in the animation but it's easier to start it at zero degrees. That way I can know exactly where I'm at when I rotate it and then if I need to get back to zero for any of the morphing, It's easy to get back to zero. If this ticket were already rotated in the Illustrator, then it would be at whatever degrees that is at and after-effects and aftereffects would set these degrees to zero. If you have any graphics that you know will be rotated in the animation, make sure that you start them from zero degrees in Illustrator. You'll also notice that the globe icon on the passport is a square instead of a circle. The reason for this is because this circle is going to transform into this little square like a name-plate thing on the suitcase and it's really easy to transform a square into a circle and after-effects. Let me show you what that looks like. If you have a shape layer that's a square, you can just toggle down under contents, then rectangle path. You have an option for roundness and if you just bring this up, now you have a circle and you can keyframe this value too. If I set a keyframe, go ahead in time and go back to a square. Now I'll have an animation of a square to a circle. You could also do this by altering the path of the shape if it wasn't a rectangle and if it was just the shape that you hand drew, but it's way more precise to do it this way it'll come out perfect, rather than having to worry about the bezier handles and adjust them and make it exact. That can be really tedious. Any shape that I knew would be going from a rectangle or a rounded rectangle to a pointy cornered rectangle or to a circle, I made it a square or rectangle that had pointy corners. You can see that in the camera, these are rounded in the final animation, on the plane this is obviously is going to be round and the suitcase, the corners will be rounded and these little key things will be rounded as well. Another way that I make my graphics easy to animate is that I have a clear labeling system. You'll see that all of my shapes are in different layers and I've named them with the object first. Suitcase we have left foot, then right foot, then main, and anything that is common to multiple things I'll put the commonality first. This has suitcase corner lower then left, then suitcase corner, same corner, also lower, but now right, and so on. The reason that I have the object first for all of the layers is because when I put them into after-effects, all of the layers from all the different icons are going to be in the same timeline. It helps to block things off visually to have the main name first. A lot of times you'll have to reorganize these. Now all of this suitcase layers will be together, so it won't be separated by other layers.
7. Import AI Files into After Effects: Now there's another reason that I start with pointy corners when I want rounded or circles, and that's because of the way that I import my shapes into After Effects. I use this really handy extension called Overlord. It's a super, super useful tool. It does cost money, but I found it to be totally worth it. If you make graphics in Illustrator and send them to After Effects often, then I would definitely recommend checking out Overlord and you can do that at battleaxe.co. So what Overlord does is it lets you take a shape from Illustrator and push it into After Effects. So you just hit that little arrow. You have the same little window in After Effects, and now I have this suitcase main layer, which is what I named it in Illustrator, in After Effects in your timeline. If I toggle down, I can see that it's actually already set up as a rectangle. That is super handy because now I can go in and round the corners. Then to get my next shape, I can use this little handy button to switch back into Illustrator, and then I can select my next shape and move it in. Now you should note that to make sure that the shape imports as a rectangle or a circle, you want to make sure that this button right here is checked. If you've never used Overlord, there might be a little bit of a learning curve, but they have a lot of free, great tutorials to get you up to speed quickly. If you don't want to use Overlord, that's totally fine. You'll be able to do everything that I am. You'll need to import your Illustrator file. So go to File, Import, File, or hit Command+ I, then find your file. Make sure you import as Composition-Retain Layer Sizes. If you don't see this option, click the option button down here. So then click "Open" and it will make a new comp over in your project panel. Double-click that to open it and now you can see that you have all of your layers as you made them in Illustrator right here in your timeline. But these are going to be vector layers. So when you toggle down, you don't have those same options that the shape layers have, and you're going to need those controls for this kind of animation. What you have to do is right-click, go to Create, Create Shapes from Vector Layer, and now you have a new layer, that's the shape layer. Now when you go into your shape layer, you'll have contents, group, and then path. So when we have a shape layer, when we imported from Overlord, we actually had this say, rectangle path and it gave us the option to round the corners or adjust the size. We'll talk about why size is important in just a second. But this is just a path and so I can animate these anchor points individually, but that's going to make it more difficult for what I'm trying to do with this. For some cases, that may be exactly what you want. But since I have this perfect rectangle, I want it to be a perfect rectangle. I don't want to animate each vertices. Unfortunately, what I'm going to have to do is just recreate in After Effects this rectangle by going to the shape tool and then trying to trace this exactly. If you're not using Overlord, you may even want to just make all of your icons in After Effects. It doesn't have all the tools that Illustrator does, it may be a little bit harder to work in, but you may save time if you don't want to go back and recreate certain layers. Now you probably won't have to recreate all of your layers in After Effects, but if you want anything that's a rectangle to have the properties that rectangles create in After Effects app, then you will need to recreate them. If you're using a similar style to mine that have outlines or strokes for your shapes, it's important that your layers are shape layers that have the shape layer properties from After Effects. Because you'll want to animate the size of the rectangle rather than the scale. Let me show you what I mean by that. If I go to Transform and then Scale, when I start to scale this my stroke is scaling as well. That's not going to be what I want because then my stroke width won't match up between objects when I'm morphing them. I want this to always stay 100 and what I want to do instead of animating the scale is to animate the size. So I can animate the size without affecting the stroke width.
8. Animate Ticket & Passport to Suitcase, Part 1: Once you have your graphics all ready and organized, let's jump into After Effects. First we need to create a new composition. So you can go to this little Composition button at the bottom of the project's panel. I'm just going to name it travel icons. I'm using the same size as my art boards in Illustrator. Square pixels. I always like to use an even number frame rate for animation, so I'm going to choose 30. Then I can always change my duration later if I need to extend it. I'm starting with my background color being this cyan. I'm going to use Overlord to get all of my icons into After Effects, but you can do the traditional method or Overlord, whatever works best for you. I'm going to go into Illustrator. If you're using Overlord, this little button, "Split shapes to layers", is really useful because it will make all of these layers their own layers in your After Effects timeline. I like to color code my layer so that I know which ones belong to which icons. Even though I do have that in the label name, it's just even more helpful to have them color coded. So, I'll just go ahead and select all of these, click on the little blue box here, and then you can pick any color you want. I'm going to go on rainbow order since that will make it really clear what's first, second, third, etc. Now I'm going to go ahead and parent my layers. I know that the label, the globe, all parts of the globe are going to be parented to the passport - main. That means that when I move the passport main, all of those layers that I just parented are attached, but I can also move them individually. So if I were to move the globe outer, that moves on it own without the parent moving because it's a child. If you want to know more about parenting, you can check out my fast, "Easy animated icons." Then the ticket, I will need to parent all of those little dots and lines to the main. You can select multiple and use the pick whip. Now I'm going to import my second icon and then I'll color this orange, and then I'll parent the layers to the main suitcase. The first thing I'm going to do is animate the passport moving into the shape of the inner part of the suitcase here. So I'm going to go find those layers, passport-main, solo that, and then suitcase inner, solo that. Then I'll go back to my passport-main. Here's the basic logic on how all of these icons are going to morph from one to the other. I'm going to animate the passport-main layer, into the same exact shape as the suitcase inner layer. Basically, I'm just making this passport animate from here to here, the inner suitcase layer. But for this piece, there's a twist. I know I'm going to have the ticket rotating, so it will look best if I also have the passport-main layer rotate as it moves into the shape of the suitcase inner. First, I'm going to set a rotation key frame and then go ahead 20 frames and set that to 90. Then I'm going to go back to zero and animate the path. So I'll set a key frame on the path then go ahead to 20 frames again then animate the path of the passport going to the same shape as the suitcase inner. So I'll click and drag to select multiple anchor points and then drag them into place. For these two rounded corners, I'm going to have to animate the path of them moving from a rounded corner into a pointy corner. Because there's just two rounded corners and not four, I've made