How to Create a Perfect Ping Pong Loop in After Effects

1. Introduction: Hi, my name is Martin, and I'm a motion graphics artist from Argentina. Today, you are going to learn how to create these beautiful ping-pong animation. To achieve this, I'm going to teach you how my creative process is, from inspiration to final export. We're going to see some good concepts like looping theory, animation curves, smear frame, and follow through. The main idea of this class is for you to create some cool animation and share it on your social media network. This way you can connect with other artists like illustrators, animators, motion graphics people, and you can even get a job. I have been living from these profession since 2009, and I assure you that a key aspect of this is to share your work and keep the production flow all the time. You should take this class if you're an illustrator who want to give life to its illustrations, or maybe if you're an animator who wants to learn some cool animation techniques, or maybe if you just want to tell your message through an animated look. If you decide to take this class, don't forget to write your reviews and share your project on the gallery. I'll be on the other side, giving you feedback and answering all your doubts in the Community page. I can't wait to share all this with you. Enroll and I'll meet you in class. 2. Inspiration & Moodboard: Thank you so much for taking this class. Now we're going to start with the first part of every motion graphics creation which is inspiration. We have to search images, shapes, color, animations, any visual reference that you think represents the final animation we are going to do. After this, we're going to select the best ones and we going to create our mood board, which is going to guide our animation the whole process. It's going to keep the consistency of the piece because we have the colors, the shapes, the style we are going to follow. Let's prepare a coffee, let's put some cool music and we're going to look for some inspiration. First of all, I want to tell you what inspired me to create these class. I started following artists and I recognized that these kind of loop was repeated all the time. Let's see some examples. Here I got Ema Columbo's profile. I really like his loops. You can check this out. I also like James Curran. You can see a lot of beautiful loops. This guy is like the master of loops. I also like Motion Markus as well. He's got a lot of this. He's also a really good artist. After getting all this inspiration, I decided to figure out how to create these kind of loops. Why call it ping-pong loop? It all came from after effects where there is an expression called loop out ping-pong, which keeps the animation going from one key frame to another. Although this is not the expression we are going to use. I decided it was a good name for this class. To teach you this idea, I divided the process in steps, which you can repeat on your animations and motion graphics jobs. Inspiration, mood board, design, setup, animation, final touches, and export. To teach you all these concepts, I thought it would be a good idea to create a flying bird. But after learning this process, you will be able to create whatever you want. Let's begin. First of all, we're going to search on Pinterest for images that represent the style we're looking for. Once you have selected a lot of images, you can now select again the most representative ones to create your mood board. I call it Skillshare bird. Here you can find shapes like this one. I really like these geometric shapes. Also I like this color palette. I like how the texture of the chest is achieved on the eyes as well. Also, here we have a beautiful color palette. Another one. I like how these geometric shapes work. Maybe I can use something like that. I really like how this wing is separated in three parts. I think that's separated in three, it's going to give us a much more natural movement when swinging, when the bird is flying. If you have to make a more complex animation, you can make your mood boards on Illustrator and you can add topography. You can add some textures or whatever you want. For this case, we are going to use this Pinterest board as our mood board. You should invest your time in this part and also train yourself to improve every time. How can you train yourself? Well, you can create Instagram collections with the best illustrations, with the animations you like, another one with graphic design that you like, pictures. You can create Pinterest boards. You can make Vimeo playlist. With all these resources, your head will be full of new stuff, full of new creative pieces. There you're going to have some new tools to introduce in your animations. Also, another way you train yourself is to read. Here I have a very beautiful book which is Steal Like An Artist from Austin Kleon. This book really helped me out in this process of creation because it opened my mind. It helped me with this part of the production, which is inspirations. It helped me to search stuff, to introduce things that other artists make into my own animations. Now, we are ready to make the first task of this class, which is creating a mood board. In the next chapter, we're going to start with the design. 