Beginners Guide to Creating A Hand Drawn Animation Style in Adobe After Effects

1. Introduction: Hand-drawn animation looks amazing, but it takes a very long time. So sometimes we need to take some shortcuts to speed things up. Hello, I'm Russ encourage. And today we're gonna be doing some hand-drawn animation, but without drawing a single line. And for this, we're gonna be using After Effects. I'm a freelance animator and director based in Brighton in the UK. I've worked professionally for over ten years in animation, producing visual effects, motion design, 2D and 3D character animation. I get asked quite often to animate something in After Effects and then make it look drawn. Whether that's because it needs to sit alongside something that's already been drawn, or whether there's no time to do it properly. Either way is super useful to learn how to do this effect. This class will be great for both hand-drawn animators who are looking to add a little bit of after effects to their main work. Or after effects animators who are looking to work alongside their hand-drawn colleagues. I'll be taking you through step-by-step. So this class will be suitable for beginners or people who aren't very familiar with After Effects. To give you a quick idea of what we'll be covering. First, we'll be looking at different illustration styles that will work in After Effects. So whether it's coming from Photoshop, Illustrator, or maybe even a real life drawing. We'll be looking at prepping and importing those illustrations into After Effects. We'll then be looking at rebuilding those illustrations inside After Effects so that they're easier to animate. I'll then take you through the main methods that I use to recreate a wide variety of drawn effects. And finally, a few animation techniques that will help tie it all together, plus tons of extra tips and tricks along the way. I hope that once you've completed this course, you'll not only have the knowledge to create a nice drone effect in After Effects, but you'll also know which affects you use in which situations. So let's get drawing or fake. 2. Class Overview: So welcome to my class in creating a hand-drawn style in After Effects. To some of the main objective of this class is we basically want to keep all the benefits of animating digitally. So that's like the speed and the convenience. And we're going to use some effects and techniques in After Effects to bring back some of that charm that you get from something that's more handmade. In this class, you're going to need access to a couple of Adobe programs we're mainly going to be working in After Effects to create the final animation, but we're gonna be using a lot of Photoshop. So I would recommend having access to Photoshop as well. And we're going to touch on illustrated two is not essential, but if you work in Illustrator, then I'll be talking about that as well. It's quite tricky because there's such a range of illustration styles out there. So I'm going to try my best to cover what I think would be the most common ways of working. But if I'm missing anything, then please don't hesitate to give me a shout. You might be working from flattened artwork or from a scan on paper or something like that. If that's the case, then it's possible to go straight into After Effects, but it's still useful to have access to Photoshop to be able to recreate textures and maybe edit your artwork before bringing it into After Effects, I'd still recommend access to Photoshop in that case, like I said in the intro, this class will be useful for a whole range of reasons. But primarily it's for if you don't have time to animate something by hand. But it's also useful if you need to match something in After Effects to an illustration style. So if that's the case, then this class is for you. I'd highly recommend you making your own illustrations and I'm gonna be taking you through different ways of prepping it later on in the class. If you're not much of a designer, then collaboration is always an option, but please get permission before you use someone else's artwork. Artists are quite often up for animators animating the artwork because it's quite a fun thing to do. And then if you're both going to share it on your social media platforms, then it's a win-win situation anyway, later on in the class, I'm gonna be prepping an animating my own image. And I'm gonna be collaborating with the amazing illustrator Dorothy Siemens for this one. This is her image here. If you don't know her work, she goes by at Dorothy.com or on Instagram. She also has an Etsy shop. So go and buy all her beautiful things there. I won't be supplying Dorothy's original files. I'd highly recommend you sourcing your own, but I have got a test illustration that I made that comes in a couple of different formats and that's available in the class materials. As with anything in animation, things can get quite complicated very quickly. We're not going to be covering any character animation or reading techniques in this class. We're gonna be mainly focusing on the drawn effects. There is a character in the illustration that I've chosen, but I'm gonna be keeping things quiet ambient. Just very slow movements, a little bit of hand movement and blinks or something like that. I'd recommend you do the same if you're not used to animation in After Effects, I will be doing a dedicated animation in After Effects class at some point later down the line. So keep your eyes peeled for that. So with all that the way, Let's have a quick rundown of what we'll be covering in the class. First, we're gonna be talking about some common animation terminology that you get in hand-drawn animation. These are the key principles that we're going to be recreating in After Effects. Then we'll have a look at a lot of different examples of illustration styles. And I'll be taking you through what will work well enough defects and what will be a lot more challenging. After that, I wanted to share with you a couple of real-world examples where I've actually used these joint effects on a project. Then we'll be looking at how to prep and import artwork that's come from Illustrator, Photoshop, and also flattened artwork. When I say flattened artwork, I mean artwork that doesn't come with any layers. It's just a flattened JPEG or PNG. If you work in Procreate, then I believe you can just save your file as a PSD and then the Photoshop workflow would apply to you. We'll also set up our after-effects projects so it's all ready to go. And then after that, we're gonna be making an animated boiling texture in Photoshop that we can apply it to the rest of our animation in After Effects. We'll then look at how we can apply that animated texture to layers and after effects so we can start bringing our illustrations to life. We'll also be looking at a few other effects in After Effects to give it that final boost. I also have a lesson filled with tips and tricks for you to keep in mind when you're building your image. And finally, there'll be a lesson on animation techniques to keep in mind when you're actually making your images move. But once again, this is not a full After Effects animation class is more just animation techniques that are gonna be useful to enhance the drawn style. Also make sure you watch to the end of each lesson because I'm gonna be setting you some assignments that are going to prepare you for the next lesson. Hopefully the plan is all nice and clear. In the next lesson we're gonna be talking about some common animation terminology that's gonna be useful when we're recreating a handmade effect in After Effects. So I'll see you there. 3. Useful Class Terminology: I think this is a good point to bring up some bits of animation terminology before we get to the practical stuff so that we're all on the same page. If you're already familiar with these animation concepts, then feel free to just skip ahead. But I think it would be useful to cover it because we're gonna be trying to recreate handmade things digitally. So I think it's gonna be really useful just to nail down those concepts and trying to understand what they really are. These are essentially the main areas that we're gonna be trying to mimic digitally to give everything a handmade feel. I'd like to start by what's commonly referred to as boiling because videos are made up of many frames a second, anything that moves slightly randomly, every single frame will jiggle around, kind of like boiling water, hence the name. For example, if you were to draw the same frame of animation over and over again. And let's say some cheese because you're human and imperfect. So let me then, you'll be drawing it slightly different each time. And these slight variations in the frame will mean that when you play it back, the line will have a slight wobbling effect. And in animation this is called boiling. You can get boiling effects by animating textures or anything that changes per frame. Anything that's got a little bit of randomness. So that has some kind of jiggle. This is a really useful tool when you're trying to give things a handmade feel. It's good for making things feel a little bit more alive. Like they have some kind of movement to them. When you're working digitally is something that's going to have to be added in deliberately. So it's something that comes naturally when you're working with analog formats like hand-drawn or stop motion. But when you're working digitally, you will have to deliberately add that back in because the computer will just redraw the frame perfectly yellow is. The next thing I'd like to talk about, which I think people often find confusing, is referring to animation being on twos, hand-drawn animation, particularly traditional hand-drawn animation that's drawn on paper. It takes a long time obviously. And video normally runs at 2425 or 30 frames per second. Those are the, kinda the most common frame rates. So drawing that many frames for however many minutes of animation is obviously going to be a lot of frames. So an easy way to save time is obviously to reduce the frame rate. So quite often let's say you're working at 24 frames a second. You could cut that in half and work at 12 frames a second. So you're only drawing 12 frames for every second of animation. But obviously when you play 12 frames a second at 24 frames per second, because that's, for example, in cinemas, they want to project the films all at the same frame rate. So everybody sticks to 24 frames a second. So if you've drawn it at 12 times a second, when you run that at 24 frames a second, it's gonna be running too fast. So the way people do it is they duplicate every frame into two frames. So you draw one frame and then duplicate that frame. And then you draw the next frame and then you duplicate that frame. So it's two frames for every frame. And that's called being on twos. This is why hand-drawn animation often has that stuttering feeling. And we're actually programmed to see 12 frames per second is a bit more of a handmade thing as a result, but the same goes for threes or fours. It's the same term. It means Friends for every frame, four frames for every fame and so on. Then the higher the number, obviously the more stuttering is gonna be. There's an effect, very simple effect that we'll be using in After Effects called posterize time, which lets you change the frame rate of a comp or even just have a single layer. I'd also like to quickly mention strokes and fills which are a little bit more self-explanatory, but still worth mentioning here I think I'm gonna be using the term strokes to describe any kind of line or pencil line or something like that. In the illustration. We're going to be recreating that in After Effects, just using strokes on Shape layers. So you have a path in After Effects and then you can apply a stroke effect to that, which just basically draws a line along the path. Will that be adding textures and effects in After Effects to try and match the stroke style and the original artwork. Fills, on the other hand are anything that's basically not stroke. This could be a shape with a single block color, or it could be a surface with a texture, or it could be a gradient, or it could be a bit of shading. Anything that's going to have some kind of color applied to it and covers more area than just the line. Basically, any kind of fill that needs animating in your illustration will be recreating those with shape layers as well. And After Effects, it will just be a closed path shape with a filled color inside it. And then we'll be applying textures and effects to those as well. Amazing. So now that some of these animation concepts are a little bit clearer, I think it's a good time to have a look at some artwork that we might want to animate. In the next lesson, I've gathered a bunch of different illustrations with a range of different art styles that we can look at. And then we can discuss what will work and what won't work so well when we're trying to animate in After Effects. I'll see you there. 4. Should I use AE to Animate My Illustration?: Welcome back. In this lesson, we're gonna be looking at different types of artwork styles. And then we're gonna be talking about what works well when you're animating in After Effects and what would be a little bit more challenging. At this point, I'd also like to lay down a little bit of theory, I guess, in terms of when you're mixing handmade animation with digital animation. Because if it's done badly, it can go pretty wrong. The main question you need to be asking yourself, really with all of these images, is, would it be better in artifacts, or should you just do it by hand? Hand-drawn animation takes a long time for sure, but there's some things that are actually just really difficult to replicate in After Effects. So it comes down to really what needs to be animating how it's moving and for how long as well. The main thing that After Effects allows you to do is set up the thing that you're going to be animating the character of the bowl of fruit or whatever. Then once it's set up, you can animate it more easily for a longer length of time. It might actually take way longer in After Effects to get to that first finished frame of animation. Once you've done all your effects and rigging, it would have been quicker to have just drawn that single frame. But then animating ten seconds of that thing in after effects would be lightning fast comparing to draw in every single frame by hand. On the other hand, if the shot you need to animate is really short, and let's say it's 25 frames have some really complicated character animation. It might be way quicker to us to draw the whole thing by hand rather than set, set it up in After Effects, you would be finished already by the time you even get to the first frame and after effects. So some careful consideration about what you're going to be animating is required. Okay, So I'm just gonna, to these pictures that I've just selected from people I follow on Instagram basically and just talk about how suitable they are for animating in After Effects. And also which bits would be difficult, which bits would be easy, and whether it would be better to do things hand-drawn or an After Effects using after-effects techniques. So let's quickly go through these and have a quick chat about it. So yeah, this is from foreign place studio. These are guys I've actually worked with their local to where I live in my part of the UK. And I'm very talented bunch of animators. It would be perfect for animating in After Effects. It'd be kind of difficult to get this pose, this particular pose of this character, the body is totally fine, but maybe the feet are difficult. The main thing that's difficult enough to fix is changing of perspectives. Like if you're doing some kind of 3D rotation, that kind of thing. Obviously, it's easy in 3D animation, and it's also easy in drawn animation because you just draw the rotation. It might not be a 100% perfect when you're doing a drawn, but this is something that's kind of difficult enough to fix. So around here by the feet, the character will probably be standing at some point and then doing this very dynamic pose into a flip. So you could switch the feet out on a certain frame to this particular artwork. But smooth rotations and rotating these in three-dimensions would be kind of tricky, but doable. Rest of this character completely lends itself to vector animation. You'd probably have to recreate the arms and the legs, somehow upstrokes mainly. And then you'd probably have to add in these extra lines on top afterwards as another layer. But you can attach it with nulls, that kind of thing. You might want to add this wavy hair in afterwards, drawn on top of your After Effects animation. The same with these trouser legs. I mean, there could be a shape just on top, but if you want them to actually flop around, then that's another level of difficulty in doing it in After Effects. It's probably easier to draw these on top. Basically, what I'm trying to get at is when you start using shape layers and After Effects and you're changing the shape frame-by-frame. You might as well just be drawing these lines perfectly easy to do. This character looks perfect for After Effects. If he's just standing there, feet lock to the ground and you're just bending his legs and leaning back and making his arms go up in the air. And this is really nice. The difficult thing is actually these lines on top, these extra detail lines, these ones are quite tricky because they wouldn't really be part of the character rig there. But again, this is still quite a complicated one because you'd have to break the character. You'd really need to do some artifacts, character rigging, but the actual effect of making your aftereffect stuff match this drawn style. Super easy. You just need to do a little bit of distortion on the strokes, a little bit of distortion on the edge of your shape layers. No problem with this one. This one is by test Smith's robots. Really amazing illustrator that I follow. This is another perfect example of animating in After Effects would be perfect because you kind of have to imagine what animation you'd be doing on this one. I guess it's a bunch of strawberry sort of jumping around or maybe even looking around, looking at each other, that kind of thing. Definitely blinking and moving their faces around. That kind of stuff is super easy. You just use some shape layers, some strokes for the faces, shape players for the outside of the head. Ideally, if this was made using Illustrator, then you can just import your Illustrator file into After Effects. You might, if these were outlined shapes, you'd have to redo them as strokes so that they're easier to animate. A really lovely piece by Nando von ARB. This one would be great for artifacts as well. The only tricky bits would be getting these shading, which you could easily do with some kind of dancing dissolve or maybe some noise and gradients. This looks like it's all drawn on one layer. I don't know how it's actually been made. It could even be on paper. I'm guessing this is Photoshop. You'd have to just redraw the obviously just comes in as shape layers that you could probably just make one raindrop and then animate that, and maybe a few small ones, big ones here the math could be shaped. Players just make different layers. So this one would be really easy to do in After Effects. Anything that looks, anything that looks vector at all, that any kind of vector style, anything that's solid color with strokes, very easy to do. The only thing that would be difficult here is maybe like rotation on the head, because this has quite a detailed face. Making a turn wouldn't be so difficult, but making It turned all the way around, would be very difficult to show what's happening. Maybe it's just running into his head and out of his nose. I mean, this one is just straight up Illustrator and it's crazy neon radioactive drawing by inky Wang looks super digitals, super vectoring, bringing these into After Effects is absolutely no problem. I mean, you could just import your Illustrator file. You'd have to prep your Illustrator file probably because you need to split the Illustrator file up into layers depending on what you're actually going to animate. But you could definitely do strokes for legs. If they're all walking, they're all kinda look like they're more or less static looking at the camera, the arms aren't even attached to their bodies, which makes things really easy. You can just put a rotation on these, Yeah, obviously, this one is very, very easy to animate in After Effects. So this is an unknown artist. I got this virus, instagram repost. The siphon that this looks like is from Star Wars. That's not inspiration for C3PO. I don't know what it is. Okay, so now we're getting into territory which is gonna be much more difficult. So I wanted to throw in some examples of where it's going to be nearly impossible. I mean, you can animate in After Effects. You can animate this enough for x, but isn't gonna be good. Is it going to look good? Is your animation style going to match the illustration style? Because to me, this looks like it needs to be either done very, very carefully, very minimal animation, either step frame, slowly. I've chosen this one because you could potentially animate it, because what's happening in the scene isn't very dynamic. They're just standing there, this guy sitting here. You could do a very subtle move on his tie. You can have in maybe blinking, moving his hand, very subtle, that kind of thing. You wouldn't want to do anything more than that. You could definitely do some animation on the background and these science equipment, these beakers and stuff, these test tubes and beakers. That might be quite nice. A little bit of glow coming through the window. Obviously, you could animate this grain. You can make it look like it was maybe a film stock or something. You wouldn't want to go too crazy on that. Otherwise, the whole thing would just be like it would just be fizzing with noise. So you want to keep that subtler would say, but yeah, I don't know in terms of animating this, you could animate his arm a little bit. But if you start making puppets out of these kind of very highly detailed arms, they just look like puppets that she could outline all these lines and then keep the texture underneath. It would be tons of work. It would be an absolute ton of work. You could do a very subtle move and very low frame rate and have all the lights beeping and have tons of movement going on in this robot part, that would be pretty fun. But in terms of doing any actual character animation, character movements, you're going to keep it really minimal. Otherwise it's going to start looking really not good. Basically. I think someone could probably animate this in a very nice way, but yeah, you'd have to be quite limited. You'd have to be careful how you animate it. Basically. Here's another painting that I thought would be good to share because this one is looking a bit more Vector3. So there's definitely some movement you could do on this. I mean, there's no characters in it for a start, so that makes things a bit easier. I don't know exactly what animation you'd like to be doing. Maybe a camera move, you could be panning across all the perspective and this has really forced. So you could get away with some pretty Slidy things moving around with a bit of parallax, you'd have to just keep these textures inside shapes. So if you are distorting the shapes, you'd have to keep these textures in there because there was no real way to recreate this using After Effects. You'd have to maybe extend them with Photoshop a bit, which is totally possible. And then you can use masks in After Effects to reveal your textures, Photoshop textures. You could potentially have the oranges dropping down into the bowl, that kind of thing. And the bowl rocking back and forth as they land in with a nice movement. You might be a bit hard push to find things to animate in there, but it's definitely possible. This is a B by Ben Marriott. Here's one that I thought it's quite good to share because it's another one that looks kinda directory with very painterly shading. So you could definitely do some really nice boiling effects on these parts of the painting to