Create then Animate: A Fall-Themed Adobe Illustrator, Photoshop, & After Effects Workflow

1. Welcome: There's something so creatively fulfilling about starting with nothing but an idea, creating an original illustration, and bringing it to life with animation. But it's not always easy to get an idea out of your head and onto the screen. It takes practice, a lot of practice. That's where this edition of Create then Animate comes in. Taking inspiration from real life, the changing seasons, I'll guide you through the workflow of illustrating a set of leaves in Adobe Illustrator, adding colorful textures and Photoshop, and animating them falling in After Effects. Along the way, you'll learn tricks for creating professional looking illustrations, time saving tips for working more efficiently, and will break into the three D tools and After Effects to add a whole other dimension to your animations. In the end, you'll have an animation that you can put in your portfolio or post on social media to showcase your skills. I'm Megan Frias, and as a self taught motion designer, I know that I made the biggest strides in my creative and technical skills when I was having fun creating projects that I enjoyed. I hope that this class can be that for you without the frustrations of not knowing what to create or how to go about it. Having made a career of writing, illustrating and animating educational animations, mostly on health and environmental topics, I know that putting in the practice can pay off. This class is designed for those that already have a basic familiarity with Adobe Illustrator and After Effects. The first class in the Create then Animate series is perfect for complete beginners. And you can also check out my complete class curriculum for more guidance if you're just getting started. So if you're ready to have some festive fall fun, practicing Adobe Illustrator, Photoshop, and After Effects, then let's get started. 2. Class Project: And the project for this class is to illustrate a set of leaves in Adobe Illustrator, add colorful textures in Photoshop and animate them following in After Effects. You can make your leaves look like mine or make them unique. I'll show you two ways to animate leaves falling. You can use either or both in your class project. And if you just want to practice one aspect of this workflow, whether that's Illustrator, Photoshop or After Effects, I've provided my files so you can get started at any point. If you have any questions along the way, feel free to post them in the discussions tab. The first thing I'd recommend doing is creating a folder to store all your files for the class project. You can see here that I have folders for After Effects, Illustrator and Photoshop, and they're all empty for now. I've also gathered some inspiration. These are all photos that I took a few falls ago, but if you don't have your own photos, you can always just go to Google Images or your favorite stock photo site to find photos of leafs that you can use as reference. Like this oak leaf that I grabbed from Google Images. Once you've gathered some leaf photos that you can use as inspiration, let's make our Illustrator file. In Illustrator, I'm going to create a new file. For this size, I'm going to work with 38 40 by 38 40 pixels, and I'm doing square because I know that I want to do a grid of three leaves by three leaves. Also, make sure that your color mode is set to RGB because that's going to be important in After Effects. I'm also using 300 PPI, which is going to be important for getting the highest quality in Photoshop. So once you have that, hit Create. Your Illustrator workspace might look slightly different than mine, and that's okay. But if you want it to look more like mine, a good starting place is to go to Window Workspace and then choose Essentials Classic. I've customized my workspace, so if I ever use a panel that you don't see, you can always go and find it on your end underneath Window and then find the panels down here. One panel that's going to be important to have at the end when we're cleaning things up and making sure that it's ready for the next steps is the Layers panel. Next, let's grab some leave photos to use as reference. I'm just going to drag and drop a few of my photos into Illustrator. And then let's just drag them to arrange them. I'm just going to put them off of the artboard for now and use them as reference. And then once I like what I've created, I'll move that into the artboard. But however you want to work is totally fine. Keep in mind that you can always drag in more photos later. So let's just start with this. I'm also going to use this layer as the reference layer and just lock it so that I don't accidentally move around these photos as I'm working. Then I'll go down here to this little plus button to add a new layer that I can use to work in. Now that that's all set up in the next videos, we'll start illustrating our leaves. 3. Illustrate Elm Leaf: Down down. For the first leap, I'm going to do something that's generally this shape. I use a lot of keyboard shortcuts, but you'll always be able to see those on my screen if I don't call them out, and to the zucchiht that you can download to help you learn all the keyboard shortcuts. So to zoom in, I'm going to hit Command and plus, and then I'm just going to use my mouse to scroll over. And for this shape, it's basically like an oval but with pointy ends. So to create that, I'm going to use the Ellipse tool. So I'm just going to hit L on the keyboard, which is the Ellipse tool. You can also find it here, and then I'm just going to drag out an ellipse. It doesn't have to be exact, and then I'll move it into place. Let's get rid of the fill. So I'm going to click over here and hit none. And then just kind of resize this. Now to make these two ends pointy, I'm going to switch over to the direct selection tool, which is this icon. And what this allows you to do is select individual points on a path and move them around. So it allows you to customize the exact shape of paths. So for this point up here, what I want to do is get rid of these handles so that it's a pointy corner. A quick way to do that is just to go up here and hit this button to convert to a corner. And I'll do the same thing on the bottom. It's totally up to you how closely you follow your reference image. For this leaf, I want to experiment with doing a wavy line for the edge, even though this leaf does have a wavy line, I'm going to exaggerate that. I think I'm also going to make the lines for the leaf veins a little bit further apart and maybe even adjust the overall shape of this to make it a little bit not as tall. With all that, I don't really need the reference photo anymore, so I'm just going to zoom out and then just drag this into my artboard, so it's a little bit easier to see to center your artboard and zoom in on it, you can do Command and zero. I'm just going to resize this a little bit. Maybe something like that looks good. I'm just going to bring the stroke weight up a little bit just to make it easier to see. I'm going to switch over to the direct selection tool, select my shape and then click and drag over these two points to select them. And then I'm just going to drag them up to give the leaf a slightly different look. So maybe something like that. Now let's add the wavy edge. I'm going to select the shape and go up to effect and then distort and transform and then zig zag. Make sure that preview is turned on so you can see what you're doing. The first thing I'm going to do is hit smooth, and then I'm just going to adjust these settings to get something that I like. I think that looks pretty good, but I don't like how it's treating the top and bottom, the corners of the leaf, so I'm going to go in and adjust that manually. So from here, I'll just hit Okay. If you want to go back and adjust the zigzag, you can go to the appearance panel and then click zig zag to get this window back. Right now the zig zag is applied as an effect on the shape, so we can't manually adjust the curve of the zig zag. In order to do that, I'm going to go up to object expand appearance. And now you can see this is no longer an effect. This is just the way that the shape is. So if I switch to the direct selection tool, all of those zig zags are created with points on the path. From here, I'm going to go in and let's just zoom in. And I want to make this point more pointy. So maybe something like that. I'm going to adjust this even more so that it really looks smooth. When you're working with symmetrical strapes like this, it can be hard to do the same exact thing on both sides. So what I'm going to do is cut this shape in half and then I'll duplicate the half once I like how it looks. So to cut the shape in half, I'm going to go to the scissors tool, which you'll find underneath the eraser or the keyboard shortcut is C. And then I'll just click this point and click the top point. And then this half that's selected, I'm going to delete, so I'll just hit Delete. You might need to do it twice. And now we just have the one half. So now I can really work on smoothing this out. And then up at the top, I'm going to make this come over more so it can come to a nice rounded peak. Since this is just one half of the leaf, I need to make sure that the top point and the bottom point line up. I'm going to first select the bottom point and then the top point and then I'm going to use the align tools to align them to the right. The reason why I selected the bottom one first is because I want the bottom one to move over to line up at the top. In that case, the selection order matters. Since the bottom point moved, it doesn't look quite right down there, so I'm going to go in and adjust this a little bit more. Once you're happy with how this half of the leaf looks, you can duplicate it to create the other half. I'm going to select the leaf and then just hold down Option or Alt and then drag and I can also hold down Shift to make sure that I'm only dragging horizontally. That will create a duplicate. Then to flip this