3. Design: With the help of our mood board, we're going to start designing inside After Effects. Here we have the mood board we created before and the sketch. As you can see, I tried to keep it geometrical and simple. We have triangles, circles, some straight lines. I took this style from this illustration. You can see the body of the bird is a circle and a triangle, and the legs are just straight lines with two circles. I like how this was made, and I really like this texture in the chest of the cat so I tried to make something similar with the wings. I did my sketch on paper with a pencil but you can make it in the way you like most. There is a nice tutorial on Skillshare that shows a great process on drawing and sketching, which is Odd Bodies from Tom Froese. I definitely recommend it. It really helped me with my process of sketching. There is a key aspect that we have to think before designing, which is where I'm I publishing my animation? This is going to determine the frame rate, the resolution, the aspect ratio of our animation. It's going to be vertical, it's going to be a horizontal. It's going to be for a TV, for a Instagram, for a YouTube, and that's how you define how you're going to design the animation. In this case, we will make our animation for Instagram and we're going to stick with the portrait dimensions which are 1080 pixels width by 1350 pixels tall. Now, we are ready to open After Effects, and we're going to create our composition accordingly with the dimensions we talked about before. We're going to name it BIRD DESIGN. We're going to make it 1080 by 1350 square pixels. 24 frames per second is a good frame rate, and duration we're going to leave it 15 seconds. Also, we will create some folders that will help us to keep our order. This will be RENDER. We're going to drop our design for the moment and ASSETS. Inside ASSETS, we're going to create our Images folder to drop all the images we're going to import, and also we will create the PRECOMP folder. Now, we're going to import our sketch and our mood board. For the mood board, I just took a screenshot of our Pinterest page. We will double-click the mood board to see it here, and we're going to drop the sketch to our BIRD DESIGN composition. We're going to start with the color palette. I really like these colors, so we're going to pick them. To make that, we just have to deselect everything, select the Square Tool, create a square, and we're going to pick our colors. When you have this selection, you can press "Alt" and drag to copy it, and we're going to keep picking our colors. Now that we have our color palette, we can name it and just keep it in a place where we can see it all the time. With the help of shape layers, we're going to recreate all the design we have now. To make the round corners, we have to open our Shape Layer and go to Stroke, and put Round Cap. If you have a join here, you can also put Round Join. We will repeat this for every stroke we have. To create a new shape layer, you just have to deselect everything and start with the Pen or with the Geometrical shape Tool. You start drawing and this will create a new layer. If you want to keep designing in the same layer, you just keep drawing without deselecting. To modify just one of the handles when needed, you have to press "Option" or "Alt" and redirection the handle. Again, just like we did with the color palette, you can press "Alt" or "Option", and keep copying our shape. You can navigate your shapes inside the Contents. There we have all our shapes. You can select them and move them around. If you keep opening the Contents and go to the Path, you can select a certain point and modify it. You can keep refining your design until you're happy. You can see that now I'm missing one wing, but I just reposition some things in order to keep the harmony of the design. When you finish all this, you have to copy the wing in order to keep them identical. To make this, we're going to solo all the wing layers. I'm going to create a null object. You can go to Layer, New Null Object and position it in the tip of the wing, and we're going to make all these layers. We're going to parent all these layers to the null. Once you make this, you can select them all again. Press "Command D" to duplicate. We can bring them up and we're going to scale the null. We press "S", we unlock it, and we put minus 100. This will reflect the null and as everything is parented, it will reflect all its layers. We missed a tip so we're going to go back. What are we missing here? This one. We didn't duplicate this. There we go. We do it again. We put a minus to reflect it. There we go. We un-solo everything. Now we reposition our left wing. We can use the help of the sketch but as you can see it already changed a lot. I think we are keeping the essence of the design. There we have it, the sketch and the final design with the shape layers. Now that we have the design ready, we can start preparing our project for further animation. 4. Setup: This chapter is about being tidy and keeping the order. When you work in motion graphics, this is going to make you much more faster. You're going to deliver your works in time, and also your clients will be happier. Sometimes in the studio, clients call us not only because we animate nicely or smoothly or whatever, but because we are tidy and we keep the order. This is really useful when you have big projects with lots of people working on it, or lots of animations to create, and it's a key aspect to keep everything in order, just to reach the deadlines that the clients put to us. Let's jump into After-Effects and I'll tell you how my process is. As told you in my previous class, the order is a key aspect of the motion graphics creation process. Mainly, we have to keep it in three places: Project Folder Organization, After-Effects Bin Organization, and After-Ethics Setup. In the first case, I strongly recommend you to work in the Cloud. For this, I think that Dropbox is the best option. This way, your files are always backed up. You can work with other team works with no problem and you can have access to your files everywhere. Sometimes, when I'm not in studio, I