Enchanting Elixir- Liquid and Bubbles Animation in Adobe After Effects

1. Class Introduction : Hello, everyone. My name is Adam, I'm professional graphic designer and Animator. And in this class, I'll be showing you guys how to make this beautiful Alexy potion animation. I have been doing animation now for almost seven years, and I have worked with some start ups, as well as some well known brands like Animator and Wonders. What I mostly love about animation is the satisfaction I get once I see my design come into life. So in this class, I'll be showing you guys how to make this beautiful liquid and bubbles animation using only the tools available in after effect with no ply ins. This class is for beginners, but a basic knowledge of after effect is recommended. So we will, of course, by importing the Vector file from illustrator to after effects, of course. Then we'll animate the shape, add the expressions, and finally, I'll show you how to easily animate bubbles and a be after effect. 2. Class project: All right, for this class projects, of course, we're going to be doing this lex lexve potion animation. Now, first thing first, I want you to go ahead and download the pass from here. All right, then you can open after effects, and then of course we can start animating. But one tip, if I have to give you one tip to finish this class project is to really take it step by step and do not wash things. If you have any questions, if you don't understand something, you can always go ahead and ask me right here. I will reply within the day. All right. Start animating. 3. Liquid And Looping Animation Using Expressions in After Effects: So in this first lecture, we'll start by animating the shape. I'll show you how to transform a shape to a liquid, then animated. And then, of course, I'll show you how to make the perfect looping animation using expressions and the snapshots tool available in after effects. An open after effects, the first thing is, of course, to create a new composition, and you can see that these are the settings I'm working with. So with 800 pixels, 600 pixels, and the duration will be 5 seconds, which is more than enough. Lion And then next thing, we want to go ahead to layer, ates and then a new solid color. You're going to keep the color white and then click on k and then lock the layer right here. Now, we have to go ahead and import our vector illustration or you can open the after effects file directly if you download it. This is our flask vector illustration. Right here, make sure you have import kind composition, and footage dimensions, we're going to put layer size. Now we're going to go ahead and open the flask layers and put the layer right here on top of the background. Now, what we need to do to create shape from this layer, right on the vector file creates and then create shapes from vector layer. And go ahead now on deletes the illustration file. Now, one more thing you have to keep in mind is that you have to make sure that the illustration is shape formed and nuts fails. So these are strokes and nuts fails. If you have something else, if you're working with files instead of strokes, this animation may not work. So make sure your vector file or illustration is made with shapes only or strokes only. Next thing, we're going to go ahead and select direct tangle. But first, make sure we select our layer right here. Rectangle two, and then we're going to draw our liquid, which is now just a basic form of rectangle. Let's go ahead and change the color for something red. We're going to work on colors later. Now, with the rectangle right here inside of the shape layer, we're going to go ahead and add the Z zag effects. So to do that. Make sure you have rectangle one selected, add and then Zzag. Open the z zag options. Right here, size, I'm going to put six. And for ridges, I'm going to put six as well. Okay, don't worry about the sharp edges. We're going to fix them here. What it says points. Instead of corner, we're going to go it smooth. Now, this is my liquid. Of course, you can adjust these settings accordingly depending on how big the liquid is or how big the rx tangle is. Now we have to do is create a mask. Now, to do this, we're going to go ahead and close Rx sngle options. Group one is the flask layer. We're going to go ahead and duplicate it using control command plus D. Select group two and xgle click, and then you can group them. Control command J to group everything, you can see the short cs here. Now with group two selected, I'm going to go ahead to add and then add merge path. Again, for this to work, you must have shape layers or stroke layers. All right. Now, everything is in group two. We have the x tangle, the flask and the merged path. Next thing, I'm going to open the options of merged path. Right here mode instead of add, we're going to go ahead and choose intersects. Okay, now we have our liquid inside of the flask. But still, we cannot see the liquid because if you go to group two, which is the flask, you will find path one and Path two. So one of these is creating problem, which is preventing us from seeing the liquid inside of the flask. So let's go to see which one is creating the problem. It's not path one, Because if I remove path one, you can see that liquid is inside B, but it's also inside the strokes. So path one must be past Path two. Path two is the one that need to go, selected and then deletes on the keyboard. All right. And just like that, we have our liquid inside the flask. Now with the selection tool, Rick Tango, I'm just going to go ahead and adjust my liquid position to be something like this. Okay? Now, the next thing here is that we need to go ahead and animate the position, okay? Because we want liquid, of course, to be moving