Animation in Adobe After Effects: Wispy Smoke Titles and Logo Reveal

1. Introduction: Hi, I'm Jake. This class will teach you how to create wispy Smoke titles using Adobe After effects and without using any plugins. You don't need any experience working with Adobe After effects. You can even download the free trial version to learn this effect and it will work fine. I'll explain each step we will take to create this animation. It will work with your text or logo. You can always write your questions in discussion section under any of my classes to get help from me while creating cool effects. I think it's the best way to learn the software while creating interesting effects for fun. And to complete this class, our goal is to create this cool wispy Smoke Titles Effect in Adobe After effects using only built in tools. I'll be happy to see in my class as also your result after following all the steps. So, let's get started. 2. Creating Basic RGB Animation: Okay, so I'm using Adobe After Effcts 2024, but you can pretty much use any version of Adobe After Effects. It will work fine. So as you can see, I'm using standard layout. The panels on my screen should be similar to yours. But if for some reason, you cannot see the panel which you can see on my screen, you can simply go to Windows and enable it from here. For example, if you need character panel and you see me using Character panel, you can just enable it from here. Character character. First of all, we need to import footage that I provided in resource step to this class. So go to File, Import, file, and you'll find these two videos. So just select both of them and click Import. First of all, let's create our composition. We can click here. Let Most click and let's call it Title 1920 by 1080 will be fine. A full HD, 30 frames per second, and maybe 9 seconds long. Also should be fine. And let's click Okay. So by using Scroll wheel on the mouse, you can zoom in and zoom out. And let's select this horizontal type tool. Leftmost click on it, left most click and hold and drag to create this kind of box and release. And now you can just type wherever you want. In my case, I'm going to type MJk class and you can press Control A to select all of this and resize it. So now I can see both of my words. Also, I need the paragraph panel, and if you're going to see it, go to Window. Graph from here, enable it and select this to align it horizontally to center the text. Then let's go to character, and here we can just decrease the spacing between our words. So something like this. In my case, I use Gilroy medium, but you can use any font which does look like this. Now we can just select the selection tool and go to Align panel. Once again, if you cannot see this panel, you can go to Window. Align. And with this align panel, we can just select our text layer and leftmost link here to align it horizontally, and leftmost link align vertically. So now we have our text, and we need to animate it. Let's scroll down here and click here on Animate, and let's select Fill Color RGB. And now here under this ad, we can just leftmost lick here and go to Selector and choose Wiki. So with these simple steps, we can get this kind of animation. Let's open it here and see a bunch of properties. One thing that I want to change is the wiggle to be a 2 seconds, but one. So let's go for one. And here we can just change the type of the wiggle animation, and I've tested all of them, and I like this man animation. So we can just select point of this animation is to get this kind of different kind of lightness on our letters because later in this class, we are going to use displacement map, and by using these different values of the light on these letters, it will move each of them up and down, so our smoke letters will not be stationary. Then we can just simply close this and let's create another composition. So let's left mostly here, let's call it bounce title, and let's click Okay and drop this title which we just created into this bounce title composition. The next video, we are going to make this horizontal movement, which I've described. See you in the next video. 3. Character Movement: So let's create this kind of biosen animation based on these colors. So first thing which I want to do, I just want to use on the edges of this text. So let's select our title, and let's go to effects and presets. And here, let's type gas. Life mostly select it and just drag and rap on our title just like this. Then we want to change this from over to transparent. So we would see only these lines. Let's select these segments and set it to one, so it would be one line creating each of these letters, and let's create a little animation. So let's set this time cursor here at the beginning, just like this. Let's create a keyframe for our length. Let's leftmost lick on the stopwatch next to the length, leftmost lick and select your layer and press U to see this keyframe, and let's move it over to 3 seconds. So about here at 3 seconds. So what is keyframe? Keyframe is basically point in time, which remembers the value of soaring property. In our case, this keyframe, remembered that at this point in time at 3 seconds, this value of one of this property length will be here. So if I'm going to scroll here to this 0 seconds and change this value to 0.5, so set this value to 0.5 at the beginning. As you can see, it created another keyframe. And now after effects, remember that in this moment in time, it should be at 0.5 and property length, which we just created a keyframe. Then it goes from this value to this value through time, just like this. As you can see, it basically just starts to appear. This is how animation