Transcripts
1. Intro: Hi, I'm JD and welcome to my very first skill share class. In this class will be making this. We'll start by creating all of our artwork in Illustrator, bringing it into after-effects and creating shape layers, animating and fine tuning with the graph editor. Finally, rendering it out and bringing it into Photoshop to export as a looping gift. So take a moment, launch illustrator, and I'll see you in the next video.
2. Drawing the character: Let's start this off by creating a background color for our project. I'm just going to title this layer PG background. If you click, you can type in the dimensions. It's 1920 by 1080, and we're going to find, want a nice bluish color here. Let's change it a little bit. I'm going to leave it like that. The first thing I'm going to do is lock the background layer, and now we're going to create our bubble. Ellipse tool, we'll create a new layer, and I'm just going to call this layer bubble. Then we're going to make the color white, and we're drawing out our bubble. Our bubble would be something about that big, and then I just want to align it to the art board. There we go, and we have our bubble, and that's literally all I want to do for the bubble right now. I'm going to lock that layer. Now we're going to start creating our character. I'm going to create another layer, and for now, we'll just leave it layer 3, because I'm going to take this character and break them up into pieces for animating later. Let's just start with the head shape and I'm actually going to use a Rectangle Tool and drag it out here. Something like this. Find whatever type of skin tone you want to use, and go up like a peachy, pinky skin tone for this round edges tool, and we got started our head. I'm going to grab my ellipse tool to bring it here and here. Then let's get some hair going, and I want my hair to be like, maybe a blackish brown color like this. Say I don't know what this is going to be just yet. I'm going to get something fun going on here. Like that. Something like this, and put that ear on top. The front, there we go. That looks good, and then we'll do another little brown part here in the back. Something like that going. I'm going to figure out like a little couple eyes for this guy. His eyes I'm going to make black for now. Yeah, look in this way. Round a little nose here and go with the skin tone, and then I'm just going to up and add a little more saturation. There we go, a little nose, and make this nose just a little bit more noticeable. There we go. Let's do a mouth. The mouth is going to be like this. Probably make it the same color as the eyes. Get it lined up here. I'm going to shrink it down just a little bit. Round rectangle at the bottom. Go ahead with a nice smile here, there we go. Let's add some teeth in, it'll also be a white. How I'm going to do the teeth is I'm just going to use shape builder tool hold down the "Option" and you can click off, truth want to do the same thing for the tongue. Let's go here. Drag in the spot where the tongue would be. I'm going to make it a nice red color. Something like that maybe, and there we go and select this like the mouth shape, shape builder and Option or Alt and click it off, no minus it, there we go, and we got a nice start to our guy here. Let's go back in. Same thing we did before, rectangle tool, figure out how I want his neck to be. It'll put it in the back, round rectangle as his neck. We're going to make his body now. Put that one all the way to the back, and let's make the body, let's make the t-shirt like I don't know. Actually, let's make it the same color as the tongue. Just like that. I like that. Bring the shoulders up a little bit. Like that. Looks pretty good. We can actually take these bottom parts here. These don't need to be rounded. They're actually just going to be masked off later so you're not going to see it anyways, and I just like to keep adjusting this stuff till I get something I like, like that. Pretty good. I think maybe the head might be too tall, so let's just move all this down a little bit. This is really just push and move it until you get something like that down, ears down. This stuff can all come down. Yeah, I like that better. Then we just keep playing with this until we get something we like. We just need a quick shadow for the neck, I need my pen tool, and we're going to start here. Here, go to here, here, go to here. It's going to be this color, and we're going to make it darker like this. Here we go. I'm going to cut it, paste it in front of the neck. Then what I'm going to do is zoom in a little bit, and I'm just going to stretch this out, and I'm going to use my shape builder tool to get the shape the way I want it, like that. If you want for the shape builder, Shift M, is the shortcut for it, and now we've got a pretty decent start here, and maybe I have this guy looking too much to one side. Here we can fix that a little bit. Something like that. There we go maybe needs eyebrows. Let's give him eyebrows, see what happens. Round edge tool, round cap. There we go, that's cool. We will take all of this. Let's just print out just a little bit, take this and I'm just going to squish it up just a little bit like that, there we go. Now, I'm