bring it to life. You could definitely animate this flame, probably hand-drawn flames and much easier than doing it in vectors. You want that wobbly jamminess, that hand-drawn fire gives you. Especially on a drawing like this, where everything is quite loose and wobbly anyway, these wings you could definitely do doing shape layers with a bit of boiling texture in the middle, you can have those wings flapping and buzzing away. Painted Pont part boiling noise that you could do in After Effects. You could definitely animate this pretty nicely using layers of effects and boiling textures. I think this drawing by Julie, It's really nice. It's such a lovely, that naive, childlike sketch, but it's just so pleasing. The colors are so nice. The amount of movement in that scribbling drawing style that she's got it. So nice. You could do this very easily hand-drawn because you can just do it super loose. So you could be doing all these scribbles by hand in Photoshop and just do it all frame-by-frame. That would work perfectly nice. I'm trying to think of the benefit of doing it in After Effects. You could do it in After Effects. You'd need to do a lot of work to get these strokes looking like pencil strokes like they do here. If you just needed to do one shot like this, in Photoshop would be the way to go, I think. But you could do this in After Effects to, if it, for example, if it needed to be really long shot, if you needed this character, be walking through this forest for awhile to step over rocks and to do loads of different acting. And you didn't have the time or budget to do hand-drawn animation on this one, then I think after effects would be the way to go this character, the style of this character you can rig in After Effects pretty easily. You could do things like animating the hair. And then all you have to do is animate a boiling version of all these textures and just kinda track them into your after-effects rig. You could have all these trees running on five frame boils that you can just draw in Photoshop and then you can use them dotted around randomly in the scene. And you could make a bunch of different scribbly boiling textures in Photoshop. The men and the same with the sun. And then you can composite the whole thing in after effects and it would be it would definitely be faster. I don't know if it would be so fast that it would be worth completely doing an after effects depending on the length of the shot, you could definitely save time. If it was a long shot, it would be much quicker in After Effects. A quick note when deciding how to animate something is that the animation style tends to need to match the illustration style. So if your illustration is made out of paper cutouts, then the animation needs to be animated in a way that paper cutouts would be able to animate. So paper doesn't tend to bend in a certain way. So if you start bending it, which you can do digitally, then it's not really going to look like a paper cut out anymore. Maybe it sounds obvious, but there are lots of animation examples out there where someone's put quite digital effects on something that's been handmade like particle effects, flames or motion blur is a really common one. If you're adding that on top of something that's supposed to feel handmade, then the two styles don't normally gel very well. I'm not saying that it can't work, but quite often, adding those effects takes away from the original illustration style on the same point, talking about characters more specifically, if characters have realistic proportions. So if the characters have been designed in a way that looks more like a human rather than a cartoon character. Then those characters need to be animated in a bit more of a realistic way as well. Otherwise, it will look a bit weird. If you think about Japanese animation. Quite often the characters are designed in a very realistic way. So the animation kind of matches that respect in terms of they move in a bit more of a realistic way. I'm not saying that it's a rule that can't be broken because obviously rules are there to be broken and especially in terms of art. But generally, it looks a little bit, it makes it a little bit more sense when things move the way they look like they should move. Obviously with stylized characters and cartoony characters that can move in a bit more of a unrealistic or exaggerated way. So it's a good idea to keep all these points in mind when you're approaching your animation. Great. So hopefully we have a little bit of a better idea of how After Effects and help get something moving compared to doing it by hand. Let's quickly recap the main points that we covered. So artifacts may be slower at setting up that first frame of animation of especially after you've done all your reading and effects. But once you've set it up, then it will be much faster to actually animate that thing. You should generally makes sure that your animation style is going to match your illustration style. So if you have realistic characterization, move in a realistic way. And the opposite is true for stylized characters. It's a good idea to consider what's going to boil in the scene. What lines you're going to have to be remaking. Other line is going to be boiling or the texture is gonna be boiling, that kind of thing. So it's a good idea to have a think about what's gonna be moving and how much of the image you're going to have to remake to make those things move. Have a think about the parts of the image that are gonna be left handmade. So if you're working with something that's painted, then that's gonna be a bit more difficult to recreate an after effects. Lots of gradients, lots of detail, that kind of thing. If you're gonna be working with that and then you're gonna be putting animated shape layers on top, how those things mixed together, and what kind of effects are you going to have to do digitally to get it to look like that, that it lives in the world of the illustration. So it's a good idea to start gathering the textures and the things that you're gonna be using to make your vectors that you're gonna be animating in After Effects look like the original illustrations. Great, so let's have a little break there. Eventually I'm gonna get you to go and find your illustration. That's gonna be one of the assignments and these lessons. But before you start doing that, I think it would be a good idea to watch the next lesson where I just wanted to share a couple of animation projects that I've worked on where we had to match a drawn illustration style and we animated the whole thing in after effects. I'll be talking a little bit about our process on those projects and how we achieved the drone effect. So I'll see you in the next lesson. 5. Examples Of Drawn Style Animation: Okay, one more short theory type class. Before we actually get to the practical stuff. I wanted to quickly share a couple of real-world examples where I use the techniques that I'm teaching in this class to achieve a handmade look on digital artifacts animation. Let's just have a quick look at these two jobs that I worked on. These were two really good examples of taking hand-drawn artwork and animating entirely and after effects. So the first one is chronemics, which I did in 2015. I think while I worked at animated, which is a London-based animation studio. So it was all designed by the creative director there, Ed Barrett. This section of the film was given to a different animator in the studio and they get to direct their own little section, really fun project to work on. Probably one of my most cherished animation memories. The thing with this is that Ed designed it with After Effects animation in mind. So he made it very simple and we had to make a lot of animation. So he kept it super simple to help us so that we have that going for us. Basically, I was tasked with rigging the after-effects characters and making it so that the drawn affect worked. But yeah, maybe you can see, but all the characters are just made out of shape layers. They're just strokes. Animating paths, and strokes in After Effects is pretty easy. We wanted to make it look like this was drawn on paper. We could have gotten really, you can go really, really overboard. So you've got to kind of draw a line at some point between how long you want to be rendering and aftereffects and how simple the rigs are and how heavy it is to work when you're animating and so on and so on. So it's a bit like striking a balance. We came up with a few quite effective ways of making this film more handmade than, than just regular After Effects shaped layers. And one of the key things was keeping in mind that if you're animating on paper, when you're scanning those frames in, for example, the background texture is only going to be changing when characters moving. If there's nothing moving on the screen than the texture of the paper texture that's running through the background isn't going to be changing. You're going to be holding that texture. So I had to, I made a little After Effects expression that randomized the paper texture every time it detected something was moving in the scene. The other thing obviously was making the strokes non-uniform. So getting this random thickness in the strokes was the other key thing that we did. There was quite a few things going on to achieve this effect. The fact that I know that it's done in After Effects, it looks like After Effects to me because the lines are still pretty clean. And if you look really close, if you go up to 100%, you can see that it's not actually paper. You can see that as a patient. And also there are few things that give it away, sometimes with the masking and that kind of thing. But generally, I think we got away with it pretty well. And this other one I worked on more recently with my friends over at o studio. And the animation was headed up by Joe Bichon over there. It was a book trailer for Chris Horton, who is an amazing children's illustrator. And for his new book called maybe, I think he works in Photoshop, either that or he makes things on paper and then cut some out and then bring them into Photoshop. Either way, we had Photoshop, layered Photoshop documents to work with. And he's got these really lovely, kind of chaotic, very loose cutout illustration style. So the animation was always going to be quite step framed. So obviously we just did a bit of parallax animation on all the different layers. And it's on 12 frames a second, I think. And then the characters were purely Reagan After Effects. I think I used cutouts of the heads for the monkeys, but I'm not sure I have a feeling. I just traced it in shape layers so that I could just change them a little bit per monkey. Also, you need to animate the eyes because there's only a few shapes. Sometimes it's just easier to trace it. So you've got it as a shape layer rather than a Photoshop document that you having to mask. And then the bodies, they're just strokes. I think it's six strokes and I think they're all on one layer. So the body that the two arms, two legs, the body and the tail. I think they're all in one shape layer or potentially if I think maybe another shape layer for the front arm. If the arm has to go in front of the head. And then it's just literally six strokes and it's got a massive roughen edges on it. One layer of roughen edges, roughen edges is just a distortion effect and we'll be using a lot is something that you basically have to use all the time if you're going to be making things look like they're hand-drawn and After Effects, There's other ways of achieving this effect, but roughen edges is such a simple one because it's just one effect. And you can put it on any shape player or anything. And it will just give that sort of rough and handmade field to any vector shape, and that's it. So just a few simple shape layers for the character rig and nice step frame animation with a low frame rate and everything feels really handmade. Great. So I hope you found that informative and useful to see how these two, a different illustration styles were made. This using a lot of the same techniques on both of them to achieve different results. See the links in the description below for the full version of both projects. Okay, Your assignment for this lesson is to go and find your artwork that you want to animate. So that could be made by yourself or with a collaborator painted in Photoshop, drawn in Illustrator or pencils and paper, watercolor painting, whatever you do. And I'd like you to keep in mind all the points that we've talked about over the last couple of lessons. Also, it's worth mentioning again that if you're working with an illustration that's not your own, then make sure you get permission first. It's better that way because the artist's original artist is normally totally fine for you to be able to animate it. And then you can both share it on your social media platforms. A couple of tips if you're working in Photoshop or Illustrator, or some kind of layered software that you separate things into as many layers as you can, because it gives you much more flexibility later on. Also, I would say worry more about making a nice picture than making it easy to animate. Because quite often your, as an animator, you're asked to make something on some illustration that you have no control over, they'll just say, can you animate this? So then there's not gonna be much consideration for you as an animator when you get those drawings. But that said, for this lesson, maybe try and keep things fairly simple. It's gonna be a bit of a waste of time if you're trying to follow the lesson and you're really struggling with a very complicated illustration. So because you have control this time, I think it's probably a good idea that once you, once you've understood the fundamentals, then you can go and make a more complicated illustration. But for this one, probably keep it simple if you can. Good luck, and I'll see you in the next lesson where we're gonna be starting to import artwork into After Effects. I'll see you there. 6. Prepping and Importing An Illustrator File: Okay, So we've gone through our fundamentals and looked at different types of illustrations. And we have a bit of a better idea of how we would approach the animation. Over the next few lessons, we'll be looking at how to prep your artwork. So whether it's a digital file that you've got access to the layers like a Photoshop and Illustrator file or a flattened artwork will be looking at how to prep those and how artifacts and puts them in different ways. So I hope you've all done the assignment and you have some artwork that you now want to animate. Whether you've made it yourself or you found a collaborator to work with. For my finished animation, I'm going to work with an Illustrator named Dorothy Seaman. She's great. I would highly recommend going checking out her work. You can see it displayed in background here, and I'll put it on screen for you now. So the next few lessons have been split up into importing from illustrator, then Photoshop, then flattened artwork. And then after that, I'll move on to how I'm prepping Dorothy's picture for animation. I've split it up like this just for easy access. And I know that everybody's at different levels. If you're just a Photoshop artists, or you normally work in Illustrator, or if you just do paintings, but you want to learn after effects, then I'm hoping that each one of these steps is going to help you understand how After Effects takes in different types of artwork because they're all slightly different. For the next three lessons, I'm gonna be using this illustration that I made quickly for myself. I made an illustrator version of Photoshop version and a flattened version. And I've included them in the class materials if you'd like to follow along. Okay, so in this lesson we're going to be looking at how to import from Illustrator. So let's get to it. I think illustrates this is quite a good place to start. I've made this really simple file, which is an example of what you might be working with. One thing to keep in mind is it's probably a lot simpler than something a client or an illustrator who doesn't animate might give you. I've had some real shock has in the past where you just get these huge documents every time there's a million layers and everything's unlabeled and grouped in weird ways. Or there's like tons of hidden stuff that you've done and what you can keep and what you can delete, that kind of thing. Obviously, this doesn't have a hand-drawn style, this is just a vector style, but we'll get to the hand-drawn stuff in a bit. You can do hand-drawn stuff in illustrator, which obviously not going to cover this time. This is a whole different process. So this is just a really simple documents to give you an idea of how to prep stuff for After Effects. So I kind of like an overview of the main steps. The first thing we gotta do is just have a quick look at your layers. So let's have a look at the structure here. If you can't see your layer box, make sure you have it there. Let me just put it over here. It might look like this on the side of your side panel here. You can just click that and that will pop out your layers. And I like to drag it off into a separate box so I can make it as big as I want. If you can't see that if you go to click, if you click on this button up here and go to Essentials Classic, that should make your layout match my layout. Or you can go to Window and click on layers here. And F7 is the shortcut and PC anyway, I'm not sure what it would be on Mac. That's how you get your Layers window. We've got background, then we've got the plant on one layer or the background. And then we've got the shadow for the character and the character on the top layer. So these are the main five layers in this document, and it's obviously been tidied up a bit. These things are layered quite nicely in a useful way, which is good. As just as an example, let's just see what happens if we import this Illustrator file straight into After Effects. They'll switch over to After Effects. And I'm going to go to my project window, and I'm gonna go to File Import, find my Illustrator document, click Import. And then the first thing you're presented with is this input dialog box. And it's asking you how you want to import it and make sure you select composition, select voltage. It will just bring in your Illustrator file as flat as a flattened image, which is not very useful for us. The other options here is you've got the layer size. So I would always go with layer size, but in some cases you might want document size. Basically it's the bounding box for the layer. So sometimes it will make the bounding box really big. That's if you're working with Illustrator layers, but we're going to be mainly changing them into shape layers. So it doesn't really matter for our case, but keep Layer Sizes most useful I think in my situation. So click Okay, and then in here you now have a composition. So let's open that. And it's also made a folder with all the layers of your Illustrator file as separate Illustrator images. So it's flattened the character into one layer, the character's shadow into one layer and so on. You can see the same in your composition down here. So we've got the character, and then here's the shadow and the plants there and the two backgrounds as well. Okay, So this is kinda useful. We can, we can work with this. But the next thing to do, especially for this character, obviously you want all the arms and limbs and different shapes separate. So if you right-click on this and go to Create, create Shapes from Vector Layer, basically what that does is it creates a shape layer are the illustrator layer. And if you open this up, go to Contents is made every shape into a separate group inside this very complicated shape layer. So that's quite useful. I mean, you could just go in there and fish out everything you need. If I were to rig this character, I would remake the arms and legs single strokes anyway with a path for the leg like this, I wouldn't have it as an outline shape that way you can animate it in a bit better way. I'm not going to talk about rigging and stuff too much in this class, but that's how I would approach it. So there's certain things that you're going to want to keep directly from Illustrator, like maybe the head and the hand, that kind of thing. But some things you'll have to remake. That's just the nature of when you working with premade illustrations in After Effects. So I think a little bit of prep in Illustrator before importing to After Effects, it's a good idea. So let's just get rid of this for the moment and do it again. I'm going to select these and just delete them. But let's go back into Illustrator. So basically, as we can, as we saw in After Effects, after Effects sees each layer, root layer in Illustrator as a separate layer. So. What would be really useful is if we had all these character pause, if they were separated into separate layers. But at the moment, you can't you can't bring a path outside its layer has to be contained within a layer. So we need to make a layer out of every single one of these paths. So I'm doing that is really easy. So just make sure everything is de-selected. You don't have anything selected in your Layers or on the scene. So you can just click anywhere to de-select, then click the layer and make sure nothing is locked inside. Make sure all the padlocks or Off. And then click on the menu and go to release, release layers to sequence. What that does is it puts every single path inside that layer into its own layer. Then all you have to do is hold down shift and click on to select all these layers. Just drag it outside the original layer, and then this one will be empty so we can just delete that. So now we've got all of those there. So I'll just go through and do that for every layer that we want broken apart. So let's just take the shadow for the moment. At least layers Release to Layers and then I just move my plant up here, click on the plant and release to layers. Okay, So now, now I've got all my shapes as separate layers. None of them are labeled, but it's the same amount of work to relabel them in after effects. So we might as well do it and after effects unless you're going to share this with other people. And so I'm just saving a new version so that we have the old version. If in case we need to go back to it, Let's go back to After Effects. This time I'm going to do Control I for import. So I'm going to select the Filter Illustrator that I'm working in, Control or Command I on a Mac and import that as a composition. Again, double-click this. And now we've got all of our shapes as separate layers. Now, if we do our trick of doing Create, create Shapes from Vector Layer, we have all of our outlines here for us. We can just delete these ones. A quick tip. If you press the Tilda button on the keyboard, it makes whatever window you're hovering over with the mouse full screen. So your composition or your layers, seeing the layers full screen is really useful if you don't know which one, the button, button that till there is, just type in T, L, D, E button, keyboard into Google. And it will show you which one I'm talking about. So the other one I wanted to show you is a plugin called overlord, which is made by a company called battle ax. So I'm just gonna, what I'm gonna do is I'm just going to delete all these illustrator layers that is brought in here. So I'm just going to delete that. And then I'm going to delete all of us shape layers in here. So we're just left with an empty composition. And I'm gonna go back to Illustrator. And I'm gonna go back to our original one with just the layers. Let's say we didn't explode two layers, all of the shapes, and they were just in this original layer layout is a paid plug-in. So if you've got the budget to buy this plugin, then it's really useful if you're doing a lot of freelance work with Illustrator files is basically an essential tool. I mean, it's not essential, but it does. In certain situations, it speeds up your workflow massively. I go to Window, go to Extensions, and open up overlord. And there's a bunch of different options here which I'm not gonna go into, but they can be super useful in different anchor point things you can do. But the main thing we're gonna look at is I'm pushing to After Effects. You can also pull from aftereffects, which is really cool. You can bring shape layers in from After Effects back into Illustrator. Very handy. So it makes sure you've got your destination selected in After Effects. I'm got this composition open. And I'm just literally going to select everything. So I'm going to select the entire thing. Nothing's locked. And I'm just going to hit Push selection to After Effects. And it switches to After Effects. And then it just rebuild the entire Illustrator document inside After Effects as shape layers and even keeps some of the layer name. So this is much easier to work with. So it's taken a couple of steps out of the input process, which is really useful. I'll go into prepping some of this stuff for animation later on. Amazing. So let's take a little break there and recap the main steps when you're importing artwork from Illustrator. So when importing any layered file really that you're going to be animating in After Effects. It's a good idea to import as composition. So if you import as footage, which is the other option, then it will just come in as a flattened single layer artwork. Be conscious when importing from Illustrator that After Effects will only really see the main layers as separate objects. You can separate them more in After Effects, after you've imported them, but it's a bit of a messy way of doing it. So it's better To do the prep upfront in Illustrator, split those single shapes off into their own separate layers, which I showed you how to do. Then everything will come in a bit more of an easy manageable way in After Effects. Or like I mentioned earlier, you could use this plug-in called overlord, which is by a company named battle ax. That makes some of the steps a lot easier. It's not actually a one button magic plug-in that can go wrong sometimes, so be aware of that. But in certain situations, it's really easy to just click overlord and it will just push everything over to After Effects. In the next lesson, we're gonna be looking at importing artwork from Photoshop into After Effects. So I'll see you there. 