this path rather than a rectangle with the controls for rounding because you can only control four rounded corners, not two like we have here. I'll drag this down, and make sure you hold down shift when you want to move in just one direction like just the Y direction right there. Then what I'll do is, grab the anchor point and move it right into the corner and then smoosh this little handle all the way into the corner as well, and do the same thing on the other anchor point, and then repeat on the other corner. Now we have the passport layer moving into the shape of the suitcase center. So once it reaches the shape of the suitcase center, and it looks like I only have one shape, I'm just going to trim the layer. I'll do option and right bracket. But then if you zoom in close, you'll see that it's actually giving me one extra frame, so I'll just drag that back one, and then I'll go up to the suitcase inner layer and do option left bracket to trim that where my first layer ends. Now I have a seamless animation and you can't tell that I've just sliced the layers. That's basically how all the morphing transitions work. Each piece moves into the shape over the next icon. Now, not all pieces need to be carried over into the next icon. You can have some pieces that completely animate out and some that completely animate in. But for the most part, these are hidden by the other morphing layers. Now before I get too far, I'm going to add some markers on my timeline so that I can tell where the animation of the morphing starts. To make a marker, the keyboard shortcut at least on a Mac is Control and 8. You can even add notes to this. If you double click on it, it'll bring up this popup box, and you can type in your notes. So you could say like, "Start." Next, I'm going to animate the ticket into the main part of the suitcase. I'm going to unsolo these two and then find ticket - main, solo that, and then find suitcase - main and solo that. Then go into the ticket - main, go down to path, set a key frame, move forward in time 20 frames and set another key frame. So this is a good example of why it's helpful to not have your shapes already rotated. I want to have this rotate at 90 degrees so that it'll more closely line up with the suitcase. I can just go in and rotate that 90 degrees then I'm going to animate the path, moving into the shape of the suitcase - main. I'm clicking and dragging to select multiple of these vertices at once and then I can just drag them altogether. Then I'll do that same technique with the corners. I'll put the verticy in the corner and then smoosh the handle in. Same on the other end and then just repeat that for all of the corners. Then these little ticket, indent things, I'm going to actually move them down to the center of the ticket because that'll look more natural when it's morphing. So I'll just click and hold to select all three of these. Actually, I wanted to do all six so that they're both even and bring those down to about the center, and then I will take the one that's indented and drag it out, and then I have to fix these handles, and same thing on the other side. The ticket - main layer is underneath that suitcase - main, and there's actually a fill on this suitcase - main layer, so we can't see the animation. I'm just going to trim the suitcase - main layer. Looks good. But now I need to set the rotation of this back. So I'll hit R on the keyboard to bring up rotation at 20 frames. I want it to be 90. Let's see. At zero, I wanted it to actually be maybe like 12. Let's see if that looks right. Yeah, that looks about right. But I need to also move the position of this. I will set a key frame for a position at 20 frames, go back in time, and then slide this over to the right a little bit, so it looks better and maybe even down to just match. Let's see what we have so far. All right. The ticket - main and the passport - main look good.
9. Animate Ticket & Passport to Suitcase, Part 2: Now, it's time to do the globe. I'm going to find this layer. A shortcut is you can click on the layer within your composition and then hit "X" and it will bring that layer to the top of your timeline. That's really helpful when you have a lot of layers like we are starting to have here. I'm going to go down into the properties, and set a keyframes for the size and the roundness, and then also this keyframes at 20 frames. While I'm at it, I'm going to solo this globe outer layer. As you can see, the globe morphs into the suitcase nameplate, so also solo that layer. All right. So now I need to make the globe start from being a circle. I'll turn the rounding up until it looks like a circle. I'm also going to animate the position of this. I want this globe to start off as a circle and then morph into the shape of this name tag on the suitcase. I'm actually going to click on the suitcase, hit "X" to bring up that layer and then find out what size it is and then I can just type in that size. It looks like it's 77 by 60 pixels, so I'll just go down and at 20 frames type in. To unconstrained at first, I'll type in 77 by 60. It looks like that's actually the wrong x and y because it's parented to the passport main layer that rotated. So I'll just switch those, 60 by 77, and now I can just move the globe layer into place. Let's see what that looks like. The only problem is that my globe layer has a dark fill on it and my name tag thing has a [inaudible] so it counts like no fill. What I ended up doing is changing the color of the fill on the globe, I just made it the same color. There we go, and now we can slice these layers. The next thing I'm going to animate is the lines on the inside of the globe. I'll just go down and turn those on. I want them to just get masked out as the shape is rotating. Actually, let me parent the lines of the globe to the actual globe so that when the globe layer moves at all, the lines will move with it. They look more lined up that way. I'll just go in and just select one of them and go to Effect, and then Channel and then Set Matte. So this is another way to make a mask. All you have to do is go in here and then choose the layer that you want to use as the mask. So now I have that line is being cut off. I want the Set Matte to be on all three of these other lines as well. So I'll just copy it from the Effects and Controls panel, hit ''Command+C'' and then click the rest of them, "Command+V." Now everything is masked and it looks pretty good. We can make it look better if we move these lines out as the animation is going. So I'll set position keyframes for each of these lines, and at 20 frames, I'll have them each move out. To make sure that each line moves the same amount, I'm going to click on the position and then go in and put in some math, so just negative 50. After Effects will calculate that for me, and I can do the same thing on each layer and then I know that they're moving at the same amount. I want to actually plus 50 on this one, it needs to move in the X direction. So it needs to minus 50. All right. Let's see what that looks like. That's looks better. Let's see what we have so far. Next I'm going to animate the line on the password, so just go in and add trim paths by clicking this Add button with the triangle right here. I'll then go down to trim path. At the start, I am going to have it be at 100 percent, so I'll have to start at zero and the end at 100 percent. I'll then go forward to 20 frames and have this go to 50 and the start going to 50 as well, that way I'll have the line animating towards the middle. I don't really like the way that it's crashing into this other shape right here, so I'm going to animate the position as well. I'll just move it towards the center. That looks a lot better. I want the seam trim paths animation on all these lines on the ticket, so I'm just going to go into the label and go to the trim path and copy those trim paths. Make sure I set my play head to zero-frame, so pace it as your frames for all of the ticket lines. I'll just go to Ticket Line when they're seven and hit "Command+V". Now if I hit U on the keyword, I can see that has keyframes now and sure enough, those lines are animating app. So far we have it looking like this, not bad. I'm going to move the passport over a little bit at the start. I'll make some position keyframes and just move that over a little bit. Now it's a good time to add some easing to these keyframes to make the animation a little bit more interesting. I'm just going to hit "U" on the keyboard to bring up all my layers with keyframes and then I'm just going to start from the bottom and select all of them by clicking and dragging. I'm then going to use this handy tool called Motion 2. Again, this is another tool I'm not affiliated with, but I use all the time. So I would highly recommend if you're going to be spending a lot of time in After Effects. It lets you adjust the easing on your keyframes really quickly. I already have this setup because I've been using it. I've been using ease of 30 and then 70. If I just click these buttons, it'll apply that to all of my keyframes, and you can see that those now are eased keyframes. You can also go into the graph editor and edit them. It's totally possible to do the same thing without Motion 2, but Motion 2 will save your time. Let's see what we have. I didn't actually animate these dots out, what I'm going to do is go down to the dots. They all get hidden about here, so I'll just cut them all right here. The lines and the ticket seem to be hanging around too long and I don't like how that looks. So I'm just going to cut them and make the animation go a little bit faster. Let me find the lines. I'm just going to drag all my keyframes up to about seven frames and then cut the layer. The reason I chose to have the lines disappear here is because it's the fastest part of the morphing animation, and you can see that in the speed graph here. It will go almost unnoticed that the lines disappear here because everything else is moving so fast. Let's see how that looks, good. I also need to do that on the passport label layer. Looking good. Before moving on to the next icon morph, I like to save a version of my project in case I mess something up and want to go back. I'll just take this travel icons tutorial, hit "Command+D" and then I just give it a duplicate with an aim of two at the end. I just know that I always have that if I need to get back to it.
