Basics in Adobe After Effects: From Sketch to Animation With the Pen Tool

1. Introduction: Have you ever wanted to bring your sketches to life? It's surprisingly easy to go from sketch to animated illustration in After Effects using one simple tool. Hi, I'm Taylor, I'm a freelance illustrator and motion designer. I've had the opportunity to work on a lot of cool projects over the past couple of years and I'm really excited to help you learn how to animate. In this class, I'm going to be showing you how to bring your sketches into After Effects and trace them with an all-purpose tool called the pen tool. The pen tool allows us to trace our sketches and turn them into illustrations ready to animate. For your class project, we'll be coming up with an object and imagining what could be inside of it. I consider myself a bit of a nosy, hopefully more on the curious side person. I'm always wondering what's that old test at my grandma's? What's in that brightly-colored suitcase at the airport? What did they pack? Where are they going? Why is it so bright? All these weird things go through my head basically. But X-ray goggles don't exist probably for the better. We're going to animate what it would look like if they did exist using the pen tool and masks. Masks are often used to create stunning transitions, cut out video clips or do text reveals. But really the sky's the limit with this personal tool. The pen tool and masks are essentially best friends. While the pen tool is used to outline and create shapes, masks are used to cover selected areas of those shapes. Together, you can use a pen tool and mask to create dynamic transitions for any of your animations. For today's projects, we're going to be using solely After Effects as our software using the pen tool inside of After Effects. You only need to have one program. Other than that, all you need is a sketchbook or a piece of paper, a pencil, and a little bit of curiosity. We will begin by sketching out some designs for our project and digitally scanning them in. Then we'll hop into After Effects to trace our sketch using the pen tool. To add some fun and dimension to our illustration, we will be adding some animated effects and textures. I've provided some animated textures in the project and resources section for you to use. Once that's done, we'll reveal what's inside our object using a custom mask. This class is great for beginners who are just starting to learn how to animate, as well as any illustrators who've been dying the to turn the illustrations into animations. What are we waiting for? Let's go ahead and get started animating. 2. Project Description: For this class project, we'll be creating a brand new sketch. But once this class is over, you'll have the knowledge to be able to trace any of your sketches that you come up with or have already created. For your sketch, don't be afraid to also think outside of the box, anything can be your container. In my one example, I used a ghost. That's not a typical container, but it does contain something, in this case, an alien. Really, anything you can think of is fair game. Go ahead, go for it. The main objective is that we have an object that's going to be revealed through a mask. While you're sketching for your class project, please don't be afraid to use references. Artists can't be expected to know what everything in the world looks like, so please use Pinterest, Google, Bing, if you're a Bing person, Yahoo, anything to look up images that might help you get inspired as well as help you reference what specific objects look like. Once you're done with your class project, I'm going to be looking for an MP4 and AVI file. If you have no idea what I just said, don't worry, I'll be showing you all about that in the quick render video at the end of this class. While the main goal of this class is to take your illustrations and turn them into an animation, I really want you to take the opportunity to look into all of the effects that After Effects offers. There's a reason it's called After Effects. There's so many cool effects that you can apply to your illustration that will add an extra little oomph to the final look that you couldn't do on a piece of paper. I've included a list of resources as well. It's a whole PDF that goes over all of the things that I went over in the class, as well as a little bonus slide that has some of the effects I used and what those do. You want a more behind-the-scenes, under-the-hood look of how I tackle illustration into animation, I've included two of the example projects that I've done, and I've collected all of the files so you can just open it up in After Effects and see how I made my layers, how I organized my files, and what affects I used. Let's go ahead and just start sketching our illustration. I absolutely cannot wait to see what ideas you come up with for this prompt, so let's go. 3. Sketching Your Design: Before we can open up After Effects, we need to come up with some ideas. Be sure to have fun with this and really come up with whatever comes to mind. I thought about some things that I've always wanted to see inside of imagine what would be in that object. Say, there's a cute suitcase, there could be some beach close, and some sunscreen inside, but there also could be an alien. Who knows? That's up to you. You can make this as serious or as silly as you'd like. While I'm sketching, I'm going to be sketching pretty dark. I normally sketch pretty light, but I want you all to be able to see it. Also, when we go to scan this in, we're going to want the lines to be dark, so however you scan it or take a photograph of it, it'll show up better. The first thing I mentioned was an old chest. While I have a good idea of what a chest look like, I'm going to actually whip out my handy manny phone here and I'm going to look up old treasure chest. Let's see. This one is good. I like that angle. I'm going to over here and going to draw this little chest. I'm going to thicken up my lines, and again, being really free, nothing is permanent, it's just piece of paper. Don't worry about it. I don't need that anymore. Here's my little wobbly weird looking chest with my lock on it, I'll put some rabbits because I could do little eclipses like little circles and after effects for those. Then I'm going to draw a little arrow. I might sketch some things that I think will be in this. Since we're revealing it in after effects, I'm going to try to do a little outline of my chest, so that I can fit everything in here. If you've ever done sketching exercises, it's like a fit in the box thing. I feel like this chest would have a treasure map in it. You got to scroll. Maybe this scroll is coming undone. We could see like the little eggs. I'm going to get it detailed first, and then when we bring it in the After Effects, I can see what I want to keep. This little x and dots might be a little too detailed to line over in After Effects, but we can definitely make this brown and add some texture to it and roughen it up to make it look more like a map without having to put the tiny details. There is what could be in my chest, and then let's do the suitcase that we talked about. I'm going to look up a suitcase. Again, I know what a suitcase looks like but I like a weird one so I'll look up cool suitcase. Those are cute. I like those bubbly suitcases, those are cool. This one is not super cool but that look what I had in mind. Draw out my little box, little circle. We're just simplifying everything. You see that this has those little lines on it but I'm just going to do a little circles on mine and I can make those a certain color, and then we'll see the edge of those suitcase over here. I'm not going to do the zipper but you get the chest and then we'll do the big handle. Let's do these bubbles because these are the symbols I need to put in the After Effects, just these little lines to add some texture. We can make those shiny looking with some