going to take our guy, I'm going to move him over here and let's scale him up to fit how we want him to be in our bubble. Beautiful, that is a pretty good start. Now, I'm going to do a couple of arms here, and the arms I'm going to do with the pen tool. I'm going to flip it over to stroke. Let's make it a round cap, and let's just bring it up. Let's get a little thicker. That's good. Let's grab it and put it behind like this, there we go. We're going to make just a few adjustments here I think. I'll bring his elbow in a little more. Arm out just a little bit. I think what I'm going to do is I'm going to make his arm the same color as the shirt. Let's just grab that color number real quick. Let's just change the color. We'll give long sleeves, there we go. Then I want to this point, let's remove it out of the way. Also what I'm going to do is I'm going to make this just slightly darker than the red we used, like that. Perfect. Then we're going to take this and we're going to duplicate it. We are going to rotate it. Put it just like this. We're going to bring it to the front, and we're going to make it the same color as the red shirt. Just adjust it a little bit like it's on his hip, there we go. Now we have both arms made. I'm going to take, and make a little hand here. So take our rectangle, do something like this. Skin tone, let's get in a little more, round it, something like that. Then another one like this, round it and this is our thumb for our thumbs up. Now, we have a guy giving us a thumbs up. Now, what I want to do is I want to have most of this stuff on its own layer for animating. I'm going to take these two guys here. Let's just start with what's going to be in the back, so we need some layers here. I'm going to call this layer three. I'm actually going to change the name I'm going to call it body, and that's going to be for our main body, neck, head, probably the mouth, nose, hair, all that stuff. I'm really going to put out some layers, maybe the eyebrows, eyes, and the arms. Below that we're going to have one arm and probably put the thumb on its own layer. We're going to have left arm and thumb. Left arm is going to be this and the hand, so the arm and the hand. Let's cut that. Put that on left arm based in place. Grab the thumb, cut that, put that on the thumb layer. What that does is that's going to allow us to animate the thumb popping up later. Then we got right arm. I'm going to do eyes, and then I'm going to do one called blink, and then I'm going to do one more for eyebrows. I got eyebrows. I think that'll cover it, so let's put the eyes on their layer. Paste in place. Let's put this arm on its layer, right arm paste in place. Eyebrows, cut it, paste in place. Lastly, let's make a blink. Let's copy these, paste them in blink. Let's hide the eyes layer. Nice and close. We wanted it to be there but it will be something like that. That'll be our blink. Now we can turn blink off, so we got blink layer. I think this is probably a good time to save. I'm just going to ''File'', ''Save As'' and I'm going to save it as ''Bubble Guy'' and "Save". We have our guy, he's ready for animation. Next, we'll create the diamond and get everything in after effects.
3. Creating the Diamond: In this video, we're just going to make a quick little diamond for the guy to be able to do like a 3D 180 flip to reveal the diamond. What we're going to do is let's just hide the guy, so just our bubble is showing. How I'm going to make the diamond is create a new layer and call this layer diamond. With that selected, we are going to basically just make a triangle here. A nice little triangle like this. Perfect. I might make this just a little taller, like that. We're going to duplicate it once, duplicate it twice, bring it, and duplicate it again. Bring it so it's center's there. Rotate it around, one more time and we have the top part of our diamond. Then we're going to take the Pen tool, find the center, draw the bottom half and come down just a little bit. I think that's pretty good. Pen tool again. We're going to draw this piece there. There is our diamond, or where our diamond should be. Bring that to the front. I drew it in the back somehow. We need to get the outlines. Let's make it a flat design color. I'll make a bluish color so I'm going to come in and find another good blue. I don't know. Let's see something like that just to see how this turns out. It's pretty good. I'm just going to copy all of this, select everything, change all to the same color. Take this one, we'll make it a little brighter. Something like that. I'm going to take this one and this one and match that color. Pick the center one and make it the brightest. I'm actually going to take these two and just bring them up a little bit more, like right there. I want this one to be even brighter. There's our diamond. Then what I'm going to do is take this diamond, I'm going to group it, "Command G," and we're just going to fit it inside our bubble like this. The guy is breaking the shape out of the bubble. The diamond is going sit in the bubble. Just like that. Perfect. Our diamond is made. In the next video, we'll start an After Effects composition and get all this in there there's so [inaudible] in to animate.