over, I'm going to use the reflect tool, which the keyboard shortcut is O. It's this tool here. And then I'm going to click and drag horizontally and hold down Shift to make sure that I don't accidentally move vertically. Then I can just move it into place. And you'll notice that I'm getting all of these pink guides as I'm moving things, and that's because I have Smart Guides turned on. If you go underneath, view Smart Guides is right here. Make sure that's checked if you want those helpful guides. To create the stem, I'm going to draw a line with the Pen tool. If I hover over right here where I want to start the line, you can see that little slash icon next to the Pen Tool, and that means that I'm going to be adding on to this existing path, which I don't want to do. I want the stem to be a separate shape. So I'm just going to move down a little bit to make sure I don't see that slash line. I see the little star to mean a new path, and then I'll click to create a point, go down, and then hold down Shift to make sure that this is going to be a perfectly vertical line, and then click to create another point. And then I'll hit Return to end this path. I'm going to switch over to the direct selection tool and then just grab this point and move it where I want it. Next, let's create the vein lines for the leaf. To do this, I'm just going to go off of the leaf and use the pen tool again. I'm just going to create some 45 degree angled lines. I'm going to click to create a point and then hold down shift and that snaps it to 45 degree increments. I'll just create a line that's going to be a bit longer than I need. Then I'm just going to position this into place on the leaf. I'm going to hold option while dragging this line to duplicate it. And then a trick to repeat the last thing that you did is that you can hit Command D. So that'll just duplicate the line a bunch of times. And actually, let's delete that last one. Now I need to trim these lines. So I'm going to switch to the direct selection tool. And if I grab one of these points, I can hold down Shift to make sure that I'm maintaining a 45 degree angle as I'm dragging and then just drag this until it intersects with the leaf line. And I'll repeat that for all the other lines. Now let's duplicate the lines for the other side. So I'm just going to click and drag to select all of these lines, make sure that the outer leaf shape is not selected, and then I'm going to hold down option or A and drag to create a duplicate, and I'm also holding Shift to maintain the vertical positioning. And now I need to flip these over. So I'm going to use O, the reflect tool, click and drag again to flip them over and then back to the selection tool and move them into place. So now I have the basic skeleton for the first leaf. We'll work on coloring the leaves in a later video. Before we move on, remember to save your Illustrator file. To stay organized, I would recommend saving it in a master folder for all of your files for this project and then within that an Illustrator folder. 4. Illustrate Oak Leaf: Down down. For leaves with more complex shapes like this oak leaf, you could try to use the pen tool to trace the shape of this leaf, but I'm going to show you a different technique that I like to use that creates perfectly rounded corners to give your illustration a more geometric look. So to do that, I am going to use the Pen tool, but I'm only going to be creating straight lines, which also makes this technique a little bit easier, especially if you're a beginner with the Pen tool. So I'm going to switch over to the pentil which is P on the keyboard, and then I'm just going to start at the bottom of this leaf, and I'm going to trace the left side because I like how this side looks slightly better. So I'm going to start at the bottom and then just draw straight lines, but I'm going to extend the line, past any curves so that I can round the corners and make it curve. So if that doesn't quite make sense, as I do this, it'll probably make more sense. I'm also going to bring down the stroke weight just because this is a little big for the size of this reference photo. So I'm going past the curves, but trying to line up with the line in between the curves as much as possible, and it's okay if it's not exact because we can always go back and change it. So for this part, I'm just kind of squaring off this rounded piece of the leaf. And then same thing on the indent here, I'm kind of squaring off that curve. And I'll repeat that for the rest of the leaf. For the last point, I'm getting this guide that tells me that it's lined up with a point at the bottom, and this way I'm making a perfect half. But if yours doesn't quite line up, you can always line them up later, kind of like I showed you in the last leaf illustration example. So I'm going to click to create that point and then hit Return to end this line. And then I'm just going to go through with the direct selection tool and adjust these lines so that they more line up with the leaf. So right here, there's a gap, so I'm just going to pull this corner in a little bit so that it lines up better with the actual leaf reference. The next step is to use the round corners widget. So making sure you're still on the direct selection tool, if you select any of the points, you should get this little circle icon. And if you click and drag that icon, you can round that point. So I'm just going to go through and do this for all of the different points. You can select multiple points at once to get both of the rounded icons at the same time, which is handy in cases like this where I want both of these corners to be the same amount of roundness. For these points, I'm just rounding completely to make a really nice rounded point and same for these indents. I'm rounding as much as it'll let me to create this nice rounded shape. At the bottom of this leaf, I want this line to be curved inward. First, I'm going to take this corner and undo the round corner, and then to curve this line, I'm actually going to use the anchor point tool. That's going to be Shift C on the keyboard. So once you have this tool, you can grab anywhere on the line I like to grab from the center, and you can just pull in either direction to curve the line. And then I'm going to switch back to the direct selection tool, and now I'll re round this corner. One thing to be careful of is if you use the direct selection tool and you're changing these paths, the round corners option might go away if you change it too much. So if I wanted to undo this, but I had adjusted this line somehow, then now that round corner widget doesn't come up anymore. That's just something to be aware of. But if I undo that, you can see that I can click back onto this point and the round corner widget that's closest to that point will pop up so that I could unround this if I wanted to. Or round it less or whatever. The next step is to duplicate this half of the leaf. I'm going to select it with the selection tool to get the whole thing, and then I'm going to hold down option while dragging and also shift, and then I'm going to flip it over with the reflect tool, also holding shift, and then I'll move it into place. Obviously, this leaf isn't following the reference exactly, but I like how it's perfectly symmetrical, those things are totally up to you as the artist. Now let's move this over onto the artboard. I'll select both halves of the leaf and just drag this over. This top point, I don't really like how it comes to a point. I want it to be more rounded, kind of like how the reference is kind of round. In order to make this point rounded, I need to join the two halves of the leaf. So I'm going to switch over to the direct selection tool and then just click and drag to select both of those points. To join them, you can go up to object path, and then join, or the keyboard shortcut is Command or Control J. Now it's going to combine the two points, but there's still multiple points really close to each other. You can drag them apart to check that there's multiple. So there's not a round corner widget that I can use to round the corners yet. To fix this, I'm going to make sure that I have both of those points selected, and then I need to average them so that they're in the same exact place so that I can then merge them. So the keyboard shortcut to average is going to be option command, and J. And then I'm going to do both vertically and horizontally. And now there should be two points right here, but in the exact same place. So now if I select both of these points, I can go to the Pathfinder panel and hit the Unite button. So now there's only one. If I click out and then select this again, now there's a round corner widget, and so I can drag that to round this corner. Let's create the stem with the Pen tool. And then also some veins. I'm going to use the Pen tool again and then just go from these pointy parts in towards the stem. Then I'll select all of these lines and then option and drag them to duplicate and then flip them over with the reflect tool and move them into place. 