in Adobe After facts works. Now I want to fix a few issues which we can see here. You can see each letter draw itself from left top corner. If we will click on this random phase, you can see that it created at different moments and it looks a bit more organic. This is exactly what we want. Next thing which I want to do is to set the start opacity to lowest number 0.02, and end opacity, I want to set to one. So what I did, I basically swapped the thicker part with the thinnest part. You can see that now we have this organic animation, like we have this right on animation. Here, as you can see, it comes to full stop. And let's continue this motion just by holding Alt key on keyboard, as you can see, I'm holding Alt and then left mostly on this rotation. And here we are going to write our expression. It's really simple, type your time, multiply 50. So now, as you can see, it doesn't really stop here and it continues going, which is exactly what we want. Then I want to change this color to white. Click Okay, and to fix this issue with this flickering, we can actually go to effects and presets and type here fill and drag and drop just before this Vegas effect, just like this. And if we will set here to white, as you can see, we don't have any issues with the flickering. So this is how we can fix that issue, and let's make sure that our animation goes out here as well. So what we can do is to select these keyframes, press Control C to copy then go to six second and press Control V to paste. And then you can just write most lick in it and go to keyframe assistant and time reverse keyframes, which basically will do the same animation but backwards. And as you can see, it doesn't really fully go out. So let's animate another property. Let's go to this mid point opacity and here at the beginning, let's create a keyframe. Let most liken it, and let's set this to minus one. And then let's go to 3 seconds. Here and let's set it to one. So it would be fully visible. And now as you can see, we have this really nice animation of its appearing, and let's press on keyboard and one more time to see all the keyframes which we've created. Select these ones, which is midpoint opacity and go to this six second, a press C sroll V to paste it. As you can see, I've pasted by the accident on this length. So let's press Control Z to undo this, select one more time, and press Control C. Make sure that you've selected this property. Press control V, and now we've pasted it where we need it. So let's write mouse clicking it, Keyframe assistant and time reverse keyframes to make this animation backwards as well. And now you can see it goes out. What we actually can do, we can select these top ones and press F nine, which will make this animation a bit smoother by the end. And I actually want this to be fully invisible at the start. So let's just press T on keyboard to see the opacity, create a keyframe, move it over just a few frames, and here set it to zero. Select both of these keyframes and press F nine, so we will get the smooth animation of operation. We can select both of these keyframes and press can show to Capia and here by the end can show V to paste. Once again, right mouse click in it. Go to keyframe assistant time reverse keyframe. Let's make sure that it will happen at the end. So now we have this really nice animation, and then it goes out. Okay, so next thing which I want to do is to go to this project panel and drop this title once again here. Let's disable by clicking on this eyeball, and now we're left with our animation and this one. We can just select it and press Enter and call it map. Basically, we will use this one below as a map for our displacement map effect. So let's also go to layer new adjustment layer. Let's drag it to the top, so it will apply on what is below this layer let's go to displacement map. So here at FX and presets, just type displacement map, leftmost lik in it and drag and drop on our adjustment layer. So here what we want to do is to select this horizontal and set to zero because we don't want to move this title horizontally. So let's set it to zero, and here let's set it to luminance and change this to 25 because we would want this to move vertically. So these letters will kind of move a bit. So let's set it to 25. And as you can see now, it doesn't really work as we want. This is why we created this map, and also this is why we created this kind of animation. Because now, as you see that here in displacement map effect, we set it to luminance. So it will not pay attention at these colors and only we'll look at this light for every of the character. So with these random values, we are going to move our letters. So let's go to bounce title and set this displacement map to our map. You can see it already works a bit. It starts to wiggle, which is exactly what we want, but we need to make a bit of cleanup on our map. So what we can do is to select our map and apply a few effects. So let's go to effects and presets and type here minimax. Select it and drop it on our map. Let's set this channel to Alpha and color, so it will work on our letters, and let's also enable it. So you can see what this effect does. Basically, we are growing the edges in horizontal and vertical way, and we can change this so it would be just vertical. So now as you can see, we are growing this distance. Basically, it works as a Alpha met. We're just outlining the path how much these letters can go. So in our case, we can set legs 30, we'll disable it, select this minimax effect, and press C Sal D to duplicate. This time, we will use horizontal and let's enable it so you can see how it works. This time we don't want