4. Importing to After Effects: What we're going to do now is create a new composition in After Effects and then import in our Illustrator artwork and prepare it for animation. We'll start by just clicking the new composition button here. It'll bring up our composition settings. I'm going to name this main animation. This is where the main animation will be held. It's going to be 1,920 by 1,080 and frame rate 2,997. I'm going to leave it at 25 seconds long with the white background color. Click okay. Now, next what we'll do is import our Illustrator artwork. I'm going to my finder and just drag and drop the Illustrator file right into After Effects like that. Import kind, we're going to leave it as composition. Footage, layer size, click okay. That brings in all of our work in a composition. We double-click it if we want. I'm actually just going to for now copy all of this into our main animation. I've got a main animation, paste it. There we go. Then I'm actually just going to delete the bubble guy for now. We still have all of our Illustrator artwork right here in the bubble guy layers. What I want to do now is I want to take all of this as, they're all AI files right now. What I want to do is get these converted over to shape layers and that's really easy to do. All we have to do is, you can turn all these on if you want, doesn't matter. We have the background. I'm actually going to leave the background as is. We could just lock that so that you can't move it. Then the bubble, we're going to just right-click it and click on create shapes from vector layer. Just like that, we get a vector bubble or we get shapes out of our vector layer. Then we can just delete the bubble layer. We're going to do that for each one of these. Click off for that. Two more. Keep clicking into vast. I'll go through and delete all of the Illustrator files. Now we have all the same layers, they're just now After Effects shaped layers instead. I'm going to get rid of outlines off at each one of these bubble. We've got left arm, thumb, body outlines, right arm outlines, eyes, wink, eyebrows, and the diamond. Now we've got everything named, layered. What's nice about this is if we want to make any changes in everyone. If we decided we didn't like the color of his shirt or anything like that, we don't have to jump back into Illustrator, change the color, save it, and then jump back into After Effects, we can go to our body layer, toggle it down, contents, go through our groups and you can take the time to name all these groups. Like this is body, this is neck shadow. You can see what's getting highlighted up here when it gets clicked. I can just grab the shirt and I can see up here is the color and the feel and I can change it to anything I want, real easily here. We got all of this then laid out. It's pretty much ready to start figuring out how we're going to animate it. The next video, what we'll do is we'll get the guy animated. I'll show you how to set up the mask so that it hides the bottom part of it here. Then we'll do the 3D flip that reveals a diamond shape. See you in the next video.