10. Animate Extra Suitcase Layers In: At this point, we've animated all of the passport and take it into the suitcase, but not all the suitcase is there. Now we can go in and unhide these layers of suitcase that I had hidden. Those are the ones that we're going to need to animate in on their own. The first thing that I'm going to animate is the suitcase-corner details. I'm actually going to want to parent them to the ticket-main because that's the thing that's animating. I'm going to go into Effect and Set Matte it's up at the top because I've recently used it. Then I'm going to go in and select the ticket-main layer, because that's what the suitcase main morphs from. Now you can't actually see the corner right now, but we should, so let's go see the ticket-main and it doesn't have a fill, so we are going to need to add a Fill, so that we can see the map. We don't want that red. Now it's showing up and you can see that it's masked out. We'll copy this Set Matte from the effects and controls panel and paste it onto the other three corners. Now they are all masked out. What I'm going to do now is animate the position of these corners coming into the suitcase. I'll set position key frames, and I'll just drag them out where it looks pretty good. I'm not going to make this exact because it goes really fast. Let's see what that looks like. Looks pretty good. Before moving on, I'm just going to make sure these key frames have the same easing as the rest of my key frames. Now if you look closely, you'll see that when I added the fill to my ticket, all the little lines and dots on it disappeared, and that's because the ticket is on top. I'm just going to move the ticket-main down to the bottom. There we go, everything's back. Next I'm going to animate the handle coming in. I'm going to actually parent it to the passport-main layer because that's the one that is closest to and it will look the most natural to be parented to that. Now you can see that it follows that layer and I just need to hide it behind the layer and then animate it out. I'll just drag it behind, but obviously that's not actually behind it because this layer is on top. What I'm going to do is just drag this layer all the way to the bottom. That's where my naming and color coding comes in super handy. Now the handle just pops in, lets ease those key frames. Good. Next lets do the feet. First I'm going to round those corners. About 18 looks pretty good. I'll do the same on the other one. Then this little feet layers are most closely aligned with the ticket-main when it's rotating and morphing. I'm just going to change the pair of these two feet to ticket-main, and I'll set a position key frame at 20 to where they are now. Then I'll go forward in time and then just drag them into the ticket. I want them to hide behind, but they are on top, so all I have to do is drag them to the bottom. Looks good in those neat easing. Now the only thing left to do is my suitcase and you can see in my finished version, my suitcase has rounded corners and I forgot to do that here. Let's round those corners out. I'll find the suitcase-main layer, go into Rectangle Path and then Roundness and then I'll just set that to something that looks good, maybe like 40. Then you can see that I solved those pointy corners. I need to line up those corners with the suitcase rounded corner. I'm going to solo that and then I'll find the ticket-main and solo that. In the ticket-main path, I made those corners pointy because I was forgetting that I actually wanted them rounded and the reason that I made the suitcase layer pointy is because of the next animation into the plane. I needed to have those rounding controls to make that animation look good. What I'll do is just delete this key frame and redo that ticket animation. Now you can see that the rounding is a little bit off, so it's easier to change the rounding on the suitcase layer because they have these controls, I'll just turn this down a little bit until it lines up. There, that looks a lot better. Quick fix and with that, let's see what we have. Our first icon morph animation is done.
11. Animate Suitcase to Plane: Moving on. You'll notice that in my Finnish animation I have my suitcase rotating and it keeps swinging back and forth as if someone's carrying it. That's because I was trying to add some motion throughout the whole entire animation, so nothing was ever standing still. But I'll add things like swinging the suitcase and other details like overshoot and anticipation later on. First, let us focus on transitioning from one icon to another. If I said every key film in this class, we might be here for a year. For the next animation, I'm just going to talk you through this version that I have, that pretty much finish, it just doesn't have those extra polishing details. This transition from the suitcase to the plane is pretty straightforward. I start the animation at two seconds, so I hit ''Control'' and hit to make this marker here. Then the first thing that animated here is the main suitcase animating into the wings of the plane. I'm just going to solve those two layers and hit ''U'' in the U bar to show you the keyframes. Basically what this suitcase main does, remember it's a rectangle with the properties of a rectangle path in After Effects. I'm just animating the size down to zero on the y-axis and then I have a straight line. Then I cut the layer and that's where my plane wing layer starts. My plane wing layer is just a straight line and so I animate the path from the straight line into this more angle line that makes it look more like a wing. That's the animation I have here. What's next? I have the suitcase inner becoming this back like tail of the plane. Let's take a look at that. I just have the size of this rectangle moving from its current state to zero on the x-axis and then I'm changing the position just slightly to line it up with the plane. Then once it's in place, I cut the layer and that's where the plane tail comes in, and that doesn't have any keyframes until later on in the next transition. After that I have the nameplate of the suitcase turning into the main part of the plane. As you can see, I had to move this suitcase name tag layer up above some of my plane layers. Let's look at the animation on that. What I have is a shape, which is a rectangle moving from this size in the nameplate to a bigger size, which is this keyframes. I also I'm animating the roundness, so it's going from a rectangle to more of an oval shape by animating the roundness here. Next you can see that these little feet layers are animating to become more round, so that's the roundness keyframes here. I'm also animating the size of them just so that they line up with these little engine things on the plane, and of course moving the position up so that they sit right underneath the wing. Now, I also I'm animating out the corners of the suitcase the same way that I animated them in. Let's take a look at those. These are just animating the position out. One thing about these suitcase layer to know is that I actually chopped them and have a duplicate. I have the suitcase corner layers here and then you can see I have suitcase lower corner left to, right to etc. The reason I had to chop those is because the matte on these was set to the ticket main layer. But now we're done with the ticket main layer, and so what actually needs to be making the mask for these corners is the suitcase main layer. I just took these layers, hit ''Command Shift D'' to chop and duplicate them and that's how I created these four layers here that are duplicates. Then I went in and set the matte to the suitcase main layer. Then I animated the position of them far away from the suitcase main layer, as the suitcase main layer is morphing into the straight line that makes up the wings of the plane. I can just chop the suitcase corner layers when they're not visible anymore. The next thing that has to animate in is this little window line on the plane, so let's take a look at that. That's actually not coming from the suitcase at all, it's just animating in on its own. How animated that was with trim path? This is a path that's just a line and I went to add and then trim paths to get these trim path properties. I animated the start and end from 50 percent to the start being a zero and the end being 100 and that makes it so both the line animates from the middle and out. You can see that this back portion of the tail, these little like back tailing or whatever on the plane, they're doing the same thing. There's another thing that doesn't carry over from the suitcase to the plane and that's this top handle on the suitcase. What I did here was just animate the position, down below the suitcase so it gets hidden and then I just chop it at the fastest point in the animation so that you don't notice it so much. You can see it just hides and disappears, and that's how I got from the suitcase to the plane.