5. Illustrate Maple Leaf: Down. For the maple leaf, I'll show you a couple of different techniques that you can use. Before I get started, I'm going to double click on layer two here in the layer panel and then change the label color to something that's going to stand out a little bit better on this red leaf. So maybe let's go with yellow. The first technique I'll show you is just using the pen tool. The pen tool can be a little bit challenging. There's kind of a learning curve to it, but let me just show you how I would go about using the pen tool to kind of trace this leaf. First, click to create a point and then click again to create another point and keep holding your mouse down, and then you can drag out handles to create a curved line. Then for this part, I want it to curve the other way. So you can see right now if I click, it will curve the wrong direction. In order to fix that, I'm just going to click again on this point, and that's going to remove the curve. Now I could go in and create another point and curve it in any direction I want based on which way I drag. I'm just going to create a point like this and then here I'll click and drag again to create a curve. And then here I'll click and drag to create a curve. Then I'm going to click this point again so that the outgoing handle won't be there and then this line will be straight, but I can click and drag to curve inward. I'll do the same thing again. Then to finish, I'll hit Return. From here, you can always switch over to the direct selection tool and adjust any of the curves. You can also move the points around too. And you can nudge them with your arrow keys if that helps. Using the pen tool creates a little bit more of an organic feel. It's not quite as perfect and geometric as the other techniques that I showed you in previous leaves. I brought in another leaf here and I'm going to show you a different technique on this leaf. This time, I'm going to use the pen tool still, but I'm going to draw straight lines and then curve them later. I'm going to start down here again, and I think I'm just going to ignore this piece, just to simplify a little bit. I'll click over here to create a straight line. Then for these two indents like this one here and this one here, I'm going to use the round corners tool to create a perfectly rounded corner. That way, the style will fit together across all through my leaves. I'm just going to go inward past that corner so that I can use the round corners tool later to round the corner here. And then I'll click over here. And then I'm just going to connect these two points and then I'll take this straight line later and curve it. Then the same thing here, here and here. And then for this indent, I'm going to use the round corners tool. So I'll go further in and then here, I'm just going to connect these points and curve this straight line later and same thing for this. Then hit Return. Before I go and fix this up and make it look the way that I want to, I want to show you one other thing that you might find useful. With the path selected, you can go up to object, repeat, and then mirror. This is going to create a copy on the other side so that when I adjust this side, the exact same thing happens on this side. I can help you see how your full leaf is going to look. Now let's adjust these lines. First, I'm going to use the anchor point tool to create some curves on the straight lines. The keyboard shortcut for that tool is Shift C, or you can also find it underneath the pen tool. So from here, I'm just going to drag these straight lines to create a curve. You can see how that already updates it on the other side, and then I'm going to leave these two straight and then pull this one into a curve. And then this one. And then I'll use the round corners tool on this, so I'll leave that and then curve these. I'm going to switch over to the direct selection tool and then curve these corners. There's an important reason that I use the round corners tool after curving the lines with the convert vertex tool. That's because doing it in this order preserves the editability of the corners. Because I did it in this order, I still have the ability to change my mind on these rounded corners. But if I were to now use the convert vertex tool and curve a line that's close to one of the corners and then go back and try to curve this corner, you can see that it's broken the corner so that round corners widget is no longer an option. It doesn't show up when I select near the corner. So I could still adjust this corner with these handles by dragging the handles, but the round corner widget is no longer an option in this corner. It still is over here because that wasn't close enough to break this corner. So that's why I like to do it in the order of convert vertex tool to curve any straight lines, and then round corners widget to round any corners. When you're using the mirror repeat, you'll see this gray bar at the top, and you can exit the mirror repeat by clicking on this gray bar or just double clicking anywhere outside of your shape. And then if you want to go back into the mirror repeat to edit both sides again, you can select your shape, and you'll see that this is a mirror repeat because of this dash line in the middle. And then just double click on the path to get back into the mirror repeat, where you can now go and edit, and it should update both sides. Let's bring this leaf into the Rbard. I'm actually going to duplicate it just to save a copy because I think I'm going to need to edit this to make it look like it fits the style of the other leaves. I'm going to do a little bit of cleanup here to make sure that all the leaves are about the same size. I'll give them all the same stroke weight. Both of these leaves have more of a geometric style. These have perfectly rounded corners for each of these little pieces and perfectly zigzagged lines. And the maple leaf doesn't quite fit in with that style. So I'm going to go in and work on this to try to make it match this style by making it look a little bit more uniform. Like making these pieces more symmetrical like this compared to this. So to do that, I first going to double click into the maple leaf, and then I'm going to unround those corners just so that I don't break the corners and I can go back and adjust those later. And then I'm just going to use the direct selection tool to click and drag these points and adjust the handles. Okay. You can also click and drag over multiple points at once to move them all at the same time. Also, with multiple points selected, you can switch to other tools like the rotation tools. So I'm gonna hit R on the keyboard, and then I can just rotate these a little bit to get the look that I'm going for. The last thing I'm going to do is round these corners with the round corners Widget. The last step is to add the stem and the veins. I'm going to exit mirror mode to add the stem and then I'm going to go back into the mirror mode so that I can add the veins to both sides at once. Once that's done, you can click out of Isolation mode. So here are the three leaves so far. 6. Color Leaves: In this video, I'll show you how to find color inspiration and then color your leaves. But first, let's do a little bit of prep work. I'm going to resize these leaves a little bit. Then I'm just going to select them all and make sure they all have the same stroke weight. I also want to make the stems wider at the bottom and narrower at the top, and let's make them have round caps. I'll select all the stems and then just choose round cap in the stroke panel. Then let's go into this oak leaf. And then I'm going to use the Stroke Width tool, which is right here, or the keyword horca is Shift W. Then I'm going to hover over this anchor point at the bottom of the stem and then click and drag to expand the width. Then just repeat the process on the other leaves. I'm going to give each half of the leaf a slightly different color. So for the oak leaf, this whole thing is one shape, so I need to cut it into two different halves. So to do that, I'm just going to zoom in and then go over to the scissors tool or see on the keyboard, and then cut at this point down here, and then make a cut up here. There's no point, but I'll just make it cut right in the middle. And then now I have this half selected. I I just double click on this, it'll make sure that I'm only able to select this half the leaf and then I'm going to go to the Pen tool and then hover over this point and you should see this little slash icon next to the Pen tool, which means that you're adding to this point or connecting to this point. So I'm going to click and then go down here and you should see the little circle, which means that you're completing a path. Now this half is one complete shape, and I'm going to do the same thing on the other side. Just click this. I'll double click into it just to make sure that I don't accidentally connect the stem or something and then I'll go to the pen tool, click and then click to Connect. For the maple leaf, we used a mirror repeat so that the two sides were identical. In order to color them with slightly different colors, I need to release that mirror repeat. If you select the leaf and then go into the layers panel, you can see that it has this mirror repeat. So what I'm going to do is go up to Object Expand. And then object and fill is good and hit Okay. Now it's turn that mirror repeat into a group. I'm going to ungroup it by doing the keyboard shortcut, which is Shift Command G. Now there's two different mirror repeats, so I'm going to ungroup those again. And now it's two different clipping groups. So I'm going to right click on one of the clipping groups and choose release clipping mask. So now I have this half of the leaf that I can select, and then also this half of the leaf that I can select. These aren't close shapes which might not actually end up being a problem, but just to keep things nice and clean, I'm going to double click into this and then close this shape. If you look carefully in your layers panel, there's also going to be this invisible rectangle, which was used in the clipping mask. I don't need this anymore because it's not doing anything, and it's also just invisible, so I'm just going to delete it to clean things up. Then moving on to the last leaf, these are two different open shapes, so I'm just going to double click onto the shape just to make sure that I can only select that shape and then just close it up just to keep things clean. Now that each leaf is set up, let's duplicate them to create nine total leaves. To make it easier to align things with the align tools, I'm going to just select each leaf individually and group it with the keyboard shortcut Command or Control G. If you want to, you can make sure that all of these are aligned by using the bottom align or however you want to align them. Then with all three of these leaves selected, I'm going to hit Command G to just group this row. Then I'll hold down Option or Alt and drag out a copy and then you can do Command