really to move that much. We just want to cover the edges of our letters. So as you can see a zero, it's just a bit sticking out. And if you will set to five, it covers all of our letters. So let's disable it. But to finish this effect as we want, we need to go to effects and presets and type our final effect, which is Gausia blur, select it and drop it on our map. By the way, I just forgot that we need to go to this adjustment layer and change this not only to use this map, but also to use with effect. You can see our cleanup job, which we just did here, it already started working. So if we will disable all of these effects, you can see that with this effect, we clean up vertically because we set it to just vertical, then with the second one, just horizontal, we are cutting off these parts which sticking out. Like this. This previous path with this new path, we can just enable it and crank up this value, and you can see it really nicely blends, just like this. And if you will set this value like to 50, we can see this blending, kind of and stretching animation, which looks pretty interesting. And you can crank up this value even more if you want. So it would be a lot smoother, and it gives this really interesting effects. So maybe let's set it to 100 and you can press zero numpad to see how it looks. Okay, so now we have this kind of motion as a base for our effect. And the next video, we are going to add even more effects, so it will look even more interesting. I'll see you in the next video. 4. First Smoke Animation: So we have this space animation. And now let's create our final composition. Let's go to Project and left mostly here to create a composition. And let's call it final effect. And click Okay. At this point, it's a good idea to save your project because adobo effects can crash from time to time. So let's click File, Save and save wherever you want on your computer. Safe. So in this final composition, we are going to apply all of our effects together. So first of all, what I want to do is to select this smoke, which is available in resource step to this class and drop it here below. And if you're going to scroll through, you're going to see this really nice animation of the smoke. It will be our background. So basically, you can just press T on keyboard and reduce this opacity to really small value like five. You might not be able to see after the compression of this video. So maybe I'm going to leave it as nine or 12, so it would be easier for you to I would use really low value because it will look a lot better. So this is our atmosphere to get more believable look, then we can just close it here. And we can add this smoke effect as well. So let's drop it here. And what we can do is to change this mode to screen. If you cannot see this mode, you just need to click on this button Toggle Switches. Just let more click on it. Until you'll see this mode. So let's select it, and let's change to screen. And now we can see both videos, this one on top, and this one below. Okay, so we have our assets, and now we need to drop our effect. So let's select our bounce title and drop it just below of this small layer. So first thing which I want to do is to apply some transform effect. So let's go to effects and presets and let's type here transform. Select it and drop it onto our bounce title. So with this transform effect, I just want to add a simple animation of position and scale. At the beginning, let's set it this time cursor at the beginning, and let's just create a keyframe for position. Then you can just press Yon keyboard and move this out of the way. And here, let's move it down. As you can see, that represents our layer, which moves down. So I'm going to set my time cursor here at the beginning at this keyframe, and let's move it lower maybe to 1080, which is basically the bottom line of our composition. We want to use a scale, but we don't want to uniformly scale it down. We just want to unclick on this check this checkbox and squish it by the width. So my width, I want to set to 30 and also create a keyframe. Then select our layer and press U and one more time, you can see both of our keyframe as you can see it squished and goes up, and let's say about 3 seconds, we can set this keyframe here and set the scale width to 100%. So now we have this nice animation. What we can do to make this animation a bit more interesting is to select these keyframes and press F nine, which will make it go slower here by the end. So it would look much more smoother. Also, let's go to 6 seconds and create another keyframe for position by clicking here alongside of position. As you can see, we created a keyframe let's go to the final frame of our video at 9 seconds, and let's move it up just like this. Maybe let's set to 400 because we don't want to really move it that much. We just want to have this little animation of it goes up. Maybe let's set to 350, so it will go even further. Okay, we have this really nice animation, and now we can add even more effects to make this look a lot more like smoke. First effect, which I want to add is twirl effect. So let's go to effects and presets and type here twirl, select here under distort, and drop it on our bounce title. Here at the beginning, let's set this angle to, like, maybe -55 and create and if we will scroll through, as you can see, it already twirled our effect. And here we want our title to be fully visible. So let's set it to zero here at 3 seconds. And we can also press on keyboard one more time to see our keyframes and also select this keyframe and press F nine. To make a bit more variation to our twirl effect, we can actually select it and press Control D to