7. Prepping and Importing A Photoshop File: Welcome back. We're going to continue our importation journey. And this time we're gonna be looking at how to import a layered Photoshop file into After Effects. Switch to Photoshop. I've got the same image as hand-drawn Photoshop file. So this is a bit, now we're getting into a bit more of that, how to deal with hand-drawn elements. So you've been given this by an illustrator and you've been told to animate it, or maybe you've done it yourself. That's cool to go in here. You've got strokes on that layer, I've got the skin on that layer. That's nice. And all these have the textures embedded in the layer. That's fine. The shadows on a separate layer. So this is really useful. We can definitely work with some of this. Just a quick note is that when you've been given a Photoshop file or if you're working in Photoshop quite a lot, you have a group for a bunch of layers. Maybe this is the character group. If you bring that into After Effects, I won't show you like I did with the illustrate one. But if you bring this into After Effects, it will bring in all the separate layers. So that's fine. But it will bring each folder in as a preComp, will have a Photoshop Composite main composition. And then inside that will be all the loose layers that you have in the root. Then when it sees a folder that will come in to our flex as a precomp. And then you open the pre-comp and inside there will be your layers. So if you don't want to have your document pre-comp in exactly the same way as your Photoshop document, which is probably the case when you're doing illustration is in here. It's very different to working in animation and after effects. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. Like in this particular situation, you probably will have a precomp called character, but I like to make that decision for myself. So I normally just group all the stuff from layers in Photoshop so that they're all just like loose in the flagship document. Because then you can decide for yourself when you're in After Effects, how to organize it. So I hit Save on that. Let's go to over to After Effects and import it. So I'm going to go to my Photoshop folder, hit Control I and import the Photoshop file. And again, we just want composition. Now we have all of our layers in here in Photoshop. This probably applies to all of the different things that you're important. You need to check your image size. So actually, I kinda made it easy for myself that I've done this in HD. So these are all 1920 by 1080. The illustrator one, the Photoshop one, and the flattened one, which we'll be doing next. Once you've created your composition, go to Composition, composition Settings. And that brings up this window. And then you can change the size of this. So if your image sizes too big, like if it's something large, which illustrations tend to be because then normally made for printing out big. Obviously we want to work at something that's more reasonable in After Effects. If you're working, you can be working really big, obviously like for k as totally normal format now, but it's still not really used that much. Hd is still the most common format that you'll find. Common size. So if your image sizes way bigger than, I would recommend setting your, either your width to 1920 or your height to 1920 because you could be working in portrait or landscape After Effects goes really slow when you're working with huge image sizes just quickly. I probably, I think I mentioned it before, but if you work in Procreate, procreate can save files as a PSD, which is a Photoshop format. And you can also open those in Photoshop. So if you're working in Procreate, which a lot of people do nowadays than people who don't know what it is. It's a really common drawing app on the iPad. So if you are working in Procreate, then you can just follow the Photoshop workflow if you want to import stuff into After Effects. So just a quick, quickly talk about how we would approach the animation on this. The character. I'm afraid you're pretty much going to have to remake this blaze completely and it means tracing over it. There's no real way to automatically do this unless you, unless this was originally done in Illustrator, you just can't make shapes out of this. You might want to go through the whole process of outlining this using the automated illustrated stuff but using trace or whatever live trace. But personally, this shape is quite simple. Even then with the Illustrator outlined. If you manage that, automatically outline this in Illustrator, you'd still have to redo some of it using different techniques in After Effects to be able to animate it so I wouldn't bother, or it just rebuild it. Read the character how you want to break and just use this as a guide for the plan. You can probably reuse these leaves, so you can just do masks around each one of these leaves. And then those leaves would be good to animate. But anything that needs to change shape or form, you're going to have to remake. Or you can use Puppet tools. But puppet tools doesn't always work nicely. So if you don't know what public tools is, I'll show it to you really quickly if you just press this button up here. So I'm just going to solo this body layer because it only works on one layer. Um, well you can pre-cum stuff obviously, but if you press this pin button up here, you can start drawing pins and it recognizes where the alpha channel is and makes it a bendable shape. It just, it just doesn't bend things properly. It makes a really weird distortions. So if you're going to use Puppet tells, you still have to break everything apart. It's super useful and I use it all the time and I would definitely use it on projects like this. But you can't just use one layer and stick puppets tools on it. It's just not in the work. If I keep talking about making these characters about strokes, this is what I mean. So I would be tracing this character like this. So let's say I want this leg. I would use the pen tool. And then we'll be creating shape layers like this. And then you can make the stroke bigger. Something like that. And then that would be an animatable leg. Now, once you've added your effects on, but don't worry about this too much. But right now, that's just to show you the example of this because I'm gonna be working on a different picture later. But this character should be made out of strokes like that. You can make all the limbs like that just because they are the perfect shape for strokes, these are kind of uniform width all the way down, so it makes it nice and easy to work with strokes. But yeah, we'll be making shape layers and doing all the effects later in the class. So before we get onto looking at how to recreate these textures and strokes in After Effects. We're going to be just quickly talking about working with land art work. Great. So it's worth quickly mentioning that these are actually pretty simple examples of artwork that you might be importing into After Effects. Quite often you might get Photoshop file with hundreds of layers, or it's got lots of different types of layer styles and masks and shape layers within the Photoshop document. But this gives you an idea of the main part of the process. So let's quickly recap the main points in this lesson. So in Photoshop, you can group layers together into little folders. And when you import that into After Effects, it comes in as a pre-comp. And then inside those precomps will be the different layers that are inside that group. So it's kind of easier than Illustrator when you're importing. But it's worth keeping in mind that that structure might not be the best way to animate it in After Effects. So make sure that you're prepping your Photoshop file for the structure that you want in after effects. Obviously, once you're in After Effects, you can rearrange it, but it's quite good to make sure your Photoshop file layer structure is all nice and clean. So it's not really a big confusing mess when you bring it into after effects. Depending on what you're animating, a lot of Photoshop layers can just be animated as they are. For example, the plant, in my example, the plants all on one layer, but you can really easily cut that out with masks in After Effects. And then you can animate the leaves swaying, something like that. However, you won't get shaped players coming in from Photoshop like you do with illustrators. So anything that needs to change shape, for example, the stem on the leaf or the character's body. You might have to then remake those. So you'll be having to use the Photoshop illustration or the first shape layer as a reference for remaking something in After Effects. And then we'll be looking at creating textures and effects to mimic the Photoshop style. So we'll be looking at that later. So I'm not going to be going too much into character rigging in this class, but with characters, it's very tempting to, for example, this character here to just cut the different parts of the arms and legs out with masks in After Effects and then just parent them together like that. But with this one I would say it's a good idea to just make strokes and then have quite thick strokes for like shutting the shape layers. I mean, shape layer strokes for the arms and legs. That way you can just have a few points and a thick stroke to create the arm and leg. And that way it's, they're really nice and easy to animate and then also perfect for rigging as well. So keep that in mind when you're doing characters, like I said, we're not gonna go into it too much in this class, are going to be saving all my characters specific stuff for a later class. But it's just a quick tip to keep in mind if you are going to go into character animation with your illustrations. Okay, great. In the next lesson we're gonna be covering importing flattened artwork into After Effects. I'll see you there. 8. Prepping and Importing Flattened Artwork: Okay, so the last type of artwork that I want to talk about importing into After Effects is just plain old flattened images. So that might be a JPEG or a PNG. It might be a scan of a painting or a line drawing in pencil. Or it could just be a picture that you don't have the original layered digital file for. We're gonna be talking about how affects brings that in, how we'd work with it, and how to maybe prep it before, bring it into After Effects. To. The last thing you might be working with is a totally flattened piece of work. So let's just open that. So unclick important, I've got this JPEG. So I'm just going to drag this JPEG on to this icon down here, which will make a new composition based on the JPEG size. And in this case it's just HD, so that's ready to go straight away. And then that's it. I mean, you're kind of stuck with a flat layer. We went through how much work it was gonna be to rebuild layered Photoshop file. You'd have to draw over this stuff quite a lot. You basically using this as a reference. It depends what animation you're doing really. If you just need it to boil, you can run textures through it and use the transparency that you've got in the Photoshop document. But when you when it comes to the flattened one, you can't do that. You pretty much going to have to draw over everything. You're going to have to recreate all of this stuff using shape layers. And then you're going to have to make textures in Photoshop. But to be honest, it's not that much more work because you're going to have to, if you're working with a Photoshop document, you're going to have to be remaking stuff a lot anyway. You can probably keep the background layers and not touch them if there's just a big painting that doesn't need to be animated in the background. Obviously, you can keep all of that stuff with a flattened document. You're gonna have to remake everything, or you're going to have to remake the stuff that animates and then paint it out, make it clean version of that. So you'd probably go back into Photoshop. For example, I've just drawn a really quick leaf background for this one, and it's still layered. But if I flatten this, so now this is essentially just flattened out work. The way I would go about separating this is I'd probably go in and cut out the character like this onto another layer. So I'll just draw around it. I'm not gonna go too deep into this because we're gonna be focusing on After Effects menu for this. But I would separate this out. You can do control J or Command J to duplicate what you've selected onto another layer using. So I just use the Lasso selection and then I'd hide that layer. For now I've got the characters separated. Obviously there's a bit more clean up to do. Just go in and erase everything around the character up until the line, up until the counter is black line around this character. And then in the background, you'd need to either just use the Brush Tools and paint this out. Probably get rid of the mixture to get rid of the shadow as well because the character's shadow would be moving to. So you can just go in and erase this stuff and then you can paint in background. So when the character moves out the way you're gonna be able to see the background or something more complicated. You could use a stamp tool, maybe take this leaf and paste it here. You could do it neater job if you're doing it more carefully, but that's essentially the process. So you'd go through and erase the character from the scene. And then when you bring back this character, you now have a character that can move out of the way when it's animating in front. Just keep all that stuff in mind that there might be a lot more prep in your Photoshop document when bring it in. So yeah, so that's the process of working with Illustrator, Photoshop, and flattened artwork when you're importing into After Effects. Great. So I hope the process of prepping and importing artwork into After Effects is a little bit clearer for you. Let's quickly recap the main steps that we covered in this class about importing flattened artwork. You're probably going to be mainly using the original artwork as a reference for recreating stuff in After Effects That's going to be animated if there's certain elements in the picture that maybe on animating so much or difficult to recreate an After Effects, then you can always put it into Photoshop. And you can rebuild that thing on its own separate layer, either by painting out what's in the foreground and then rebuilding what's behind that thing in the background. So like, for example, if you had a character standing in front of a cityscape, you might want to paint out the character by filling in the cityscape where the character won't be. So if the character is gonna move out the way, obviously you're going to need to see that part that the character is obscuring in the original illustration most of the time, like what I'm gonna be doing for most of my illustration, even though I do have a layered Photoshop document for it, I'm probably going to be remaking, using that as a reference for remaking stuff in After Effects. Anyway, this is mainly because I'm planning to animate pretty much everything in the image. So if everything's moving and most things are going to be easier to animate as shape layers. I'm gonna be using the original Photoshop document as reference anyway. So it depends on what you need to do and how detailed your images. I guess it's also a good idea to keep in mind that you can always prep more stuff to import into After Effects. So if don't worry about getting your prep perfect before you hit Import and After Effects or even if you've started animating, if you've started work on an image and you realize that you need an extra element, then you can always go back into Photoshop, make that element and import it again. Okay, so a little assignment for this lesson is to just prep your artwork, whatever it is, and import it into After Effects. I'm hoping it's gonna be pretty straightforward for those of you that have made your own artwork. If it's a layered Photoshop document, for example. But if it's flattened out work and it's really complicated than maybe some of you have your work cut out for you. So good luck. In the next lesson, we're just going to be quickly looking at some After Effects project settings to make sure you're all ready to start animating. 9. Setting Up Your After Effects Project: Okay, so to just round off the artwork prep section, I wanted to have a quick look at aftereffects project settings just to make sure everybody is nicely set up to start animating. So like I said, I'm going to be using this artwork by Dorothy Siemens for my animation. So your project settings might differ slightly. In particular, the size because the dimensions are probably different. But as long as you are kind of around HD, which is 1920 by 1080, then everything else should be fine. That's if you're working kind of landscape. If you work in portrait, then the opposite, if you're working around 1080 across by 1920 down, then we're going to be all good. So just in case I lost anybody during the artwork prep section, I'm gonna be starting enough for x project from scratch. I'm going to be importing my artwork and showing you how to set it up. Let's go and start a new project and import these things again, the button to make a new folder is down here. It's this little folder icon. Next to it is the create new composition icon. Just click on the folder been to make new folders, I like to just make a little bit of organization here, so its assets. So assets, I'm going to import my Photoshop file of the original artwork or like I've saved a new version of the artwork. So I'm going to import that. And just like before, hit Import and then make sure you select the composition in this little window. Pops up. Then we've got our main artwork here is quite big. Got my temporary note to myself about the brush there. I can just hide that. And then I'm going to make, I'm gonna, what I'm gonna do is I'm going to drag that main comp into a new comp like this. And this, this is going to be our main comp. So I'm going to call this animation that into comps. So this is gonna be our main comes from this is I like art asset comes. And then I'm going to, like I said before, this is, this is a much bigger size and I want to export the export. This is gonna be the export size now. So I'm going to set this maybe 248. And then it's much smaller than the actual original artwork. And I want to work at a frame rate of 24 frames a second, because 24 frames a second is just kinda the best frame rate. I think it looks really good and it's also easy to work with. It divides into lots of different things. Like if you want to work on twos, which is what I'm going to be talking about when it comes to how the movement should look with hand-drawn animation. Then you can work on to our femtosecond. You click on six frames a second. You didn't have to be doing 12.5 to 6.25 or this kind of stuff. So I like to work at 24, so let's do that. Oh yeah, one more thing in here is the duration. So it's good idea to work to a longer duration than, than you need. So hopefully your animations, I'm going to be too long that you're planning. But I would definitely recommend setting the duration of your comp to something longer. This so the default, why they don't, maybe the defaults and frames or seconds or whatever, wherever you are in. If you hit Cancel on this, you can go to the timeline down here and hover over where the frame number is here. And if you do Control click or Command click, it will switch between frames and seconds. So this is now on minutes, seconds and frames. And then if we go back to composition settings, you can do Command key or Control key. And now it will be in minutes and seconds. So at the moment, mine is only two seconds and two frames. It's not very useful, but I'm going to set mine to one minute to seconds and two frames because there's no way I'm going to make a one-minute animation. It's gonna be shorter than that. Just gonna make some kind of loop, maybe 510 seconds, something like that. And it's made it longer. The problem is so mine is actually longer anyway, because mine was longer than on imports. So if I click on my comp up here, it's already at one-minute O6. So that's fine. If yours is really sure, I would definitely recommend maybe importing it again. The thing with After Effects is when you import a Photoshop file or something that doesn't really have a length. It will just make it the length of the last comp that was made. So if your comp is coming out really sure. And you've got kind of pre-comps. You maybe you've got some Photoshop groups in here. All these precomps will be the same length as the main composition that it makes when you import Photoshop files. So what you can do to lengthen that is you can just delete these or maybe important. Again, I'm not going to delete mine right now. But you can make a composition and set it to, let's say you want it to be two minutes long. We can set this to two minutes. So again, that's minutes, seconds and then frames. So two minutes and then that's fine. And then when you import your Photoshop file again, this will now have a two-minute length. So if you click on this, you can see it goes all the way up to two minutes here, or one fifty nine fifty three. Later on when you do your final export, you can work on a longer comp. That's fine, but having to lengthen everything is really difficult. And After Effects, It's not difficult, it's just really long. So if you've got lots of pre-comps, if you change the length of this main comp to be longer, all of your pre comps inside will be too short. So let's say I wanted this one to now be three minutes. If I went in and change this to three minutes. This new group here, this group, which is a pre-comp, is too short so you can grab all of these other layers and that's fine. But the pre-comps or too short still the precomps are still two minutes, so you'd have to go inside that pre-comp. Go Command K, this to three minutes, then go back and then lengthen it. And in fact, you have to do more than that. You'd have to, you have to lengthen all the layers in here as well because it will lay as a