or Control D to do that same thing again. These are not fitting on the artboard, so I'm just going to select everything and resize them a little bit. Then you can use the align tools to make the layout of the leaves look good. Last, I'm going to make sure that the rows are ungrouped. And then I'm going to also ungroup all the leaves just to make it a little bit easier to color. So now each piece is its own separate thing. Now let's color the leaves. If you want to use the same exact colors as me, I've provided a link below this video where you can access my color library. Once you click the link, you should be able to pretty easily add this library of colors to your creative cold libraries, just like I have it here. Or you're more than welcome to come up with your own color palette. If you need some inspiration, color.adobe.com is a really helpful tool. There's a few different ways you can use it. If you go to the Create tab, you can use the color wheel and the color harmony rules to create a custom color palette. Just make sure you're on RGB mode. From here, you can adjust the sliders. Once you like the palette, you can go over to Save to and click the Plus button to create a new library, and then just hit Save. Back in Illustrator, if you go to the library's panel, you should be able to see your new library here. You can also use a photo to create a color palette. So if you go to extract theme, you can dragon drop a photo, and it will grab the colors from the photo. You can also move these little dots around to find different colors within the photo. And then again, go over here to save to your library. Another option is to go to the Explore tab and you can type in something like Autumn and then you'll find a bunch of different options that would work really well for this project. All you need to do to save a color pale is hover over the image and then click ADT Library. You can also build a color palette or add to one from Illustrator. I'm just going to create some squares that I can use to color, and then you can color them here or you can go over two swatches or you could use colors from your library. Then if you wanted colors that are similar to that, you could go over to the color guide and then select that color and then it'll give you different shades and tints, or you can change the color rules to get different options here. If you want to add a color to your library, select it and then go down to the plus button and choose fill color. In case you're wondering why I'm using libraries to store my colors instead of swatches. It's because in Photoshop, the libraries will automatically be available, so I can just start using these colors for texturing without having to do any extra steps. Once you have your color palette ready, let's start coloring the leaves. I'm going to select this half of the oak leaf, and then I'm just going to switch the fill and stroke so that it actually has a fill and has no stroke, and then I'll go over to my library and select a color. Then for the other side, I'm just going to do the same thing but select a lighter green. So I'm going to color these with one half slightly darker than the other, but feel free to do this however you want. Also make sure to color the line. So I'm going to select this half and then unselect the actual leaf. You can hit X to switch which is on top, whether it's fill or stroke, and then go in and choose a stroke color. Now go through and color all of your leaves. Feel free to change up the color palette if you don't like how it's turning out and really play around with this until you get something that you like. 7. Save for Photoshop: Yeah. Last step in Illustrator is to separate each piece of the leaf into its own layer so that we can access each piece and texture it in Photoshop. You'll need to have the layers panel open, so if you don't see this already, go under window to find this panel. First, I'm just going to click and drag over each individual leaf and then hit Command G to group it. That way, it'll be a little bit cleaner when we're working with this giant stack of layers. This layer one has all of the reference photos, but I don't need this anymore, so I'm just going to hit the trash can to delete this layer. There's also a couple other things that I was working on that I decided not to use, so I'll just delete those two as well. Then it looks like this little piece of the maple leaf didn't get to be part of the group, so I'm just going to drag it into the group that it should be in. Now I have a group for each leaf, but I want all these leaves to be on their own layers. That way, Photoshop will recognize them as separate layers. To separate these groups into layers, I'm going to select where it says layer two, go to this three line menu and then choose release layers to sequins. Notice that it renamed all those groups to layer three, four, five, six, seven, and so on. I'm going to take all these layers, select them, and then just drag them out of layer two. Now they're no longer nested in layer two. Layer two is now empty, so I can just delete it. If I were to stop here, Photoshop would import each of these leaves as just one layer each. It's not going to have each half of the leaf as separate layers, but I need to access each half of the leaf and the lines of the la separately so that I can do the texturing in the way that I want it to look. So if we click on one of the leaves, let's take this oak leaf. It's going to be grouped, so I'm going to ungroup it. I need to create nested layers or sub layers for everything that I want to be separate. So I'm going to select where it says Layer ten. This is the parent layer, and then I'm going to go down to the bottom and click this new sub layer button. Notice how this has a name of layer 12. Now I can take the lines on the left side and just drag them into layer 12 so that now this represents all the lines on the left, and I'll just name the lines left. Then let's do the same thing to create a new sub layer for all the lines on the right. This is the stem, but I need to make sure it has its own sub layer. So again, select the parent layer, new sub layer, and then drag the stem into this layer, and then I can rename this stem. And then same thing for these two halfs of the leaf. They can't just be named path. They have to be an actual layer, a sub layer within this parent layer. So I'll create a sub layer and another sub layer and drag the two halves of the leaf in and name them. And then let's name the parent layer. You can triple check that you've done this correctly and that Photoshop is going to recognize each of these as its own layer within a group that's called oak leaf green if it has these little toggles so that you can toggle down and see each of the items within this subgroup. So as long as yours looks like this, it should work when imported into Photoshop. This is really important. Otherwise, you might not be able to access some of the layers. So if you're trying to texture just this half of the leaf, it might flow over into this half if it's all one group, or it might go on top of the lines. So just make sure it looks just like this and that you followed my steps exactly. And then once you do that, all you need to do is repeat for all of the other leaves. I know it's tedious, but after all of that, your layer stack should look like this, and this will make it so we can work with it in Photoshop. From here, I'm going to save the Illustrator file. But in order to import this into Photoshop, I need to save it as a Photoshop file from Illustrator. In order to do that, I'm going to go to File Export and then Export As. Then I'm going to go into my Photoshop folder. And then choose the format as Photoshop PSD and then hit Export. Make sure the color mode is set to RGB. Then for the resolution, I'm going to keep it at 300 PPI. That way I get the highest quality in Photoshop. It's also important that you have right layers checked and maximum editability. From here, I'll hit Okay. Here's the PSD file that I exported and I can just double click to open it in Photoshop. If you separated out all the layers correctly, you should have a folder for each leaf and then within each folder, you should have separate layers for the lines, the stem, and the halves of the leaf. 8. Texture in Photoshop: Now it's time for what I think is one of the funneest parts, which is texturing the leaves in Photoshop. The first thing I'm going to do is switch this transparent background to a white background just out of personal preference. If you want to do that, too, you can go to the Properties panel and then go to Phil and change it to white. To create the textures, I'm going to use brushes. I'm just going to create a new layer just to scribble on to show you some of the brushes I'm going to use. If you go over to the brushes here, then up to this button, you can change your brushes. I'm going to be using a bunch of brushes in this Kyle Webster splatter brushes pack that you can download for free. So let me show you how to do that. If you go to this gear icon, you can go down to get more brushes, and then it will open up this webpage, and you can scroll down. The ones that I'm using are in this splatter pack. So I'm going to hit Download. Once that's downloaded, basically, all you have to do is double click on this file. There's also instructions at the bottom of this page if you need more help. One of the brushes that I'm going to use a lot is this WC splatter spread. Here's what it looks like. You can increase or decrease the size of the brush with the bracket keys on your keyboard. This brush, notice that when I overlap strokes, so I do multiple strokes on top of each other, the colors start to get darker and that's because the blending mode is set to multiply. You can change it to normal here if you don't like that look. Now when I use the brush and then I do multiple brush strokes on top of each other, the colors never change. If you want to save the brush with any changes like this that you've made so you don't have to do that every time you use the