duplicate let's go to the beginning of this video. And actually, let's move it a bit more. And actually, what we can do is to move the center a bit down to 970. So this twirl will happen a bit lower. And with the combination of these two effects, as you can see, it gets this more organic flow. And also, what you can do is press you two times to see all the keyframes and move this bit here. So the second twirl will happen a bit later. So by playing around with these keyframes and with these values of the twirl effect, you can get really unique results. So let's go to the next effect, which I want to add, and that will be turbulence displays. So let's go to effects and presets and type here turbulence and select this turbulence display and just drop it under this twirl. With this effect, we would want to add this amount. We already can see displacement. If I'm disabling and enabling, you can see that we getting a lot more movement in our letters, which looks really nice. Let's make sure that our size will be smaller. So these waves will be a bit more frequent. Let's set it to 50 and maybe here at 2 seconds. Let's create a key frame for amount and here at 3 seconds, we can lower it down or maybe even a bit later, leave here. Let's set it to 20. We will still have this kind of tardy effect, but not so much. Can see we already getting this kind of effect. And one more thing which we want to do to this effect is to animate this evolution. So it will still move here at these moments where it really stationary. So let's hold old Keyon keyboard and left mostly on this evolution. And now we can type the expression which we used before, which is time, multiply 100. And now you can see we still have this little wiggle in our letters. Which is exactly what we want. But for now, it's a bit too easy to read. As you can see, the smoke itself, it should be a bit more blurrier. So let's go to effects and presets and type here Gaussian blur, select it, and drop it on our bounce title, and let's set it to 25. So we would blurt it out more, just like this. And about here at 5 seconds, let's create a keyframe for it for blurriness. And at 8 seconds, let's increase this blurriness to like 60, so it will blur out even more. So it will, like, blend with our background. So if we will scroll through, you can see this effect. To get a bit more fancier blur, we can use a vector blur. Let's type here vector and our effects and presets and select this CC vector blur and drop on our bounce title. Here what we want to do is to use not natural blur but a directional fading, which is really cool blur. Select it amount, let's set it to 100% to see this actual blur. As you can see, it really looks nice and let's rotate it so it will go not to the side, but rather up. So something like -180 should work fine. But we can even move it to the right you can offset it just a tiny bit, like to the right -173, and now you can see this effect in full glory, which looks really nice. So before and after, as you can see now, it blends with our background a lot more interesting and fades away even cooler. And the next video, we are going to duplicate our bounce title and build on this effect even more to create more details to finish this effect. See you next video. 5. Final Adjusments: So we already created this really nice effect, and by the way, if you would want it to appear a bit later, you can just simply press T on keyboard and create a keyframe, and here at the beginning, you can just set it to zero. So it will appear later with this smoke as well. Okay, so we created this first instance of our text, and now what we can do is to not do this from the scratch. We can just simply select it and press Control D to duplicate. So with this effect, we can actually use rate what we've built. Let's delete only this Gaussian and vector blur, select it and press delete. Make sure set this to Auto, so your computer will choose which resolution is the best for your PC. In my case, half runs pretty smoothly, but later we can just simply select the layer on which we are working on and just click here to solo and it will be a lot faster. Just keep in mind if your PC is running low. I'm going to unslo because for now, it works pretty fast. Let's like this second duplicate which we created and press Enter. Let's call it wave just so we can differentiate the different parts of this effect. Okay, so we've left with this transform twirl and twirl effect and turbulence display. And now I want to add another effect which called wave warp. So let's go to this effects and presurs panel. Let's type here wave and select this wave warp and just drop it on our wave composition. And here at wave width, let's set it to 73, so it would be not the dense of the waves. Wave speed, let's set to 0.5, so it will go smooth here. And also, let's maybe change this direction to zero. So we would have our waves going vertically, which basically mimics this kind of wavineess of the smoke. Then once again, we can type here vector because as you can guess, I really like this effect or this smoky kind of look. So let's apply it on our wave composition. And this time we are going to use a perpendicular kind of type. And at this point, we can just solw this layer to see what we are working on and to see how this effect works. So let's set this amount to 100%, and we already can see this vector block working. But to get the effect which I really like, I want to change this map softness, and if we will increase it like to 100, going to see this really nice blurriness on some of the edges. And what I like about this effect that it doesn't work across all of the letters, I kind of works on some parts