inside on the blast. Now, go to rectangle one. Tally close group two. We don't need it anymore. Rectangle one, look for transform rectangle. And then we're going to look for position. So right here where it says position, I'm going to go ahead and add a keyframe, okay? And then I want to move to play ahead 1 second, and adjust the key frame of the position to be moving from right to left, but before we do that, what we want to do here is to create a seamless looping animation. Now, one trick to make the animation look seamless and that's glitchy is one very important trick is the snapshot right here. So just to explain, we want to take a snapshot of the first frame like this, can hear the sound. Now, when we move in the position, we want to make sure that we move the liquid to be similar as key frame number one, right? So you will learn more as I'm doing this. So when I'm moving the liquid to the left. If I click on Snap, you can see that the position is not exactly the same as key frame number one. Which means I need to move it a little bit more to the left. And this one. Let's check now. Now on neck lick here show snapshot. You can see that the position is similar to keyframe number one. So basically, all I want to do is make sure that key frame number two looks similar to keyframe number one. Otherwise, the loop and animation will now look good. Now, if I click on play, Next, let's go ahead and add our looping animation, so select everything here. Then alter option and click on the clock. Click here again, go to property, and then find loop out type equal cycle number frames equal zero. Now if I click on play, we can see that we have a seamless animation. Or seamless looping animation. Now, here's what happened if you didn't use the snapshot trick. Let's say, for example, I go to this position and maybe I'll move it a little bit further more to the left. If I click on play, you can see what happens. It looks like the looping animation is glitchy. So to avoid that, we use the snapshot trick. Now, control command Z to undo the change. Now we have our beautiful seamless looping liquid animation. All right. So for this lecture, we covered animating a shape and an expression. Up next, will be animating the bubbles. 4. Animating the bubbles using Custom Paths and Speed graph : So if you look at the animation of the bubbles, it's complicated, but it's actually not because you just have to do it once then duplicate the same thing over and over again. Now, in this lecture, let's go ahead and see how we can easily animate the bubbles to make it look as realistic as possible. Now, of course, it's important to understand the shape or how the bubbles work or how the bubbles are animated in real life. So to do that, of course, you can always take a look at references, which may be very helpful in nailing the perfect realistic animation. Now for animating debubbles, we're going to close layer number one here and just rename it. Liquid. Okay. Now, let's go to our shape tool again and this time, let's create the ellipse tool. Now, I'm not going to go ahead and create the bubbles inside of the liquid layer because it's going to take too much time to animate each bubble individually. Instead, I'm going to create each bubble in its own layer. Now, it's not as complicated as at a sound. It's not that difficult. We just have to do the work bonds and you can duplicate it. So make sure nothing is selected and then go ahead right here, click drag hold shift to create the perfect bubble just like this. I'm going to change the color twit, so we have some contrast in here. Go back to the selection tool and put the bubble down here. This is our first bubble. Now, to animate this, we need to create a custom path. And to do that, we're going to be using the pen tool. Again, make sure you're not selecting anything. And then with the pen tool, I'm going to come over here and just create the path that I want to use to animate my bubbles. So click here once, twice and track. Then here and track. Change the fill to this, we have a look. Okay, it looks fine. Open the new shape layer. It's rename this one bubble. Now, this one to shape layer, this path that we created, goes to constants. Shape and then we're going to look for path one, control command x. Delete shape plane number two. Then we're going to go to ellipse, Transform, look for position, control command V to paste the new position. Now one thing here is that you have to make sure that you have three key frames for the position. If you have four key frames, that's mean you did something wrong with the custom path with the pen tool. Delete that path and create it again and make sure you only have three incre points in your path animation. Okay, now, since we copy pasted this position to the bubble, it did send the bubble flying somewhere in the composition. It's here. Let's go ahead and just bring it back. Using shifts and arrows on my keyboard. And position it's right here under the flask somewhere here. Click on play. Okay, you can see that the animation is going to the opposite direction. That's fine. We're just going to go ahead, select this layer, click on you, so we just have the keyframes, select all the key frames. Next, I'm going to go to this keyframe right here in the middle. You can see it's rounded. It's not sharp. It doesn't look like rectangle. The other ones look like rectangle. So to fix that, just hold tertion and click on the key frame. Now it looks similar to other key frames. Select all three of them. Right click on one of them. Key frame assist, time reverse keyframe. Again, adjust the position of the bubble right here in the middle. There's the color to whites. Now, if I click on play. All right, so you can see the animation now it's fine. We