brush, what you need to do is go into the brush, find it here, and then hit the plus button, and then you can give it a new name. You can check this box if you always want the brush to start out in the same size that you're currently at and same thing with color. And then just hit Okay. I already did that step. So this brush is the one that I've saved with that normal blending mode. I've also moved it up into my favorites folder, which is a totally optional step if you want to do that, too. To change the color of your brush, all you have to do is select a different color in the library's panel. Let's delete this layer and start texturing the leaves. I'm going to go into the group for the first oak leaf, and then above this leaf left layer, I'm going to click the plus button to add another layer. Let's just zoom in on this leaf. I'm going to use this lighter green color on the left half of the leaf. First, I'm going to decrease the brush size. Maybe something like this. But obviously, I don't want the texture to be outside of the leaf. So to do that, you can go over to this layer where you're adding the texture and then hold down Option or A, and you should see this little icon for your mouse. And then if you click, it will make it into a clipping mask so that this layer is only visible where this layer is. So now I can go in and add more texture. And this is all about what you think looks best, so just kind of have fun with it and feel free to use different brushes than what I use. But one thing that I would suggest is that if you use different brushes or different sizes of brush, even, like, if I were to go in and do a version of this that's much bigger, I would recommend adding another layer, making that clipping mask so you can have multiple clipping masks for the same layer, and then do that on a separate clipping mask. Because if you tri side that you don't like one of the textures that you've added, it's a little bit easier to go back and edit what you've done. Like, I could just delete this layer. And then start again. But if I combined the small texture with the big texture on one layer, then I'd have to delete the whole thing to start over. This just makes it a little bit more easy to edit, if you have multiple layers and have each different kind of texture on its own layer. I'm going to create another layer, make it a clipping mask, and then go in and change the brush. So let's change it to these splatter brush is dots one. This is also in the splatter brush pack. And then I clicked out and I actually made some dots over here, so I'm going to undo that. And then let's make the brush bigger. Just add some random little dots. And let's go and add one more layer, make it a clipping mask, and then I'm going to go over and grab this grain shader four. With this brush, I'm going to add a little bit of a darker shadow on the left side of the stem to kind of make it look like the leaf is a little bit more three D. So I'm going to use the dark green color, but that's the same color as this half of the leaf. So I'm going to change this entire layers blending mode right here to multiply. And then I'll use this brush to create that shadow. I'm going to make it a little bit darker down at the bottom. Something like that, but I think that's too dark. So I'm going to take this entire layer and change the opacity to 30%. I'm happy with how the left side of the leaf looks so far, so now let's add the textures for the right half. So I'll just add some layers and then option, click to make that clipping mask, and then I'm going to use the dark green color, but I'm going to switch the brush to this flatter brush and then draw some texture over here. Let's create another layer and grab a different brush. That's a little too small. So I'm gonna make the brush bigger. I think I'm gonna leave the green leaf like this. Now it's time to repeat the process on all of your other leaves. Have fun with this and feel free to experiment with different brushes and colors. For the maple leaves, I decided to go around the edges with the WC splatter spread brush and the grain chador for brush. I realized that in my photos of real maple leaves, they kind of start turning color from the outsides, and the veins of the leaves are the last to change. So on the orange maple leaf, I added some green underneath the veins and some yellow in between to give it an even more colorful look. Here's the result. One last thing that I want to fix is that if I zoom in on the maple leaves and on these leaves, right here, you can see that the lines are going off the leaf. So if I go in, let's find this elm leaf, I'm going to take the lines and make them clipped to their half of the leaf. I'm just going to make this panel bigger so you can see more of the layers, and I'm going to bring the right lines down here on top of the right half of the leaf. And then option click to make it a clipping mask, and now you can see that it's clipped off that little corner that was sticking out, and I'll do the same thing on the left. So now just go through and do that on all the other leaves. 9. Export from Ps & Import into Ae: Down down down. Let's export these leaves so we can animate them in after effects. You can import entire Photoshop files into after effects and have access to all of the different layers. Any group will be imported as a precomposition. But actually, for this project, we're going to go with a different method because I found that it's a lot easier for what we're trying to do. So instead of importing the PSD file into after effects, I'll show you how to export each leaf individually as a PNG file, and then we'll import those into after effects. But first, we need to change the resolution from 300 PPI to 72 because after effects only works with 72, so giving it something like 300 is going to slow down for no reason. Like to save a copy of the Photoshot file at 300 PPI just in case I want to go back and edit something, I still have the full resolution. I'm going to hit Command Shift S to save as, and then I'll just name this for A E and then hit Save. Then go up to Image, Image size, and then change the resolution to 72. Now to export all the leaves as PNG files, I'm going to select them in the layers panel, right click and then choose quick export as PNG and then navigate to where you want to save these. I'm going to create a new folder called PNGs and then just hit Open. The nice thing about this method is that it saves each file as a PNG with a transparent background, and it automatically crops the dimensions of the file to the size of the leaf. Now let's open up after effects. Let's create a new project, and then I'm just going to grow and grab my PNGs. And then just drop them into after effects. I'm going to select the green oak leaf and then just drag it onto this button here to create a new composition with this PNG inside. Now, you can see that this is just an image file and we don't have access to all of our layers. Usually, when you want access to all of the different layers that you had in Photoshop, it's going to be best to import the PSD file, not an image file like a PNG. But for this specific project, it's going to be easier to use the PNG. Before we get too far, let's save the After effects project file. Navigate to where you want to save it and give it a name and then just hit Save. 10. Set Up Leaf for Animation: Down down down. In this video, I'll show you how to prep your leaves for animation so they're actual three D shapes that are falling. The first step that I already did was to take a leaf and drag it onto this new button to create a new composition with the PNG inside. The next step is going to be to mask out the leaf so that we just have one half. With the leaf selected, I'm going to use the keyboard shortcut to create a new mask. That's going to be Command or Control, Shift If we toggle this open, here's the mask. And then if you clicked off of the mask and then back on to this top level mask, you should be able to select the individual points and adjust them. I'm going to crop this so you can only see the left side of the leaf, not including the stem. Now that that's done, I'm going to rename this. I know this might seem a little tedious, and we had all the layers already in Illustrator and Photoshop, but trust me, there's a reason this is going to save you time. So just stick with me for a second. I'm going to close this up and then duplicate it with Commander Control D. Let's name this right and then go in and adjust the mask. So if you click on the top level mask, you should be able to adjust the individual points on the mask. So I'll just drag this over the kind of flip this around. And then make sure that the stem is cropped out. Now let's recreate the stem with the Pen tool. So I'm going to click to create a point up here, and then holding Shift to make sure that I get a perfectly straight line. I'll click down here to create another point. If you need to change the color of the stroke, click here and you can either use the eyedropper to sample a color or type in the hex code. I want to make sure that this is centered. So first, I need to make sure the anchor point is centered within the line. To do that, I'm going to go up to the Pan Behind tool and then double click while holding Command or Control. That centers the anchor point. And now let's center this line in the center of the comp with the align tool. Let's rename this stem. And then in the properties panel, you can give it round caps. If you need to go back in and adjust the line, you can go into the contents, shape one, and then Path one. And if you select path one, you should be able to select the individual points on the path to adjust. Next, I'm going to go into the stroke and then underneath taper, I'm going to set the start length to 100% and then bring the start width up a little bit so it's not so narrow at the top. So maybe something like that. And I need to adjust this so it's a little bit higher. Let's close this up and then go up to layer new null object. A null is basically an invisible layer that