Premium Logo Animation in Adobe After Effects

1. Logo Animation Intro: Get ready to take your creative career to the next level with logo animation. Hi, I'm Valerie. I'm a professional motion designer and instructor in the best software for motion graphics, Adobe After Effects. After sharing some valuable content on social media for years and dropping three successful courses, I'm super excited introduce my biggest course yet. In this course, you're going to create five different types of premium logo animations and learn motion graphics in the most fun and efficient way possible. All while exploring Adobe after effects. You're going to learn the steps you have to take before animating a logo. How to get your logo ready for animation, add new graphics to it, make it work with your videos and pictures and so much more. You will start with easy animations and then move on to more complicated ones. After each lesson, you will get a fun task to practice what you've learned. By the end of the course, you will have the confidence to create five different types of logo animations. Don't worry if you're a newbie or just starting with after effects. I'll explain all the important functions and concepts of after effects in the simple way ever. If you want to go in that and learn more. I have a free beginner's guide where you can find detailed explanations about the most important topics of after effects. On top of all, to give you the best learning experience, you will get a clear notification on when to work with me and when to just listen without touching the computer. You will also get a mid lessons questions to help you memorize the lessons better. I'll even tell you want to take a 10 minutes break and the cherry on top the discourse is voiced by a professional voice over in super simple English. Even if English is not your native language like mine, you will easily understand the lessons. So get ready for a fun, engaging, and rich learning experience with logo animation. 2. What is Logo Animation: Hi, what exactly is logo animation and why should you care about it? Logo animation refers to the process of bringing a static logo to life through motion graphics and animation techniques. With the help of engaging in dynamic animations, we can enhance the impact and visual appeal of a logo. Logo Animation can be simple or complex depending on the client's needs, desired effect, and the complexity of the logo design. Here are a few reasons why learning how to create logo animation can be beneficial for you and your client. By offering logo animation services, designers can provide a more comprehensive and valuable service to their clients. Greater client satisfaction and higher salaries. Furthermore, a well crafted logo animation can help elevate a brand's image and create a memorable and engaging visual identity. This can help to increase brand recognition and customer loyalty overall. Knowing how to create cool logo animations can help creative peeps like you, stand out from the crowd, Boost your tech skills and make your clients super happy. Alright, enough with the talking. Let's get started. 3. Adobe After Effects Installation: Hey there. Before we dive into animating logos and after effects, don't forget to download the main folder of the course with all the necessary materials. That way you can follow along with me through the lessons. Next, let's talk about getting Adobe After Effects set up. It's a program made by Adobe, the company that creates some of the coolest platforms for creators out there. If you don't have an Adobe subscription yet, no worries. Check out the PDF file and the main folder for a link to a free trial. Sign up for the trial and head over to the app section to install after effects. After installing after effects, head over to the illustration apps and install Adobe Illustrator as well. Soon we will talk about this software and why we need it while dealing with logo animation. Now, if you already have an Adobe subscription, simply log into your account on the website or the desktop version, head over to the app section and install after effects From there. While installing the software, make sure to include the cinema for plug in, because we are going to use it in the course. Make sure you install Illustrator too, if you don't have it already. 4. Logo #1 - Animating a logo for a sportswear brand: Hey everyone. In this lesson, we're going to create a super cool logo animation for a made up women's sportswear brand named Athena. We'll be making five different animated scenes and then connecting them together. There's a lot to cover, so let's not waste any time and jump right in. 5. Adobe After Effects Introduction: Hi, and welcome to our first lesson. When we work on an after effects project, we need to work very organized to prevent issues in the future. The best way to work on an animation project is to create organized folders on our computer. Find a good spot on your computer where you want to create the main folder for the course. Great. Now, after finding a good spot, create a new folder. We'll name this folder D I M, underscore logo animation. If you're using Windows, you can write, click on the folder and select Pin two. Quick Access. This will make it easier to access this folder in the future. Now let's enter the folder we just created and create four more subfolders. The first one is where we will save all our after effects files. The second one is renders or samples. In this folder, we will keep all the renders and project tests. Now we need to create two more folders. One is named Assets, where we will store all the graphic assets related to this project. The second one is AI, where we will keep all the Adobe Illustrator files. In our case, these are the logo designs for this project. Since I already prepared the folders for this course, instead of creating these folders, let's go into the main folder of the course that you downloaded from me. Open it and copy these two folders from there. Now paste them into the folder we just created. Now let's install the fonts we will use in this course. For this, open the assets folder. Don't worry if you see more files here than in the lesson recording right now. I'll add those later. For now, just open the fonts folder. I'll show you how to install fonts for both Windows and Mac users. Let's start with this font called Montserrat. Open the folder and go into the static folder for Windows users. Select all the files, right click, click on Show More Options. If you don't see all the actions and choose install for all users or install. This font is already installed on my computer, so I won't install it again for Mac users with finder selected, click on Go. Now click on Go to Folder and type this line. Then press Enter. This will bring you to the fonts folder installed on your system. Now, copy all the fonts from the course folder to the system fonts folder. Okay. Now let's go back to the fonts folder and install another font called Ezra. Once you're in the folder, enter the OTF folder and select all the files. Right click and choose install for all users or install. The last font will use in this course is called belly, and it's only available on Adobe's fonts website. Let's go there and install it. Find the link to the font in the description of this video. If you don't have a subscription to Adobe Fonts, it's totally fine. I will tell you what font use instead later in this course. Don't worry, you don't have to install this font right now. For those that have an Adobe subscription first, make sure you sign in, then just click on a family and hit Okay. All right, After installing all the fonts, let's head back to the main folder and open the AI