short so you have to stretch out all these layers. So it's a good idea to import something that's too long and then shorten it later. And if you're struggling with getting your comps to be longer than you need, you can always just make a new comp, set it to the length that you want, and then input again and it will match the length from that computers made. And frame rate as well as same goes for frame rate. If you want your, all your comps to be 24 frames a second and all the Photoshop pre-comps, then you need to set that new comp that you make to 24 and then it will input the 24. Yeah, I'm just gonna click on our work and I'm gonna do Control F or Command F on a Mac. And what that does is it just fits the artwork to your comp. That automatically scales it down. So I don't have to fiddle around with the scale to get it exact, or you can just right-click on the layer. So select the layer you want to be to the right size of the comp. And then you can right-click and go to Transform Fit to Comp. I will do it. And if your image is not the same aspect ratio as the comp, it will stretch it. So you can do Fit to Comp Width or Fit to Comp Height. And then you'll either, it will either scale to the height or scatter the width depending on what you want. And then I'm also going to right-click on this. And I'm going to turn this into a guide layer when you come to do your final render, a guide layer or anything with a guide layer, it won't appear, but you can see it in your comp while you're working on it. So those are really handy. Great. So now we should all have our artwork prep and our aftereffects projects or set up nicely. Let's quickly recap what we went through in this lesson. Make sure you use folders inside the After Effects project window to keep things nicely organized. It's not just all in one big list. I'd like to separate my assets from my comps. That's like the most basic level of organization. So drag your imported artwork onto the new comp button and that will create a new composition with the artwork inside with the correct dimensions. Then make sure you're working at a sensible size. So then you can re-size that comp that's been made to something more like HD. So I would go for a maximum width of 1920 or maximum height of 1920s, depending if you're working horizontally or portrait. I went for something slightly bigger than HD, which was two or four. I think that was my height. I wanted it slightly bigger because I'm going to scale it down afterwards. Plus I'm going to be exporting it for lots of different things. So I knew that I was going to need it slightly bigger unless there's a particular reason you want to work at a different frame rate, I would recommend going with 24 frames a second just because it's a really nice frame rate to work in. That's the frame rate I'm going to be working with. So if you want to be following my numbers, like working on twos will be 12 frames per second and so on. Then it will all line up if you work at 24 frames a second as well. And finally, set your complex to something longer than you're going to need. Because in After Effects it's quite difficult to go through and length and afterwards because you have to go through every single pre-comp and lengthen it one-by-one. It's much easier to have all the comps longer than you need. And then at the end, just make a shorter comp for export Assignment time. I just want you to make sure that your artwork is all prepped and imported into After Effects and all the settings are looking correct. So make sure that you've kept everything in mind that we've been through so far and that your after-effects comp is a good size and it's a good length so that we can start working in the next lesson. I'm hoping this will be pretty straightforward for most of you unless you've got really complicated illustrations. And if you're working with flattened artwork, try to keep your animation ideas simple so that you don't have to go in and separate every tiny little thing. Because if you've got something too complicated in mind, then you're going to have your work cut out for you. Amazing. So in the next lesson, we're gonna be making an animated texture for use in our animation. So I'll see you there. 10. Creating an Animated Boiling Texture: Hello. For this lesson, we're gonna be using mainly Photoshop. So make sure you have a copy if you're going to be following this part of the class. So this might not necessarily be relevant to all illustration styles. There might be some handmade stuff out there that doesn't really have any texture, but I think most of it probably will because it's gonna be made out of paper, probably if it's handmade and if you're making 2D animation of an illustration, then it might be paper, probably will be. So that could be the subtle paper texture in the background, or it could mean if it's a pencil drawing than the texture that's inside the stroke or the pencil when is drawn on paper. Or maybe even an airbrush. Sometimes when you spray air brush on paper, then it will have a very fine dot pattern. And in this lesson we're going to look at how to make that stuff move. The artwork I'm going to be using, which I've mentioned before is this one by Dorothy siemens. I'm not going to be sharing her original source files for this. So I'm hoping that you're gonna be using your own illustrations. But I think generally the process will be roughly the same for most people. If you don't have Photoshop, then you can follow this process. You can skip over the Photoshop bit and go straight to the after fix bit where I'm gonna be talking about how to take a static texture. Well, in my case it will be an animated texture. But you can do the same thing to a static texture. For example, just an image of paper texture that you've maybe taken on your phone or something. And you move that around to give it a random field. But I'm gonna be starting off by painting a boil in Photoshop and then adding a bit more movement using the offspring's process. So either way it will be useful. I'd also recommend for the Photoshop bit to the use of a Wacom tablet because I'm gonna be drawing in, it's mainly the pressure sensitivity that I'm gonna be using. When you use a Wacom tablet. If you, if you're coloring in like you would do on a piece of paper, they're gonna be natural variations in how hard you're pressing. And when you use that in Photoshop, you will get some areas that are more dense, densely colored in, and more sparsely covered in so that you get this variation. And that's what I'm gonna be looking for in Photoshop. Don't worry if you don't have access to a webcam tablet, you can use a mouse or a trackpad. It just might take a little bit more manual persuasion to get that sort of natural feeling. You're going to have to be manually changing the pressure of the flow rate on the brush, which you can adjust at the top, either that or you can just use a static texture if you want to skip over that bit. So this is the end result will be looking for, It's quite chaotic texture, but it's gonna be really useful to cut out small pieces of it and use all over the places like on strokes and fills and stuff like that. This is how it will look straight out of Photoshop. Photoshop has this weird thing with textures. It doesn't really randomized the texture. It kinda keeps texture fixed. So if you're using multiple frames and it might look a little bit weird. That's why we're going to add a little bit more motion in artifacts afterwards. For the rest of the class, I'm gonna be setting up this picture by Dorothy Siemens for animation. I'm going to start just in Photoshop, having a look really and making a plan in my head of how I'm going to remake each shape. I've chose this one because I think it will translate quite easily to after effects. And also it's got a lot of clear strokes and clear fills. And there wasn't a lot of shading or gradients which are gonna be difficult to recreate. So I thought this one would be pretty straightforward and got really lovely textured quality to it as well. Final animation is actually gonna be portrait. So that's okay. Illustrations tend to be really big because normally for print, this height is 3,500 pixels high and keep it all. Everything is big and high-quality as possible before bringing into after effects, unless it's going really slow. If you're bringing in stuff that ginormous, then you might end up working really slowly and after effects. So it's a bit of a balance. You want to keep the quality, but you also want to be able to work on it otherwise it gets really painful. So I'd recommend if your source image is huge, to reduce it down to just a little bit bigger than the after-effects. The final export from After Effects. If you're working in HD and your images eight k, you might as well reduced the image down to about two k, and then it will scale it down just a little bit in After Effects so that it's HD, if that makes sense. So I don't actually know. I think this was painted in Photoshop, but I don't actually know which brush was used. I've already had a quick look through my brushes that I've got already haven't found the exact one, but I found one that's close enough. And I think there's gonna be a lot of compromise with this. I mean, you could make it, you can really spend a lot of time to make it exact. It doesn't in my particular case, it doesn't have to be exact, exact because we're gonna be animating. There's gonna be stuff moving and changing anyway, so you can always get more accurate as what I'm saying, but then it's at the expense of time. So you've got to decide how accurate you're going to be matching your original artwork. Testing I like to do is actually go and see if I can recreate this. So I know that I'm gonna be having to recreate textures. So maybe that's probably the place where we should start, is actually remaking some of these textures and seeing how close we can get. I've looked through all the brushes that I've got in Photoshop and I found one which is pretty close. It's called new pastel, which is one of the Kyle brushes. I'm not mistaken. Kyle brushes now come with Photoshop there at least available too. Um, everybody has gotten Adobe CC license. I think if you go to, if you click on your brush and you click on the drop down here to see all your different brushes. If you click on the cog here and go to get more brushes, you'll eventually end up at this website where you can download some new brush packs. I think it's this mega pack. I think this is the car one, the Mega Pak. So if you're looking for some really good brushes, I'd highly recommend this. I'm sure there's plenty of other really good ones in here, but that is the current brushes if you can get the compresses than they are really good. So yeah, I found this brush and I've tweak the settings a little bit. I don't think they really changed much, but if I put this onto 20 pixels, so up here, I like to press the up and down square brackets to change the size of the brush. If I go to 20 and then they draw a stroke, yeah, it's kinda getting there. So I think that's close enough. I'm not actually going to be drawing strokes. This is actually more because I've seen here, if you look at the texture in here, but it looks like she's done is she's drawn the shape of whatever it is like this leg and then colored it in by hand. Let's scribbling. So to recreate that, I'm using After Effects, all these lines here, I'm going to recreate using shape layers so that we can animate them nice and easily in After Effects. And then we're going to apply effects to it to make it look like it was drawn in this style. So that's the whole aim of this class. But it's been building up to quite a lot. But we've been building up to that. But that's essentially what we're trying to do in this class. I'm going to recreate all of this stuff using various techniques and aftereffects. Your strokes will look different. Your picture that you've got could be completely different to my one. But essentially I think the workflow is roughly the same. What you need to be doing is matching the texture and matching the strokes and obviously the colors and all that kinda stuff will come as well. But let's focus on re-creating. I think the first thing we're going to recreate, once I've created this whole shape, this red shape for the leg and this hand, which means just making some strokes and one felt textured feel, then everything else would pretty much use the same effect, just different colors. And actually started this already. And new Photoshop image. I've made it two or 48 by two or 48. So we definitely want the texture to be bigger than the final image, or at least as big, we're not gonna be seeing this texture in its entirety. We are going to be just using little chunks of it, so it doesn't matter too much. But the way I did this is I sample the background color and I've made a layer of that background. And then on top of that, I made a video layer. If you've not used video layers in Photoshop before, that's basically how you do hand-drawn animation in Photoshop. And to bring that up, you can either go to Window timeline, and this will bring up your animation timeline. Or you can go to the layouts over here and click on motion. Mine's already on motion, and then I've already started here. So I'll get rid of this for the moment just so it's not confusing. And I would highly recommend the first time I did this, I just went with the default frame rate in Photoshop, which was 30 in After Effects. You can interpret any footage to any frame rate. You just have to right-click on it, go to interpret footage and change the frame rate. But with Photoshop documents, I was getting a bug or I don't know if it's a bank or just an oversight, but basically, my Photoshop document was set to 30 and I want it to work. I wanted it to be at 12 frames a second every time I re-save the Photoshop file or reopen the Artifacts document, it kept resetting from 12 back to 30. So I would highly recommend setting the frame rate in the Photoshop file to 12 frames per second or whatever frame rate you're going to use it at the end. So to do that, you go on the timeline panel, go to this menu button here on the top right, and go to set timeline frame rate. And set this to 12. We want this to be on twos. So we're working at 24 frames a second, and we want every single frame to last two frames. So we need it at 12 frames a second. So click Okay. And your timeline may change a little bit. And then you can make your video layers. If you make your video layers before changing the frame rate, the frame rate will stay in the video layer. So even if you're, if you're at 30 and you make a video layer, and then you change your frame rate to 12 frames a second. It will still be 30 frames a second on that layer. It's not a very good system. The timeline in Photoshop, this is why it's not great. As far as I can tell, there's no way to change the frame rate of a layer. So it will just make 12 frames a second layers. Now that we've made the timeline TO femtosecond, there might be a way of doing it. I'm not I'm not aware of it. So yeah, now we need to make a video layer. Go to Layer. Video layers, new blank video layer. Now we'll have 12 frames per second video layer that we can work on. Also to know if your Pugh drag this play head. So this will play through the animation. If you're not at frame 0. And when you create a new layer, new blank video layer, it will create that layer at the playhead. So make sure you're keeping an eye on what's going on down here. Because if you're trying to draw, if you select Layer three over here and you start trying to draw here, won't let you because the layer hasn't started yet. So just keep an eye on it now. It's kind of like artifacts in that respect. So I've already done it here, but basically what we wanna do is remake. This texture, but across the whole image so that we've got a lot of texture to play with. We're creating this spoiling texture elements. I'm just making this brush a little bit bigger. I still want to keep the roughness of strokes, but obviously I don't want to spend forever scribbling on the screen. I want it to be smooth, but I don't want it to be too perfect. I want a little bit of that sort of imperfect. Notice that your hand brings when coloring in. And I'm just gonna do this quickly because I've actually already done it. So just coloring the entire frame and then you can just use it play bar at the bottom to scrub to the next frame and color in another entire frame. And then do that for five to six times something else that I've done four frames. The way Photoshop brushes work is they use a texture for the opacity of that brush. And the problem is that texture doesn't move across frames, or at least the brush that I'm using, it doesn't move. There might be a way of making it move, but I'm not sure what it is, but we can work around that and after effects, so it's okay. Well, I mainly wanted to, it's just a bit of movement in here. So go through and create a few frames or five frames when you hit play, It's really boiling. We can use that movement to bring the texture to life. Obviously, you can adjust this quite a lot as well. You can make your frames more different from each other than the boil will be more intense. Got a little bit of movement in there, but we're going to have to do a little bit more in After Effects to break up this texture which has not moving per frame. That's where I like to start. So once you've made that texture, then we can go over to After Effects. Oh yeah, I'm one thing to remember as well is this much more useful to have this texture with transparent in the background. So that background layer that I've made to start with to draw on. I'm going to turn that off so that we have just the brush and no background. So it's just the brush and transparent in the background. So now I can delete that extra tough play that I just made. Now you should have this layer with four or five frames of animating brush texture. Then just when you're done, just save the Photoshop file because afterwards can just import it as it is. We don't need to do any other extra prep or exporting from here. You can just literally import directly in Photoshop file to artifacts. So let's switch over to After Effects. So here you can see I've already started during a stroke. We're gonna be covering that in the next lesson, but it's just here in my After Effects project already so you can ignore it for the moment. The next thing I need to do is bring in my texture that we made. So let's, I'm gonna go to my assets folder here and then do Control I for import or Command on the Mac. And I'm going to click on my texture boil. And I'm going to import that. This time. I don't want it as a composition. I want it just as footage and I'll show you why that is footage. Okay. So hopefully, just to remind you about the about how this was set up, if I go back to Photoshop, you see how I can see my stroke through there. It's because we want the alpha channel on. So in Photoshop, make sure you have, if you've made a background color or anything like that, that you just have your paint layer visible. You want to see these gray classic Photoshop transparency squares through to the background. That way, when you're using the texture, you're not using it as a solid, using it as a semi-transparent, hopefully break broken up texture. So yeah, you should have transparency in your layer. He's not have to. If you did this black and white, then you could do the same thing. But the power of using Photoshop and After Effects combination, that means that you can use a brush and get transparency from that brush, which is really nice. If you're using a texture which is black and white, it means you can actually use that as a, you can still use that texture as a track matte, but you'd have to set your track matte to luma matte rather than what I'm going to use, which is alpha matte. So if you don't have transparency in your texture, you could try using it as a luma matte. I'm going to be using the transparency that's in the layer for the rest of the class. So I'm hoping that you've got something similar. Your frame rate in Photoshop should be the correct frame rate. If you're following me with working in 24 frames a second, then you should have changed the timeline frame rate in Photoshop to be 12 femtosecond, so that when you bring it into After Effects, it's on twos. But if you haven't done that, then here's how you change it. I think the default frame rate in Photoshop is 30 and we are working in 24 frames a second. I'm actually going to half that so that it's on 12 femtoseconds, it's on twos because that makes it feel a lot more hand-drawn. So right-click on your texture. Go down to Interpret Footage, and then click Main, and it should bring up this panel. I'm going to change this from 30 to 12. And that's totally fine to do. All that's doing is just taking those frames and retiring it to 12 femtoseconds. So it's no longer running at 30, it's running at 12. That way we don't have to do any stretching or poster rising on this texture is just. Interprets it as raw frames. Basically, if you're using Interpret Footage to change your frame rate, then please be aware that there's a bug. I don't know if it's a bug, it might be some kind of oversight and after effects where if every time you either reopen the After Effects file or resave the Photoshop file, or every time after effects basically has to reload the Photoshop file. It resets your interpreted frame rate back to the default frame rate or whatever frame rate is in the Photoshop file. So if you're working out the default Photoshop frame rate, which is 30 and you've changed it to 12 using Interpret Footage, it will keep popping back to 30 frames per seconds. So if you are wondering why your animation, It's all broken, then it's probably that if it looks all broken after you've saved close off, flex reopened it and it's looking weird, then check that first because that was happening to me a lot. Now I'm going to drag this onto a new composition. And if you check the composition settings here, I'm sorry, I'm pressing Control K or Command K on a Mac. That will bring up your composition settings. Alternatively, you can go to Composition, composition Settings up here. You can see that it's created the composition at the same settings as the Photoshop file, which is now 12 frames a second, and exactly the right size. So that's perfect. Okay, So only actually need the first four frames. So 1234, then it goes black. I'm gonna go to the last frame, frame four, which is three because it starts at 0 and I'm going to press N. And what that does is it reduces my preview range to where the playhead is. The other one just so you know, is B, that sets your Start frame. So I want to start at the beginning and then on the end frame for fourth frame. And then I'm gonna do composition, Composition, trim comp to work area. And now we have a comp which is just four frames long. Okay, nice. The other thing we need to do in here is break up this texture a little bit. So at the moment, the press space bar, and it will play through and press space bar and it will play through. And you can see that the text is not moving, but my strokes are moving. So what I wanna do is I just want to add a little bit more randomness to this and I'm just gonna do it really simply. But what I'm gonna do is I'm going to press P and I'm going to set a keyframe for position. So p, if you select the layer and press P, it will bring up your position animation control. I'm going to press the stopwatch on there. And it's created a keyframe. I'm just going to make this a stepped key frame for now because I might be doing some retiring with this, I'm not planning to do any retiring, but if you don't have a stepped key frame on here and then you sort of re-time this footage. It will try and interpellate between these things. If you press Control and click on the keyframe, it will cycle through a linear keyframe and an auto key-frame. And what I wanna do is I can hold down Control and Alt. And that'll cycle between the linear keyframe and a stepped key frame. So I want to stepped one which has got this square on the side. Okay, and that's fine. Now every single keyframe after this that we set will also be a