glow or something. There is my suitcase. Again, being really rough, we're going to outline this super clean. You can be sketchy, and then once we do some sketches, we'll do over here more confident line drawing. I think, since I really want to go to the beach I do this one, also because you can definitely do these squiggly lines in After Effects. But I think I want something a little more simple that can hide more stuff in it. I think I'm going to go with this one. What I'm going to do is I'm going to sketch it over here, I'm going to do my big sketch. Now, let's do some confident line making. I'm going to make bold, confident lines. We got our confident drawn out from here to here, so this is easier to trace over in After Effects because everything is really clean, and marked out where we wanted. Then we only need the box part. I'm going to sketch that finer. Because on mine, I don't think I'm going to show the outline of the object, but you could. I just want it to be like boom, like x-ray, you see all the way through it. Now, I'm going to draw my itsy bitsy, teeny weeny, yellow polka dot bikini. Now, what I have to do is I have to scan it in. I could take this to my printer that has a scanner on top and scan that over, but I'm actually going to use this really fun app called Adobe Scan. It's free, all you do is download it. I think you sign in to Adobe but you don't want to have an Adobe account to do that. I'm just going to do document on here. It should open up right to the photo thing. If you'll see, it's doing it's little dance, and it'll put the dots out. I can adjust the corners. I want to get my sketch in here, but it doesn't have to be a perfect square. If it does like a plain document, it gets ray on the corners. As you can see, you can move where it goes. Then I'll just hit "Continue", and then hit this little button because it's done. I'm going to rename that Sketch. It saved it as a scan, so it's now a PDF. I think you can save it as a PNG as well and then change any color or like clean up anything, but for our purposes, this is all we need. Save as PDF. Then boom, it's in there. I've used this for other artwork and sketches before. Once it's ready to go, all you do is click "Share" and you can e-mail yourself a link. Then we're going to be tracing it over with the pen tool in After Effects in the next lesson. I'll see you there. 4. Setting Up After Effects: Before we can get started tracing with a pencil, we need to set up a folder system to keep ourselves organized and also set up our composition and After Effects. I'm going to be showing you how to do that now. We need to get our sketch. If you use Adobe Scan, if you email it to yourself, you'll actually get this little link. When you click it, it'll open up the PDF of the sketch that you scanned in and all you have to do is click "Download File". After that, I highly recommend going ahead and creating a folder for your project. I like to take a lot of classes at one One so I'm constantly bouncing around learning. I often name my classes the name of the teacher and then whatever relevant name of the class is. You can name yours whatever works best for your workflow and how you can find it on computer. I went ahead and name mine ObjectReveal_Project and you'll see I've created some sub-folders. I always create an After Effects folder, and that's just because I want to make sure that After Effects is saved in a place that I know where to find it and then it knows where to reference and find all of the materials it needs. If you move things around and it's all over your desktop and you put it in a folder later, After Effects will actually say that the media is missing and you have to link it and it's just a nightmare. It's best to just go ahead and get that out of the way and create a system of folders. I also have References. So I use this for color palettes and also for any pictures. I might pop in After Effects to use as a reference. Then I have my sketch folder. That's where I put my PDF that I just downloaded from Adobe Scan. Now it's time to open up After Effects. I'm using After Effects 2020, but anything like 2017 and above should be fine. Everything should be in about the same spot. Before we get started, we're going to go ahead and click "New Projects". This is our home screen project, and then we're going to create a new composition. I'm going to go ahead and name mine. I named it ObjectReveal_Animation and I'm going set my width and heights to 1920 by 1080, so that standard HD size. Anytime you ever like watching TV, that's a 16 by 9 aspect ratio. Unless you have a 4K TV, it's typically going to be about 1920 by 1080 resolution. Then I'm going to set my frame rate to 24 frames per second. The reason I do this is because most hand-drawn animation is set in 24 frames instead of the typical like 29 or 30. I just like the little bit more choppy look, so that's why I'm setting up for mine. I'm going to make sure my duration is set at 15 seconds. Typically with these kind of animations, they normally only last about five to 10 seconds because they're quick little things that can be turned into GIFs or just stuff to pop on social media. But I like to give myself a little bit of extra time in case I go guess crazy with it. Then I'm going keep my background color as black, only because I could make it this dark gray color, which I've seen some people do, but then you can't see where the base of your composition is. I think white is a little too harsh on the eyes. I'm just going to leave that complete black. Now we're set up and we have our composition ready. But it's really important at this point to hit "Control" or "Command S". What that's going to do is it's going to save our project. We want to make sure we're doing that throughout the project. That's a good skill to have as a digital artist anyway. Control or command S is like your life other than Control or Command Z. You might be wondering, well, I thought we just created a composition. So that should be the name or that should be said. But After Effects can hold multiple compositions, but the whole unit is the project. I'm going to name this ObjectAnimation_Project and if you'll notice that it's already going to be saving in my folder, in my After Effects folder. I'm going to hit "Save" and now you'll see it says ObjectAnimation_Project and then we have a composition that called ObjectReveal_Animation. I'm going to go ahead and sit this to my screen by doing this little drop-down and only get full size. I work in VR a lot, so I have this VR Comp Editor, but you probably won't have that. Let me close that out. Just in case this is the default workspace, so if you open up your After Effects, all you have to do is click window workspace and just make sure that it's set on default. Now we need to bring in our sketch, so I'm going to open our little folder, go into our sketch folder and then drop in our PDF. Nothing happened over here because our PDF was just put into the bin. It wasn't actually put into our composition. To put into our composition, all you have to do is drag it down and drop it in. Most likely yours is going to be rotated on the way that you don't want it to be rotated. While your object and your PDF is selected, you're just going hit "R" and that's going to open up the rotation properties. I'm just going to click this little double zero after the plus and type in 90 and that's going to rotate it the way I want. You can also hold and drag this if yours is in a like really weird spot and you need to see, I don't even know what degree that is. You can definitely do that. I'm going to keep mine at 90. Then I'm going to press "S" again while I'm still select on this and this is going to open up my scale. I'm going to scale this up to about 300. I'm really weird, I like numbers to be very specific sometimes. There's no need for it if like 286 is the perfect scale and that's good to go. I set that to 300. With my selection tool selected, I'm going to drag this down. I'm happy with that. If you click this little arrow, like drop-down arrow, it will close all that out. Now that we have our sketch brought in, our composition setup, and our project saved, we're going to go over how to choose a color palette before we start tracing with the Pen tool. So I'll see you in the next lesson. 