5. Animating the Character: Okay, welcome back. The first thing we're going to do before we start animating is, we should probably "Save" because we didn't do that in the last video. So we're going to go,"File", "Save as", and we're going to save it as Bubble Guy Animation and "Click Save". Now, we've got the project saved and what we're going to do is just figure out how we want to animate the guy. Then we'll worry about masking him off. Let's hide the diamond for now. Just take a look at our guy we have here. Okay, so we probably want to do is take the eyebrows, the blink, the eyes, the right arm and the left arm and parent all of those to the body. Then I'm going to take the thumb and I'm going to parent it to the left arm. That way I can move the body around and everything follows it. So the very first thing I'm going to do is, I think I wanted to sweep up from the left bottom and come in and settle in the center. So I'm actually going to start this animation at the one second mark. I'm going to take the body if I use the Y key, we can change where the anchor point is. I'm going to put the anchor point down in the corner here and V takes us back to our normal tool and what I'm going to do is, I'm going to go to rotation and I know I want him rotated like this. Then he's going to go back to zero like that. So we will add a key-frame. Let's move that key-frame out, say 10 frames or 12 frames for now. You can do that by doing Option and Shift with the frame selected and you can move it ten at a time. You just hold Option one frame at a time. Then back at where we're at, we're going to rotate it back. Maybe, let's try 30 degrees and that is way too slow. Let's zoom in. Use the plus, zoom in and I know already that's going to be way too slow to go ten. Okay, there we go. All right, now I'm not worried about how smooth the motion is. I just want to see how fast the motion is. Timing wise like that. Then we're going to position key frame here and just say then go forward ten and we want it to be down like this. We're just going to see how it looks. So I want it to go up and then like that. Then if you hit U we can see all of our key frames and what I want to happen as I want the rotation to linger behind the other movements so that it's like he's moving up and then he swings in. Let us just get this motion easy and a little bit. We're going to take all this and F-9 function. F-9 adds a little easing and there we go. Now I'm thinking also that maybe this rotation should be, let's go for a few frames. You click the little hover here. It actually adds the exact same key-frame you already have and I'm going back to overshoot this a little bit, maybe by like five and then I will play with this a little more in the graph editor in a minute, but let us get the basic movement going. Then what I want to do is let us get the head so we are in the body. Let us actually expand this out a little bit more and let's find the head. There is the head. I am going to name this so that we know it is, head. The head actually has a transform. Now here is where we have a problem. I want the hair and the eyes and everything to move with the head so what I'm going to do is I'm actually going to take the head, the hair, the ear, nose, a mouth all this stuff. So I'm going to take all of this. Let's cut that. Then this is why it's nice to create this stuff as shaped layers. I'm going to go to the top layer, new Shape Layer and I'm going to Paste the head back in, then what we can do is I can actually just take this head and move it right back up and a place where we had it just like that and now we can rename this shape layer Head. Now we can rotate it like this and what I can change is, I can take the blink, the eyebrows and the eyes and have these paired to the head instead. Now when I rotate my head, all that follows. So what we a re going to do is we're going to go back to body. The Body is coming up. I think it's doing its thing. We have the head attached to the body that way it goes with and while the head, well, the body has momentum going up this way, what we are going to do is we're going to take the head. We're going to do the exact same thing that we did before. We're going to use the Y tool and set our anchor point right here to the bottom. Then we're going to go back a little bit like this. Set a key-frame and as we move forward he's going to go a little bit, maybe plus two and then we're going to settle back at zero. We'll have a little bit of overshoot with our head as well and then we're going to "function F-9" easy is his frames and now we go and then I may offset this by a few frames. There we go. Okay. We have a nice start to the animation with the head moving up with a little bit of bounce. I didn't notice a little bit of a problem with the shadow on the neck so we can do just like we did before. We can go into the body, break it open, code the contents, find the next shadow right there open it up. Click on the path and if we zoom in, select the point and just drag it up like this and now there's no break in the shadow on the neck. We can play the animation again and we got a nice little bounce. I think that is a good start. In the next video what we will do is we'll work on animating the arms and the hand and then we'll mask this guy off with the circle and work in the graph editor.