stepped key frame. And all I'm gonna do is I'm going to move it a little bit, move it to the top-left. And then I'm going to move it again over to the top right on the next frame. And then on the next frame, I'm just going to move it to the bottom right. And then if we hit play again on space-bar, okay, so I'm gonna do that. I'm position. I'm going to add scale as well. So I'm going to animate the scale. And again, I'm going to hold Control and Alt on that first keyframe and make it a step to keyframe. And then on the second frame, that needs to be 100 minus 100 on both scales. That way it's completely flipped. And then on the next frame, we're going to put it back to a 100. And then on the fourth frame, I'm going to do minus a 100 again. Now when we press Play is really random. So now we've got a nice for frame boil. So it looks quite chaotic. This is a very intense Boyle going on in this texture. But I think I'm going to start with this for the moment. I think it'll be quite good because it's not like filling the background. If you were filling the entire background and you're going to see a lot of this, then you might want it to be more subtle. But because I'm gonna be using it in small chunks on strokes and on shapes, that kind of thing. I want it to be quite intense. So if you wanted it to be less intense than you could probably try not flipping the scale. Or you can have your textured, generally less textured. Or even you can just start with this and you can actually just reduce the amount of opacity. So there's a lot you can do in terms of color correction on the actual texture itself to reduce its intensity or to ramp it up a bit, or to reduce it. Another way is to just layer on top of each other so you lock the gaps that you see there, there'll be reduced. You learned, you'll only see gaps when two different textures line up with each other, two different gaps in the texture lineup. So it would be much less intense. This is a good one. It's good to start with something more intense because it's easy to reduce it then signed with something less intense and trying to increase the intensity of it. So yeah, I think this is looking pretty good, great. So now we have a nice boiling texture that we can use in different ways all over animation. So let's quickly recap the main steps. If you're working with something that's drawn, then have a look through your brushes in Photoshop and see if you can match. That drawn style with a Photoshop brush. If you're working in Photoshop already, if your illustration was drawn in Photoshop and you know the brush already, then you are ready to go. That's perfect. In my case, I didn't I knew it was drawn in Photoshop. I didn't know that brush, so I just found one that was close. There's lots of brushes that are that come with your Adobe subscription. So you just have to click through to the Adobe website and download those. And then you can install this separately, which I showed you how to do it previously in the video, the kyle mega pack. If you can find that as a really good collection, I haven't really explored much further than that because I don't do tons of illustration in Photoshop. But I know that the car Mega Pak serves me. In most cases. Photoshop brushes come with all different kinds of textures, but this technique will work just as well with any kind of texture I really like. It could be paper textures or concrete, or little tiny dots that come with airbrushing. Just as long as there's a fairly uniform texture and it doesn't have lots of crazy variations across the image. This technique will work fine. Make sure that the texture that you're using is big enough to cover the biggest the biggest area that you're going to use it for. I made mine to 048 by two or 48, which I think is a good size because my final export is going to be having a maximum size of two over 48. So kind of a square at the maximum size of your final exports. So if you're working in HD, then 1920 by 1920 would be a good square size to work out. Use the Photoshop video layer feature to animate the boil between 46 frames is probably quite a good length. The Photoshop brush texture, annoyingly doesn't change if you're animating it per frame. But then you can go into After Effects and add more randomness. They're animating the position and scale, etc. And this technique will work just the same on a static texture. Keep in mind that the default frame rate in a Photoshop document is 30 frames a second. And you're probably gonna be wanting to use it on twos in After Effects. So you can change that frame rate in After Effects by right-clicking on the footage and going to Interpret Footage. In my case, it was 12 frames a second because my mainframe, it was 24 frames a second. But for example, if you are working at 30 frames a second, you'd need to interpret the footage at 15 frames a second. Another quick note is that there's a really annoying bug in After Effects at the moment that I've noticed, every time you reopen the project file, it will reset the frame rate of the Photoshop document back to the default, so it keeps switching back to 30 for me. So to avoid this, you could go into Photoshop before you start animating your texture and set it to 12 frames per second or whatever you want the end result to be. So after you've changed the frame rate of the animating texts or file, you've got the frame rate that you want for me, it was tall frames a second. Then you can drag that Photoshop file onto new composition. And then it will just make a composition with the correct dimensions and frame rate for you. Shorten the length to match your texture file. So for me it was four frames, so my composition was four frames long. Then you can go in and add some more randomness by animating the position scale and rotation or whatever else you want to do to make it move the fill a bit more moving, the more you move it per frame, the bigger the boil effect will be. Personally, I think it's a good idea to start with a more intense boil. Then, then it's more visible. You can see what it's really doing in your main comp when you're using it, you can always go back into that after you started using it, if it's not working for you particularly well and reduce it. So I think it's easier to start with more intense and then reduce it if you need to. But it's up to you. Okay, so your assignment this time is basically just to do what we did in this lesson, just make sure that your texture is boiling. And I want you to bring that into After Effects, make a comp That's the correct length for your Boyle. And then we should be ready for the next lesson. Because in the next lesson we're gonna be applying that texture to strokes to make them look like they're drawn. So I'll see you there. 11. Creating Drawn Style Strokes: Welcome back. In this lesson, we're going to actually start building the effect that's going to match the original stroke style from the illustration. To do this, we're gonna be using a shape layer in After Effects, and we're gonna be applying the texture that we made in the last lesson along with some other effects. So let's jump back into After Effects and get started. This is what we're aiming towards. This is the kind of finished strokes. This is just an example. Stroke is just a part of the arm that I've traced over. So you can see that the texture is running through it and there's a nice roughness to the edge of the stroke which will be adding. This is not the finished effect. There's gonna be more kind of worldliness on top that we're gonna be adding at the end. But this is where we're gonna get to in this lesson. I'm going to make a stroke now for this arm, and I'm going to click on the Pen tool up here, make sure you have no layer selected when you're making a stroke. Otherwise it will start making a mask on whichever layer you've got selected. Unless you have a shape layer already selected, then it will start making another shape inside that shape layer. So it does a few different things depending what you've got selected when you are using the pen tool. So make sure you're aware of what's selected in your timeline before you start drawing with the pen tool. And in this case, we're going to use it with nothing selected so that it will create a new shape layer when we start drawing and just start drawing. So it's got some default settings in here, but that's fine. We can just change those afterwards. So I'm gonna make a few points. And you generally want to keep it as simple as possible. But whilst also keeping that sort of natural flow of a hand-drawn line, though, if you add too many points in here, it's gonna be really difficult to work with. And too few, You're not gonna get the shape that you want. So that's striking a balance there. You can see a shape layers appear down here. You'll probably have some other kind of default, colors and strokes that up here. But we just want the stroke. So I'm going to open this up. I'm gonna go to contents shape and I'm going to hide the fill layer. I'm not going to delete it for the moment, just going to hide it. You never know when you want to fill back in. So we can just hide it. And I'm going to open up the stroke and see the stroke settings down here. And I am going to increase the width until it's roughly the width of the hand-drawn stroke here, just a little bit to match the stroke of it better doesn't actually matter the color of the stroke, because we're gonna be adding a texture on top of it anyway. So I'm just going to make it a little bit more visible. And I don't want to match the same color as the as the real strokes because then I can't tell the difference like they're going to blend in too much. So I'm just gonna make it something that stands out and it's also not color of this path line. Gradients. Good. This is just a little test to get style of the stroke, right? And then we can go in and actually make the hand because obviously this stroke would just be mainly one stroke and in all in one shape layer. So I'll go through that later. I'll probably set it up and then show you what I've done rather than show you every part of the step, this is just to get the stroke looking right. Okay, so we've got the stroke, I'm going to hide the guide layer. So now we're working on this. And the first thing I'm gonna do is add the roughen edges effect. If you run a texture through this and you've just got a textbook, you're still going to see these really hard edits. So we need to break up the edge of this vector line. So I'm going to click on the Shape Layer and I'm going to go to my effects controls. If this affects controls is not visible, you go to Window and click on Effects Controls. I know that when you open After Effects for some reason the default layout is not to have the effects controls open. So you click on the layer, go to Window and click Effects Controls. If it's not open, then right-click in the effects controls. I'm going to go to Stylize. And I'm going to click on roughen edges. With roughen edges on a path layer is added a quiet, nice wavy distortion to the line, and it's already looking a lot more natural. So we've got this. The first thing we're gonna do is actually ten scale down. So what we're aiming for at the moment is not the big wobbles in stroke. We're going to try and just get the texture feeling like it's a textured stroke that could have been made with a pencil or a piece of chalk or something like that. And in my case it's kinda looks like chalk, so it's gonna be a big thick line with a rough edge. And then we're going to add some texture to it. So what I want is, I mean, it's also good to keep bringing your reference up here as well. So let's have another quick look at the reference. So what I'm going for at the moment I'm just focusing on is just the very edge. So the very edge of this line is what I'm trying to recreate. What we can do is ten scale all the way down. The scale only goes down to about 10% here, which is fine. And then you get this really fine looking noise going on in the Edit stroke. If you press Control Shift H or Command Shift H, it will hide all of your guides and stuff so that you can just focus on what you're looking at. Then I'm going to turn the edge sharpness up. So the edge up to someone at the moment, and I want it to be much sharper than that. If you turn it all the way up, then you start getting this really hard broken edge. I think something like that is good. Around five. And then 4.8 words matter, and then border. I don't want it really big, otherwise it just starts disappearing, really breaking up too much. I'm not trying to do the texture of the middle of the stroke with this. I'm just looking at the edge. So if we turn this to something like that, maybe five or so, yeah, that's looking really good. You could duplicate this. So if we look back at our stroke, so it's got a really rough edge and then it's got these kind of wobbles in it as well. You see how these are cells like the slightly bigger wobbles, not going to create that at the moment. Because we can add that right at the end on top of everything because pretty much everything has that waves. I've worked on a lot of projects where it looks really good. We roughen edges on every single layer. But then in the next project becomes unmanageable. Be slow because it's having to process reference edges on about 2030 layers, something like that. So it's a bit of a balance. So I'm gonna do this, do it like this for now. And then if it's getting too slow, then we can try something else. Alternatively, you could have a temporary one or even just turn off all the effects and then turn them all back on again when you need to render. But if you're rendering really big long sequences and it's taking forever to render, then you might have to compromise somewhere. Great, So that's looking pretty good. The next thing we need to do is go back and grab the texture that we made from the last lesson because we're going to add it to the stroke. If you don't have the texture that you made in the last lesson in the same project file as this affects project, you can always like if you've got a separate off the next project, you can just import the texture affects project. And it will just come into the current After Effects project as a separate folder. Hopefully you're working in the same project because this is all one thing that we're working on. But if you don't have it, then you can just go and input that other offers project and you should have everything you need in there. We've got our texture boiling. Let's go back to the composition where we're making our stroke. So I'm going to drag in my composition of my texture boil. And now we have a four frame Boyle in here. If you notice, it's actually eight frames in here because inside this texture, this texture is running at 12 frames a second. So for every two frames of 24 frames per second, we get one of our 12 firms second. That makes sense. So it goes 11, 2233, and so on. Obviously we want it to loop for the entire time. We just want, We want that texture to just be looping and looping, looping. So the way we do that, if you right-click on the texture composition layer and go to time, enable time remapping. There's a few different ways to loop stuff in After Effects. You can actually right-click on footage like the Photoshop file and say loop inside the Interpret Footage box, but it's not very good in your footage is cropped to exactly the length of the loop. So a more powerful way of looping stuff in After Effects is with a tiny expression inside whatever property you're animating. And if you want to loop and entire preComp than you have to turn on time remapping. So it's a very roundabout way of looping stuff in After Effects, but this is the most powerful way. So we could loop it inside the precomp and then we'll just have a looping texture the whole time. But it's the same process, but we're gonna do it outside pre-comp. So I can just show you how to do it using a timing map. It sounds complicated and it is more complicated than it should be for sure. I wish there was an effect which just says loop or something like that. But there isn't, so we have to do it like this. But if you just follow my steps closely enough, then everything should be fine. So the first thing I'm gonna do is drag the end of the texture boil layer all the way to the end. Which time remapping allows you to do. This still doesn't loop it. So this will just get black after the end of these keyframes that you can see here. Essentially what these keyframes are if you've not used timely mapping before I quickly cover it gives you an animation property for the time inside this layer, independent of the time in the parent composition. So if you see here, the value of this keyframe is 0 and the value of this keyframe is four, because we've got four frames and our composition. And we're going to use a little bit of espresso here to make it loop because this is how you loop stuff in After Effects. If you hold down Alt and click on the stopwatch on the timing map, this gives you a little bit of code here. I know this seems crazy because you have to do some coding to make something loop in After Effects. But after effects is that kind of program. It is a bit old fashioned. It's not particularly user-friendly. It's very user-friendly to get started. But then once you need to do more advanced stuff, that gets very complicated quite quickly. But don't worry, it's not a complicated piece of code. You just have to type in a couple of words, but you do have to remember these words every time you want to loop something. So it has to be exactly this lowercase loop. And it gives you a little hint here. Now it didn't use to do that, but now we've got these hints here. It's really handy. So once you type in loop, you can actually just press down and the loopOut is what we want. So we want Loop Out, out with a capital O and open bracket, close bracket. So once you've got that in your expression box, click somewhere neutral. And now it will loop these keyframes. Unfortunately, it's including this black frame in the loop, so we're not completely finished yet. The next thing we have to do to make it loop properly. When you do loopOut, it removes this last keyframe apart from on this first one. So it might look alright for the rest of the composition, but this first one is actually not working. So what we need to do is we need to go to the frame before the end. So my case that's frame seven, set another keyframe here. And then I'm going to copy the first one, control C, and then go to last frame. And I'm going to do Control V. So now what that does is it actually does place the last frame and then it goes back to the first frame. And then for the rest, I will be removing this one. You're not gonna get a double frame here. We'll just loop. You don't have to fully understand this if this, if this is completely new to you, this might seem totally insane just to loop something. But if you follow these steps, exactly, everything will loop perfectly. And if you're going into more advanced After Effects stuff, this is gonna be a really useful set up for you because that means you can loop anything you want. You can select the middle of a video or the middle of an animation, bring it in as a composition. Hit time remap, set these keyframes, put the loop out on it and everything will do perfectly smoothly anyway. So let's just test that and zoom out a little bit so we can see what the whole frame is doing. Hit Play. And we've got our looping come out and it goes on forever. So that's perfect. Then all we have to do to get a stroke is make sure that the texture Boyle is below the shape layer. And then you go over here, make sure your track mats turned on. If it's not turned on, you might need to toggle this button down here to turn on mode and track matte so that it's visible on your layers. Click on the layer below and click Alpha Matte. So click on Track Matte where it says none and go to alpha matte. And what that does is it turns off the layer above and uses it as an alpha channel for the layer below. Now we've got our texture running through our stroke shape layer. And if you press play now, we've got the texture running through it, okay? But it's still not looking quite right. And the reason being is that the roughen edges is not animated yet. So let's go back to our roughen edges to click on our shape layer again and go to roughen edges effect. I'm going to increase the border just a little bit, just to roughen it up a little bit more. And then we're gonna do one more expression, another very simple one. So I'm just going to drop down the effect in here. So if you drop down this layer and go to effects and open roughen edges in the effects in the layers down here. That way we have a more easy access to the expressions. And I'm going to find the one which is evolution options. And I'm going to go to random seed. And random seed basically, if you change this, it will just randomize the noise on the roughen edges. So this gives you just a different shape every single time. So I want that to happen every frame because this is essentially like a drawn layer. So the random seed and then go to the stopwatch. And I'm going to hold down Alt and click on the stopwatch. Now in here, it's got this effect which is just, that means the same value as what's in there. But don't worry about that. We're just going to delete all of that. So I'm going to type in time. And what that does is it gives you the time in seconds in here. Obviously, I want it to change every frame, so I just times that by 24 because our composition is at 24 frames a second. So if you do take the seconds and times it by the frame rate, it will give you one number every frame. It's tough but 24. Now it should be going one to two. Basically got your frame number down here. But it also gives you a random seed every single frame. So now if we press Play, we get this nice textured and boiling line. But the thing is I don't actually want it to change every frame. I want it to change every other frame. So in After Effects because we can, because we're animating at 24 frames a second. I want to add an adjustment layer up here. So if you right-click on a neutral space inside your timeline and go to new adjustment layer that will make a new layer in your timeline called an adjustment layer. And adjustment layers are basically a layer where you can add an effect to it and it will affect everything below that layer. So it doesn't do anything by itself and it will be invisible until you add an effect to it. And it's really handy because it means you can, rather than adding an effect to every single layer, you can just have an adjustment layer at the top. And that will affect everything below it. I actually want it on twos. So to do 2s and after effects, even when you're animating on ones, because let's say you're working at 24 frames a second. You don't want to work at 12 frames a second because it's not the most powerful thing and it's a bit of a weird frame rate to set your composition at this, it's quite often those things that are running at 24, but you only want to show every other frame. And there's a very simple effect in After Effects called posterize time, which allows you to do that. I'm going to just rename this adjustment layer two, posterize time. So you can right-click in the effects control and that will just bring up all the effects that you need. And if Effects Controls is not visible, you can go to, you can click on the top of our Effects Window, Effects Controls. And that'll bring up your effects controls window. If it's not visible, then you can just right-click on that and it will show you the full list of effects that you can add. And then in the effects control, I'm gonna go to Time, posterize time. The default frame out here is normally 24 and there's click on that, set it to 12 so that everything underneath this adjustment layer now runs at 12 frames per second instead of 24 frames per second. So now when we hit play, everything is running at 12 frames a second, including the roughen edges. Because before with this off, the roughen edges is running out on, running on one's changing every frame. And the texture is running at 12 frames a second because that's what we set it to. If I just stepped through holding