can solve deliveries from my teammates or clients from my phone. This is really helpful. The folder structure is this, we have AE, where we're going to store all the After-Effects projects, remember to put the name of the client, this would be Skillshare Bird, and the name of the project. This would be loop, ping pong loop. We always make them sequential, one, two, three, four and five, just in case you have to go back to a previous version. Then we have Client Material. Here, I just made the folder with no use because I don't have any Client Material, but this is useful when clients send you fonts, or feedback, or images, whatever clients send is here. In Design, we have Mood board, Sketch, and then every image format you use AE, JPEGS, PSD, whatever you bought. If you're going to work in PSD, or in Illustrator, you can put the name of the scene, and then you keep putting the name sequentially so you always know which is the last version. In this case, we design everything inside After-Effects, so we're not going to have any Illustrator, JPEGS, or PSD. We're just going to have Mood board and Sketch. Also, if you add any font, this would be the place to put it. Then we have the Renders folder, where we're going to have all the renders we make with the date. We have the folders, for example, 22nd, August, and inside we're going to have all the renders we made on that date. When we talk about After-Effects Project's Bin Organization, we are talking about this window here. Here we're going to organize all the files we import, our design, our scenes, our voice-over music, whatever you import and also we're going to have the compositions. This simple setup I'm going to show you is going to help you to be faster, and for you not to lose time looking for the character, looking for the music, looking for the background, you will always be faster because you will always know where to look. Here we have Render. This composition is really important because it has to have the right frame rate, the right resolution, the workspace area already in the place we need it to be, because when you're working with other people, you all have to know where the render is coming from. When you have a big project, you may have a lot of pre-comps, and maybe you're rendering a pre-comp that is not the final comp, so when you put it in this folder, you all know that this is the composition you have to make the render from. Then we have the Assets folder. There we're going to put all the files we import. This folder can be also named JPEG, and then to create a new folder you just have to click this icon. You can have Illustrator files, you import them here. You can have voice-over, or music, you keep making the folders you need as you import your files. It's not recommended to create a lot of folders if you're not going to use them. Then we have the Pre-comp folder where we're going to drop all the pre-compositions that we create while animating. At last, we have the Layers Organization. Here, we have all the shape layers we created in the bus video. We're going to have to organize it and prepare it for animation. This step is really important because you are going to save a lot of time preparing files before animating. I really recommend you to spend some time in this setup. We are going to change the color of the layers to have a visual order. We're also going to adjust the anchor points where the layer rotate from and scale from. We also will rename everything and we're going to parade things. For example, here we have the wing which rotates from this point, which is not that good, and it also doesn't move with the feathers we design. You can make this at the same time that you are designing. I separate it in order to be more clear for this class. Here we have, for example, the beak. First of all, I want the beak and the tail to rotate from the center of the body. We're going to drop some rulers. If you don't have the rulers, you have to press Command or Ctrl+R, then you put the mouse in the numbers and you're going to see the icon changes, now you click and drag, and you're going to find this line. We're going to put some rulers here. Now our beak is rotating from its anchor point, and we want to rotate it from the center of the body. We're going to press the Y, and we can see the anchor point snaps in the guides. We're going to place it in the intersection of our guides. If you go to View, you can lock guides, snap to guides, show guides, clear guides. You can play a little bit with that. We're going to do the same for the tail, I'm sorry I have to rename this we press Y, if we press and hold Y, when we unpress it, we go back to the last tool we have, which would be the selection tool, which you can go back with the short v. That's okay, our eye will rotate from that anchor point, we're going to rename this. For renaming you press Enter. The most important part of this design is the body because it is going to control everything. We rename it body. We can put a strong color like this one in order to firstly see where our body layer is, because we are going to come back to this animation a lot. Then we have beak and tail. If we click in this red box, we will have all the colors we can use, yellow, then we have the eye, we're going to keep it yellow. Then here we have the legs. The legs are going to rotate from the tip. There we go. We have the right leg and left. I'm going put them green. Then we have the wing, we have the base. Remember if we press this solo icon, we're going to see just the solo layer. We have a wing. We can change it to blue. We are not going to animate the feathers, we are just going to parent them to this part of the wing and this other group to these