12. Animate Plane to Globe, Part 1: Next I'm going to transition from the plane to the Earth. I'm going to go back into my in-progress file to show you exactly how I set all of these key frames and made the 3D spinning globe effect. So first I need to import my earth layers. If you take a look at my Illustrator file, you'll notice I have a fat map of the earth and It doesn't have a stroke. That's because I added the stroke and after-effects and I'll show you exactly how to do that later. If you have the stroke already around the land in Illustrator, when you apply the effect and after effect, it's going to distort the stroke. You can see up here the stroke is really skinny and then around here, it's really fat. I want the stroke to be the same width throughout. So that's why I'm going to add it later in after effects. It's also important that the map has a background layer. So that's this rectangle here. Even notice how the background extends past some of the land on all the sides. Sorry to Antarctica, I just couldn't get it to look good down here at the bottom. So I just didn't include it. We're going to be wrapping this map around a three sphere and after effects. It's not a real 3D program. If I were to do this in cinema 4D then I could've gotten Antarctica of look good in there. But since this is just a 3D effect and after effects, I just took it out because it looked better that way. So if you are creating your own map or doing something similar, make sure you have space on the edges. Because if I didn't, it would wrap this around the 3D sphere and then my continents will get squashed and maybe even might collide in places. So that's why I have this background layer. So in this illustrator file, I also have the outline circle of my Earth. Then I have a mask that is just going to mask out the map onto the Earth. It looks like that wouldn't work right now, but I'll show you that all work out when we get into after effects. So I'm going to overlord these layers over. You can import them the traditional way and then convert them to shapes if you don't have overlord. First thing first, I'm going to color code these green. All right, I'll just chop them to start here. First, I'm going to make my plane main layer size up to match the size of the Earth layer. So I'll set a key frame for the size at four seconds. I was doing the transition is to last about 20 frames, so we'll start with that. Let me hide those layers. We'll just scale this up. Also I'm going to have to animate the roundness because this is a rectangle layer in the position as well. So you also notice that my plane layer is not a perfect circle. I'm actually going to go into my Earth outline and find out the size of that. Then I can just type it in. It's 598 by 598, it's perfect circle. So I'll just go in and type in 598 by 598, and I need to crank up the roundness and just nudge it up a little bit. Then once it gets to the size of the Earth, and I'm just going to chop it, and drag back that one last frame. Then I'm going to try to hide all of these other plane layers behind the main plane layer so that they just animate out. So first let's start with the wings and I'll animate the star and end out, just the way they came in. So 50 and 50, so that I'll animate them going in. Then let's have the little engine pieces move in as the Boeing moves in. I'll just do position key frames. Then I'll just set this to the center of my composition and I know that 540. So now those are both going to move towards the center. So we also have to do the back wing. So that's going to animate out with term pass as well. The last thing is the top tail. This layer is just a paths is a couple of ways I could animate it out. So I'll just do trim paths and I'll set the start to be 100. Now I'll just animate that line down. All right, so now you have everything moving in, but that window in the front is going slow. So let's make that faster. So maybe just 10 frames. Let me just hit you on the keyboard to bring up all the properties that have key frames. Then I'll just ease them all. Let's take a look. All right, not bad. I'm going to cut all my layers where they end. In the next video, I'll show you how I did that 3D looking effect on the Earth.
13. Animate Globe Spin: Here I have my earth map and my earth outline soloed. I'm going to go select my "Earth-map layer" and then go over to effects and presets. If you don't see this option, go to "Window" and then "Effects & presets." Then in my effects and presets panel, I'm going to search for CC Sphere and I'm going to drag that effect onto my earth-map layer. Now you can see that it's wrapped the map around a 3D sphere. If you're not using Overlord and you're importing your Illustrator files into After Effects and then converting them to shape layers, then you might have just run into a problem. I'm just going to hide this mask for now and then drag my CC Sphere onto my earth-map outlines layer. You can see that the map has been really stretched and that's not what Africa really looks like. First, why is this happening? Second, how can we fix it? If you go into your project panel and go into the folder that contains your shape layers from Illustrator, and then you go to the earth-map layer, in this little preview right here, you can see what's happening. Basically, After Effects is cropping your graphics to fit the size of the composition. That's cropping out parts of the land in the background ocean layer. If you go into your earth-map outlines and toggle down, you should have six groups if you're using the same file that I provided for this class. Now in group 6, you have what's making up the ocean layer, but it's cropped this layer to the size of my composition. But I need this layer to extend all the way to the edges of the land, so over here near Alaska and over here near Russia. I'm going to toggle down and click on the top layer path. Then I can select these anchor points and just hold down "Shift" and drag them out. You can see that that's actually updating my globe right here. It's already starting to look a little bit less distorted. Let's do that to the other side too. That's looking better. Now if I were to go into my effect controls and into the rotation and then rotate this, you'll see that I have this big area of no land, so that's not good. Why is this happening? Well, this is happening because also, when I converted this from Illustrator layer to an After Effect shape layer, it's cropped the land. Anywhere that the land is outside of the composition, like all of North America basically, and a lot of Russia over here, has been cropped out because it's extending past the composition. But I want to include that. I have found that in group 2 and group 4, we have this extra path. That path, as you can see, is this rectangle, or really square, that is the size of the composition. You can also see that we have a "Merge paths". Now, merge paths is a way to crop within a shape layer. What I need to do is just delete path 2 and merge paths from group 2 and also from group 4. Now if we just rotate this around and check, it looks like we have all of our land and it doesn't look distorted anymore. If you're importing your graphics from Illustrator into After Effects, the traditional way without Overlord, you might have run into this problem, but hopefully, now you fixed it and you can continue to follow along with the rest of this video. My globe has shading and lighting effects that I don't want because it doesn't match the rest of the style of my animation. I'm going to go to the effects controls panel and go down to shading and then set ambient to 100 and diffuse to zero. Now it looks a lot better. I also need a scale up my globe to fit in the outline, so I'm going to set the radius to 300. Next, I want to add my stroke back around all of my land. There's a couple of ways to add stroke, but I've only found one that doesn't distort the stroke, like I showed you earlier. To do that, you're going to select the "Earth-map" right-click, go up to "Layer styles" and then "Stroke". Then go into the stroke and you can see that it's added a red stroke, but we're not seeing it. That's because of that background layer that we created. If you go into contents, group 2 is the background layer. If you hide that, you can see that now you can see your stroke. But you can also notice that when I hide it, it distorts the land. That's because when I hide it, the wrapping of the sphere is just looking at the land layer and not the background, and so I actually can't hide this. What I can do is go in and set the opacity to zero, and that'll make it, so my stroke is visible but my land is not distorted. I want to change the stroke to the dark greenish relish and then I'm going to increase my stroke to 21 because that's what I've been using. The stroke has been added to the outside of all of my land, so it's made some of my oceans smaller. What I want to do is make the stroke aligned to the center. I have this option for position here, but if I align it to the center, for some reason it's turning all of my land that darker color and that's not what I want. I'll set it back to outside and then I'm going to add an offset path. I'm going to go up to group 1, which is the land layer, and then hit "Add offset paths." Now I'm going to set the amount to half of the stroke wave. My stroke is 21, so I'm going to make this negative 10.5. That makes it so that the stroke is halfway on the land and halfway off the land. It's aligned on the center of the edge. That's the same way it was set up in Illustrator, so it will look the same here. You can see that I got a little bit more of my oceans back. Next time I'm going to go in and mask out the earth because you can see that some of my strokes around the land are extending past my outline of the earth that I have. I'll just go up to my earth-map, under Track Matte, and if you don't see that, hit "Toggle switches and modes." Under Track Matte choose "Alpha Matte earth-mask." That'll take this earth-mask layer and make it a mask of the map layer. Now you can see that the stroke that was hanging over is chopped off. To make the earth spin in 3D, you can go under "Effect Controls panel" and then go to "Rotation" and then you can rotate in the Y- direction. Now we have a problem here. When we rotate, all of our land is showing through to the other side, so it's like mushing together and making completely new continents and that's not what we want. I'm going to set that back to zero. I'm going to go under "Render", instead of "Full", I'm going to set it to "Outside." That just means that I only see the top layer of earth and not seeing through the sphere. Now when I rotate the earth, it looks like it should. I'm going to set some rotation keyframes on my earth. First of all, I want to tilt it because the earth is actually tilted and the angle is about negative 23 on the Z-axis. Then I'm going to set a keyframe for the Y-rotation. I experimented with this and found that 49 works well for the transition from the plane. Then I'm going to go ahead, I know that my next transition is starting at six seconds, but want the rotation of the earth to continue a little bit past there. I'm just going to guess about six seconds and 10 frames and I'm going to set this to one rotation and the 49, so now it'll do one full revolution.