6. Animating the Character Continued: [MUSIC]. All right, welcome back. Let's take a quick look at what we got so far. I'm just going to go the first frame here, I hit the B key as I move some of these keyframes over just so they started the one I'm going to go out to two seconds and hit the Enter key. Then we'll just loop around see what we've got. Okay, let's get these arms animated and it's actually going to be easy. So actually we're going to start at the end here. We're going to go to our right arm real quick here and toggle it down. Want to go to the path. Actually going to go out, say 10 and then we'll go back 10, and what I'm going to do is, grab the bottom point, just going to bring it down a little bit. Grab this point bringing it in a little bit, it's going to move this around and we're going to see what it does is, bringing it up as putting it on his hip. Almost. Just watch it. All right, let's ease those bring them back a couple of frames. Bring back more. Let's go this way. Just decide what I like the best and I'm liking that a little more. All right. I'm going to stick with that for right now. Maybe we'll move it, just a little bit more. A lot of this stuff is playing with it, until you get it the way I like it. I just keep playing with it and playing with it. All right. So we got that. Now, let's get the other arm. The other arm is below here. So at this, I want the thumb to be attached to left arm, which already have, okay and we're going to have this part happen after it pops up and then right here we're going to have the other hand start to pop up. So let's go contents, path and we actually, I don't want the path for the thumb, my bad. I want the path for the arm, here we go. So we've got the hand and we got the arm. Okay, what we're going to do is, we're just going to take these points and animate them. I'm going to go down same thing we did before. I want the final point to be like this. I'm going to hit to create a key frame on the path and then I bring this up a little bit, bring this up a little bit, and then what we're going to do is, lets go back 10 and we're just going to position it so that his arm is down. So we'll pull this one down, we'll pull this one down and straighten it out back like this and we may need to tweak it a little bit, but let's just see what happens. I might go in between and just adjust my arm so there we go that looks better. All right, that's easy, just watch it real quick. Let's give ourselves some more frame. Let's go out three seconds here. I'm going to bring these out. What does that 10, 11, 12 put this at six mark mark. All right, so let's get that. Let's animate the hand to follow. The hand is going to be this other group that's here. Here's the hand. So what we can do with this hand is, we'd go down to the transform and we have a position. So we can go to the end. Let's go to the end. We know we want it to be done and at a position key frame all the way back. I'm actually going to add a rotation key frame as well. Let's add rotation and I have both of those. Let's go back. I want the hand to be down and I'm not too concerned about the thumb right now and I'm going to rotate it. Let's see what this looks like. Go on the middle, down, take the rotation is fine on that. Okay, let's easy, ease it double-check it one more time, there we go. Let's watch it. All right, so once we get to here, what we'll do is we'll grab our thumb and hit the left bracket and we can animate the thumb and the thumb is going to position, will go out, say 10. Add a position keyframe back to the beginning and let's just zoom in so we can see, make sure we're moving it right and what we're going to do is, we're just going to slide it down like this, easy and bring it back up. Let's watch it again. I want to take all of this move it a little bit this way and I don't quite like the rotation of the hand yet. I'm going to rotate it a little bit more. I slid this back over the keyframe so it doesn't pop up on me and I get rid of that keyframe real quick. Let's take a look. I'm going to make some more adjustments and this is really how it works. You just constantly make adjustments until you get something you like. There we go, that flows better. Let's move this back a couple of frames. Just about got this, must take all of this. Let's move this in, a bit more. Not happy with the time in here, maybe a little sooner. We want the thumbnail to pop up quicker. All right and when we get into the graph editor, we're going to make this stuff pop a little more, but I think this is a pretty good start. Let us just add just a little bit more animation to this. Okay? I'm going to hit you that I'll shrink that