part of the wing so the anchor point, it's okay. Then we have the long feathers, which are these runs. We're going to adjust its anchor points to rotate from this tip. There we go. Now we have everything with its name, its anchor point, and its layer color. Now it's time to parent things. The tail is going to be parented to the body. The eye is going to be parented to the body as well. The peak is going to be parented to the body, the right leg, it's going to be parented to the body and the left leg as well. For the wing, I want to divide it in three parts. We have the first part here, the second part here, and the third part would be these yellow feathers. These would give us a much more dynamic and fluid swing when the bird is flying. First, we are going to solo the wing to have a more clear vision and then we're going to create a circle in this part to divide the bigger part from the smaller part. This circle will give us a clean join. I go to the ellipse tool and I create a perfect circle. You can press shift to make it perfect and command or control to scale from the center. Then if you press the short v, the program will let you move or scale again. We're going to position this in order to touch the edge of the other shape. That's perfect. Now we're going to go to the pen tool, click and hold, we're going to select the plus icon. We put a point there and we're going to put a point there as well. Let me check if the points are on the right path. If we select the path inside the shape layer, we're going to be able to control the points so this's okay and this one is okay too. We have the ellipse and the shape with two points in the intersections. Now we're going to duplicate the wing. For one wing, we're going to delete this part and for the other, we're going to delete this part, keeping always the circle in both. We're going to start with the wing number 1. We're going to go to the shape, we're going to press and hold, select the minus icon. I'm going to click in these points. Now we have half wing with the circle and we're going to go to the other. Select this point, open the path of the shape. We press the V. This way we can adjust it in order to keep the circle as the edge. Now we're going to position our anchor point. We're going to use the same technique we used before. Now, we go and press Y. Now we have wing 1 and wing 2 and both have the same circle. When we rotate, you can see we don't have sharp points in the middle. The join is perfect. You can use the same method when rigging the character for the shoulders, the knees, everything that rotates should end with a circle. That way you have these kind of join. Now we can parent the tip feathers to the wing too. Let me check. We're going to parent all these to wing 2. We're going to parent these two feathers to wing 1. Wing 2 is going to be parented to wing 1. Now when we rotate, you can see we have the wing working perfectly. The feathers are okay. The long feathers are okay too. You can see that animating this way with a very good setup done will be faster and much more fun. Because you can really feel the movement of a wing 1 animating. You're not going to be losing your time doing and redoing animations. 5. Looping Theory & Follow Through: Now we are ready for animation. But first, let's check some theory. We have two things to pay attention to when making a loop. The first one is the main loop duration, and the second one is the internal animation duration. As we're making a ping-pong loop, the movements of the elements should come and go back to its starting position. We will call this Animation Loops. The key here is to fit all the animation loops inside the main loop duration. For example, if our loop is 20 frames long, our animation clips can be of 20 frames, ten, five or two. Which would be too fast and chaotic, but it's still an option. This way, you can move the animation loops in time and they will always loop inside our main loop. This will keep the loop flow all the time and it will give us the option to create follow through, which consists on delaying some layers, one or two frames, to follow one of the 12 animation principles, giving a more natural and organic look to our animations. We will be making this, while animating our bird. Finally, we are ready for animation and we're going to start moving things in the next chapter. 6. Wings & Body: Before animating, we will define the durations. In the main loop duration, wings when swing two times, while the head will come and go just once. It comes with the first swing and it goes back with the second, just like the legs. First of all, we will define our main loop duration. You can try animating roughly until you have the duration you want. You can try with the wing or with the body, that's okay, or also you can check some references. I have some reference from the Pinterest, also you can check on Dribbble and this one is really good. You can check the timing when the wings go up, when they go down, this is a really good way to extract information from other references. In this case, I think we can use a main duration of 36 frames at 24 frames per second. Let me check. Everything's, it's okay. We can see the composition settings. We have the portrayed dimensions and 24 frames per second. We will put a marker at frame 20, then we're going to go forward 36 frames. We will put another marker, and as the winds will come up and down twice, I will put a marker in the middle. We have the in, we have the middle, and we have the out. We can adjust a workspace area, here we'll have one swing, two swing and body will go up and down, up and down. In this first part, the wing will start in the down position. It will go up and down again