control and the arrow keys left and right. So I just press right, it will step through. So go 1212. You can see the texture is actually changing every other frame. But the roughen edges is changing every frame. So now that the Posterize Time on, everything is running on twos. 12. There we go. So now it's working perfectly. So we would press play. We have a really lovely texture running through our stroke. So yeah, just a quick note. If you re-interpret your footage from 30 from 30 to 12, like I've done here to make it on twos in the Interpret Footage setting. Then you go into Photoshop, make a change to your Photoshop document and save it. When you come back to after effects, it will have changed because After Effects reloads the Photoshop file. And when it reloads, it puts it back to 30 frames a second. So you have to make sure to go back and change it again. I don't think it used to do that, but for some reason this is what's happening now. So if this was a Thursday, what's happened? This is a really clear way of telling if it's gone wrong is it will start looking wrong in your render moment is flashes on and off. And it took me a little while to realize why kept breaking and I realized it was because I was saving the Photoshop file. It does the same thing when you reload the aftereffects project. So just be aware if you're working at different frame. I said this a few times because the first time I made this tutorial, I did just worked at the default frame rate in Photoshop thinking that we can interpret footage and artifacts, but I didn't realize that you had to. It would reset the frame rate every single time you either save the Photoshop document or you reopened after effects project. So just keep that in mind. And we went through setting your frame rate in the Photoshop file before bringing it into After Effects, make sure you actually do go back and have the correct frame rate in Photoshop. Because one export, it will also reload the Photoshop file and it will look wrong when you do your final render. So make sure you go back and actually fix the Photoshop files frame rate. Amazing. So now we've got a really solid setup of recreating the strokes from the original illustration. And this technique with a few tweaks here and there shouldn't be able to match most strokes styles. So let's quickly recap how we achieve this. We use the pen tool to trace over the original artwork. In my case, it was the arm, making sure to use as few points as possible to keep it manageable but enough so that you can keep the original shape. We then went inside the Shape Layer and hit the fill if it was visible and adjusted the stroke style to match the same width as the original stroke. We then used roughen edges to give the edge of the path that sort of broken up, textured look that you commonly get with things like pencil or chalk. We then brought our texture boil into the same comp and we made it loop by switching on time remapping and using the loopOut expression. We then used our stroke that we made as a track matte for the texture. This makes it so that the texture is only visible where the stroke is. After that, we made a roughen edges boil randomly by finding the random seed property and adding in a simple time expression that makes it change on every frame. Finally, we added a posterize time effect on an adjustment layer so that everything below the adjustment layer is running on twos, including the roughen edges boil, and any animation that we're gonna be putting in later on. Amazing. So your assignment this time is to match the stroke style in your illustration. This should be totally possible with this exact method. It's just gonna be a matter of matching the texture, matching the color, matching the stroke width, and maybe fiddling with the roughen edges, border width, that kind of thing. I mean, digital animation is basically about fiddling with numbers. So good luck. In the next lesson, we're gonna be taking what we learned in this lesson and applying it to a larger filled color area. So I'll see you there. 12. Creating Textured Colour Fills: Hello. In this lesson, we're gonna be applying our boiling texture to a filled color area. To do this, we're gonna be using fills rather than strokes inside shape layers. And we're going to be looking at various ways we can change our texture or adjusted to match the artwork more closely. So let's jump back in. So the next thing we're gonna do is create a filled. I'm just sitting on the techniques for the moment. Make sure that we've got it working. And then I'm gonna go through and apply that technique to the whole image. So this is just gonna be on tests. And now I'm going to try and make him one of these fills. So the thing that's gonna be really difficult to recreate this flow, you see how when the lake was colored in, the coloring is sort of going following the leg direction. That thing is going to be really difficult to recreate. But these are one of the compromises that we might have to make. So I'm just going to try making this part of the leg and see how they look. I think you can see, you can kinda see a stroke here as well. So that's something that we could try and recreate. The first thing I'm gonna do is make a fill and just see how close we get and then maybe we can start adjusting it from there. So I'm just going to trace over the leg. It's worth pointing out that if you are going to animate this leg, you might not want to have an outline like this. You might want to somehow figure out how to make it out of a stroke, a single stroke, which is possible, but this leg is quite a complicated shape, so it would be kinda fiddly to do that. I'm just going to turn off the fill for the lumen so I can see what I'm doing. I'm just going to adjust it a little bit. Then I'm going to turn off the stroke and I'm going to turn on the fill. So now we just have a fill on the Shape Layer. And I'm going to hide reference again. Basically all I'm gonna do at the moment is just duplicate what we already have on the stroke and see how it's looking. So this is going to be the leg fill. Just going to click on our arm line test. I'm going to copy these roughen edges. I'm going to paste it onto the leg fill. So now we have the exact same thing going on the edge. And I'm going to duplicate this texture boil layer by doing control D, apple D on a Mac, it's got the alpha matte turned on already, but the leg fill layer is still visible, so you need to turn that off. So if that's happened to you, you can do that or it will reset it. You can just go click on the texture boil layer, click No Track Matte and then it will be reset. And then when you click on Alpha Matte again, it will automatically turn off this layer and use it as a, as the alpha matte. So that's basically, I mean, you can see it's very different texture. So there's a few things we can do to make it look a little bit more like the illustration. Let's just hit play on that and see how it's looking. So it's looking quite nice already. Especially from this distance to the boil is quite intense. And if we go back to our reference layer, it's not, the texture is not as intense as that. I do want to see boiling because I think it would be nice. This texture movement all the way through, but I think it's a little bit too much using this current texture. So from here, I'm just going to be refining my texture effects. So it might not necessarily be relevant to all illustrations, obviously because there's going to be such a variety of textures out there if you've got textures in your image. But I think the process is kind of useful because this will show you how to adjust the texture. It's a lot of different techniques of how to refine it. So I think it's still useful to watch. Like I said, it might not necessarily be directly relevant to every image. So there's a few things that we can do to remedy that. The first thing I'm going to try is clicking on the texture and bringing in levels effect. So I'm going to click on the texture layer and in the effects controls, I'm going to go to Color Correction levels. The main use of the levels of factors as a grading tool. It allows you to control the high end and low end using the left and right controls at the top there. And you can do various things like clipping off the black and clipping off the white. And there's middle control there, which allows you to adjust the levels in-between. But the way I'm going to use it is for adjusting the alpha channel and the texture. And I'm going to change the channel on the levels here to Alpha. And this gives you control over the alpha channel on the texture because this is the transparency. So this will be relevant if you have an alpha channel in your texture, if you're using a texture that's not got an alpha channel, like it's a black and white image, like I mentioned before, if you're using it as a luma matte, which you can do as a track matte instead of what we're using, which is an Alpha matte or an Alpha Track Matte, then you can use the levels in the default, which is RGB mode, which is just affecting regular colors, rather than Alpha motors, which is how I'm going to be using it. And the first thing to do is just play with this middle control a little bit. See if I can just reduce the amount of texture that's going on. Then you can also bring down the light. There's quite a harsh texture. So at the moment. So I'm going to reset this for the moment. And I'm going to add another effect on top. I'm going to add a Blur and Sharpen Fast Box Blur. I'm going to put that above the levels. And I'm going to set the blur radius to something that's way too much of something very small. So maybe 0.1 just to give the levels of something to play with. Because if I turn this off, you can see the texture is either on or off. The transparency is either on or off. So I'm going to put the blur on first, maybe 0.2. That way. It just softens that texture a little bit. Allow these levels to have something to play with. And then I'm gonna go back to the levels, select Alpha again. And now I've got a little bit more control over the brightness of this texture. So I can try bringing this, see how I've got a bit more. I don't want to get rid of it. I just don't want it to be quite as strong. Okay, I think that's looking better. Now, I can maybe try adding a sharpened until I'm adding the sharp end. If you go to the blur and sharpen effects, then the sharpened is to try and get rid of the blurriness. We add blur. Then we use the levels effects to adjust the density of the texture. And then we can add a sharp and effect to then remove the blur again. So now it's just been reduced quite a lot. So that's looking closer to the drawing. I would say play on that. That's looking better. I'm still getting quiet a lot boiling down to maybe what we can do now is add another layer just to reduce the texture even more. Also, I think I'm going to add in that stroke. So if you go back to the reference, you can see that it's kinda thicker towards the edge. I'd like to keep a little bit of that to see if we can make it feel a little bit more like it's been outlined and then colored in. So I'm going to duplicate the leg fill, pressing Control D or Command D on a Mac. And then I'm going to switch back on the stroke to contents shape. And there's tons stroke on it and turn the fill off and then change it strikes a bit more visible stroke color and make it yellow. I want it to be the same as this line texture. So let's go in and see what the size of that stroke cause. Stroke width 10.5. Okay, so that's kinda the stroke width for the entire documents. So 10.5 or something to for me to keep my head now. 10.5, Nice. And then I've already got the roughen edges on it. Call this leg line. And I'm going to duplicate my text to boil again and turn off this layer. Now I've got the leg line as well as if I hide the leg texture, you can see that I've got now got a line for the whole thing. Didn't text me back on. Sticking closer. It's nice. I'm going to try duplicating the leg texture for the leg films, going to grab the leg fill and its texture and do Control D on that. So I've got another one. See how it's looking even thicker. This is the same texture on top of each other, on top of itself. I'm just going to offset it if I just drag the texture layer so that the animation is offset to the one below. It's getting really thick now. So actually what I'm gonna do is I'm going to make this one a really light, since we made the other texture quite heavy by increasing the levels on this. So you can see it here like you can control here. So in fact on, so that's the bottom layer that's on my bass texture layer. And the next extra layer, I'm going to actually decrease it just so that I have just a little bit more texture on top because I'm going to grab that middle levels control again and just pump it up so that I've got a real light texture with lots of transparency. And I'm just going to see if I can dive in a little bit. I'm also going to rotate this, see what happens. Move it. Okay, let's see what happens when we play that. That's looking nice. So now it's not too intense, It's not catching my eye too much, I guess is what I'm trying to do, but I'm getting a lot of like completely solid red. So maybe what I can do now is take the bottom layer and just start reducing the texture on this one as well. Until I've got the right level of texture. That's looking pretty good. I'm gonna go with that for the moment. One thing I didn't do is actually put the background color and this is still completely black. So I'm just going to grab the background color control Y. And that creates a new solid. Or you can go to layer new solid, Control Y or Command Y on a Mac and just use this little picker here, I can sample the background color and that solid is just correct background color. I'm going to drag it to the bottom so it's behind everything. Okay, so that's basically it. Now I just have to apply this technique to everything to recreate the whole picture. So that's the technique I'm going to use. Football could probably get closer with this texture. I could go back into Photoshop and make it closer texture, but I think I'm just going to go with this one for the moment. It's quite easy to swap these out. So if you make a new texture, you can just bring it in as another texture boil at texture for O2 and then make the same thing. And then you can just look, let's say I had texture boil O2 here. I could just grab that and hold down Alt with a layer selected down here and just replace these textures so I can mix and match them. This is another powerful thing with doing it like this and after effects is you can actually fully adjust everything afterwards, especially this is great for client projects. If a client comes to you and says this texture is not close enough, Okay? Try and making it closer and you've kept all your animation, everything is finished. But you can then go back and fix that texture. You can change it for completely different texture. So far, everything's red at the moment because that's the color that I painted in Photoshop, which is sampled from the original image because there's a lot of red in my image, but I haven't shown you how to actually change the color of the fill. So I'll take you through that now. And obviously if I want a different color and that texture, if I change it inside the texture boil pre-comp, then it's going to change the color of everything that we're using on. So we need to change it in the main comp. So I'm just going to click on one of my texture boil layers. I'm going to right-click because I'm doing work on the head now, I'm gonna go to Generate Fill. This is a really good effect for changing the color of anything without affecting the alpha channel properties of it. So I click on that layer. I'm just going to reveal this so I can sample my reference, which is this yellow that I want now. And then I'm going to hide that again. So now we can see the yellow coming through. But because like on the leg, we'd used to texture layers. So obviously I need it on the second layer as well. So I'm just going to copy that fill and I'm going to add it onto one above. And now I've got the exact same animation that I had on my leg. Now I've got a yellow head, yellow version of it because you do not see. So running through. Great. So now we have our strokes and fills, all looking pretty close to the illustration style. Let's quickly recap what we covered in this lesson. We traced that filled color area. In my case, it was the characters leg. And we made sure that the film was on rather than the stroke inside the shape layer. We then applied the textured boil to that filled area, just like we did with a stroke in the last lesson using a track matte. I then showed you how I took my quite intense boil and reduced it down a little bit to more closely match the illustration style. And to make it a bit more subtle. For this, I used a combination of the blur effect, a little bit of blur, and then applying the levels effect so that you could adjust the intensity of the texture. And I also used multiple texture layers so that when they combined, they filled in more areas and you had less gaps. I also showed you a quick way of changing your texture colors by using the color fill effect. Your assignment this time is to match a filled color area in your illustration by applying your texture and refining it so that it matches your illustration. So when you're happy with the style of both your strokes and your fills. In the next lesson, we're gonna be looking at that final sprinkle that will really sell the handmade look. Worldliness. 13. Make Things Wobbly: Okay, So this is the last main effect will be looking at in creating our handmade styles. In this lesson, we're going to be looking at creating a kind of a big but subtle wobbling effect, which will help recreate those little inconsistencies that occur when you're making things by hand. And to do this, we're gonna be using an effect called turbulence displace. So let's go back to our composition and I'll show you how to set it up. The last thing I'm gonna do before I go ahead and make the entire image using these techniques, is I'm going to add one more adjustment layer at the top. This one is going to be a sort of overall distortion. I'm going to put it underneath the Posterize Time. Posterize time should be right at the top. And I'm going to call this big distort. And I'm going to click on that and I'm going to right-click on the Effects Controls. And I'm gonna go to distort, and I'm going to use a different one called turbulent displace. That's made everything really wonky like that. So that's too big at the moment. I just want to add a big wobble, but a small bit wobbly. I want the scale of it to be large. So when I say scale big, I mean like this, you can see how the wobbles are getting smaller. I want a fairly big wobble. I want to recreate basically what I'm trying to recreate the inaccuracy that your hand would have when drawing the line. I just want something, maybe we can adjust this afterwards as well. Let's see how it looks when it's moving. But I want it to be maybe that big. So I'm gonna go with 64 size. And then I want a small amount. So maybe something like two. When you turn it on and off. Maybe we can make it a bit bigger so we can see it a bit more. But I think it's gonna be a receivable. When you just look at it at a still, you're not even going to notice that it's on. But when it's moving, it will add an extra level of handmade. Like it's going to add that slight wobble that you would get if you were redrawing every single frame by hand. And then we're going to use the same expression that we did for the roughen edges. So we're gonna go to evolution options and we find that random seed again. I'm going to do it down here actually good at affects turbulent displace evolution options. And I'm going to hold down Alt again on random seed and click the stopwatch. And that gives us access to the expression control. And I'm going to type in again time, times 24, and then somewhere in neutral. Now, that should be changing again on every frame, we can double-check that if you've made an expression on a layer and you want to go straight back to it. You can press E to bring up all the expressions on that layer. If you just press E, it will bring up the effects. If you press E, It brings up the expressions. And you can see if I'm stepping through the frame is holding down Control and right arrow and left our running up there. You can see it's changing. This number is going up once every frame, just like we did before with the roughen edges, going to press L. L is actually to bring up audio controls, but because most layers don't have audio, it actually just closes wherever you've got open. So I just press L in it. Why does everything? So let's just test that. And because it's under the posterize time, that big distortion will be changing every other frame along with everything else. So let's just check it. Very nice. So now this is actually really tying everything together. This is now telling me that this is pretty hand-drawn. We've got the texture going. We've got the edge boiling along with the roughen edges. And we have a sort of hand-drawn wobble boil using this turbulence displace. And that's pretty much it. That's probably mostly the effects I'm going to use for this one. So I'm going to go through now and finish the rest of the drawing. I'll point out any places if I'm using a different technique or from fine-tuning it in a, in an interesting way. I'm essentially going to go through and recreate this whole picture using this technique. Yeah, and then after that we can look at some animation. So you don't necessarily have to follow this next section, but I'm just going to go through and take off all the effects that we've done so far and compare it to what it would look like if we had no effects at all. So we've got this nice strong effect going and I just wanted to show you the power of this. So let's just do a really test animation basically on this arm. So I'm just going to change the shape of this path. Then the set a keyframe on this path. And let's say we wanted the arm to open up like this. I mean, this is not really an animation. This is just moving a path just to show you how it would look if these parts were moving. I'll just I'll just add a little bit of easing on it. So now we've got this arm moving and it's completely drawn. And let's say I want to change it. It looks like it's been hand-drawn or like it could technically have been hand-drawn in Photoshop. And it's completely changeable, let's say, instead of going over there, I wanted to just go up here and change into this shape. So it's super easy to change and it looks all hand-drawn and everything is really nice. So we've got this animation looking nice and drawn just to compare. If we turn all the effects off, we just have shaped players with no taxes or anything. And it's not on twos. It just looks like a super digital vector animation. This is what After Effects will look like by default, if you're animating using shape layers. It really shows the difference when you add all these effects on top. Amazing. So now we've got a really good foundation for a drawn effect. We can now go through and finish out illustrations using these techniques. Let's quickly recap the steps in this lesson that we use to create the wobbling effect, we added another adjustment layer below our posterize time. To that we added a turbulence displace effect. We then added that same time expression to the random seed to give it that random boil effect on every single frame. I then went through and showed you what a path animation would look like before and after we added all of the drawn effects just to show you what the difference it would make. Your assignment this time if you haven't already done it, is to add that turbulence displays on top to give it that little bit of inconsistency over everything. And then I want you to go through and finish your illustration using all the techniques that we've gone through so far. So textured, boil, roughen edges, posterize time, all of that stuff makes sure you've got it all in there. And then I want you to rebuild all the shapes that you're going to be animating in your illustration. Then I want you to think about what you're going to animate. So keep it simple unless you really familiar with effects animation. But if you're not, then definitely keep the animation simple. Don't think about creating any kind of John Wick action sequences or anything like that. I want you to think about more subtle things that you could do, such as adding cloud's going past, maybe some hand movements. If you're feeling adventurous, character blinks, that kind of thing. Go for it If you're really up for it. But for the purpose of this class, we only need a simple animation. In the next lesson, I'm going to be going through a random list of extra tips and techniques that you can keep in mind when building your illustrations. So you could watch this next lesson while doing your assignment of building your illustration, you might find something that's really useful. I'll see you there. 