just have to put this key form a little bit closer together. So somewhere around 1 second. Like this. And now it's better. Now, just this last one, I'm going to go ahead and click on F nine, add ***, and then go to the speed graph editor, and then maybe just bring it a little bit, drag this one to the left. All right. So we have that you know, just to kill the generic animation. So it starts slow and then disappears real quick. All right, looks good. Now, same thing here. To make it look more realistic, we need to adjust the scale as well. So let's go to transform. Find the scale at the keyframe. Go back here, click on. Then just move the keyframe little bit here after the position. Somewhere here. It starts with zero, a little bit here goes back to 100. Then it stays 100 here at the keyframe here. Then it goes back to zero here. Selects everything, and then we want to apply easiness to this one. Let do something like this. Let's click on play. All right, so it starts around here. Then it disappears around here. So it just adjust these. Accordingly, Select everything. Now, I just want to adjust the position of the bubble a little bit. So make sure to select all the keyframes here and make sure that you are on key frame number one. So we can move the position of the bubble without adding a new keyframe to the position sittings. We can play now. Let's see what we have. Okay, so it disappears around here. We're just fine. That's not a problem. Now, the next time, of course, we're going to do is just go ahead and duplicate the bubbles three times. So control command D rubbles number two and control command D for rubble number three. Now, let's just bubble number two, a little bit to the left like this. And bubble number three, a little bit to the right like this. Then we're going to offset everything, four frames. So the first one, let's go with eights. And the second one, let's go with four, don't play. Okay. So for this one, number two, we want the bubble to disappear a little bit early. So with the position keyframe, hold the last one and then just drag it a little bit to the right. So it disappears around here. Okay. And same thing for this one. Take the last key frame of the position and drag it b to the right as well. So it disappears here. And of course adjust this and play with this however you want. And just like that, we have our bubble animation. Now of course, this is not enough. I want to create more bubbles. So selects all the bubbles layers to close them. This one, two, select everything. Control C and D. We go and drag everything again to the right. I want to look more. Yeah, so I just want to give a small delay between the first bubble and the second bubbles. This is why I'm just in this and playing at the same time. You see which one is going to look better. Okay, this looks fine. A little bit here. All right, this looks good. Now selects everything, click, then pre Hey, bubbles. All right, so let's click on plane now. Hey, we can also duplicate this. With this bit here. All right, so you get the idea. You can duplicate this as much as you want. And then just drag to the right and adjust the animation, however you want. So it plays all the way throughout the animation. Now, I want to add my color because of course we are making a loaf portion and we have to add a good color. So double click here. And then I'm going to add my color. But here, Now, let's go to liquid. And so under contents. Then we go to merch path, then fill. Then we can change the color to this, right? Again, go to group two. Then find merch path, and then stroke, then fill one, and then you can change the color from here. And of course, I did include the final project as well. So in case you're stuck with something, you can take a look here and figure it out. And with that, I think we are done. Let's just explain now. All right. Now, for these bubbles, we can always do one more thing to make it look a little bit more like it was hand animated. So select the layer, go to effects and presets, and then we're going to look for an effect called posturze time. This one right here, and we can just add it to our first precomp. And we already know that the key frame of the sequence is 24. Now, basically, I'm just changing the frames of the animation, so it's a bit slower. Just to give it that feeling that it was like handmade. Control command C, and I can paste here and here. Now, just to give you an idea, for example, if I go here and I change this to ten, you can see how slow it will look. So I'm going to leave it somewhere around 20. Okay. And just like that, we have our beautiful loop in liquid and bubbles animation. All right. So in this lecture, we covered animating the bubbles, and of course, mostly we covered the shape path tool, how to reverse the key frans and of course, the speed graph to make the animation as realistic as possible. Now, that's it for this lecture and congratulations for finishing everything. 5. Congratulations: All right, so congratulations to you guys for finishing this class. Now, on this lecture, of course, we covered everything from animating the shape to adding effects to adding expressions to working with the speed graph. Now, one more thing I have to do here is just take this layer and put it up here at the top. This is the illustration layer. It has to be on the top. And with that, we have covered everything. So now we can go ahead, of course, and upload your project to the Skillshare's gallery or you can upload it to your own social media and tag me so I can leave a comment alike. Also make sure you follow me here on Skillshare and leave an honest review for this class if you found it helpful, so other students can find it as well. Thank you for watching and see you on the next one.