so we will start rotating. You can press the R to reveal the rotation properties, and we will put a keyframe clicking in the stopwatch. We will rotate this until we are happy with it. Also, we can rotate the long feathers as well. To create the effect of a good swing, we have to give more time to the app movement and less time to the down movement. We will break our 18 frames into up 10 frames and down eight frames. We can put a marker here as well. This would be up, and now we can rotate everything at the same time, as it is all pirated, you can see it all rotates a little bit more than the part that was before. You can adjust this. If you want to exaggerate one part of the wing, you can rotate just that part. You can play with this until you are happy. Then we will see it animated and it will have much more sense. Then we go back. We will start copying and pasting our A position. Remember, you always work with three keyframes, position A, position B, and position A again. Now we can see the wings swinging with the timing that we set up. Now it's looking a bit awful, but we will make it better with the animation curves. If you want to go further on this, you can check Jake's Barlett animation with ease in After Effects class. First of all, we're going to press F9 to easy this all keyframes. Now it's looking better, but we still have to play with the animation curves to reach a more dynamic swing. The fastest way I've found to work with motion dynamics is to modify the keyframe velocity. I don't usually use the graph, I just use it for specific movements I want to reach. Let me show you quickly how it works. When we were talking about key from velocity, we are talking about the interpolation between two keyframes. When you first move an element, you put a keyframe into position A and a keyframe into position B. Here we have a ball which comes from this position to this position. Automatically, the program puts these linear keyframes. The program calculates the speed the ball has to reach to go from A to B without accelerating or decelerating. When we select the keyframe and press F9, we are starting to work with motion curves. You can see the balls start from zero velocity, it accelerate, and then decelerate. Now, manipulating the keyframe velocity, we can exaggerate this. For example, here we have another ball. Let's start with an F9, and then we're going to go to the keyframe velocity settings. The F9 drops the speed to zero to and the influence to 33. If we put 100 of influence, you can see the time it takes to accelerate. It takes much more time, then it reaches a maximum speed around here. The two balls move from A to B at the same time, but in the middle, different things are happening. We can check this with the motion path. The motion path shows where the anchor point of our layer is at each frame. You can see all the frames it takes to accelerate. But how few it takes and how long distances it travels at the end. Now we have a third ball and we're going to put some influence at the end. As it is the end, the animation comes from here to here. We are going to play with the incoming velocity, the incoming velocity towards the keyframe. We put zero, and we put 100. Now we have the inverted draw of the motion path, there you can see the difference between influence in the outgoing and influence in the incoming. I recommend you to play with this until you feel comfortable. It's really important for you to dominate these technique. In this animation, we will start in the down position. To go to the up position, we will put some influence in order to get the sensation that the wings are heavy. We can go with the shortcut or we can just right-click and press keyframe velocity. We will put some influence in order to delay the start of the movement, and before reaching the up position, we will put a lot of influence, maximum influence. This will delay the wing until it reach its up position, creating some anticipation for the down movement. For the outgoing velocity, we will keep the lane a little bit with 75 percent of influence. We're going to end up with a 33 influence and zero for the down, this will give us a much more faster down movement. There we go. You can see it takes more time in the up position anticipating the down position, and we're getting a much more fluid movement now. Remember, you can play with the influence selecting more than one keyframe, but they all have to be the same parameter. Summing up, here we play with the outgoing velocity, we delay it a little bit just to give the wing more weight, then we delay a lot the up position to anticipate the down position. For the final influence and velocity, we just keep the F9, 33 percent. Remember, we made 10 frames for the up position and just eight frames for the down, this also help us to make the down position swing faster. Now, as our main duration loop is 36 frames and not 18, we have to put some expressions to loop this. We're going to play "Alt" or "Option" and click in the stopwatch. Then, we're going to just type loopOut. If you have the last After Effects version, when you type loop, it appears here, and if not, you just type loopOut and parenthesis. There we go. We can press enter from the number. Now we have one part loop as you can see, and we can replicate this by copying expression and pasting. You hold down "Shift" to select all the rotation properties and "Command V." There we go. Now, our wing is looping forever. For the body, we are going to follow the same logic. As we have a good parent hierarchy, when we move the body, all the parts of it are going to move. We're going to go to the down position, we're going to put a key frame here, then we're going to go up and play