down, gets hides us,hit you on this to hide some of the other stuff. That way we get still more condensed and it only shows me my key frames. Then what I am going to do is let's get the blink going. We've got the eyes, eyes are going to be there the whole time. Then maybe around here. We will cut it there. Then we are going to left bracket. He blinks and blinks for 1,2, 3, 4 maybe and three because then [inaudible] left bracket will cut it. That'll be four frame. Then we're going to Command Duplicate or Control Duplicate, Command D. Bring the eye back out. That'll be one little blink and there we go. Now he is blinking and then what I might also do is once the thumb pops up, we'll just do a little eyebrow raise. Go key, at a key frame, go forward. Five, bringing it up 1,2,3,4, and then go 1,2,3,4,5 and bring it down 1,2,3,4, and we'll easy [inaudible]. All right, let us Save and take a quick watch. Let us space those out a little bit more. Instead of five, let's do 5,6,7,8, and this one is 5,6,7,8. Do it again. That's too slow, so let's go seven. There we go and actually, I think what I want to do is I want to move the blink after the eyebrow race. We're just going to move this stuff long. Watch it again. A little bit later, Pops up. "Eyebrow raise", click. Okay. I think this has gone pretty good. All right, so I think we have just got one more thing to do here and that is adding the mask so that we can keep them within the circle. Okay, so let's get this mask going. What I'm going to do is I'm going to take my entire character at this point, select everything. We are going to right click it, "Pre-compose". We're going to call this Bubble guy animation. That's going to take all the animation I just did and pop it into its own composition and now it's not in the main animation. Now I can take this circle, duplicate it, Command D, put it above our guy and what I'm going to do with this now is make it a track mat and there is inside the circle, so I can tell the difference with my track mat, I'm going to call it Bubble Mat. I like to color my mats, fuchsia, so I can see where they're. Okay. Now just like our character, we're able to modify the parts of this guy. What I can do is let's just add, say a couple more points on it here, and here. Okay, and I'll probably add one. Maybe here. I want to see how this goes. Okay, so I got my points and I need to think about how he's going to come up through here. I might add a couple extra points here. I think I'm going to add a couple more here, maybe here and here and here. Because what I want to do is I want to be able to retain the shape until he gets to, I guess until it gets to like right here. Okay, so right here I know I'm going to add a path. Then right here, I know at least want this point out of the way. I am going to click "My path". I'm going to get this point out of the way. He is going to come in and I want this point out of the way. Now that I'm thinking about it, maybe he should come down more this way so that when it comes up it's not cutting into his head. What we're going to do is we're going to jump in here. We're already in that same point. I'm going to grab the body. I can see my position keyframe. Come down on the position. I'm actually going to just pull him little more this way so that he comes up like this. Let's go back and take a look at it. Okay, so I'm going to pull them still just a little more and I can actually adjust it here. At this point, we're just going to adjust it a little more here and go back and watch it again. I want to get this one. Let's just pull it even more. See where we're at. There we go. That's perfect. Okay. Sometimes you just got to play with it a little bit to get it where you want it and then I know that I want this, so that it breaks out of the shape up here. Now, and I actually don't even need these keyframes now I just do it like this. Here we go. Now it is just coming out of the bottom. All right? Then got his hand coming up. We're going to do this. All right, we're going to do the same thing we did before. I am going to add a point here and we're just going to move this mask out of the way. I'm going to see how his hand comes up. Okay? Add a point here. That's all that needs to be. What I want to do. I'm actually going to animate this one. Let us bring up the path and animate it. We're going to get it. Here is where I wanted out of the way. Okay? As it comes down here. This a little bit more. All right. That's getting there. It's going pretty fast. It is just a snap into place after his hand gets there. Might adjust hand a little bit. In the next video, we'll look at just tweaking some of these animations in the graph editor.