of it, which gives this really unique look. And at this point, it will work a lot slower. So consider to work in half, and then you will render in the full. And as you can see in full resolution, it will look a lot cooler. But it's pretty heavy effect. So just keep in mind that at this time, you would not be able to scroll through as easily as we did before. It's fine because we are left to add another instance of this CC vector blur. So let's select it and press Control D. And let's change this to directional fading, which we used before. Let's set this amount to 15, and here let's set it to -180, so it will blur a bit up as with this composition. And map softness, we can set to 50. So with this instance of this effect, we are kind of getting a bit more details, but still we preserving this blurriness, so it will look like a smoke. Once again, it's up to you if you would want to have this effect a bit more visible, you can just disable this last CC vector blur. In my case, I'm going to use it, so we would have a bit more blurrier image. But just keep in mind that you can always disable this last instance. Now what we can do is to select this wave and press Control D to stack another type of the effect on top of it. And let's call it this roughen. Press Enter let's call it roughen. And this time as well, we can leave this transform in both of these twirls effects. We can even leave this wave warp. Let's reset it, and let's make sure that it stays at 0.5 seconds. These effects, we can still leave here. But what we can do is to apply the roughen effect. So let's select the roughen edges. Let's left mostly. And let's apply just below this troll effect and on top of this turbulence displays. So with this rough edges effect, if we will just sollow this layer and disable this edges effect, we are going to take parts of this image. So let's enable it. And let's change this to spike, then border. Let's set it to, like, 3.5. So it would be a bit more visible edge sharpness. Let's set it to a minimum amount, like 0.1, scale, let's set it to like 307. Basically, you can just keep at something high and see what part you like. In my case, maybe like 300 should work fine. In my original example, I've used 307. And as you can see, it only reveals some parts of this effect. So if you will unslo this layer, you're going to see that we are just adding a bit of these extra lines for wisps of smoke. And by the way, you can just select all of them and just change to the screen. So it will blend nicely. So if you will disable this effect, enable it, you can see that we are getting these little extra waves to our text. And what we can do, actually, we can just select this rough and effect and press Control D to duplicate one more time. And maybe let's find this effect wave warp and let's change this direction to smaller value, maybe like 38. So if we will solve this layer with the changing of this value, we can just get in a bit more different kind of wave. So if you'll select this layer let's also click on the solo button to see both of these layers. You can see that we are stacking this kind of effect on top of each other to get more details. So let's select this top one. And basically, by changing a bunch of values to our wave warp, we can get this kind of wisps which kind of intersects with each other. Also, what we can do is to select these both vector blurs and delete them. So we would get a bit more pronounce these lines like sharper lines here. And finally, we can just go to our roughen edges effect and just change the evolution to different kind of values. To see what parts of the image you want to display. So in my case, I like this part. So I set to 131. But you can play around and see which part to be more visible. So let's unslo these two layers to see all together. And once again, now we can just adjust it and see where you want to have these kind of parts with extra visibility. Let's say it at the full. And now, as you can see, we're getting a lot of these details, which looks pretty cool. And final thing which you can do, you can just offset these layers a bit. So, for example, at two frames, you can just start this wave and maybe here at six frames, we can start this rough and effect, and here at nine frames, we can start this second rough and effect. So let's scroll through to see how it looks here in the middle. So basically the idea with this offset is that when it will appear, it will give you this kind of three D effect with kind of depth to these layers as you can see. So you can play and upset it them as you want. And now you can see it looks more like three D letters. And here in the middle, it will come together and would look a bit more visible. And by the end, as we've animated earlier, it will just simply slowly disappear. And so this is how I created this final effect. Feel free to follow me here on Skillshare. I have a lot of classes on VFX. If you're going as here on Seymour, you'll see even more of VFX classes in Adobe After Effects and so I have a new classes this month in this section and you can see what I've posted lately. Also have the fundamentals of Ado after effects in these classes, logo animation. You can also click here on Seymore to see even more classes, free AI tools classes, complex VFX, DaVinci Resolve classes, and even more. Feel free to click here under Projects and Resources submit your project. I watch all of them and even give you feedback if you want. And also here in discussion sections, feel free to suggest the effect or just leave a link to effect which you would want to learn. Follow me here on Skillshare, and I'll happy to see you in my next class. Thank you for watching.