with the position of the body. Remember, you always have to keep Position a, Position b, and Position a again. We press "F9", we can close the workspace area in the middle for now, and play with the parameters. Once we are happy with it, you can start changing the animation influence. For the body, I just want to delay when it goes up and down, all with the same influence. We're going to start with 55. If you want, you can also play with this little feathers. For the moment, I think it's looking pretty good like this. Now, we are missing only just one thing, which is replicating the expression loop out. Now, we can check the whole loop, it's looking pretty good. You can see that we are animating just one wing, that's okay, we're going to replicate it and put it here when we're finished. Once we have everything animated, it's time to make some follow-through. To make these properly, we will move our workspace area. We don't have to worry because everything is looping. Here, we will have the same loop we have here. But we will keep the markers because they will help us with further animations. Now, as I told you in the previous chapter, it's time to move things, just some frames in order to get a follow-through effect and a much more dynamic and natural animation. First, we have the body. The body is going to guide everything. Then, we have this wing, which it will be Wing number 1. We're going to delay these Wing 1 frame, and we're going to delay these Wing 1 frame from the previous one. There we go. We can exaggerate this a little bit, try to play with it until you are happy. There we go. We also can delay all these long feathers. We will go to the last animation and we'll put the starting position of the long furthers one frame further. Now, we get a much more dynamic movement and we can also exaggerate this. We can rotate the feathers. Remember, you always have to copy and paste the first position, it has to be exactly the same. There we go. You can see that now our screen is really natural. Now, we have to duplicate the wing and create the left wing. We're going to select it, all the parts of the wing, we're going to duplicate them, move them up, and we're going to change its color to cyan. We also are going to create in order to reflect it. We only have to parent the the first wing because it's all parented to that wing. Then, we are going to hit "Yes" to scale and we're going to make it negative just in the x-position. That's okay. We will move the wing in order to reach the desired point. Now, we have to re-parent this wing to the body. We can delete the null, we just don't need it anymore. Now, we have our flying bird looking really amazing. 7. Smears! Peak, Tail & Eyes: For the head and the tail, we get three elements. We have the eyes, we have the tail, and we have the peak. We will start with the tail and the peak. As we prepare in the setup, they both have these anchor points in the center of the head. These will make rotation around the head and we will generate arcs. This is another principle of animation which is really nice to get. We were working here with these markers but we started delaying some layers in order to create follow through. Some layers start looping later. We have to move the workspace area further in time to locate the period that we want. Now, we have a workspace area of 36 frames. We know everything loops in 36 frames so it's all right. We're going to place the head animation while the bird is swinging down. It would be here, from left to right, and here, from right to left. We're going to delete this marker and we can put two new markers, here in and out. That's okay. We're going to start with the peak. I'm going to hit "R", for rotation. We're going to put a keyframe at the beginning of the swing and then I'm going to try to locate the end of the string. There we go. That's okay. We will start pressing "F9" to see the movement. I think it's going to be more rotated to end up just like the beginning. That's okay. We're going to start playing with the keyframe velocity. We will try 85 and 85. This will generate a delay on accelerating. It will reach a top speed around here, and it will start decelerating to reach zero velocity. I like it. I think we can exaggerate this little bit. I will shut down the tail for now. We can expand a little bit the area. There we go. You can play with this until you feel comfortable with the peak movement. Now, we're going to make the reverse movement. To make this, we're going to copy and paste keyframes and right-click Keyframe Assistant, Time reverse keyframes. It's looking pretty good. I like it. Now, we're going to move the tail. It's looking pretty good. Now, we're going to animate the eye. The eye is just going to reflect to change from left eye to right eye. To do this, we're going to play with this scale. I'll put a keyframe. Here we're going to put minus in the x value. This will rotate the eye. We can toggle hold these keyframe. This means, it's not going to be interpolation between keyframes. It's just going to change abruptly. There you go. We based the same keyframes and we time reverse the keyframes. There we go. Now, we're just missing the loop. To give this looping all the time, we are going to put a keyframe at the beginning and at the end. This will close the loop in 36 frames, which is what do we need to put the expression loop out?. There we go. Now our bird is looping forever. It's always looping in 36 frames because we put these two key frames at the beginning and at the end. Now that we have this done, we can add some magic with smear frames. But what is a smear frame? It consists on one or two frames that exaggerate the movement a lot. Sometimes, we can use