14. Extra Tips While Re-Building Your Illustration: Welcome back. So you should currently be in the process of building your illustration in After Effects ready for animation. In this lesson, I'm going to take you through a bunch of extra tips and techniques that I came across while building my own illustration for animation that I thought might be useful for you. I've put them together one after the other, like gauntlet style. And I've put some notes in the timeline, in the Skillshare timeline for easier access. My arm, I've got multiple strokes. I don't think I mentioned this before. But for example, the main stroke IS goes around the elbow and it's just connected to this finger. But obviously there's lots of different shapes here. And you can put multiple shapes inside one shape layer. And actually what I like to do is for the parts are going to be roughly the same. You can drop the paths under one shape group inside the shape layer. So I just drew this second shape here and it made shape to inside the shape layer. But for that second finger, I think it's gonna be pretty much the same as the first finger, but there's a different taper settings on there. So maybe I will keep it as stroke too. But yeah, there's a lot of arrangements that you can have inside the shape player. And so I'm gonna do this entire arm inside one layer. It's quite a good idea to do as much as you can within one shape layer, obviously depending how you're animating. So keep in mind, you can't do any different position on rotational animation where you can't do without difficulty on different shape layers within one layer. If you want to be animating just the entire layer, that it was going to move. All the shapes within multiple shapes. And you can even have multiple paths within one shape group as well, which can be handy in a lot of ways. I'm just making this line in the background. I'm going to do it in a slightly different way. I just thought it'd be worth showing because this has got two different colors on it. The scene is getting quite heavy because there's so many layers of textures. And up until this point I've been doing a texture is the layer that's visible and it's using the Shape Layer Mask. Problem with that is that you can only have one color. So the whole layer is the same color, which is fine for most of this image. But maybe you want to have multiple colors on the same layer. And maybe you want to keep the color of the shape layer. I'm gonna do it that way this time. So it's pretty simple. So I've just got this line here and I'm going to duplicate this path, which is this one here, this green line that I've just made. So I'm going to hide that for the moment, hide the illustration. I'm going to solo this layer because now I need it to be a different color. I'm going to duplicate the entire shape. Command D on the Shape, Control D. Open that up and then I'm going to move the path up to make the blue one. And I'm going to select the stroke color as well and just hide this for a sec and then select the blue. So now we've got green and blue shapes. I'm just going to tidy this up a bit. Now we've got that. I'm going to grab a texture, the texture I've been using for the lines command, Control D on that. And this time I'm going to use the Shape layer as the color, and I'm going to use the text to boil as the track matte. So I'm going to go to shake lonely and nameless midi lines and then click on the track matte. And I'm going to select alpha matte. Now, got the texture running through it and we've kept the color. So you can do it either way round. You've basically got two layers with alpha channels and track mattes kind of combine the two alpha channels together. So it uses one as a base and then it lays the other one on top. So for these cheeks, I'm going to, instead of making a new shape layer, I'm just going to make an adjustment layer and make it tweak the color of the head below. So it's gonna be a slightly different technique. It's just a bit easier. I think this is gonna be pretty much straightforward. So I'm gonna go to layer, new adjustment layer. I'm going to drag that down to just above the head layers, which I've got down here. And then I'm going to just hide my reference. And I'm going to show everything below the adjustment layer. There we go. There's my head. This is gonna be cheek color and I'm going to put in a color correction. Hue and saturation does a few different ways of doing this. You could probably do change the color, but I quite like hue and saturation. So this is going to be a little bit more manual, but I think it's going to be a nicer way to change the color. So the way I'm gonna do is I'm going to just start by guessing. I think it's just pretty much orange, maybe a bit more saturation. And then I'm going to show my reference fairly close for now, we'll find the color later. I'm going to get this circle tool and I'm just going to draw two masks. So these are not shape layers, these masks. So you can see on my cheek color adjustment layer, it's made a mask. I'm just gonna make another one, the second cheek. And then you can use the pen tool to adjust these. They're not perfect ellipses, they're slightly misshapen, which will make everything look a little bit more handmade. And then there's a bit of a feather on these, so they're slightly blurry. So I'm just going to go into these mask and I'm going to hide this reference to now. Wait to read, but yeah, just that in a sec. And I'm going to increase the mask feather. And then now I'm going to work on the color. Might just use the little camera tool here. You can take a snapshot so that I don't have to keep hiding and showing the layer. Now that I've got snapshot, I can just press this show Snapshot button. Obviously need to make it a little bit less red. I'm going to hide the mass by doing Control Shift H or Command Shift H on a Mac, obviously it's not identical. This is just a quick way of doing it and it saves because the more texture layers, the more shape layers and roughen edges you use them heavier the scene gets. So this is just kind of a quick cheat. And obviously if you want it to move with the face, which I will want to do, then you can just attach it to the face lines layer, make sure the eyes are attached as well. When you move this around. Move whole face. If you need to vary the width of your stroke, which often happens in hand-drawn animation. It's a pretty tricky thing to animate with. If it's changing a lot, it might be difficult, but if it doesn't change, like it probably won't do for me. The open up the stroke inside your shape layer stroke options. And then I can't remember the version where they introduced this. I think it was a few versions ago. So if you're on an old version of artifacts, you might not have it, but there's the Taper options here. And this allows you to either make the start or the end of the stroke a bit thinner. So you first, you need to find which one it is. If you do start to strike either the start link to the end length, you can see it shrinking down there. So I've got this thing where on the end of this finger it's thinner than it is down here at the elbow. One stroke. So I want this to be thinner, but I don't want it to go down to 0. I just want it to go down to the thickness that is here. So I can increase the start width from 0 and then just stop when it's about right. And you can also change the easing here, which kind of gives you a little bit control over where the taper starts. So yeah, you can use taper if you need to vary the thickness of your stroke. So I'm just working on these lines in the background. And unlike the strokes and the rest of the image, these ones have a variable stroke width, the ones around the arm here, or just a single width. So I haven't had to vary the width along the line. But quite often when you're doing drawn animation such as or something like that do a width will vary. The natural variation in your stroke when you're drawing, your pressure will be different. So you might be making a thicker or thinner stroke generally. And this is like how we did in chronemics and the example chronemics that I showed you earlier on, we did it in a different way, but you can do it in quite an easy way. And so the raffinate is that you'll have on your strokes already will be something like this. There will be a small amount of border, maybe four or five or something like that. And then small scale as well. And that's creating that really small roughness along the edge of the stroke. And the way I'm going to vary the thickness of these lines is I'm just going to duplicate the roughen edges. So I'm going to press Control D or Command D on a Mac. And that gives us a second one. I'm going to turn the second one off for the moment and this one below. So the way the effects work in After Effects as they go down. So anything that you have above at the top happens first and then the ones below are affecting the ones above, if that makes sense. So what I want is I want to have the vary the line thickness first and then I want to add up the roughness back on afterwards, vary the line thickness by increasing the border size of the roughen edges just a little bit. And then I'm going to increase the scale quite a lot. I'm going increase the scale to something like one hundred and twenty, one hundred and thirty. And then I'm going to increase the podocytes a little bit more just until I get the variation that I want, I'm going to take my reference again. So something like that is working well. And then if you want a rough line as well, you can add the roughness back on, on top so we can turn the second roughen edges back on and that will roughen the edge of the first roughen edges if that makes sense. So we've got one big, nice smooth stroke with varying line. And then we can add the roughness back on top of that. My line isn't particularly rough, so I'm actually not going to use that second roughen edges. I'm just going to keep the first one. But that's how you do it. If you want to have a variable line thickness on your stroke. I'm a good point with this. I think I'm going to split this up into a second scene. So I've done the whole character. Yeah, I'm gonna do the background stuff in a different comp because it's going to be much simpler. So I'm just going to split this comp off with a second same setup. And I'll do a null set up all the background elements in there. Literally just go into project, Project tab. And I'm going to duplicate hit control D on my sunny and anime. And this is going to be, I'm going to rename that one, sunny and in main. I'm going to name this one background, this background one. I want to keep some things just as referenced, but I can delete most of the stuff. I want to keep the posterize time. I want to keep the big distortion. Then I'm going to delete all the other things. I can always go back to the main copying and copying stuff from there if I need it. Now I've done the background elements here and I'm just going to put that calm sunny and MPG. In fact, I'm going to make a little folder here. This is going to be a pre-comp and I'm going to drag sunny and MEG. I'm going to put it below, right at the bottom, above the background color, but below everything else. So now we've got this sunny and MPG precomp in there. And you can see if I turn it off, it's got my background elements. I'm going to go in there and I don't need, these aren't the posterize time and the big distort. It's better to have those off in the pre-comp. This is just so that I could work there and that you can see what you're doing when you actually animating in this comp, the effects on so you can make sure that it's boiling in a correct way. But if I go back to main comp now, I only need that effect on top of everything anyway, so it doesn't need to be added twice on this comp. So I'm just working on the face now. I would just as a recommendation, I would put much more effort into getting the face looking right than pretty much anything else in your image. Just because our brains just look at faces first. So the original artists on this one has made a really nice face here. And I kinda want to capture as much detail as that of that as possible in my regression of it. I'm not sure if I mentioned this before, but don't forget that you can move the texture as well. So if something's getting in the way, like I'm getting this line going through the eyebrow here, which I'm not too keen on. So I'm literally just going to grab the texture layer and I'm just going to move it. And then I'm going to test to make sure that it's not appearing on any of the other frames to the boil. This arm you can see is causing me a problem. If you look at the original, you can see it through the back here. And then if you look at the original, it's got an interesting layering. So this arm is see-through, but it's not see-through for the background is only S3 for the head. I got to figure out a way to mask out anything that goes behind the arm apart from the head. So obviously we can't just make the inside of the arm black because we need at C34 on top of the head. So obviously, whatever is making this black fill needs to go behind the head, but in front of the background objects. And from this arm, something that's a bit more fiddly is that we have to do the same on the leg. I didn't really think about that before. I thought I spotted this on the arm and I thought that's gonna be easy. But then obviously we're gonna have to do it the leg as well, which I'll show you a good way of setting this up so that we have a fill that's the same as the arm that goes behind the head find bilayer with the arm line. I'm just going to duplicate it, Control D and then drag this below it. I'm going to solo this and actually what we need. So this is a stroke at the moment and we need it to be a fill. So I'm just going to add a fill. Now we've just got the arm main and I'm going to just open this up and I'm going to turn this fill layer back on and the stroke off. And this green needs to be the color of the background. I'm not going to use well, I guess it yeah, I'm gonna do that. So I'm going to select the background color, and I'm going to solo this again. Now it's just the background color. So that's fine. And then we can put this just above this white arm layer, which I've called our arm for, right arm goes there. And because I'm probably going to animate these pads, I need to make sure that the online fill is moving the same way. So the way to do that is I'm going to Alt, click on the path and make to open the expression box. Don't worry, we didn't have to do any programming. And I'm going to pick whip. This, pick whip, not this one. There's one next to the expression parser. Make sure you're on the expression whip icon. And you just hold down on that and drag it makes a little line. And I'm going to link it to the corresponding path on the main online layer. And that puts a little bit of automatic code in there, which you don't need to know, but essentially points the values that are held within this path is just going to say these values equal this value. So you're just linking that to that. So they become the same thing. That way whenever I animate this path, we'll do the exact same thing and we don't have to worry about it, we don't have to think about it. I'm just gonna do the same one on this path two. Click on the stopwatch. That opens up the expressions. I'm going to pick whip from the expressions and I'm going to pick whip path to, and that's his path to in there. So there's the fill. Should probably point out that the fill, because this is an open path, it just draws a line directly to the points where it's open. So that doesn't really matter because I think in the picture and we only need this elbow bit to be filled in. But we're quite lucky with that because otherwise you'd see things through here. So I'm just gonna be careful not to see things through here though, just to quickly show you if I move the, these paths which we've linked together on this layer, you can see that both layers move. The cards are linked together. Another quick tip, if you double-click the shape tool. So if you've got nothing selected in your scene and double-click on the rectangle tool or any one of these. If you double-click it, it will make a shape the same size as your Comp. Double-click that made us shape. Rectangle shape, which is exactly the same size as my comp. It's pretty handy, can do it with masks as well. So if you've got a layer selected and you double-click on the shape, it will make a mask on that layer the same size. And it does it with any of these shapes. I think even if you make the Star Tool, yeah, it makes a star the same size as the comp. I'm just about to make these dotted lines here. So obviously I don't want to have to go in and make a little separate line for each one of these with any of these things. If you're not going to animate it, then you can just use the original artwork and put a little displacement on it. But I think I will animate this. So there's a very handy tool that's built into After Effects. I'm just gonna make this stroke black and I'm going to match the width. So inside the strokes tab, if you look down here, there's a dashes drop-down. When you drop it down, nothing happens but you need to add dashes. So basically what you do is you add a dash and then you can add gaps. And then if you keep clicking that adds dash gap, dash gap. So we want to add a dash. If you don't have a gap, the dashes and the gaps will just be the same size. There's also, the third option here is offset, so you can just 12 that and it makes your dashes scroll up and down. So I'm just making these trails for the shooting star. And I think I'm just going to use the same technique as I used for the borders here, these dashed lines. So I've got a dashed line going here. And I'm just going to duplicate this path that I've made. And I'm going to make multiple trials like in the illustration. And then I can just animate the offset. So then they go like this as the shooting star is flying through the sky, I think that would be quite effective. There's more complicated ways you could do this. You could do it with particles. But the only other thing that I need to worry about is making sure that these don't look just like identical lines. So maybe we can just shorten these or yeah, if I move the start point, then it changes a lot. So that way they don't look identical. But I think that's gonna be a really nice way of animating the trial. So a lot of this things you've got to keep in mind how you're going to animate something before you set it up. Obviously, if I draw lots of little squares, that's not gonna be animatable, but doing it on a line like this with dashes. And then all I need to do is animate the offset of the dashes. Then that's gonna be really easy to animate. I just attach this trail to the star and I animate the star and the whole thing flies across the sky. I'm just saying that the star in the background, and I want them to feel like they're twinkling. And at the moment, this is what the effect looks like. This is just the static effect that's over everything that makes it feel kind of drawn. But I think the stars should twinkle more. So what I wanna do is make a more exaggerated Boyle. And the way I'm gonna do that is literally by animating the path. So this is not necessarily animation, animation, but this is, this is just exaggerating the boil effect even more. So I'm just going to randomly pull these around and just see what comes up. I'm going to do this and step frames. So I'm just going to pull these around a bit and move forward two frames because I want it to be on twos. And actually maybe it's a good idea to start with the first one. Otherwise you'll start walking around. I think I made that too big. Just don't want it to go too far. Otherwise, it will start animating, look like it's growing by just want it to look like it's wobbling. The test this, by the way, B and N will set your in and out points for this preview range. And then I'm going to hit preview it and I'm going to see how that's feeling. The, I think that looks really nice. That's definitely feeling like a hand-drawn style to me. There's an issue though, because it's difficult to loop path animation. This is the normal way to loop layer. So you hit the expression, then you go loop out. And that will loop after, loop through all the keyframes afterwards. And that's what loopOut loop will loop all the keyframes before it, and then you need those brackets there and that will loop. But this is a problem, is that you can't loop paths for whatever reason, you can't look for paths. So we need an extra expression for that. So what I'm gonna do is I've got, I'm not going to write this expression and this is a really complicated expression. This expression is a little bit beyond me, but it takes the keyframes and looks at the numbers of the keyframes and then it loops that. So it's kind of a manual way of looping the keyframes using an expression. I'm not sure exactly where this one came from. I copied and pasted it. It might be a Dann eben, it's one who's famous for writing a lot of expressions, but you can copy and paste this expression. So once you've copied it, just paste it into there. And hopefully it will look like that. You've got all these. And then when you hit render will be looping for the whole timeline we go. So I think this is a good point to show where I've got two using the techniques that we've gone through so far. Um, I haven't done any actual animation yet. This is just the boiling and this wobbling that we've added on. Your assignment for this lesson is just to finish your illustration. So I want your illustrations to be kind of boiling away in After Effects using all the techniques that we've gone through so far. So it should look like the original illustration, but hopefully it's boiling away as if it was alive. Don't do any actual animation yet. Don't get anything moving yet. Because we're gonna be doing some animation tips next for you to keep in mind when you're actually approaching the animation. So I'll see you there. 