14. Animate Plane to Globe, Part 2: Now I need to work out how the plane transitions to the earth with the map included. I'm going to go back in and unsolo this, I can see everything. I'm actually going to animate my earth outlines scaling up from the size of the plane, because that'll be a guide for my mask and my map to scale up as well. I'm going to go in and set a key frame for the size. Then I can bring this down and actually just go in, and see what the plane-main, start it out. It's 195 and 210. I'll just type that in. I'm also going to need to animate the position of the earth outline. That's where it'll be helpful to parent the earth mask and the earth map to the earth outline, so it'll follow it. Now I'm going to set position key frames for my earth outline. Now to get my earth mask to be the same size as my outline, I'm going to go into the earth mask and then parent the size to the size of the earth outline. Now, my mask is working the way that I like it to. But I need to add some easing on these key frames. Now they should align with the plane layer. It's looking good.
15. Animate Globe to Location Pin & Map: Now that we've got the globe setup, it's time to animate the morph between the globe and the location pin. That looks like this. I'm going to go back into my work-in-progress file and import my location pin layers. You'll see that I have my map in three different layers, so I can animate each piece individually. First, I'm going to cut these layers to start at six seconds and then I'm going to move the anchor point to the bottom of the location pin. If you have this motion 2 plugin, you can just use these anchor point tools, or if you don't, you can hit y on the keyboard, or go to your pin behind tool up in the top, and then just drag your anchor point down. If you hold down command, it'll snap into place. First I'm going to animate the location pin from the earth. I'm going to solo the location pin in the earth-outline. Now the inside of the location pin is going to be this earth-outline. Let's go into the location pin and you'll see that I have an ellipse, which is that center circle and then the path here is the outside. I'm going to animate the size of the ellipse, to be the same size as the earth-outline. That was 598 and I also need to animate the position. Now I'm going to animate the path of this location pin. I'll go back and find the paths, set a key frame at 20 frames. I'm going to animate the path of this location pin to line up with the circle that was my earth. To get this anchor point at the bottom to have handles, so I can line this up better. I'm going to go up to the Pin tool, click and hold, and then go to Convert Vertex tool, and then just click on the anchor point. Then if I go back to my regular selection tool, I can edit the handles. Once you get that close enough, then you can play back your animation, all is pretty good. Now we just have to get rid of the earth outline. I'm going to animate the size to line up with the size of the location pin. I'm going to look at what size this location pin is, that circle piece. It's 126, so I can just type that in, and I also need to animate the position of this. Now why did I need to animate the earth-outline as well? Well, because the earth-outline is the parent of the mask and the map. When I un-solo this, you can see that now my map is getting masked. Well, my circle is shrinking down into the location pin. For the map at the bottom of the location pin, I'm going to start with a flat line and then animate the map coming up. I'm just going to go ahead and show my map layers and then draw a new line that's about the same length as the map layers. I'm going to set my width in color for my stroke and I don't want to fill. I'm going to name this map line and hit "Enter", and then I'm going to go in and make the caps of the line rounded. That looks good. Then I'm going to go to "Add", Trim Paths, and then I'm going to say start an end key frames for zero and 100 percent, and then go back to the beginning and set these both to 50. That way my line will animate in from the center. I'm actually going to make that line animating in a little bit faster because I also have to animate the map folds coming up. I'll just make that like 10 frames. Then before I forget, I'm going to ease the key frames that I just recently set, and my globe needs easing to when it's rotating. Here we go. Now I need to animate the map layers coming up from the line. I'll just go in and set path key frames on each of the map layers. An easy way to get down to the path rather than having to toggle a bunch of times, is you can search path in the search bar and then it brings it up for you. Then I'll go back to the beginning and then I'm going to animate each of the map folds coming down to a straight line. We're just going to solo my map line, and each piece of the map to make it easier to see. Then I'm actually going to slide this forward in time just so I have this line as reference, and we're going to move it back later, but that'll help me line up the map pieces. I'm just going to hold down shift to make sure that I'm only moving in one direction and try to line that up. Then same for these top ones, holding down shift, I'll do the same thing for this piece and same for last one. Let's see how that looks. Pretty good. I'm going to move this back into place and actually just chop that layer, and then I'm going to ease these key frames. They're starting too soon, so I want to start them at 10 frames and I also need to chop these at the start. I need to chop the map line at the end. Looks good. Let's see what we have. Good. I'm going to add a bounce to the location pin later on.
16. Animate Location Pin & Map to Camera: Now it's time to animate the location pin and map into the camera. So I'm going to go into my embargos file and import the camera layers. First I'm going to color code my camera layers purple, and then chop them at eight seconds. The first step is to animate the map coming up and flattening out. I'm going to go into the path of the map layers and set a key-frame. Then I'll go ahead and in time about 10 frames and then start animating those to be a flattened out version of the map. First, I need to hide all these camera layers so I can see what I'm doing. Now, it looks like I forgot to cut my earth outline layer. So now I'm going to animate the map flattening out and it can be helpful to use rulers and guides for this. So I'll hit Command R to get the rulers. Then dragging out from the ruler will make a guide. So I'll just put that about here and about here. So I'm just going to line up the guide with the bottom anchor point. Then this will just help me line everything up and it'll even snap in place. Oops, I need one for the bottom too. I found that it needs to be even a little bit taller than this. So I'm just going to adjust this a bit. I think that looks good. To hide the guides you can do command and then the colon key. That looks good. So now if you look at my finished version, you can see that I have the map coming up, flattening, and then spinning into the camera. That's how these lines of the fold of the map become the inner part of the camera. So to get that rotation, what I'm going to do is use a null. If you haven't used null object before, here's the concept. A null object is a layer in your timeline that you can use to control other layers, but it's not going to be visible when you render out your final animation. So to make a null, you can either use motion, or go to Layer, New, Null Object. So I can take my circle and my square layers here and parent them to the null. Then I can take the null and move its position around, and animate that. Both my circle and square will follow it. The reason this can be useful is because what if I want in my circles have its own animation. So maybe it's moving on its own. But I don't want the square to have that same animation. So it wouldn't work to just pair this square to the circle. I want the circle and square to have an animation together. Then the circles have its own animation. So that's where a null can come in handy. I'm going to drag this down on top of my map layers. It doesn't actually matter the layer order and then I'm just going to move it to be around in the center of there. So then I'm going to parent all three map layers to the null. Then I'm going to set rotation key-frames on the null. I'm going to set that for when my map layers are finished, their path animation. Actually my null is now not really in the place that I wanted. I wanted to be more centered. So I'm going to unparent these really quick, adjust the positioning of my null and then reparent them. The reason why the placement of the null matters is because it's going to be rotating around here and I want it to rotate from the center. It doesn't have to be exact though. So then I'm going to go for it about 10 frames and rotate this negative 90 degrees. From here, I'm going to have the camera layers to the rest of the animation. So I'm going to find my camera entering camera main and show those. Then when these map layers finished their path animation, I'm going to start the camera in or in camera main. I'm going to go ahead about 10 frames and then set size key-frames on these layers, and then go backwards to the beginning of the layer and animate them backwards so that they line up with the Map layer. But I also need to be rotating these camera layers so that they'll folds will line up with these lines on the camera. So I'll go to my key-frames that I set for the finished position of the camera and then I will parent these layers to the null. The time where you parent something actually matters. So if I were to parent them here, they would have been twisted the wrong way. So I have to parent them here where they're lined up how I want them and then they'll follow the null back to this position. So now I can animate the size of the inner, and I can change the proportions. I'm also going to need to animate the positions. Then I go back to the second key-frame, set position key-frames, and then hit U to see all my key-frames, and we'll move this over. Let me hide the main layer so I can see better. Now it's pretty good. Then I'll do the same on the main. You'll notice that the size in the x value is actually controlling the up and down position here. That's because we've rotated it with the null. Now it looks like it's lined up pretty well. So I'm just going to cut the map layers right here. Now the Camera Main and Camera Inner are taking over the animation. They're going to rotate into place, and now we're ready to animate the next part. So that's going to be the location pin moving into the shape of the camera lens. So I'm just going to solo these layers. So I'm going to go into my location pin and then animate the circle on the inside, lining up with the circle of the inner lens and then the outer part of the location pin lining up with the outer lens. So I'll set a size key-frame and then a path key-frame. I'm also going to need to set up position key-frames. So I'll go down and set up position key-frame, then move ahead about 20 frames, and then just adjust the x and y position to line it up a little bit closer. So I can look at the size of my inner camera lens. So there's going to be 179.5. Then I can just type that value in for this circle. Then the path I'll just move into place. Let's see how that looks. I need a sharper location pin layer where the animation ends and then start the camera lens layers there. Then I can unsolo these to see what we have. So obviously this isn't quite right. We're going to have to reorder the layers a little bit. So the location pin is going to end up moving to above the camera inner. Let's see how that looks. Yep. Alright, but now I'm noticing that the map is showing through this location pin and I don't like the way that looks. So I'm going to go into the location pin and then go to Add and Fill. Then I'm going to drag the fill on top of the path and that'll close up the circle with a fill. But I don't want read obviously, so I'm going to change that. Now you can see that the fill is on top of the stroke for the inner circle. So what I'm going to do is also add a stroke. Then I need to adjust the size and the color and that solved the issue. So now I don't see the map through the location pin anymore. Adding this fill has messed up our globe layer right here. So what I'm going to do is go into the opacity of that fill that I just added. At eight, actually 729, I'm going to set the opacity to zero. Then one frame later at eight seconds, I'll set it to 100. So that is going to fix it so that there's no fill here. So I can still see the mass coming around the land of the earth. But I still have that fill later to block out the map behind it.