5. Selecting A Color Palette: Creating a color palette can seem daunting because it takes years of practice to learn color theory and understand what colors go with what and then even what you like. I'm going to go ahead and show you a website that I use to help make the process a little easier. I like to use this website called coolors.co. You can actually get it as an Adobe extension for like $4 or like an app. But I just use the website. It's still new, it's super easy. You just click start the generator. I'm not going to go in-depth on how to use this, because if you've never opened it before, it will actually tell you a little tutorial. But basically, you just press space, it will cycle through colors and color schemes. Say I like this blue, I can lock that color then it will give me colors that go with that color. I've already created a couple of palettes and I've saved them into my account. I'm going over to my account and I normally like to make three palettes per project I'm working on. So for the beach project, I've got all of these green tones and the blue very like beachy, but more serene. Then I really like this yellow for a bikini. But I don't know. Something about this is still a little too woodsy and not beachy enough for me. Whereas this color combo that I came up with, I really like how bright this is. I think this would be good and bright for the suitcase. Then we have the bikini and our little crab, and then probably our umbrella and some sand and seashells. We can put the seashells in this blue color as well so that one's going to be good. All I have to do is click these little dots and export palette and then save it as an image and just name it beach colors and then export. Now it's going to download and I'm just going to drag it over, put it into a folder. Then I'm going to go back to After Effects and then drop it into our little bin. We'll bring that in by clicking and dragging and put that into our composition. Now that we've picked out a beautiful color palette for our illustration, we're going ahead and start tracing our design using the pen tool, so I'll see you there. 6. Tracing With The Pen Tool: It's finally time to learn how to use the pencil and trace that design and turn it into an illustration in After Effects. So let's go ahead and get started. I'm going to select off my PDF by clicking in the empty space of the composition. Now we're going to use the pen tool, so to use the pen tool, you can go up to your toolbar and press the "Pen Tool", or you can hit "G". Then I'll switch to the pen tool. There's a couple of different things that the pen tool can do and to get to all of the tools that it has, you actually just hold it, click down. We have pen tool, add vertex tool, delete vertex tool, convert vertex tool, and mask feather tool. We're mostly just going to be using the pen tool and the convert vertex tool. But if you have G selected and you hit them twice, it'll switch between the pen tool and the mask feather tool. If you're ever working over here and you see this a weird little feather, that's not what you want to be on, you want to make sure that it is this little pen tool icon. To get started, we're just going to make vertices or vertex. We're just going to click and boom, we have this little square. If you'll notice down in our composition, it says "Shape Layer one When you're creating staff with a pen tool, you're actually creating shape layers. Shape layer is made out of vertices and paths. So the path, the vertices make up the path. I wanted to quickly go over the anatomy of a line. When we're creating a line or a path, we're creating vertex points with the pen tool to tell our path where to go. When you're creating a path, you're going to be creating straight lines, and if you want to curve those lines, then you're going to use what's called a Bezier handle, and you're going to do that with the convert vertex tool. So to show you what I mean, here's our first vertice. If I go over here and set another point. Now we have a path with two vertices. It doesn't create a new shape layer because we're still on the same one, we haven't closed the shape. Now you don't have to close the shape like if I click off, then that's the shape done. We can put a line on it or a stroke, but we're going to continue. So if you'll notice no we're not close on this anymore, and to get back to it, all we have to do is make sure a pen tool selected and click the last point we were at, and boom, we're back on and you'll see that in the bottom it's selected again. All we're going to do is really roughly outline with straight lines. You'll see it starting to fill in this blue color, and we don't want that. We want to be able to see where we're dropping our lines. So if we put it over here, then it's going to start blocking off stuff and it's just not helpful. You're going to go over to this little fill. You'll see it's blue and it's the actual text and you click on the box, it'll actually show you the colors and you can change the color, but that's not what we want right now. We want to hit the "Fill" and hit none. Hit "Okay" and again we're going to hit our last point to start the path maker all over again. Click and close the shape. Now you might be wondering, well that's not the outline. If I zoom in by using the scroll wheel and hit "H" to use a hand tool that's not lined up. That's not what we want. So we can go back and fit this. We're actually going to use the convert vertex tool now, and to get to that, you do have to click and hold down on the pen tool in your toolbar and let it go, and now you'll see we're got this weird little open triangle thing. If you hold them, click on a vertex and pull, it'll start creating some curves. Now if you see the way I'm pulling is actually creating a loop, we don't want that because it's not outlining our shape. Sometimes when I'm pulling I'll be like, oh, I thought I had to pull that direction but I was wrong, so I'll pull it back. You can see that's wind up pretty well then we're going to just do that all over the shape. If I want a line to be a little bit longer. So if you see down here, if I pull it still not quite getting it all the way where I want it, but I like this curve. So I'm going to let go and then just pull this Bezier handle. Pull that down, and then boom, it's all in there. You want to be careful though. So when you pull both of them at the same time, it creates a smoother curve. Whereas if move this one up, now we're going to have a sharp curve there. So just be aware of that. Like if you want sharp edges or if you want smooth edges, then be aware of which way your Bezier handles are going. I'm just going to control or command seeds, take that back. H to use my hand tool, G to go back to the pen tool, then pulling. That should be good to go and it is outlined. So before we continue, I'm going to go down here, you're shape layer and select it, and then hit "Enter" to rename it. So I'm naming Suitcase_Base and "Enter" again to commit that rename. Now I'm going to work on the other parts. If I go up here and make sure my pen tool is selected and I'm using the pen tool, I'm going to start outlining the handle. If I hold shift I'll actually get a straight line from each vertex point. Let me go ahead and change this fill to be more like a soft black, I think. Hit "Okay". Instead of starting a new shape layer, I'm going to go ahead and make sure that these are both on the same just because I know I'm not going to animate them separately and they're going to be the same color. So if I click, you'll see that