repetition, and other times, we can stretch shapes like rubber. Where do we put them? In the moment of the animation where the movement is faster. First, we will locate that moment. It would be these two frames. You can see the big troubles a lot of distance. Now, we have to replace the beak and tail with the rubber stretch shape for two frames. For this, we will create a perfect circle. We will duplicate the body, remove all the key frames and expressions and we're going to generate a stroke and remove the fill. There we go. We're going to make it yellow for the beak and eclipse, we're going to scale it a little bit to reach the tip of the beak. Now, we're going to add an animator, which is trim path. This will trim our circle and we're going to get it just where we want it. You can take the previous key frame as a reference. It goes from here to here. We will make the stroke round. That's good. Owl's mirror frame will appear in this frame. We will put a keyframe of opacity and we can animate the trim path for the second frame. That's looking good. We're animating the opacity with tug or hold keyframes from zero to a hundred to zero again. There we go. Now we're going to place the trim path inside the ellipse and we're going to duplicate the ellipse. We're going to create a smaller and shorter one. Press the U to reveal all the key frames we have. There we go. That's okay, perfect. Now, we're going to make the same for the tail. You're going to duplicate our ellipse. We can change its name here. We can put smear frame beak, smear frame beak two. Now we can make the tail. We are animating the start and the end of the trim path. This will move the starting point and the end point. We will use the same two keyframes. We will change it's color and it's width. We can move the opposite as well. There we go, it's looking pretty good. Now we can lower the opacity of the beak and tail while this mere frame is happening. We put the keyframe at 100 percent just a frame before we move further. We go to zero, one frame, two frames, 100. We can toggle hold this. It doesn't interpolate here. We can copy and paste the keyframes for the tail. There we go. It's looking pretty good. Now we're going to play with the eye. For the eye, we're going to create like a rubber eye at the same time that it's reflecting. This would be the left eye and this the right eye. In the middle, we will have a smear frame that connects both eyes. For this, we will create a shape with the pen tool. Looking good. We will name it SMEAR EYE. We're going to paint it to the body. We're going to make its stroke cup round. Now we have to make it appear. We will follow the smear's so we created before. In this frame, it should have zero opacity. In this one it has 100. This one, it has zero. Toggle hold. Now we have to position the smear where the eye is. We can rotate it a little bit. There we go. We can animate the path. We'll put a keyframe here. Here we can move the tail of the smear frame a bit forward. There we go. Now we have to lower the opacity of the eye. Just like we did before. Toggle hold. We will look at it. It's looking pretty good. Now we have the movement from left to right. We will have to repeat this process to create the smear frame and that way complete the loop. We can paint the smear into the body. We will follow the body everywhere and it will let us make the second smear easier. Now we get everything looping, but just inside the workspace area. If we move forward, we can see that not everything is looping forever. We're missing the smears and the eye animation. This is because we only work in this space. Now, in order to make the expression work, we have to cover with keyframes the 36 frames. This is because when the expressions reach the last keyframe, it automatically goes back to the first one. If we don't cover the 36 frames, it will constantly be looping between these frames. This will be much faster than 36 frames because we got 19 frames. This will constantly be repeated faster and it won't loop like we want to. For all these layers, we have to close the loop in 36. We will put a keyframe at the end and at the beginning of all the parameters that are animated. Here we have the opacity of the tail. This way we can put our expression loop out. There we go. Now we have to do this for every single animation that occurs with the smears of the tail, the beak, and the eye. The Problem here is that everything is looping but our path animation is not. This is because the LoopOut expression is not working on both animations. To fix this, I will paste a new expression. Don't worry, these will be available in the resource section. Now our path is looping too. We can see our bird is looping forever. Also, if you want to, you can reposition the layers we just animated in order to delay them a little bit. I think that's looking pretty awesome. Now we are ready to animate the legs and give everything a rotation. Just like if the bird was flying. 