17. Animate Extra Camera Layers: All right. The next thing we need to do is animate the pieces of the camera that are not carrying over from the location pin on map. That's going to be the camera top. I'll just parent that to the null. That way it will be rotating and I can just hide it behind and then pop it out. Set a position key frame, go back in time and just tuck that under. Now it doesn't look like that's going to work at this point, so I'll just move the animation so it starts at about eight seconds in 10 frames. Let's see how that looks. That works. Then I can trim this layer. Good. We can do the same thing with the camera button. I'll just parent that to the null. Then set a position key frame. Go probably the same spot about eight seconds in 10 frames and then bring that in. Also probably needs to go down a little. All right. Looks good. The last thing is the little dot on the camera. I'm just going to animate the scale of the dot, so I'll scale it from zero to 100. But I need to parent this dot to the camera main layer, so it sticks to that layer. I'm also going to move this camera dot layer underneath the location pin because I don't like how you can see it coming up right here on top of it. That looks better. Before I forget, I need to round these corners on the camera main. I'll just set key frames for the roundness. Let's see what we have. One last thing on this camera is that I need to animate the glare coming in. I'm going to show that layer. Then I'm going to go in and add trim paths. At the end of the animation, I want it to be about a quarter of the circle and then I want it to be in the upper left. I just adjusted the offset and the end percentage to get it where I wanted it. I'm going to set key frames for the end and offset at 20 frames. I'm also going to animate the position of the glare. I found that parenting it doesn't work in this case because I have the rotation going on and I don't want this to rotate. In fact, I want it to rotate the opposite way as my camera rotates in. I'll just set a position key frame and then go forward in time and then line this up better to be in the center of the location pin. Then I'm going to bring the end value down to zero. Let's see how that looks. All right. It might need some easing to line up right. I'm just going to hit "U" on the keyboard, make sure that everything I just set is eased. I'm also going to need to estimate the size of my layer because right now it's hitting the edges. I'll just go to the 20 frames and set the size key frame. Go to the beginning and just shrink this down. It's about the same distance from the edges as it is at the end. All right. That looks pretty good. I wanted to actually do a little extra animation. I'm going to animate the offset as well. We want to go more negative. Maybe like there one that key frame up. Yeah. That's what I was looking for. All right. We have the glare coming in, but it seems to be taking a little bit too long. I'm going to actually start the animation here at 10 frames. I'll just drag the layer forward and drag key frames forward. I need to make sure that they're all eased. Let's take a look at that. My position is off because I was lining it up at eight seconds and it's different at 8.10. I'm just going to have to adjust the position and maybe even the size at this point. Let's take a look. All right. Much better. Now we have our location pin and map transitioning into our camera. I'm going to add some extra detail with more rotation overshoot and something like that later on.
18. Animate Camera to Photos: The next animation is to get the camera into the photo and that actually breaks off into two photos. I'm going to go into my in-progress file again, and I'm going to import those photo layers. This looks a little bit funky, this water layer is going to be masked within the photo and I'll do that part in after effects. For now I'll just transfer all of these over and I've run out of rainbow colors, so I'll just make them pink and I will chop them to 10 seconds. The first thing that's going to happen is the inner part of the camera is going to transition into the inner part of the photo and then the outer part of the camera is going to morph into the outer part of the photo so let's focus on that first. I'm going to find my inner camera and main camera, solo those and then on the sun photo, that's the first photo, I'm going to solo the photo inner and photo outer and then I'm just going to set the size key-frames on my camera inner and camera main and then I'm going to move ahead 20 frames and I can actually just look at the size of the photo. I actually just copy this size and then paste it. I also need to set key-frames for the roundness and the position. Then I'll do the same thing for the camera inner layer to the inner part of the photo. I'll copy the size of this and paste it and move the position up. Now I can trim my layers. The next step is to animate the lenses moving into the sun. I'm going to solve those layers, both of the lens layers. I'm going to make the outer lens line up with the inner lens and then the inner lens line up with the sun, so basically they all three come together. I'm going to go in and set size key-frames as well as position key-frames. When I go ahead to this place in time, you actually can't see my lenses because the photo inner and outer is on top so I'm going to unsolo those. I'm going move the lens layers to look like they're more lined up with the sun and then I'll find out the size of the sun. So 80 and I'll make the size of these guys 80 as well. Let's take a look. I'm going to add easing to these key-frames, so I want my outer lens to go a little bit faster so that I don't have such a thick stroke right here. I'm just going to go maybe like here, find out what the size of the inner layer is and I'll just set a key-frame but then copy that key-frame and paste it on to the outer layer and then I can delete it from the inner layer, delete the last key-frame and drop the layer. Now what I've done is made the outer lens come towards the inner lens quicker. Now, I can cut my lens inner layer and trim my sun layer to start here. I'm going unsolo all my layers, I'm going to hide the second photo and let's see what else we have to deal with here. The water in the photo is going to move up into its position. It also needs to be masked with this inner photo. What I'm going do is duplicate the inner photo and then I'm going to name this duplicate mask and I'm going to pair the mask to the photo inner. Then I'm going to move the mask up above the water. Click on the water and then I'm going to set masks. I have to go to toggle switches and modes and then under track matte go to alpha matte photo inner mask. But now you can see that the water is covering up the stroke on part of this inner photo. I'm going to move the inner photo layer up to the top but it has a fill so I'm going to take out the fill. I'll actually just hide it and that looks good. I'm going to hide the camera button in the camera top sort of the same way that they came in. I'll just set position key frames and then about here I'll have them drop down and hide and then I can trap the layer there. Let's get rid of this little dot on the camera, I'll animate it out the same way it came in. I'll just scale it down to zero and cut the layer. Now, we need to animate the glare out. I'm going to go in and animate the trim paths. But I'm going to do with a start going from 0-25 and since that's the same percentage as the end, that'll make it disappear. I also need to animate the position so it lines up better while the lenses are moving. I'll set a position key-frame and then adjust the position. Maybe I need to animate the size as well. I'll just set a key-frame for size and then I size this down a little bit.