it doesn't create a new shape layer because I'm already selected on the current one. Shift, you get a straight line, and boom we got our handles, hit "Enter" to rename those, and now I'm going to select off. Use a pen tool again. I'm not happy with where this incur point, this vertice is, I can use the selection tool to hold and drag it out. It comes in really handy, so you don't have to fuss too much with any things in the exact right place, and I want this to be curved. So I'm going to go back to our convert vertex tool. Pull it up. Go ahead and change that fill, I wanted to be the same color as our suitcase. You notice these handles are overlapping, so I'm going to select both of these and put it under the base so they're hidden under there. That's really the basics of the pen tool. I'm going to go ahead and outline more of the shapes, and then I'll be back to show you some finishing touches with the pen tool. But really, once you've gotten into a flow, it's really quick and easy to get down. If you'll notice, I'm not using the Ellipse tools to create these circles, and that's because I want them to be a little uneven and funky. Go with my drawing. If you hold Shift while you're pulling, it'll lock the bezel handles completely evenly. Now it's time to do a little detail on the front of the suitcase because I know there's a couple of more lines in there that I need to get. To do that, I'm going to use this little eye tool. Click that to turn up the suitcase base. Make sure I'm not selected on any layers. Then use G to select our pencil, and I'm going to create our zipper and our lines. I'm going to go ahead and turn the wheels back off too, so they don't get in our way. Again, using the same principles that we've just learned. Now, if you notice, when I clicked in the middle, it actually created another vertices. If you see it, turned to the pen tool a little plus sign, and that means it's going to add another vertices. I don't need one there, so I'm going to Control or Command Z. Now we have our zipper. I want our zipper and our lines on our suitcase to be like an off-white, so I'm going to do them on the same Shape layer, except for the lines. Instead of drawing out a thick rectangle type shape, I'm actually just going to use stroke. To do that, I'm going to make sure my pen tool is selected, I'm going to click and then instead of doing a straight line, I'm going to go ahead, and pull when I drop my line. What that's going to do is it's going to go ahead and create the bezel handle for me. When I go down here, it's already starting to get a curve on it, and we're done with that line. Now that we've outlined everything, we're going to click on our Shape Layer. Go through our drop-down and click "Shape 1" since the zipper is the first shape that we drew. I'm going to hit Fill, turn the fill back on. Now, let's set it to an off-white. What I'm doing is I'm clicking Shape 2 through 5 and just holding Shift to select them all. I'm going to hit "Stroke" this time. Solid color. Okay. It should already be on our white because that's what the other one was set to, which is to make sure. Get your eyedropper tool, hit "Okay." As always, we're going to name our layer. If I turn off the sketch, you'll notice that our zipper and lines are actually overhanging. I did that on purpose when I was tracing because we're actually going to go ahead and use a mask to make sure that they fit perfectly on our suitcase. If I have zipper and line selected, I'm going to right-click "Mask," "New Mask." You'll see this yellow box pop up, so this is our mask, and I'm going to go more in-depth on this when we create our custom mask, but this is a quick little basic overview. If you'll see as I move the mask up, it hides the color of whatever layer it's masking. I'm going to move that back down, and a mask is essentially the same steps as using the pen tool. I'm going to go in with the pen tool with my mask on, and I'm going to add some points, and go into my selection and move those points around. We don't have to perfectly outline the suitcase, but we just want to crop off where the suitcase ends. Again, this is the same exact steps as using the pen tool or just using it on a mass now. Go to Convert Vertex tool, and it's okay if this is a little sloppy. I like the little discrepancies. That suits my style more, especially where I work a lot traditionally. Nothing's ever going to be perfect and I feel like when you work digitally, you can sometimes overthink it and try to go to perfection because you constantly can start over, you can get it pixel perfect. But that's just not what I'm into, so I don't worry about it too much. Especially when you're learning, it's really not a big deal. Just be happy that you're making something and enjoy the process. Our suitcase is done now. I'm pretty happy with it. It's really simple. You can notice the lines are really, really clean, which is nice if you want to go for a vector look, which is really crisp. But I want a little bit more fun and imperfection, so in the next lesson, I'm going to go over how we can add effects and textures so it can bring it more to life and make it look a little bit more organic and slowy, instead of so harsh and clean. I'm going to go ahead and outline my objects, and to do that, I'm just going to open my sketch and have the selection tool selected. We're just going to move my sketch up and scale it so it fits in the suitcase, all of my stuff. Now that I have the sketch where I want it so that all of my objects are fitting into the suitcase, before I start tracing it, I'm going to go ahead and select the bottom one, hold "Shift," and select the top one. Then we're going to right-click and hit "Pre-compose." We'll get this little box that'll pop up and we're just going to name that Suitcase. Boom its all together, so we can turn it off and on with just the suitcase. A pre-comp just makes another composition, so if you'll see up in our bin, it's just the suitcase. We can still access all of these and make any adjustments if we needed to. But in our main composition, it's all packaged up together so we can add effects to the whole thing and move it around as we see fit. We now have an understanding of how the basics of the pen tool works and as well as how to create larger shapes using it. Now I'm going to go over some tips and tricks that will help you outline those tiny little details. I'll see you in the next lesson. 7. Details With The Pen Tool: Now that you know how to use the Pen Tool to create larger shapes, I'm going to show you how I go about drawing my smaller detailed areas of my sketch. For the bikini top, there's a couple different things going on, so what I'm actually going do is I'm going to use a stroke and I'm going to create multiple paths in the same layer. To do this, you're just going to click off of the path once you've created it, but making sure that you're on the same layer, and just continually draw the lines where you want them. Just be aware of where you're drawing your endpoints. Well, this is going to be a pretty thick stroke. I'm not too worried about you being able to see that it's multiple paths, but that is something to keep in mind. Once you're done you're going to set the stroke. However, if you have multiple strokes on the same layer, you need to open up the layer and select all of the paths and then set the stroke that way. As always don't forget to name your layers so that you can keep up with everything and keep everything organized. For the actual fabric of the bikini, I'm actually going to be creating really rough shapes over top of our bikini straps, and then I'm going to refine it from there, again, keeping it above our strap layer. Then once I'm done and I'm happy with the shapes, I'll drop it below the strap layer so it looks like it's part of the bikini. If you have one object that is the same, so I have the seashell, but I have another seashell up here and I'm okay