you can use to control other layers. I'm just going to rename this controller. Then let's make all of our layers three D by checking this box here. When you're working with any kind of three D layers, there are different renders that you can use, and basically this just means that it changes some of the properties and options that you have. So to make sure that you're using the same render, you should see this dropdown here. Yours might be set to three D classic, but we want it to be set to Advanced three D. And just in case you don't see this dropdown, you can also go to composition settings and then go to three D render and change it here. So just make sure you're using Advanced three D and then hit Okay. Next, I'm going to select all the layers except for the null and then take this pick whip and drag it onto the null layer. What this does is parents all of these layers to the null. So now if I were to take this null and move it around, you can see that all the layers follow. We're not going to use this to move the layers. We're actually going to use it to rotate the layers. So if I were to rotate this in the Y space, you can see that the leaf is now three D. But when I rotate this, you can see that the stem looks flat, but a stem has a little bit more dimensionality to it. It's not as flat as the actual leaf itself in real life. So let's make it look like that. I'm going to undo that. And then on the stem, I'm going to hit R to bring up the rotation properties. Then on the Y rotation, I'm going to grab this pick whip and drag it up to the Y rotation on the controller. These numbers should turn red, which means that it's being controlled by an expression. An expression is just a little bit of JavaScript code that tells the property to do something. In this case, it's telling the property to copy the Y rotation of the controller. But we don't want it to copy the Y rotation of the controller exactly. We want it to do the opposite of that. So what I'm going to do is click into this expression and then just arrow over so that my cursor is at the beginning of the expression and just add a minus sign. So now, whatever the wire rotation is for the controller, the Y rotation of the stem is going to be the opposite, so in the negative direction. So now it looks like the stem has some three dimensionality to it, but in reality, it's just not rotating. I'm going to undo just to set things back to zero. Next, I'm going to go into each half of the leaf and then underneath geometry options, I'm going to set the curvature to negative 50%. This is going to give it kind of a curve. So when I rotate it in three D space, it's not just perfectly flat. There's a little bit of a curve to it. I'm also going to increase the segments to ten just so that it looks a little bit more smooth. And then I'll do the same thing on the other half. Underneath material options, I'm going to turn off cast shadows, except shadows and lights. You don't necessarily have to do this if you like the look of these on better. If you look at a leaf in real life, usually the backside is a little bit less bright in color. So let's make our leaf look like that so that when it rotates in three day space, it looks a little bit more realistic. To set that up, I'm going to duplicate the right and left half of the leaves. So just select them and hit Commander Control D, and then bring these duplicates to the bottom. You can rename them if you want. Then I'm going to go to effects and presets and look for saturation. And then this hue saturation here, I'm going to drag onto one of the halves of the leaf, and then I'm just going to adjust these sliders. But I'm not going to be able to see this because it's on the bottom, so I'm just going to solo this layer so I can see just this layer. I'm going to bring the saturation down and the lightness up. Then I'm going to take this effect. So selecting at the top, where it says Hue saturation and hit Commander Control C to copy the effect, and then I'll paste it onto the other half of the leaf. And then I'm going to unsolo those. Again, I can't see the back of the leaf because the top of the leaf is in front. And if I rotate this, we still can't see the back of the leaf. So what I need to do is go in here and hit P on the keyboard to bring up the position property, and I'm going to change the Z position to 0.1. So now you can see the back of the leaf. And then I'll just rotate this back to zero. Setting these back leaves to 0.1 in the Z space makes them just barely behind these top layers so that now when I rotate the null in three D space, you can see the back of the leaf. In order to animate this leaf and reuse it multiple times, this is going to be a pre composition inside of another composition. If that doesn't make any sense to you, let me show you. I'm going to go over to the project panel and then create a new composition. Let's name this. I'm just going to make it 1920 by 1080. And I'll change the background color to white and the duration is fine at 10 seconds. I'm also going to use a frame rate of 30 frames per second, but if you want to use something else, that's okay too. And then hit Ok. To animate my oak leaf, I'll drag that into this composition, and now I can animate the position of this leaf and the rotation. But right now I only have this one rotation. I can't rotate it in three D space. Let's set that up back in the oak leaf comp. To do that, right click in an empty space in the timeline and choose open and essential graphics. This is going to open up this Essential Graphics panel, and this allows you to take properties here from inside of this comp and expose them so that when the comp is in a different comp, you'll see those properties listed here. So I'm going to select the controller and hit R to bring up the rotation properties, and then I'm going to drag in this X rotation and the Y rotation. Now if I switch back to my falling leaves composition, there's this new essential properties toggle and I can open that up and then I can rotate this so that it rotates in three D space, this direction, and also this direction. But you'll notice that as I'm rotating, it's getting cut off a little bit, so I'm going to go back in to the main oak leaf comp and just hit Command or Control K to bring up the composition settings. Let's just lock this aspect ratio and just drag this so that it's a little bit bigger. If you want to, you can make this a nice number. Just make sure that you have enough extra space on the sides. Now when we rotate this, it shouldn't be getting cut off. 11. Quickly Set Up Other Leaves: Now that this oak leaf is ready, we need to do this setup with all the other leaves, and this is where importing the leaves as PNG files is going to save you a bunch of time. So I'm going to go over to the oak leaf composition in the project panel, duplicate it, and then rename it. And then I'm going to open up and then select all four of these halves of the leaf, and then I'm going to take the lime green PNG file, hold down Option or Alt, and then drag it onto these leaf halves. And now the majority of the work to set up this lime green oak leaf is already done. The only thing that you really need to do is click on the stem and then change the stroke color up here. You can just eyedropper the correct color from the leaf itself. Then if I go back into the falling leaves composition and drag in the new leaf, Everything is already set up, so if I go into essential properties, I can already rotate this in three D space. You can just repeat this process to set up the yellow oak leaf. You can also use the already set up oak leaf as a starting point for setting up the maple leaf and elm leaf. Let me do that. I'm going to duplicate this again, rename it. Let's open that up, and we can actually close essential graphics. And then I'm going to select these four halfs of the leaf and then drag in the maple leaf, holding down Option or Alt. Since this leaf is a totally different shape, there's going to be a couple more things that we need to adjust. First, I'm going to go into composition settings, which is Command or Control K, and then adjust the width. Et's also adjust the stem. So if you toggle down, open up contents, shape one, and then click on where it says path one, you should be able to select the individual points on the path and then drag them to move them. If you want to, you can drag in a maple leaf, the PNG version to use as a reference. So for this stem, it's a little bit long, so now I can just adjust that. I'll just delete that reference. Next, I need to go into the max and just adjust so that there's no gap right here. And I need to now adjust the SEM a little bit more. And also adjust the stem color. I adjusted the mask for the top half of the leaf, but not for the bottom half of the leaf. So what I'm going to do is just open up the top halfs and then open up the corresponding back half and just take this mask path on the back and parent it to the top. That way, it's going to be the exact same path. So you can see how that updated to where I just made that adjustment. And actually, it looks like this path that I have on the top is going to be cutting off part of the leaf, so I need to bring this down a little bit. But now that the back half of the leaf is parented to the top half, I don't need to worry about adjusting this one at all. It's always gonna update when this one gets updated. So let's do the same thing on the other side. I'm going to make a few more adjustments so that there's a little bit more variation within my leaves. If I rotate this leaf in the Y direction, you can kind of see how it looks like it's curving out from the stem and then kind of going back. But I looked at some maple leaves in real life, and a lot of times, it looks like they kind of start to curve in on themselves. So let's try to make the leaf look like that. I'm going to turn off the back halfs of the leaf for now just so that they don't get in the way. And then let's go into the right side, open up geometry options, and then change this curvature from negative 