7. The Graph Editor: Welcome back. We have, just recapping, a pretty good-looking start to our animation. He pops out of the circle, pops his hands, sticks up his thumb, gives a little eyebrow raise. We matted it with a Alpha matte, and we put our character animation inside of its own pre-comp. Let's go ahead and hit "U" on this so we see the key frames, and let's double-click on our pre-comp and take a look at all of our animation. I'm going to select all, hit "U". Take a look at all of our key frames. Let's start with just the body coming up and flipping up. I'm going to select these key frames for the body, and I am going to click on the Graph editor. Here we are. If you go down at the bottom here and click on this, Fit All Graphs to View, it'll pop your graphs into view just like it says, and we can take a look at our two sets of key frames. One is position, the other is rotation. Let's do position first. I'm actually just going to use the speed graph for this right now. I'm going to select it. I'm going to grab this little handle, and I want to have a little bit of a delay, I want it to snap in, and then when it comes in, I want it to ease a little more into place. It's going to take a little time, ramp up to full speed, start coming down and then start to slow down a little bit. Let's see that looks like. Then the same thing is going to happen with our rotation. How I want the rotation to happen is the same thing. I'm going to grab the rotation, I'm going to pull it. I want it to really takes a while to ramp up and then I want to flip and snap back, snap back fast. Let's see. There we go. Let's come back a little bit on that. I might actually have this go a little bit less. I might have this settle just a little bit more. There we go. You can see it again. I think I like that. Let's go back out, and we did the head next. Let's do the head. Let's grab its key frames, go into the Graph Editor, and I want the same thing to happen, this is really linear right now, so I want the head to delay a little bit. It's going to delay back, it's going to start to snap forward, and then what I want it to do is take a little bit longer coming forward and then snap back. Let's see how that looks. Let's have it come to a rest a little bit slower. Actually I'm going to pop this. Let's go two more frames. Nope, I liked it better the way it was. See it again. Okay, I'm taking that. Let's do right arm. Just click it just like that on the side and I'll just populate here. We don't have to keep going back and forth. I'm going to do the same thing. I want the right arm to take a second. There we go. I'm taking that, and we'll just have it come just a slight bit more rest. Let's go to the left arm, and we can select all of these because we want to see all of them. That looks good. Then we're going to go to thumb, and do the same thing. We want the thumb to just pop up. There we go. I'm just going to add just a little bit of easing on the end there. There we go. We'll do the eyebrows as well. How we want the eyebrows to do is we want it to go up quick and come to a rest. There we go. I think one of the thing I want to do while we're here, let's go back to the head and go to the contents, and let's find that piece of hair right there, is our Y tool, and I'm going to move the anchor point to it, and let's say right here, just down in this little spot there. I'm going to go back to our regular view, and I'm going to add a rotation key frame. I want it to be like it's here. Right here. Let's have it back to normal here. Let's go back 1,2,3,4,5. Let's rotate it forward a little bit, and go back 10, so we go all the way back to the beginning. Let's rotate it up a little bit. Actually, I got that backwards. It's going to be down as he comes up, and as he comes down, it's going to come up a little bit, and then going to a final resting spot, and let's ease that. Going to the Graph Editor, and I want it to be coming up fast and then come into a fast rest as well, so let's see. Let's add a little bit more movement. Let's see what this looks like in our main animation, it's going to be off a little bit now. Let's just make sure this guy, I moved something here. We can add maybe another key frame here to keep him from going where we don't want him to go. Maybe something like that. In front of the path of this should all be open. Let's take a look at it. I think I'm going to put another tool here. There we go. He's still coming up too high though. Right here. See he's up too high. Right here we're just going to bring down just here at the end, there like that, and then you just rotate in. Then we can see, problem solved. We do have a little weirdness going on here. I guess we could still keep that like that, and then here, pop it into place. This time we get a little better. There we go. In the next video, we'll work on doing the coin flip and revealing the diamond.