with them being the same general shapes, so I'm just going to Command C or Control plus C, or Command and Control plus V and that's going to copy it. Then you'll see this little, it almost looks like a crosshair, that's the in-group point of the object. I need to rotate this object, but as I rotate it, it's going to rotate around the anchor point not in the middle. To fix that, I'm going to use the Pan Behind Tool which you can get using Y. Then I drag that down until it's roughly in the center. You can click "Snapping" to turn that on and it'll snap it in the center for you, whatever it deems the center. Then now we can rotate it the way we want it, and I'm going to scale this one down a little bit because I want it the same size. To do the little dots for the sand, instead of creating a bunch of ellipses because then those will be all separate shape layers, I'm actually just going to zoom in and use my Pen Tool and make little lines, and they'll create little dots with the stroke on. I kind of want them to be this yellow tone. I'm just going to keep doing that and then select V, just click off of the shape. You'll notice I'm making sure to select off the side because if I select over here, there's a good chance that I might actually hit one of my other Shape layers and then I will confuse the whole thing. Now we've got some sand going on, little blocks. They look like confetti, they're cute. To make the polka dots on the bikini, I'm going to do the same thing as I did with the sand. They're going to be more like little lines, but I like the way this is looking with all of the sharp edges, especially because in the next lesson, we're going to be roughening up some of those edges. I think it will look nice in the end. Of course this can be our fun interpretation on the itsy bitsy teeny-weeny yellow polka dot bikini, it can be the itsy bitsy teeny-weeny yellow, square dot bikini, rectangle dot bikini. Now we're done with all of our outlines, so we're going to do a pre comp on all of our objects like we did for the suitcase. We're going to go to Pre compose after we right-click and click "Objects". Now we have a suitcase that will put on top with our objects inside. Now that we have our final design traced and after-effects with the Pen Tool, we're going to add some fun animated textures and effects to really bring it to life, so it's not so clean cut. I'll see you in the next lesson. 8. Adding Effects & Textures: Before we work on our customer veal, we're going to be adding some animated effects and textures. In the project resources, I've added a couple of textures that I created, little video loops that you can use in your animation and I'll be showing you how to use those. Now that we have our design traced, we have our outside, so whatever our object is, and then what's inside trace as well, we're going to get started on adding some effects and textures. But before we get started, I'm going to create a background. To do that I'm going to right click in our panel, select New, then Solid. You want to make sure you click Make Comp Size. This one's already 1920 by 1080. I'm going to name it Background. I'm going to leave that white for now because we can change the color later. Hit Okay, and it'll bring it up to the top so you just drag it down to the bottom. Now we have a background. We're going to do the same process again. We're going to right click New, but this one we're going to select Adjustment Layer. What that's going to do is allow us to add some effects to our objects without placing them directly on the object. Hit Enter, going to name that Effects. I'm going to go over to our effects and presets panel, and I'm going to type in noise. There's quite a few different types of noise, but what we're going to be using is just plano noise. If we click that, we can drag it and drop it on our effects or you can double-click when you have the layer selected, and it'll drop it on that layer. Right now we have no noise. I f you see if I pull this up, we have lots of noise. I don't like to use color noise, so I always unclick color noise because I don't want to add any colors to my already selected colors, I just wanted to add some graininess. Obviously 100 is a bit much, so I'm going to set mine to about 10. I'm going to go back over to effects and presets and this time I'm going to type in turbulent. You'll see there's turbulent displays and turbulent noise. What we're going to use is turbulent displays. I'm going to click that and you'll see it's going to warp whatever's under it. If I turn off the suitcase you'll see that the objects underneath it are also warped. This is way too much, so I'm going to turn this down. I want the size of the displays to be about 10. We got a little less, still wonky but we're going to take down this amount. Let's try 10 on the amount as well. The umbrella is a little wonky, so I might take the size down to like an eight. That looks good. This effect isn't going to move, but what it's going to do is just add these little bumpy edges to make it look more rough, handmade looking, which I personally am into. Now we're going to apply some effects directly to our objects. I wanted to put these effects in their own layers so I can turn them off and on since I want them to affect the whole composition, but there's certain effects that I want to only apply to the suitcase and the objects. I'm going to click the suitcase and we'll start with that one, go back over to our panel. This time I'm going to a lookup drop shadow. I'm going to add a drop shadow to this, but insert black. I think I'm going to use a darker navy. Since black like I have this darker color but I don't have any true blacks in my scene. I'm staying away from really harsh black because I don't want that intense contrast, hit Okay. Then I'm going to bring out the distance to about 10, see how that looks. I want it a little softer, and then 20. Let's take the opacity down to about 40. The reason I did this is I want my object to look like it's been cut out. With the turbulent displays which gives it this handmaid hand cut feel and then with the drop shadow on it, it looks like it's cut out and placed on the little piece of paper or white background that I have setup. To push that even further to make it look even more like it's been cut out, I'm going to look up emboss and I'm going to hit Color Emboss and apply that. That was a little intense. You see by turning off and on by using this little FX button. It's a little much for me, so I'm going to take it down, get a contrast of 50, see how that works. Great, I'm happy with that. I'm going to bring up to blend original may be about 10 percent, a little more. It's quite subtle but you'll notice it's adding a little bit of emboss on this edge, so that's what I'm paying attention to while I'm looking and then all of these edges. Lets see. I'm happy with the amount of that. Now the cool thing is, I like the way this looks and it's all cut out. I'm just going to click both of these and then hold Shift to clip the other one, hit Command or Control C, and then hit our objects and then Command or Control V, and you'll see it drops them in here by turning the suitcase off. Boom, they have the same effects. When you copy and place effects, I do recommend that you actually look at your other layers if you're just pacing effects, just to make sure that it goes well with the other objects. The emboss might be a little too strong for this one, so I'm going to take the emboss and bring the contrast down maybe like 10 points. Yeah, that looks a little bit better. Now let's play with the background. Now if you'll notice though, where the effects of turbulent displays is above the whole layer, it's actually displacing the solid in the background. To deal with that all I'm going to do is just pull out the background a little bit, so you are not seen as a rough edges. Then I'm going to go over here and type in fill, and I'm just