50 to a positive number so that it curves in the other direction. And then I'll do the same thing on the other side. I can make this look even more curvy by also going into transform and adjusting the Y rotation. And then on the other side, this is going to need to be in the negative direction to curve in. Another optional thing that you can do is add a little bit of animation to the leaf itself. So not actually animating it falling yet, but just animating the leaf waving in the wind just a little bit so that when we do animate it falling, it looks even more realistic. So to do that, I'm just going to go up to the Y rotation property and then from here, hold down Option or Alt and then click this stopwatch here. And we're going to write a really simple expression that gives it a random wiggle animation. So I'm going to write wiggle and then if it guesses what you mean, you can hit Enter. And then inside of those parentheses, the expression wants to know the frequency that we want this rotation value to wiggle and how much. So I'm going to do 0.5, so 0.5 seconds, and then a comma, and then let's do ten degrees. So it's going to go plus or minus ten degrees from this value that I set here at 15. And then just click away to get out of the expression writing. So here's what that looks like. You can just copy and paste the expression onto the Y rotation of the left leaf. So option her out, click this stopwatch, and then hit Command B to paste. We can also add a wiggle expression to the curvature. So I'm going to option her out, click the stopwatch. I could just paste that expression again, and maybe let's try increasing the amount that it curves. So let's do 25, and then I'll copy this and paste it on the left side. So here's what this is looking like. Feel free to adjust this so it looks good to you, and I'm just going to rotate this back. Next, we need to update the back halfs of the leaf. I'm actually going to delete these two back halves and then select the two front halves. Go up to Edit and then copy with property links. And then hit Command V to paste, Let's move that behind and then parent it to the controller, and that should center it. So what that did was it duplicated this leaf, but all of the properties of this leaf, including the mask and the rotation property that we added the expression to, they're all parented to this left leaf, the top one. That's why you see all of these red numbers because all of these properties are parented to the left leaf. Now I'm going to go into one of my other leaves that's already set up and grab one of the back leaves, go to the effect controls panel and then grab this hue saturation effect, copy it, and then go back to my maple leaf. Select the back halfs of the leaf and paste that on. So remember, this was the effect that makes the back half not as vibrant as the front half of the leaf. There's one more thing to set up, and that's to adjust the position of the back half of the leaf so that when the leaf is rotated, it can actually be seen. So I'm going to hit P on the keyboard to bring up the position property. And then I need to type in 0.1, but there's an expression on this, so it doesn't really let me type in a different value because it's already parented to this leaf, so it's just kind of overriding it. So I'm going to option her out, click on the Stopwatch to get rid of those expressions. And then now you can see that my 0.1 is actually working. It's there. And so, if we rotate this, you can see that the back half of the leaf is a lighter, less saturated color, which is exactly the effect we're going for. Now you should have everything you need to know to duplicate this maple leaf to create the other maple leaves, just like we did with the oak leaves. And you should even be able to set up the elm leaves. 12. Animate Leaves Falling: Let's animate our leaves falling. I've organized my project panel a little bit, so feel free to do that, too with the new folder button down here. And then I've created a new comp called Falling Leaves, and it's 1920 by 1920, and I'm using a frame rate of 30 frames per second. You don't necessarily have to use the same settings as me if you have a reason to do otherwise. The first step is going to be to drag in a leaf. I'm going to start off by resizing this by 50%. And then let's animate the position property. I want the leaf to start off screen. So I'll set a key frame, and then let's go forward like 3 seconds and drag the position all the way down so it's offscreen at the bottom. And then I don't want it to just fall straight down. So let's add a few more keyframes to just make it zig zag. And right now, these are very jagged zig zag, so I'm going to go up to the pen tool, click and hold, and then grab the convert Vertex tool. And then if you click on the keyframes, it'll add those handles if you didn't already have them. So you can adjust these handles to adjust the motion path. So right now, this does not look very realistic. So there's a few things we need to change. First, let's rotate the leaf so that it's falling with the stem up. So I'm just going to rotate this 180 degrees. And then it's not really following the motion path. So I could animate the rotation with keyframes, or an easier way to do this, in this case is going to be to right click on the layer, go to transform, and then auto orient. And then choose orient along path that might change the direction of the leaf. So let's change it to what we want, something like that. And now you can see that the leaf is going to follow that motion path. So that looks a lot better. But this still doesn't look very realistic because the keyframes are linear and that's not how a leaf would move in real life. I add in the middle two keyframes just to make points on the motion path, so the leave goes side to side. But I don't want these keyframes to affect the overall speed of the leaf. They're just there to tell the leaf to go side to side, to hold that position. So what I'm going to do is select these two keyframes in the middle. And if you had more keyframes in the middle, select all of the keyframes that are not the first and last keyframe and then right click on it and go to Rove Across time. That's going to convert the keyframes to these little dots. And basically, it means that when you adjust the easing on the first and last keyframe, these rove across time keyframes in the middle are not going to affect the speed of the animation. If you want more details on the speed graph and adjusting motion curves and ovcroft time and all of this type of stuff, then check on my class smooth moves because I go way more into detail into all of this. And this is a key skill for being able to create realistic motion and after effects. So definitely recommend if you want to learn after effects, if you're serious about it, that class is an important one. With that said, let's look at how to adjust the graph with this particular animation. So I'm going to select the first and last keyframes and just add EZ Es to them. That adds the handles that you can adjust in the graph editor. So you can either right click, go to Keyframe Assistant, and then EZ Es or use the keyboard shortcut, which is F nine. So now with the keyframe still selected, I'm going to go into the graph editor, and you can see this is the speed graph. So it's starting off slow. The speed is increasing. It's going to be fastest in the middle and then slowing down towards the end. But that's not how a leaf would move in real life. So let's adjust this. Also note, if you're not seeing the speed graph, if you're seeing a graph that looks more like this, then you need to just go to this button here. This is the value graph, and if you go here, you can switch to the speed graph. And you can also see these little points right here are the RovcrossT keyframes. So I want my leaf to start out with zero speed, we're pretending it was attached to a tree and then started falling. So as it starts falling, it's going to accelerate towards the ground because gravity is pulling it down. But as the speed increases, the air resistance also increases. So the speed graph should start to level off. And then my leaf is going to go completely off the screen so you never actually see it hit the ground. But if it were to hit the ground, the speed would go to zero suddenly. So to create the type of graph that starts out with an acceleration and then levels off, I'm going to grab this keyframe and drag it up, and I'm holding shift just to make sure I don't actually move the timing of this keyframe. So I'm going to move that up and then let's even drag out these handles so that the acceleration at the beginning is fast and then it starts to level off. So maybe something like that. And you can see when I drag the handles that the rove across time key frames just follow that graph. So let's see what this looks like. That looks a lot better than it did before. Technically, as the orientation of the leaves changes, the speed would change slightly because the air resistance or drag on the leaf changes. You're welcome to further adjust the graph editor to add these details, but I tried this, and I don't really think it made a noticeable difference, especially when there were multiple leaves falling. So I'd say, Let's save ourselves some time and not worry about it. Next, I'm going to click out of the graph editor and let's rotate the leaf. So I'm going to open up the essential properties and let's animate the Y rotation. So maybe at the start, I'll set a keyframe for the Y rotation to be zero. And then let's just have it kind of rotating the whole way down. So maybe I'll set this to one. Let's just add Easy Ease to smooth out this animation. You could also animate the X rotation. And if you do that, it actually looks like this leaf is getting cut off, and if you have the same problem, you can just double click into the composition and then hit Command or Control K to get to composition settings and just increase the width or height or both of your composition. I'm going to actually just set this back to zero. Another