8. Legs: Before animating the legs, I will add some rotation to the body to get a more natural feel of these flying loop. We will go to the body, we will hit R to reveal the rotation property. Remember, we have to keep the 36 frame animation duration. I will put a key-frame at the beginning, I will give a minus 15 degrees, then I have to move to the middle, which is 18 frames. I would put the opposite value which would be 15, and then at the end, we will copy and paste. Here we have the animation. First of all we will press F-9, to Easy ease all the key-frames. It's looking pretty good, and I think we can exaggerate this with putting some influence, in the incoming velocity and in the outgoing velocity. I will put 85 percent, which is a lot of influence. You can play with this until you're happy with it, and now we can animate the legs. We will animate legs in the same moments as the body rotation we just did and then, we can relocate everything by adding the loopOut expression. We will make those first, we will add our loopOut expression. That's okay. Our body rotation is looping forever with all the parts of our bird, looking good, and now we will animate the legs. We will put a key-frame. We go to the middle. That's okay. We'll copy and paste the first two key-frames, and we will press F-9, just to visualize how our animation is. It's looking good. What I want to do now, is playing with the animation curves. I want to delay this second leg a little bit while going down. First of all, we will put some influence to both legs in all the key-frames. Just like we did with the body. That's Okay. Now, when the first leg is going down, I mean the first one that should go down. We will put some outgoing velocity of 33. This will make these leg start faster than the second one, and we will do the same thing, when these leg is going down. We'll put 33 instead of 55, these will make this leg a bit faster when going down. When we preview this, that's looking really awesome. Now we're going to add our Expression loopOut, to both legs. There we go, everything is looping. We did everything keeping the looping theory, so everything should loop perfectly. Now, you can play and relocate these parts to get different results. You ca n also move the legs separately from the body, if you want to get these results. Now, you can play your loop forever. Keep moving things around until you're happy with the result, and you will have your perfect ping-pong loop done. We finished our animation, and now it's time to go through the process and export our motion graphics space. 9. Export: The last thing to do is to add some final touches like texture or maybe an animated background or typography, a message you want to tell whatever you want. But I think in this class, we have a lot of theory and you have a lot to process. We will not include that in this class. I just wanted to tell you that to close the process, you can add some final touches to the animation, and also we have to export it and publish it. We're going to create a background. There we go. Now, we're going to pre-compose everything. Now, we will define the duration. We know that from here on, our bird is looping perfectly forever. You can close the workspace area here, pressing the B, and then you can move 36 frames as many times as you want. 123, 123456, 123, 123456, We will go one frame backwards and we will press the N to close our workspace area. That's looking pretty awesome. As we work entirely with shape layers, they are all vectors. The only thing we have to vectorize is the background. If we press here, we convert it into a vector. When things are become vectors, we can scale them without losing quality. If we scale now, we will see things are pixelated. But if we press these collapse button, everything is vector again. Now we can scale and position our bird again. We have to be careful not to lose any part of it. We can turn on the title action safe to located in the middle. That's okay. I think we are not loosing any wing here. Looking good. We will preview our animation. Now, we are ready for exporting with the workspace area set, we will press ''File export'' add to Render Queue. Here in the Render Queue. We're going press in ''lossless'' will keep the QuickTime format. Here in the format options, I will choose Apple ProRes 422. You can use animation or whatever compression you like. I like to use high-quality format. Then we're going convert it for Instagram. That's okay, or hit ''Okay''. Then we're going to click here to put the output. I will put it in my ping pong loop folder renders. I will put today's date, which is 29 of August. That's okay. Bird loop 001. We could render. That's really cool. Now, to convert this, we're going to open it. We have to open these arrow and click here. That will automatically bring us to our Loop is. I will use another program which is called HandBrake. From here, you can download it for free. Once you download HandBrake, we will open it with it. Now, we will open the video with HandBrake. You can also drag your video to this window. It will also open. Now, we have, we go to the video sets, we put 9,000 Constant Framerate. Framerate same as source, and that should work. Here we put the destination. I will put the same folder we used before. I would put 02 in order to know this is the compress one, and then we click in ''Start''. There we go. Now we have our Bird Loop here, and it's looking pretty awesome. Now this is ready to upload in your Instagram. 10. Conclusion: We finally finish this animation, and I hope you can apply all these concepts into your own animations. You can start gathering some inspiration, creating your mood board, preparing your aftereffects file, the signage animated with some looping theory on introducing cool concepts like animation curves, follow throughs near frames, and all the things we saw in this class. Also, after sharing your project in the gallery, I think you should share your project with your friends, in your social media networks, and dribble in Facebook or YouTube, Vimeo, whatever. Just share it, and you will reach a lot of people. If you have any doubt please contact me in the community page. I will be answering all your questions and also giving feedback to your animations. It has been a pleasure to share all this with you. If you like the class, please write your reviews. If you don't, write it anyway. It's useful for me. This is the end, and see you in the next class.