going to drop a fill on the background. This is just an easy way to change your solids. I think I'm going to use one of these colors. I really like this orange but I don't want it to blend in too much, so let's see. Yeah, it's blending in a little too much of our objects, but it looks with the suitcase. I'm going to open up our color again, and I'm going to pick a different shade of orange. There I'm pretty happy with that one. That's like an orangish yellow and it's not directly from our color palette that I created, but it's pretty close in that it's in the same family and it keeps the whole composition warm. Now we're almost done but there's something that I super love to do when I'm animating, is add some animated texture. I already have these textures in here, and I'll go ahead and let them play above the composition, so see what they're doing. All this is a Photoshop file that I said to animate and then I just put different spray textures down. We're going to go ahead and change the mode to screen, and then I'm going to hit T once selected on a texture and bring the opacity down to probably 10. Then play through that. I'm seeing it but it's a little too subtle, so bring it up. Just to keep the timeline looping since this will be a short animation, I'm going to take this little line right here, this is bottom. It's going to edit your work area and I'm just going to hold and slide it in till the end of this. Our animation is going to be about four seconds long. We set spacebar to play. I'm not super happy with the noise, so I went ahead and turned it off. To get to it if you're in your project panel, if you just click the Effect and then if you double-click it's going to open up the whole layer. If you see this don't be freaked out. All you have to do is click this x, it'll take you back to your main comp. If I click here, you'll see effects controls up here, and then you can get back to it. I just hit this Effects button to turn the noise off. I can always add it back on later, so there's no sense in deleting it, here's really not going to take up that much render time. Go ahead and turn that off and scrub through. Pretty happy with that. Then, I like the way it looks on the objects, but the only thing that I'm not super loving right now is that the suitcase is just floating. I'm going to move them up a little bit, and then I'm actually going to make a shadow. I'm going to click and hold to open up my ellipse tool and make sure you're not selected on a layer because if you are you will be creating a mask, so nothing's highlighted. I'm going to be making a shape and I pull, and then I'm going to hit V for my selection and pull that up, and then drop that under all of my objects. Then I'm going to hit Enter to rename. Now we have a shadow, although I don't think a white shadow quite make sense. I'm going to open up my beach colors again, double-click and then I drop this orange. This time I'm actually going to use that orange color and turn my colors back off. Look pretty good. Again, I'm going to adjust it a little bit I want it to be darker, so it sticks out a bit better. That looks super nice, but with everything all wonky, it's a little too perfect for me. We're going to add an effect to that as well. We're going to go over and type in wave warp, and then I drop that in. Now if you'll see, that's super wavy. I'm going to pull it. Let's see, add one, I don't think is going to do much. Let's set it to like three. I'm happy with two. When we set that, we work on two. Now we have a little shadow and our animated texture. That's all we're going to do to add some animated effects and textures, but I'm going to include a bonus lesson where I show you how I created the actual texture animations as well as putting them in the project panel, so you can have access to them in case you just want to go ahead and add them to your file. Be thinking of how you'd like your object to reveal what's inside for the next lesson. I'll see you there. 9. Creating Animated Textures: I wanted to show you really quickly how I made those animated effects and textures so you can create them yourselves. However, if you don't feel like creating them and you're just trying to get animating, then feel free to download the free ones that I uploaded for you all in the project resources. Go ahead and open Photoshop, and then you're just going to hit "Create New", and we're going to be doing a 1920 by 1080 because that is our comp size. You just set it to pixels, 1920 by 1080 horizontal, 300 dpi is fine, RGB color is fine because we are using digital, so it would be on the screen. We can keep the background white and then I'm just going to name this Animated Texture. Hit "Create". From here, it's pretty simple. You are going to go to window. Then you are going to go down to timeline. It's going to pop up a little timeline down here. If it does not pop up there, you can always dock it by dragging it until you see a little blue and let it go. We are going to drop down and hit "Create frame animation". What that is going to do is, it's going to create frames based on your layers. Select a new layer and then hit "Create frame animation". With my new layer, every layer after that will be a new frame. To create the texture, I'm going to go and hit B. It's going to bring up my brush panel. I just selected a brush that I liked, and I'm going to make sure that my color is set on black. Hit "Okay". Then just lay in some texture. Once I'm happy with that, I'm going to go down here and click "New Layer". Then click "New frame". Make sure that just my new layer is turned on, so turn that one off and you'll see down in the panel that we have a clear frame. I'm just going to do the same thing I just did. You notice it is still not showing up down here and that is because it is on the wrong layer. We want to just make sure it is on Photoshop. Animation is a little finicky. Both of them are turned on, so I'm going to turn one of them off. There, they will play back and forth. It's that fast. You are going to click down here and then I'm going to change it to every two seconds. Now if we playback, is a bit slower. This is how I created those textures. It is super simple and you can use any brush you want. You can do as many layers as you want. I'm going to do one more and then hit Play and it is going to play through those. You can always adjust how slow or how fast you want it. I'm going to set up to one second. You can do as many frames as you would like. I typically do about four. When you are happy with it, just a good variation of texture. Go to File, Export and then render video. From here, it is already going to be named Animated Texture. You can select what folder it is going to go in. Then we're going to export as an H.264 file, which is just an MP4 file, high-quality, and you just click "Render". Then from there you will have a rendered out video of this texture that you can then loop and apply to your animations in After Effects. That's how I create an animated texture. You can bring this into After Effects and then sequence it and change how fast it plays, how much it plays, all that fun stuff. You can use any brush with it like I said. Feel free to make your own textures or you can use the ones that I have provided in the project resources. I hope this was super helpful and I will see you in the next lesson where we are going to hop back in to After Effects, and we are going to animate our custom veil using masks. I will see you in the next lesson. 