8. Coin Flip and Export: Now that the graph editor is done, we are going to work on the coin flip. First I want to do is go into the Bubble Guy animation. I want to stretch him out for four seconds, lets go a little further, just in case because there's a little more room to play with, and he'll just stay frozen there. Lets go back to main animation, we got this and now we can stress this a little further. We'll stretch it out for five seconds. What we have to do is, the bubble matt needs to be parented to bubble guy, and bubble guy needs to be parented to bubble, and the diamond needs to be a 3D layer, they actually all need to be in 3D layers. Lets draw in 3D layers and we're actually going to turn the diamond on. But diamond is going to be behind our bubble layer, what we're going to do is go to the diamond and go to position, and we're going to make this one, and one is just going to put it behind the bubble. Now that we got that, we're going to take a look at here where we wanted to flip, it's going to come up and put his thumb up. Soon as he gets his thumb up, right at the two second mark here, gets a sum up. Come in a little bit, we'll give it a little bit more time like that. Now we're going to prepare for the flip and we're actually going to flip the bubble. The bubble flips on if you hit "R" it'll bring up rotation, and we want to rotate it on "Y". You can see it rotates here on "Y". Now we'll get a weird glitch with the diamond, is because the diamond isn't parented on anything and we want the diamond to be parented to the bubble as well. Now if we rotate this, the diamond is behind being perfect. "Undo" and we're going to put a rotation key for n, and I'm going to go 1,2,3,4,5 frames and we're going to do an anticipation. We're going to bring it back a little bit this way, and then I want it to go forward 10 maybe 12 and I want it to do a full 180 back the other way. We're just going to hit "180", and there's the full 180, so we're going to have cool. Maybe when it hits here will go 1,2,3,4,5 and put that key frame in, just go over and click the "KEY-FRAME", puts the correct key friend that's already there, back in place. We're going to take this one, we're just going to overshoot it a little bit. Then what I want to do is when it starts to flip and it gets to be right there. Actually before we do this, let's ease this, here we go and seeing that we're already familiar with the graph editor, let's just do the graph editor now. What we want to do is we want it to take a little while the [inaudible] then we want to, so its going to take a second anticipation and it's going to full up really fast, it's going to start to ease into it, then I want it to settle into it a little bit. Let's take a look at that. Maybe too much, let's just back it off a little bit. Then if we want to we could actually, when we hit here, we want to have the guy and the mask quickly gone and it's just the diamond, and just like that, we have a coin flip, and we want this to be a looping animation, so after we have the coin flip, let that sit for a second then we will "KEY-FRAME" 1,2,3,4,5, little anticipation, 10,11,12, flip it back to zero. Maybe 1,2,3,4,5. Put that back and go back, overshoot it a little bit, and we'll do the same thing here in the graph editor. I'm going to release that. We're going to just mimic the same thing we did on the other one, and then let's watch it one more time. There we go.. Set out, and we have animation that loops. We have a looping animation. The last thing to do is to render this out and turn it into a GIF. What we're going to do is add this to our render queue, we can go up to composition, add to render queue and then what we want to do is under settings format, I'm going to put it as a H.264. Click "OK" and we're going to put two and to whatever folder you are saving into. I'm going to call it bubble guy animation and click "SAVE". Now, all we have to do now is hit render. But before we do that, we have it set to 1920 by 1080. If you were setting this up for dribble or Instagram, it needs to be set to something a little smaller, 800 by 600 is the largest that dribble takes, and then Instagram will take bigger, but it has to be square. You could do 600 by 600 or 800 by 800. Let's actually prep this for drivel real quick. Let's go back to our main animation before we render this, I'm going to hit "COMMAND"OK , or you can go up to composition and do composition settings, and then we're just going to change this to 800 by 600. We already know that everything is attached to the bubble, I'm just going to just scale this down so that it fits in here nice. Actually, let's move it down a little bit so it's a little more centered, and now this is actually ready for dribble. Like I said, if you wanted on Instagram, you just make it square. Now we'll go back to our settings, and we have this set to H.264. We have a set ready to render, and we'll just click "RENDER" and that's it. Now we can open it up in photoshop. Here we have photoshop open, what we're going to do is go to where we put our video, and we're going to go down and just drag this right into the photoshop icon or into Photoshop. Now that the video is in Photoshop, we can see it here. We're going to go up to File, Export, Export for web and it'll bring up this menu for us to create a GIF. I'm going to make sure GIF is chosen up here, and we can preview what it's going look like. It looks pretty good. Then we want Looping options set to forever so that it's a continuous loop, and we just click "SAVE" and then we save it in the same folder we've already been saving the rest of our project files, click "SAVE" and that's It. Now we can go into our folder where we just saved our looping GIF, click on it, and there it is, continuously looping. Now this is actually set and ready for you to upload, to dribble or if you made it square, you could upload it to Instagram or any other website of your choice. Thanks for watching.
JD McNeil, Sr. Motion Graphics Designer