15. Animation Tips For A Drawn Look: Okay, So I went through an animated, my illustration and his final result. I wanted to keep it fairly simple and ambient just to bring the character to life a little bit, I didn't wanna do anything too crazy movement wise as this class mainly focuses on the drawn effects. In this lesson, I'm going to be breaking down some of the techniques I use to make my final animation. Like I said before, this is less of a full animation tutorial, which is too big a topic to include in this class. It's more of animation tips and tricks to help you keep everything in a drawn style. That said, I will quickly show you some of the fundamentals to animation and after effects. Just in case anybody is completely new to the timeline, I would highly recommend keeping things very simple like I have in my animation. I wouldn't go for any crazy icon sequences at this time unless you're really comfortable in After Effects already, like in the last lesson, I'm going to be going through these one-by-one kind of randomly. But I'll be including the notes in the timeline again for easy access. So we'll just do a quick intro to the actual timeline and After Effects, I know that we've done an entire affects class at this point, but I think it's still worthwhile talking about the animation timeline a little bit. So if I just make a, make a new composition 24 frames a second, HD, and then I'm just going to make a shape layer. I'm going to click up here and make a star, a gold star, that gold, gold enough. So this is the timeline obviously. I mean, we animated a little bit of texture before and we've been moving the position around, but I'm just going to show you a little bit more of how this works in terms of easing. And we'll talk about keyframe, keyframes a little bit. So you set a keyframe in After Effects by pressing on the stopwatch on the property that you want to move. So if you want to animate the position, then you hit the stopwatch on the position property and then automatically makes a keyframe for you that at the moment it's a linear keyframes and this is a diamond. And let's say I want start to move across the screen. So I'm just going to move it over here and it will automatically change that keyframe to this position. And then I'm going to move forward. Two seconds, hit N for just at the end of my preview range there. And I'm going to move this across. Then you're going to set a new key frame at the point in the timeline where the playhead is. So if I do another one here, if I lift it up, then we'll now go up and it's made a keyframe up there. And then it goes back down to our end keyframe. Let's get rid of that for a moment. And I'm going to move these keyframes around quite easily like this. You can just drag them around to change their timing. Now, it's stay still for a little bit and it moves forward and stops. So you can see that It's moving in quite a linear way. The three different types of keyframes are linear, eased, which is any kind of curve that you might either it's faster or slower or something like that, or hold. Hold means the key will hold that value until it reaches the next one. So you can right-click on it on the keyframe and do toggle hold keyframe. And now when you press play, the star will just jump from that position on this key frame to the end. You can also press Control Alt and click a keyframe. And that will toggle between linear and hold frames. And if you select multiple frames, that will do it on multiple frames. And if you click on it, if you click and hold Control or Command on a Mac, by the way, it will toggle between an auto key and linear and auto key. I don't think it does anything unless you have more movement going on, but basically it will try and automatically iis between, between the frames. I don't tend to use these very much because I like to do animation manually. So let's just do the easy one, which is the most common ones. So if you select your keyframes and to keyframe assistant, easy ease. So now what will happens is it kind of compresses these. You can see these dots up here. It shows you where the in-between frames are. So when you have an easy ease, it will compress the frames towards the keyframes. And as a result, the ones in-between are spaced wider, so it will go faster in the middle and slower towards the end. So now when we press Play, you get this nice smooth motion. And likewise, so let's say we want to add a bit of rotation on to this. So I'm going to hit Toggle and rotation button. I'm going to go to the end of the animation, so toggles, toggling it on their sets, a keyframe of this current rotation. And we go to the end and then we spin it around. Let's do 360. And now make one spin as, as, as, as it moves across the screen. And if I click on both of those and go to easy ease again so you can right-click keyframe assistant, easy ease, F9. Now the fresco, now at ease is nicely. It's doing a little bit of a wobble because the anchor point is not in the middle of the star. So you can actually fix that after, after you do it, if you press Y or this button up here, why is the shortcut? You can actually move the anchor point around. But it's a bit weird doing that after you've done animation, because you can move the keyframe, but it will see him. It doesn't move the subsequent keyframe, so it will kind of move back. The end position of the star is now different. Or the alternative is you can go into the Shape Layer and go to the polystyrene transform in the, inside the shape group. So if you go to contents, so this was specific to shape layers. But if you go to Contents, open the poly star, go to transform. And then because you've, because I drew it randomly on the screen or roughly in the middle, it's not quite in the center. Actually move the position inside the shape layer. So the shape layer is still in exactly in the middle of the screen because it's created in the middle of the middle of the composition. But the position of the shape inside the shape layer is off. So you can hit 00 on that to make it in the middle. And now the star is perfectly in the middle. And when we press Play, it will spin without having that wobble, even though that will look pretty cool. But now let's just spins perfectly straight. If you press on the layer that you've got animation on and you press a you than it will just show you those animated properties, which is pretty handy when you've got tons of layers and you're running out of space in your timeline. And one final thing to show you a bit more advanced animation in After Effects, you can use the graph editor. So if you press this button up here on the timeline that takes you to the Graph Editor. If you've got some keyframes selected, it will show you those keyframes inside the graph editor. This is a little bit unintuitive for beginners. I would say that this is essentially a Speed Graph, so you can see how it's going slowly at the star and then it's fast at the top. And then slow again. I mean, I guess it is fairly intuitive. There's basically, there's two ways of representing this and every other program uses a different method called, I think I don't know what the proper name is for it. In some programs are called F curves. You've got both modes in After Effects. So this is called the Speed Graph. And if you switch to the value graph, then it shows you the position in values. So red is x, green is y. So we're not moving in the wire, so it stays at the same amount that X is moving. It's going up in value because the x position is increasing. And also the rotation at the bottom. This is the rotation down here. Rotation is increasingly it's going from 0 to 360. So you can actually change that. So I'm going to switch back to the speed graph because it's kind of easier. All the keys are on the same level. You can actually drag these handles out to increase your easing. So this will just make, be careful with this because you can actually make it misaligned quite easily, but you can increase that so it exaggerates the 0s. So now we get really slow at the start and then it goes really quick and then really slow again. And that's essentially how all animation is done in After Effects. You just set keyframes on different positions and rotations or whatever you wanna do. And you can change the easing with this. One last thing to say is that you also get some handles in the actual composition here. So let's switch back to our regular view. Let's say you wanted the path of the star to change during its movement. You can actually control the path movement as a Bezier as well. These are called Bezier handles. I'm not sure if I've explained that before, but that's just what they're called. When you have a spline like this, it's called a spline or a path line. These are called Bezier handles. It's the same when you're drawing the paths for your shape layers, but this is a motion path. So now when we press Play, the star will follow that S curve that I've made and make it a bit slower. So it's not so crazy. And I can make the S-curve a bit more exaggerated so we can see more. There you go. Those are the different main aspects of animation in After Effects. The first thing I'd like to say is that my illustration is in quiet, wobbly style. The illustration itself is quite loose and the textures are nice and there's lots of wobbles generally in the design. So it suits the animation style to be quite wobbly to have also animated the head going around slowly. And there's more, some more subtle animation. So the face is quite subtle. So let's have a quick look at their hands and I'll show you how to approach the animation on those. I've got a separate compare with just the hands in them. You can see they move forward, fingers move. This hand comes forward. There's not, the character is not doing too much. I've actually done all the animation for both hands just on one layer, one layer per hand. So if you, if I click on the layer where I've done my animation and press U, that will show all the animated tracks for that layer. And at first this seems like this seems quite unmanageable, but you can see that my keyframes are quite neat and organized. And the way I've been animating this is by just selecting the points and moving them, but it's pretty easy to work with if you're animating things like this. So make sure nothing is selected. Then you click on a path that will just reveal all the points for the shapes on that one layer. And then you can just drag it from any part of the screen that's not on the path. You can just drag a box selection here and make sure you're only selecting the ones that you want to move. So I don't want this one That's part of the shoulder, but I do want this one down here, so I'm just going to hold shift and add to my selection. If you hold Shift and select a point that's already selected, it will deselect it. And then you either can press Control T or Command T, or you can just double-click on any one of these selected points. So I'm just gonna double-click. You get this transform tool up here. And this just lets you move. Scale, rotate, scale. There you go, anywhere you want. The one thing in particular which makes us especially useful is this anchor point tool. I can just move this anchor point down to the where the risk would be, where the hand would rotate around the wrist. And I can just rotate the entire hand like that as if it was rigged. So this is a completely unrelated hand. There's no rig going on. It's just a shape that I've drawn. But this is actually a really good way to animate very complicated shapes and after effects. So as long as you're neat and tidy down here in your timeline, keeping all these keyframes lined up, you can animate perfectly well just by selecting the points that you want to do. Moving the anchor point to the point at which you want them to rotate around, then just rotate them. Transform technique is really useful. Let's say you wanted to just animate the fingers. So you can just select the finger and move the anchor point. And then there you go. Sometimes your points might distort a little bit, but you can always just fix that easily. So now you can see that there's a finger moving and so on. So you can, you can do this for the whole arm as well. So let's say I actually wanted the whole arm to move so I can select these points. You don't even have to select the endpoints because you can adjust those later. It's very, very forgiving animation technique. And then we go so you can see actually that the whole arm is moving. One thing to keep in mind when you're animating with Posterize Time on, is that you, in my particular case, working at 24 frames a second and dropping in using posterize time to drop it down to 12 frames a second is that it will only show every other frame. So you can see as the hand is moving, you can see the parts move, but then the picture only updates every other frame. And then in this particular case, I've made this keyframe on an odd frame. So you can see that the last pose is not visible until you move off the keyframes to the next frame, then it will redraw. So I would recommend when you're making your keyframes to keep them on the even frames. That way you are actually seeing the keyframe that you're making rather than it's skipping over quickly. The only other thing I wanted to say about this animation technique when you're animating with points, is that it will move in a straight line. So all your points will move in a perfectly straight line to there from the start till the destination. And in this case the hand, if you're rotating around an elbow or wrist, those parts of the limbs should move in an arc really. So it should actually come over like this rather than going in a straight line. And the way you can combat that by, for example, setting a keyframe in the middle. So if I grab all my hand frames, again, maybe I should make something that's a bit more pronounced so that you can actually see what I'm talking about. Let's say this is an arm and I want to animate the services, the hand end. I want to animate this going from a bent arm to a straight arm like this. And when I scrub between, you can clearly see that the arm is shrinking and then growing. And you don't really want that. So one way to combat this is to just set a keyframe in the middle where it's longer. And that way you get this arc appearing. But you can see now it's kind of a triangular motion. So it's looks correct in the middle, but it's still a straight line between now that middle point and the end points. Then you can try adding in more, more in-between frames. And it's kinda looking better. So it's getting a bit more arc, arc like there. But this is the problem. So you don't really want to be saying tons and tons of key frames like this. So if you're doing a lot of animation that requires a very noticeable arc, then you might want to start looking at other ways of rigging this. Otherwise, your animation is going to get really messy. But if you only have to do this one time in an animation and it's quite quick and also posterize time and also some distortion on top. It all kind of helps to hide those mistakes. But if it needs to be really smooth and you need to really see that a slow arcane movement, you're probably going to want to somehow rig a null here to create this rotation. And I'm going to talk about how to connect your points to null. This alternative way of animating with paths. And that's to attach your points directly to nulls. So I'm just going to talk about this very quickly. I don't want to get too much into this, but this is essentially how you would rig shape layer, a character that's made out of shape layers. So I'm just going to make essentially an arm. So this is a limb we're going to work with unless, say, like I was saying before, this problem where you, let's say you want the arm to start like this, and you want it to go straight like that. But you're getting this squashing or let's say, let's do it even more extreme example is you want it to go all the way down like that. Then you've got some major problems. So I'm going to select this path and I'm gonna go to Window. And this is the one that's built into aftereffects. It's called, you go to Window and you go down to create nulls from paths. And when you click that, you should get a little window that pops up like this. Create Nelson pastors got a few buttons, so there's few different things you can do. I'm just going to dock it to my window here so you can see it. So I'm not actually going to use this one. What I am going to use is one called create nulls from paths extended. And I think this is, you download this separately. So if you Google. Create nulls from paths extended. You should be able to find it pretty easily. And only just because it's got a few more options. I don't know if we're going to use these options right now, but I just wanted to point out that this one exists. And if you're going to use this thing called scripts, then I would use this one rather than this one because this one will just give you more options in the long run. So I'm going to do a very simple example. If I ever get around to doing my artworks rigging class, I might come back to this. So what we wanna do is we've got this path and we want to animate this path using nulls. So we want points follow nulls. So this is what we want to do. So I just clicked the path that I want to apply this to, and I click points follow nulls. And now it's made three very useful, perfectly placed nulls. And it's automatically linked to this path to their positions. So now I've got control of this. And obviously I can't just animate the position of this like this, because it does the same thing. I mean, you could actually, I suppose, animate this in a curve now that you could do this. So that's now working, but that's a way. But it's not the best way. The best way to do it is to not animate the position of this at all. And just parent this null to this null. In my case, it's null three. And I'm going to just parent that to null to using this pick whip, parent pick whip here. So I'm just going to drag the pick whip from node three and I'm going to pick whip now too. So now you can see it's got null to in the parent link. So now when I move null to null, three moves around. But what we actually want to do is we want to rotate around that point. So I'm going to click on the rotation keyframe and switch the Keyframing on for rotation. And I'm going to just rotate this all the way around like that. Now we have our path following a perfect arc and we can add a bit of easing on that if we want to select both keyframes there and I trust F9 and they'll put an easy ease in going into a bit more of an advanced animation place. If you click on this button here, which is the graph editor, this will give you access to the amount that these things are easing. So at the moment that's the default ease which has already come looking nice, but it looks a little bit computer generated. You can select these points. And if you pull these out, this is a velocity curve, but I won't go into the ins and outs of that at the moment. But if you exaggerate this, then it has an even more exaggerated curves. So this is feeling really nice now if you make them a little sort of slightly asymmetrical and then it feels a little bit more natural. So we have a really fast start and a nice slow end. One other really useful thing when you're dealing with strokes as well, which is worth mentioning is Trim Paths go to your shape and you have a path like this, like a stroke on a path. And you want to make it shorter but keep the path length the same. You can actually draw a shorter stroke along a path. And to do that, you go to your shape layer, open up your shape, click on the shape within the shape group. And then go to Add here, this click, this little drop-down and go. There's a whole bunch of other things. It's worth exploring here, but I'll just talk about chimpanzees quickly. Click on trim paths, open that out, that will be added to your group. Then you have a Stan, end controllers and offset. And if you bring the n down a bit, it will make the stroke shorter. And the offset War make it run along the stroke as well. So that's really useful in loads of different situations for animating with shape played strokes. Just a quick look at how I animated the rain. It looks very kind of chaotic, but I think it suits the style. I just moved the layer down one, so I actually duplicated the number of raindrops. So you can see there's way more there than you can actually see an image when I select it. And then I just moved it down by one raindrop every time. So it just kinda had this flickering. The rain is changing every frame kind of feel on the texture layer. I just put a mask so that you can only see the raindrops that are within that mask. Then I did that by just selecting on the Rectangle tool. And if you've got a layer selected, then you can just remove that mask for a moment. If I put a mask on here. And then now it's only revealing the raindrops. And because the rain is moving down by one layer, right by one row of raindrops every single time. That's what it's been reading. If I show you the whole layer, you can see that it's just looping, going up and down like this, but you're only but I'm only revealing a section of them. So it just looks like they're sort of a continuously falling raindrops. Flickering pattern. Also wanted to show you the shooting star. The star itself is just one of these styles and I've just animated it moving in an arc like this in a very simple way, simple keyframes and bit of rotation. And I've just parented trail directly to the star. And the trail is very simply, it's just full path and it's got on the stroke, It's got the dashes effect again. So like the dashes that I made for the size of the borders, you can see here on these sides, on the left and right, I used the same technique again. And I'm using animating the offset here so that I can just animate these streaming out of the star. I don't even think you see it because it's so quick that you might necessarily register that the dashes are moving away from the star, but they are. So if it was slow enough, you'd actually see it. I think it kind of adds something for sure to the movement. You can just do something that's very simple. So I would say just keep it simple. If it looks simple, keep it simple because it doesn't need to be complicated. Amazing. So I hope these tips will help you cross the finish line in this class. Your final assignment is to finish off your illustrations by getting something moving. Whether it's just a few little ambient movements like the cloud's going past, rain coming down, the characters blinking, looking left or right. Something subtle like that would be perfect. Whatever you make, I'd really love to see it, so please post it in the class projects. I occasionally run competitions that involve posting of class projects so you don't want to miss out on any prizes. 16. Class Wrap Up : Congratulations, well done for completing this class in how to create hand-drawn styles in After Effects. A massive thank you to everybody who's watching through till this video. I hope you found it useful and I hope you learned something today. Let's quickly take a moment to recap all the steps we took in this class. First, we did a rundown of some of the main terminology that we'll be using to recreate handmade effects in after effects, including things like boiling and working on twos. Next, we explored some different illustration styles and discuss what would work well when animating in After Effects and what would be more challenging. I also showed you a couple of real-world examples where I'd worked on projects using these techniques to create a handmade effect. We then went through prepping and importing artwork from different sources, including Illustrator, Photoshop, and just regular flattened artwork. And then we went through After Effects and set up our composition is nicely ready for animation. We then went ahead and use those textures to recreate the strokes and the color fills from an existing illustration. I added some extra effects like turbulence displays, roughen edges and posterize time to really sell the handmade field. I took you through some extra tips and tricks to keep in your back pocket when recreating your illustrations. And finally, I took you through some animation techniques which will help you really lean into that handmade feel amazing. So I hope you found that useful and you've gone away with an extra healthy portion of After Effects knowledge. And I hope that you're able to use that knowledge to create some illustration styles that you can now animate digitally. Please post your own results. I'd love to see them in all their boiling glory. I also run the occasional competition which normally involves the posting of projects. So if you don't want to miss out, please post your projects and also follow me so that you can get the notification when a competition starts. If you've got any problems with the class, if there's nothing that's not clear, I'm always happy to help and let me know if there's any techniques that I didn't cover that you would find useful for your illustrations. I'll try my best to help you out in any situation. Once again, I'm Russ Ethernets. You can follow me on social media at Russ underscore Ether. I'm usually on Twitter and Instagram. And you can also subscribe to my YouTube channel where there's a load of extra free content going up. Thanks again, and I'll see you in the next one.