10. Creating Custom Masks: Now that our design has a little bit more fun and it's starting to look great with all of our textures, we're going to be revealing what's inside of our object using a custom mask, so let's go ahead and get started. Now that we have our effects and textures setup, we need to do the grand reveal of what's inside the object and we're actually going to do that by creating a custom mask. There's a couple ways to create what your mask will look like, I'm going to be using the Pen tool to create a custom mask, but I'm going to show you how you can do it using the shape feature in After Effects. You want to make sure that suitcase is selected and we're going to go over, and I'm going to hold down on my tool and click, "Ellipse Tool." If I pull an ellipse while I'm selected on our suitcase layer, it's going to create a mask. Mask simply block or reveal what you'd like it to show. For this one, the circle is only showing us what's inside the circle, so it's blocking out everything around the circle. You can imagine like this is completely blocked out and then only the circle, so it's like a window. If I click, "Inverted" then it's like you're in the house and then you can see through the window. You can create a custom mask using a circle and to animate that would be the same way that I'm going to show you how to animate the custom mask. But you're just going to click "Mask Path" move over, and then hit V for our selection tool and then you can move the mask. You can put your circle wherever you want to do a reveal, but this is how you animate it using key frames. I'm going to show you how to create a custom mask using the Pen tool. I'm going to make sure our suitcase is selected. We're going to grab our pin tool by clicking the toolbar or selecting it with G, then we're going to draw our mask. What I'm going to do, is I'm going to draw the center point. I want this to melt like a popsicle since it is beach clothes inside and this reminds me like sunny, it's hinting or foreshadowing to what is inside the suitcase. I'm going to pull a nice smooth line, like we learned how to do in our Pen tool lesson, and then close off the path. Boom, it's already starting to reveal. Before we begin animating our custom mask, I wanted to quickly go over keyframing. A key is a location on a timeline that marks the beginning or end of a transition. To create a keyframe, you're going to open up any property you wish to animate and hit the, stopwatch. What that's going to do, it's going to create a linear keyframe. This just means that there's no easing involved, it's just going to create a very mechanical movement from one point that you set to the endpoint that you set. Now when you're selected on a linear keyframe and you hit, "F9" it'll create a Bezier keyframe. What this is going to do is it's going to create fast and slow movement at the start and stop of your animation. Let's go ahead and dive back into animating or custom mask, so you can see how these keyframes work in real-time. To animate this path, we're going to drop down our mask menu, hit our stopwatch, I'm going to drag this over a little bit because this is our midpoint. Everything you learned in the Pen tool lesson is going to directly apply here. I'm going to hit, "V" then I'm going to select my points and I'm going to drag this so that the mask is completely hiding the whole object. Then I'm going to go over a little bit and I'm going to pull down so that the mask is now revealing the object. Now our path is animated. If I press the spacebar to play, it's going to reveal what's inside. You can do this opposite so that it's showing the suitcase first, but I'm going to show you why did it this way. I want this to loop back and forth, so it's showing the whole suitcase and then what's inside, and it's just going to endlessly loop that way. I'm going to adjust our keyframes and hit, "F9", play that through. If you'll notice it's a little choppy, some I'm actually going to delete this middle keyframe. I used it to get us started, so I knew what shape I would get, but After Effects does this thing called tweening. It's going to guess the frames in the middle. I already have this wavy shape, so it's going to continue that wavy shape as it finishes out the animation. I'm going to delete this middle one, you'll see, it's really fast, but a lot smoother. I'll move this over. Boom, we have our reveal. Then I'm going to select both of these by clicking and dragging, hit "Command" or "Control Z" move over here, hit "Command" or "Control V" and then I'm going to move these opposite to each other. What that's going to do is it's going to loop the animations. I'll play right now, it'll cover it up and then it'll reveal, cover it up and then reveal. You can play with the timing of this. I'll show you what my final timing looks like, but again, using F9 to easy, easier keyframes and then just placing them opposite of each other so it will loop continuously. This is the final mask animation that I came up with, I switch it around so that it starts as a full suitcase, reveals what's inside and then reveals a full suitcase again. Now if you'll notice, I also made our shadow go away because it didn't quite make sense for the shadow to be there when our object wasn't there. To do that, all I did was go to our shadow, I used the Pan Behind, Anchor Point Tool, you can hit "Y" to get there. I moved the anchor point to right below the suitcase, you see right here? That's where the anchor point is. Then all I did was scale the circle to full percent, 100 percent then to zero, then back to full and then zero again. So it loops with our animation and makes it go away. But I thought that looked really nice, so we didn't just have a floating circle on the bottom. Now that we have our custom reveal animation using masks, I'm going to show you how to add a couple little final touches, like some animation inside of your object, as well as just a couple of little illustrative extras that you can add to bring your whole project to life. I'll see you in the next lesson. 11. Final Touches: Because you're almost done so congratulations for making it this far. I'm going to show you a couple of little extra fun tips to help bring your animation even more to life. If you'll notice in my animation, when it reveals what's inside, the little crab close his little hands and then the sand moves around and the seashells turn. I'm going to show you how I did those effects. Super easy. To get started, you're going to open your pre comp that has all of your objects inside. You'll notice it's on a black background and that's because there is no background. This is basically like a PNG, which means that the background is just transparent. To animate this, all I did is look at all of the objects that I knew I wanted to animate. The first thing I start with is the shell. I have the shell outline as well as the shell details, and those are separate shape layers. What I did to make sure that they moved together is I used this tool called pick whip, which is going to parent the other objects to another. If I'm pulling it from this one and dropping it on the shell, that means that shell details is now parented to shell_2. You'll see right here, parent or link, it's going to say, you can use this drop-down as well. I just like doing a little pick whip because if you don't set it on anything it actually rolls backup, it's cute. I have those parented and then I used Y to select the pin behind anchored tool. I set the anchor point to the mid part of the shell. Then I just hit R to set rotation key frames on the shell. Again, super simple, all I did was rotate it slightly and then back and then back again. That's just going to create a subtle animation and then I used F9 to make those key frames super smooth. I did the same thing with shell_1. Now for the crab, I actually separated his little hands, I call them pinches. If you'll notice, these are just shape layers. We went over how I created these. These are just using the pen tool in After Effects. What that means is that we can actually animate the path. If I open up the mask, there's two shapes in here. I have shape 3, which is this pincher, and then shaped 2, which is this pincher. If it's easier for you, you can hit "Enter" and rename that. You can name it like left pinchy. I'm just going to leave it as shapes because I have