option is that you could animate the rotation here, so that'll rotate it this way. I want to have a bunch of different leaves falling with a lot of variety. So I'm just going to leave this leaf as is, and then for other leaves, I'll rotate them with this rotation and the X rotation. So I'm just going to close this up. One thing that I like to do to save time is just to duplicate this existing comp with Commander control D and then drag in a different leaf holding option onto the selected comp, and now it'll replace it with that comp. And now let's go into the position property. And if I select the entire position like this, so all the keyframes are selected, I can just drag this position over And then I could go in to each individual point and adjust this so that there's more variation. I could also go in and animate the rotation. So I'll set a keyframe, let's rotate this like 180 degrees. That looks pretty good. Then let's just add EZ Es to these to kind of smooth out that animation. I could also stagger this layer so that it's not lined up with the oak leaf. Let's bring in another leaf. I'm just going to duplicate the oak leaf again. Either leaf is fine to duplicate, and then I'll drag in the green alm leaf. Let's go to the position, move this over. Let's adjust the position keyframes. Et's also animate the X rotation. And at Easy Ease. And I can even throw in a rotation on this rotation here. And let's stagger these layers so that they don't all come down at the same time. So my approach to creating a bunch of different leaves is to just keep duplicating the comps, dragging in different leaves on top of them to switch out the leaves, and then adjusting the position and rotation key frames kind of randomly to create a bunch of different random variations and just kind of play around with this to see what looks good. Once you have enough different variations of leaves falling with different positions and rotation keyframes, you can start to reuse the same exact leaves just at different times in the timeline, and no one will really notice. Once you get more leaves in your timeline, it'll probably take after effects a longer amount of time to preview your animation back. So you can lower the resolution to make it go a little bit faster here. Another thing you can do to add variation to your leaves is to change up the scale, and I'll show you a trick so that you don't have to go into each leaf individually and change the scale number. So instead of doing that, I'm going to use an expression. So I'm just going to option or click on the Stopwatch for the scale property of one of the leaves. It doesn't matter which one, and then I'm going to write an expression. So the expression is going to be random. And then in parentheses, you can define a range. So since the scale is already 50%, I want it to be maybe between 40% and 60%. Now, if I click out of this, I'm going to get an error, and that's because the scale is two different values, X and Y, but I only gave it one random number. So to fix this, what we need to do is go back into the expression and add a variable. So S equals, and then that's going to be the random number and then put a semicolon at the end of the line and then define in brackets the two scale properties. So X and Y are both going to be S, and then click out. So now this has chosen a random number in my range of 52, but I'll just so this leaf and show you what this does. Scale changes at every frame, which is also not what we want. So in order to fix this, we need to freeze it. There's a couple of different ways you can go about this, but I'm going to use seed random. So I'm going to add seed random. And then in parentheses, it wants a number. So this is the seed number. So you can really just pick anything. So I'll just put one. And then the second thing that needs to go in the parentheses is true or false. True means that it's just going to choose one random number, which is exactly what we want. We don't want it to change on every frame. And then technically, you should have a semicolon at the end of this line. And now if I click out, it's chosen one random number, and when I play it, it just keeps that same random number the whole time. So we can copy this expression onto all of the other layers. To do that, right click, go to Copy Expression only and then select all of the other layers and hit Command or Control V to paste. You can see already how that's given each leaf a different scale. 13. Animate Leaf Drifting: Another way to animate leaves is to make them look like they're drifting. So let me show you how to do that on this oak leaf. I've already added it to a new comb and scaled it 50%. Let's animate the position property. So I'm gonna have it start off screen. And then every, like, 1 second, 20 frames, I'm gonna have it zig zag across. And then it'll end off screen. Obviously, this motion path is not going to be what we want. So let's go in and add handles so we can curve the path. So go up to the pen tool and then click and hold and grab the convert vertex tool. And then you can click these points, the keyframes to add handles. And then just drag the handles to create a more realistic motion path. This handle I need to bring down, but if I do that, it's locked to the other handle, and it messes up this part of the path. So to break these handles, hold down option or Alt and then drag the handle. And then it will unlock the two handles so you can drag them how you want. Now, let's rotate the leaf. So up here, I'll have it start kind of in line with the motion path, and I'll set a key frame. And then let's see all the keyframe so I'll hit you, and then I'll go to where changes position here, and I'll just make sure that this is kind of lined up better, and then I'll do the same thing for all the other keyframes. Let's make sure it starts all the way off screen. Obviously, we need to adjust the keyframes because this doesn't look right. So I'm going to select all the keyframes and add Es Es, and then go into the graph editor, and let's just select all the keyframes. And then I'm going to drag the handles to make this graph a little bit more extreme. So let's see what this looks like. That looks decent. I'll click out of the graph editor. Now let's rotate this in three D space. I'm going to close this and open it to find the essential properties and let's keyframe the Y rotation. So at the start, maybe I'll just move this so I can see it. We'll start the leaf, maybe something like this, and I'll set a keyframe. Let's actually move that to the start of the timeline. Then once it gets here, maybe let's rotate it so it's flattening out like this. Maybe when it travels from here to here, I'll make it do a full loop. Or maybe let's do almost a full loop. So something like that, and then maybe it'll do another loop for this segment. Then let's have it rotate all the way back like this. I'll move that. I just put it there so I can see it. Then let's ease these keyframes to smooth out that animation. Let's see what this looks like. I think this is looking pretty good, but the motion is a little bit too extreme between the fast and slow parts. So I'm going to select all of the keyframes and just hit EZ Es again to kind of reset them, and then I'll go into the graph editor and re select the keyframe so I can see those handles, and then I'll just drag the handles to make the EZ Es graph a little bit more extreme than EZs but not quite as extreme of a peak as I had before. So let's try that out. I think that looks better. I'm going to take this point and bring it down a little bit. And feel free to fine tune this as much as you feel like you need to. I've already animated this one, so the first time around, it definitely took me longer. One more thing that we can add is a bend so that the leaf looks a little bit more realistic. So I'm going to go over to effects and presets and look for CC bend it, and then just drag that onto the leaf. If that cuts off your leaf, that's okay. What we need to do is adjust the start and end values, which are these little controllers on the leaf so that nothing gets cut off. So usually, if you extend them, to the edge of the layer or a little bit beyond, that works well. So then if I adjust this bend amount, you can see how that affects the leaf. And if you go too far, obviously, it'll get cut off, but we don't really need to go that far. So maybe at this point, I'll have it bend something like this. And let's set a keyframe here. So I'll set the keyframe here, and then if you hit U on the keyboard, it'll just bring up all the properties with keyframes. And then let's move forward, and maybe around here, it needs to bend the other direction. So something like that. And then at this point, let's just bend it back to zero. And let's add Ess to these keyframes. So that's how it animate a leaf drifting. Feel free to apply this to the other leaves, too. 14. What's Next: Down. When you're ready to render out your animation, either make sure that it's open in the timeline or select it or select multiple in the project panel, then go up to composition, add to Render Q. The default settings export an MP four file, which is usually good for most things. If you want to change the type of file it exports, then click this Blue text, and you can change the settings here. Then click the blue text next to Output two to choose where you're going to be saving this file, and then just hit Render. If you want to render your animation as a gift file instead of a video, check out this tutorial, linked below. If you want to learn how to make your falling leaves animation loop semlessly, check on my class looping animated scenes. If you got something out of this class, I'd really appreciate if you left a review. Thank you. To keep learning, click on my name next to this video to check out the other classes that I'm teaching. And make sure you're following me on Skillshare, Instagram and YouTube and sign up for my email newsletter to hear when I have a new class for you. Thanks so much for being here. Until next time. Happy Animating.