19. Animate Extra Photo Layers: Next I'm going to animate these rays on the sun coming out. I'm going to go in and add trim paths. This trim path is going to animate all of the little rays coming at the same time. I'll adjust all this so we can focus on it. I'm going to animate the start percentage to animate the rays coming in. At 10 frames, I'll set the start zero. Then at the beginning, I will bring that up to 100. That's going to animate the rays coming out. I'll ease those keyframes. Now you'll see that the rays are just doing their own thing, so they need to be parented. Let's parent the rays to the inner lens of the camera. That looks better, but my animation is happening too soon. I'll just drag that forward. That looks good. Let then animate the water coming up. I'm just going to set a position keyframe here at about 20 frame, then go back to the beginning of the layer and move down. I also need to trim my mask layer so that it shows up the entire time. But if you look carefully, you can see that the edges of the water are cut off before they reach the edge of the photo. That's because this photo inner layer is being morphed from the camera inner layer. There's two things that I could do to fix this. The camera inner layer has a sized animation, so I can just copy these keyframes on to the mask layer, or I could parent the mask layer size to the camera inner layer size. That way if I need to go back and change the size, I don't have to change it in two different layers. I am going to do the second layer, so I'll find my mask again and then toggle down to the size. Then take this little pick whip and then drag it down to the size on the camera inner layer. That should update right away. That's working. But you can see that the water is going over the stroke of the inner photo. I need to do the same thing with the photo inner. I'll take the size of the photo inner layer and parent it to the camera inner layer. Then I need to trim the photo inner layer to about here so that when the water is coming in, the strobe is on top. Looks good. Now we've got the morph from the camera to the photo. In the next video, we'll animate the second photo and then make the whole animation loop back to the ticket and passport.
20. Animate Photos: After I have the Camera Morph into the photo, I have the photo turn a little bit revealing another photo behind. Then I have the photos come out and swap places, before morphing back into the password and tickets, so that I can make the animation loop. First of all, I'm going to go and color code the first photo a different color than the second photo. Now, I am going to pair all the pieces of this photo to the photo outer. That'll be the photo inner. The photo inner mask is already painted to the photo in the outside. I don't need to worry about that layer. Then the photo of sun rays have a pair already, and so what I'm going to need to do is actually cut and duplicate this layer. I'll do that in one second. I'm going to set rotation keyframes on my photo outer layer. It will start at zero as soon as the Morph is done. Then I'll go ahead in time to about here, and then rotate this just a little bit. I'm not seeing my photo behind because it's hidden. I want the photo with the flower to be on bottom, so I'm just going to move that underneath my photo with the sun. Now I have it rotating out and then I need to pair all the pieces of the flower photo to the photo outer. Then I can set position keyframes for the photo with the flower and the photo with the sun. Maybe we'll actually start those here, give it a little time to rotate. Then I'm going to go ahead in time a little more and bring those two photos apart. This reminds me that I need to deal with the sun rays. I'm going to go back to the beginning of this layer, and then selecting my photo sun rays, I'm going to hit "Shift, Command, and D", and that'll duplicate the layer and chop it where my play head is. Now, I can take this second version of the layer and parent it to the photo outer. That way when the photo rotates, now, my sun rays are parented. My photos are going to come apart, I'm going to add rotation to the flower photo. I don't need them to be spread out that far actually, so I'll just bring them back in a little bit. Now I'm going to have them come out. They're going to swap places, and then the flower photo is going to go on top of the sun photo. What I need to do is go to the last keyframes of the flower photo, selects all the layers, and hit "Command, Shift, D", to chop those layers and duplicate them. Then the duplicate I'm going to drag on top of the photo with the sun. Then I can animate the position of these coming back together. I'm just going to set this to the center, which is 540. Then I'll also set some rotation keyframes. It will come out, and then I'll set a keyframe, and then when it comes back, I'll have it rotate back to zero for the bottom photo and then for the top photo, I will have it rotate in the other direction. Let's see how that looks. Good. Then I need to add easing to these keyframes, and also to these. In the next video we'll animate these two photos, turning into the ticket and passport so that our animation will loop.
21. Animate Photos to Ticket & Passport, Part 1: The last morph animation is to get the photos into the ticket and password again, so the animation will loop. I'm going to go back into my in-progress file, and now I want this animation to start at 12 seconds. I also noticed that the animation of the photos swapping places ends right at 12 seconds. I'm just going to shorten this animation so it has a little bit of time to get to its place before the next morph starts. This initial rotation where it rotates to reveal the photo underneath, takes a little bit long. I'm just going to take all of these keyframes and push them back like five frames. Now my time is off for the other photo, so I'm going to have to adjust those keyframes too. I forgot to ease these keyframes. I can do that now. These layers will just have to move up. These ones will need to be cut. Alright, that looks good. Now I can start this animation at 12 seconds. The first thing I'm going to do is go down and copy all of my ticket and passport layers. Those are going to be all the red layers. I'll hit "Command D" to duplicate them and then bring the duplicate up to the very top. I'm going to move the layers over so that they start at 12 seconds. Now these ticket layers have the animation of the morph into the suitcase. I'm going to end up deleting a lot of the keyframes. But let's just focus on one layer at a time. The first thing I'm going to do is the passport, and so with that and the flower photo inner. It's going to be easier to animate the passport layer into the photo inner layer because the passport has these two rounded corners and I'm not going to be able to get the two rounded corners easily with this photo layer. I'll go into this passport layer, hit "U" on the keyboard. I know I need to save that position that the passport starts at so that my animation will loop, that's this position right here at the start of it. I'm going to delete all other key frames and then move these keyframes up to about 20 frames in the future. I'm also going to need to extend this layer. Now I can go back to the start of the layer and animate the rotation to 14 degrees, which is what the rotation is on this photo inner layer. Now I'm going to adjust the position so it's a little bit more aligned out, except I can't really see what I'm doing. I'm actually going to just turn down the opacity for just a second so I can see. Then I'll go in and animate the path to make it line up exactly. That looks good. I'm going to turn my opacity back up. Then I'm going to cut my photo layer here at 12 seconds. That layer is done. Now I'm going to solo my photo outer layer, and then I'm going to animate the size of it coming in and hiding behind the photo inner layer. It's also going to need to rotate. I'll set rotation keyframes. I'll also need position keyframes. Now I can adjust the size. Let me ease all of those key frames. I also need to ease the ones in the password. Sometimes if you address your keyframes and slide things around, even though they look like they're ease, they might not have these exact easing values. That's why I'll just reapply, just to be sure. That works. Now I'm going to animate the second photo into the ticket. I'll just hide those layers and then solve the ticket main, and the photo of the sun, the outer part of that. There we go. Again, it's going to be easier to animate the ticket into the simple rectangle photo. I'm going to go into the ticket layer. You'd see my keyframes. Now I want to save these keyframes because that's how it starts out the animation. They'll have it loop perfectly. I need to have it in that exact spot. I'm going to just delete the end key frames and then drag these forward in time to 20 frames and extend the layer. Then at the beginning of the layer, I'm going to rotate this back to 0, move the position over a bit. Center that up, and then animate the path into the same shape as that photo layer. That looks good. I can track my photo layer at 12 seconds. Now I'm going to add all the dots and my details to the ticket. I'll go find all those dots and lines and solo them. I need to extend all of these layers. I'm just going to press "U" on the keyboard to see all of the key frames. What I can probably do is take all the start key frames and drag them over to 20 frames. Now, let's see what I have. Good. I have all the lines in many and now let me just check out what's going on with the dots. These layers don't actually have any key frame, so I'll just set scale keyframes to bring them in. At 20 frames, I'll have the scale be 100 percent and then I'll go back in time and make them 0. I'll ease all of those keyframes. That animation takes a while. I'm just going to adjust it a bit. Maybe we'll start them all at 10 frames and finish them at 20. Same for the dots. Then I can just cut all of these layers to start at 12 seconds and 10 frames. That looks good.