the main object labeled and when you click on them, it'll actually highlight it, so I knew which one was which. Then all I did from here is I just animated the path. This took a little bit more playing with. This is the standard where it sits open. Then when I pull over, this is it closing. To do that, all I did was set this key frame by hitting the stopwatch, move it over to where I wanted it to close, then I selected V to select my selection tool, and I clicked on the path and I moved it. This is super simple because I only needed it to open and close. Once I made this close animation, all I had to do was copy key frames. I selected and copied the open key frame, then I selected and copied the close key frame, and then open again. That's all there is to it, it is just moving the path, so the little crab pinches will open and close. Then lastly, I took the sand, it was all in one layer. What I did is I went over to Effects. I just added a simple wave work to the sound and adjusted the height and the width to give it just a little bit of animation. Then when I go back to our main comp, you'll notice that you see everything moving. It just adds a bit of cuteness and some secondary animation to bring your viewers in so they get a little bit more interested in what's inside of the object, so you're not just revealing a static image. Last but not least, I created these little stars. Creating the stars is using the same principles that I used for the mask. All they are is they're set to start and then they're set to end, and it's just copied and pasted, and then I just played with the position of them. It's super simple. I'll show you really quick how I made them. To make a star, you're going to select the ellipse tool, and make sure you're not selected on any layer. You're going to pull a small little star, and then we're going to go into Add, Pucker and Bloat. Then from this drop-down we're just going to change the amount. If you look, that creates a cute little star. Then all I did was use the stopwatch, and F9 to easy ease, to create the little star moving. My little stars move a bit faster and again, just play with it, experiment and have fun. The last element which I knew I had to throw in was the trim paths. This is just creating lines, just like we did in the pen tool lesson. I created little lines here. If you haven't taken my other skill share class, trim paths are simply animating the start and end of a line. If I open this up, you'll see that it's set to end, and all that's doing is bringing in the lines to their end point, and it looks like they disappear, and then animating them back out. All you have to do to get the trim path affect of a popping little sparkle or excitement lines. I call them gay lines because it's very yay. You're going to collect G to open up the pen tool. We're going to create a line and make sure it's set as stroke not fill. Then you're going to go in to your line shape, as we learned in the pen tool lesson, you can create multiple lines or shapes on the same layer. I'm just going to go down and I'm going to hit "Add" and then "Trim Paths" From this drop-down, I can animate the start and end point. The start or end will depend on the set first vertex. If you'll see when I'm selected here, there's this little circle, and it's hard to see, but that's set as the first vertex. You can just play with the way it starts and ends to see where the first vertex is. It's just like the Pucker and Bloat. You just going to hit "Key frame" bring the key frame down, and then pull, and then you're just going to copy and paste that. F9 easy, ease, and there you're using trim paths. Feel free to share your progress along the way, if you need help at all or if you just like some feedback. I'm really excited to see what you've created. Now it's time to render it out so we can share it with the world. I'll see you in the next lesson. 12. Quick Render: Congratulations. You did it. You created an object animation. I am so excited to see it. Let's go ahead and go over how to render it out. Now that you're ready to render, you are just going to make sure that you've selected on the composition that you want to render and that you've set your work area to the length that you want to render. Mine is at four seconds. I'm going to go to File, Export, Add to Adobe Media Encoder Queue. If for some reason you don't have Adobe Media Encoder, it's okay. I'm going to show you how to quickly render in After Effects, but it should come downloaded with After Effects, so if it's not, then you can open up your Creative Cloud app and you should be able to download it if you've paid for After Effects. It's going to pop open its little project panel, then we're going to click on the first little icon that's highlighted blue, and it's going to open this up. It should say, Source Range, Work Area. I'm going to be formatting mine to an H.264, and what that is, is just an MP4 file, which is a standard file. You'll see it'll say.mp4 and if you click "Output Name", it's going to create this folder. It's going to be the name of your project and then AME, which just stands for Adobe Media Encoder. I'm going to keep mine in there, hit "Save". This does not have any audio, so I'm going to uncheck audio, so it's not even trying to render any. Then all I'm going to do is click "Use Maximum Render Quality". Then you just have to hit the little "Play" button and you'll see it render out. For some reason you don't have Adobe Media Encoder or you just want to render [inaudible] After Effects, all you have to do is go to File, Export, Add to Render Queue. Once it opens up this little panel, you're just going to hit "Output Module Lossless". Go ahead and click that. This is going to be all of your settings that we just had in Adobe Media Encoder. After Effects can't render an MP4 file. The reason I like MP4 files, is they're more compressed, so they work better for posting on social media or if you need to send it to an e-mail or put it on a website. AVI will work just fine, it's just going to be a larger file type. All of this is correct, it should be correct, you shouldn't have to click anything on here, but just in case, this is what mine looks like, and then you're just going to hit "Okay". Then where it says Output 2, you're going to click and make sure this one isn't going to create a folder for you. You want to make sure you're in your project, and then you can even make a little folder, and name it Renders, and then save it into there. Then all you have to do is hit "Render". Now that you have a rendered out video, go ahead and pop it in the project gallery for myself and other students to see it. I'm so excited to see what you came up with. 13. Final Thoughts: Congratulations on finishing your project. Make sure that you share it in the Project Gallery so that myself and everyone else can see it. During this class, we learned how to sketch out a design and digitally scan it in, trace a design using the "Pen" tool in After Effects, add and create animated effects and textures, create a custom mask, and render out of video. Now you know how easy it is to go from sketch to digitally animated illustration in After Effects. I hope you'll be able to apply the skills that you've learned in this class on your next animation projects. There are endless ways to use the "Pen" tool and masks. Make sure you're having fun with it in experimenting with every new animation you create. If there's one thing I hope you took from this class, is that you can turn any of your sketches into a digital animation using the "Pen" tool. I'm so glad I got to show you that animation doesn't have to be intimidating. I can't wait to see what you created. Be sure to share in the project gallery. If you happen to post it on Instagram, I'd love for you to tag me so that I can share it. If you like the class, I'd love for you to leave a review and follow me for more. I'll see you in the next class. Bye.