22. Animate Photos to Ticket & Passport, Part 2: Next I'm going to animate the details on the passport, so I'll just [inaudible] these ticket layers and then so the passport detail layers. Also the photo with the flower. The center of the flower is going to just scaled down. I'll start with that animation. I'm going to need to bring this layer to the very top so that you can see it. I'll just animate the size and also the position. Size is just going to go to zero. I'm actually going to make the stroke width decrease so that I don't have this as the last frame. It will shrink away more smoothly. I'll just do the stroke width and put that key frame just about there, and then make that zero. That circle is disappearing. We're going to have the flower morph into the globe. I'm actually going to paint the flower to the center of the flower. Because later I might need to adjust the positioning of these layers and I'll just do it on the center rather than having to do it on both. Then I'll go in and animate the path of the flower. Set of key frame. Then to see this better, let's just have the globe soloed. I also need to extend my globe layer so I can see it. I'm going to line up the flower center with the center of this globe. I'll adjust the position, till looks like it's about centered. Looks pretty good. Now hopefully my flower looks a little bit more centered. Now I'll animate the position of this into the position of the globe. First I'm just moving all of the anchor points to meet the globe and then I'll adjust the handles later. I just want to move them straight out from the center of the circle. Then I'm not skewing things in a strange way. Then I'll adjust the handles to make this more of a circle. That looks pretty good. We need to cut the globe layer where the flower layer makes it to the circle. Cut the flower layer first and then find the globe layer and trim that at the beginning. Also this globe layer has some key frames that I don't need, I'm just going to turn them all off. Now we have the flower morphing into the globe. Now let's add in those line details on the globe. The lines here have a set map from the first morph of the animation. I'm actually going to change it to the photo flower. I'll do that for each layer and then I also need to solo them so we can see them and extend the layers. The animation on these lines is going from inside to out, and I want it the other way around. I'll just switch these key frames around. Let's see how that looks. It's not quite centered and that's because we need to parent these to the flower instead of the original layer they're parented to. At the end of the animation, they look good. That's where I'll parent them. Let's take a look. Looks good. Now let me add easing to all the key frames that I've set so far. My passport main layer should be visible. Let me just solo that really quick. Let's see what we have. We have an issue. The flower layer needs to move up above the passport main layer. Let's try that again. That looks good. Now I can animate the label on the bottom of the passport coming in. Let me solo that. This is going to need to just be flip-flopped in the animation. I'll just switch these key frames around to make it animated. I need to extend the layer. Looks good. Let's [inaudible] all of these layers and see what we have. But first I need to trim this photo outer layer and I need to move the ticket mean underneath the second photo. Let's take a look. I forgot to cut a layer, so that's going to be this photo outer. Looks good. Let's make sure the animation loops. Looks good, we've got all the basic morphs down. In the next video, I'll show you how I make the animation a little bit more interesting.
23. Polish your Animation: Now that we have all of our morphing animations done, we can go back and make the animation more interesting using techniques like anticipation and overshoot. These techniques come from the 12 principles of animation. That's a topic that deserves a class of its own. But if you're not familiar with the 12 principles of animation, you'll find plenty of resources online. Over through all the examples in the finished version of my animation and then show you how I created them. If we play this back, you'll see that I added some rotation to the suitcase so that it's like someone is carrying it and it's swinging back and forth. How I did that is I attached all of the ticket and passport layers and all of the plane layers to this null object called swing control. It's actually hidden, but it's just up here. Everything is rotating from this point up here and so that's making that nice swinging motion. The layers that are actually parented to the swing control are going to be the suitcase inner and main, and then the passport main and the ticket main. All of the other layers that are details on the passport and ticket are parented to the main passport or the main ticket. We don't need to parent them directly to the null. Then also you'll notice that the plane layers, all of these ones, are parented to the swing control as well. The swinging animation is a good example of overshoot or follow through, because the rotation goes past the 90 degrees that I need it to go. It goes even further and then it continues to swing, and then even continues throughout the plane animation. Then right there you'll notice that before the plane transitions into the earth, the main plane layer animates in, right there before it animates out into the earth. Then when it reaches the size of the Earth, it actually goes past the size of the Earth. Past a 100 percent. Then it goes back to the final Earth position. Then as the globe comes into the location pin, you'll notice that the location pin goes down and it bounces up and down. It doesn't just bounce, it also squashes and stretches. While it's on the lowest point, it's squashing and then when it's at its highest point, it's stretching. You'll see it's stretched to this way and then squashed as it lands. That just makes it look a little bit more bouncy and fluid. Then you'll notice another example of anticipation with this map. It's going to go down before it goes up. It's anticipating the upward motion by going down first and then up. Then the camera is actually rotating past the point that it ends up at. That's an example of overshoot. You can see it goes past, straight and then back to straight and it actually keeps rotating a little bit and that's just because I wanted to make it continuously move. Then another example of anticipations right here, when the camera extends outwards horizontally before going in horizontally into the photo. Anticipating going in by going out first and then in. Then you'll notice in the sun and water there's some overshoot. Those go a little bit smaller and then bigger for the sun. The water is going up a little higher and then back down. Then at the end here, the ticket and the passport rotate past where they need to be and then back. I'll show you how I add anticipation using this plane as an example. The plane main layer is going to shrink before it expands into the earth. My current animation starts at four seconds. I'm going to go back in time, 10 frames and set another key frame for this size. This will be the starting size, and then I'll go back to where my original animation started at four seconds and just bring this size down. Now, it looks like my stroke has just gotten thicker. That's because the Earth outline layer is visible here too. I'm going to have to bring this size down on this one as well. I can just set a key frame even though it's not visible here. I'll just have it start there, and then I'm going to copy this size key frame from the plane and paste it onto the earth outline. That looks a lot better. I have it coming in, that's anticipation before it comes out. Then I want to add some overshoot. The globe is going to come out a little bit extra before it lands in this position. At four seconds and 20 frames, I'm actually going to have the size be bigger than the ending position of 598. I'll just copy this 598 key frame and paste it 10 frames in the future. Then I'll go back to that original key frame and then make this key frame a bigger size. I notice that my map is not reaching the edges of my globe now. What I need to do is go into my map layer, go to the controls and set a key frame for the radius. I'll just set that key frame up here, but then hit U on the keyboard to see the key frame. I'll bring that up so that my map is touching the edges of my globe. About there looks right. Then once it goes back down to its original position, I'll just set this back to the 300 that it was at. Let's see what we have. Anticipation. Oh, and we need to animate the plane going to the bigger size. That bigger size was 676. I'll just type that in and now let's check this. You'll notice that the stroke looks a little bit wider at some portions and that's because the plane layer is not round enough. I'm going to just go to the end of the plane animation and pull this layer out one frame so I can see it, and then I'll just bring the roundness up so that it makes a perfect circle. About there looks good. I'll put that layer back to where it was and let's see if that worked. Yeah, looks good. That's basically how I would go through and add anticipation and overshoot to my animations. One tip that may help while you're doing this polishing animation is to play your animation back in slow motion. You can actually do that from after effects by going into your preview panel. If you don't see that it's always under window. Then setting your frame rate to a lower frame rate, then your project is set to. My frame rate is 30 frames per second. If I set it to 15, it'll play the animation back in slow motion. That way it's easier for me to watch and notice little details that could be improved. Have fun going through your animation and adding little polishing details to really take your animation to the next level.
24. Wrap-Up: Thanks so much for watching. I hope you're having a blast creating morphing animations. If you have any questions at all or would like feedback on your work, feel free to reach out in the community page. Don't forget to post your class projects, if you post your work on social media remember to tag me @explainimated so I can see it there. If you want to check out my work, you can go to meganfriesth.com or on Instagram @explainimated I would really appreciate it if you left a review for this class, I'm always looking at how I can make my next class better. If you have anything in particular you want to learn, let me know.Thanks so much again for watching, happy animating.
Megan Friesth, Motion Designer