folder. This is where we'll find all our logo designs in Illustrator files. Let's start with the first logo. Let's open it up to see how it is made in Illustrator. Now to make it easier for everyone to see the same panel arrangement, go to Windows, then Workspace, and select Automation. Awesome, so this is a logo I designed specifically for the course. Let's imagine that this logo is intended for a women's sportswear company. As you can see, this logo consists of multiple layers. We have this triangle, a background layer, a capital letter A, and the letters of the logo name each separated into its own layer, which will be very helpful for us in the animation part. Every time you design a logo, it's better to try to build it in this way with all the letters separated. All right, once we have seen the logo design, it's very important to plan the animation we wish to create. To do this, we can sketch out a quick development plan for the animation. That is, create a short storyboard in order to see how the storyboard should look. Let's navigate to the assets folder and enter the ideas for the logo animations folder. Now open the storyboard for this logo and let's take a look at the sketch I made for this one. Making a sketch before animating a logo and after effects is super important. It helps you to see and plan the overall design and movement of the logo animation. This way you can decide the timing, movement, and overall design of the logo animation. It also helps your client to see the final result. And make changes before you start animating. This can save you time and effort in the long run. In our case, I think adding the silhouette of Athena from Greek mythology would be a cool idea for our women's sportswear brand. She represents the values of empowering women and could symbolize what our brand is all about. Therefore, I want the warriors silhouette to be the first thing in the scene followed by the brand name. Okay, I hope you understand the concept of how a story board should look. It doesn't have to be drawn at the highest level of detail. It's enough to present your idea in a sketch before moving on to the animation stage. Once you are satisfied with the planning and the client has approved the sketch, it's time to start the animation stage. I hope you're ready because this lesson is going to be awesome. Let's close the storyboard and open after effects together. The first screen you'll see is the home window here. You can either open a recent after effects project you've been working on or create a new one. But let me show you the most common way to start a new project. Let's close this window for now. Now so that we all see the same panels, lay it. Let's click on Default here. Now as in any editing program, we need to open a new file to do this. In after effects, we need to create a new composition. Let's click on New Composition and define the settings for our first composition. It's important to note that we can easily change all of these settings at any stage of the animation in the future. All right, so the first thing we need to do is to give it a name. Let's call our first composition logo Animation. One. Great. The next thing we need to do is to set the dimensions for our first composition. This is the dimensions of the width and height of the composition we create, which will be the size of the final video At the end, Different cases require different resolutions. As shown in the examples. A regular Instagram feed required posts to be 1080 pixels in width by 1080 pixels in height. But the new feed requires a height of 1,350 pixels. For stories reels, and Tiktok videos, the size should be 1080 pixels in width and 1920 pixels in height. For Youtube videos, it's best to use a resolution of 1080 pixels in height and 1920 pixels in width, which is a full HD format. If you want to make a four K video, you'll need to use full HD resolution multiplied by two. This time we will work in full HD format, which is 1,920 pixels in width and 1080 pixels in height. Next, we will choose the number of frames for our animation. What is the frame rate in the world of video and animation? Frame rate refers to the number of individual frames or pictures shown per second to create the illusion of motion. Frame rate is measured in frames per second, FPS. The higher the frame rate, the smoother the motion appears. Most common videos and films use a frame rate of 24, 25, or 30 frames per second. But if you want to create an animation for an app or a website, it's better to work on 60 frames per second. When you work with video editing software like after effects, you have the flexibility to choose the frame rate for your project. It's important to note that the frame rate can affect the file size of the final file. Also, higher frame rates require more storage space and power, which can slow down your workflow. In our case, we'll set it to 30. Moving on here we will choose the duration of our composition. The first numbers here are representing the amount of hours. The second one is the minutes. This one is for seconds. Last one is the solitary frames. 30 seconds will be enough. This time, we can delete the last frame. Finally, let's choose the background color of the composition. Let's set it to be black. To wrap things up, let's click on okay, here and here. Great job. You just created your first composition. Now I want to talk about the interface of the program real quick. And show you around the panels so you can get a good idea of how this program works. It might seem like there are a lot of buttons and functions, but don't worry, I'll explain everything in a way that won't make your head spin. Okay, so first things first, these are the active panels and the software. Let's start talking about this area here called the project panel. Into this panel, we will import all the assets that we will use in this project, such as pictures, sound files, videos, et cetera. Now let's move to the Layers panel, where we drag the assets from the projects panel. Or create new layers such as basic shapes, text, layers, effects, et cetera. Now let's move to the panel next to the layers panel called the composition panel. This panel shows us our time line in which we navigate using the time indicator. Here we have the ability to move layers in time to schedule between them. We will also see here the key frames that we will create later for our layers, those keyframes that make our layers move. Everything we do in these two panels will be shown in the preview panel. This is where we'll see how our layers will look to the viewer. These three panels all work together. Next we have the main toolbar panel. The main toolbar panel in After Effects is a set of tools and functions used for creating, editing, and managing visual elements within your project. It includes tools for selecting, moving, transforming, drawing shapes, creating text and more. All right, now let's talk about the final panel known as the Workflow area. This section contains various functions and panels to assist us in working on the project. We can access a window to view the list of effects, choose the font we want to use, and many other helpful utilities. Awesome. Now that you know your way around the panels, I want to make a few important notes. And give you some important tips to keep in mind while working with after effects. If you see the preview screen like this, don't worry, it's probably because your caps lock key is on. Just turn it off and everything should be back to normal. Next, when you're working on a project, in after effects, make sure you switch your computer's language to English. This way, all the shortcuts we use will work properly. If you don't see the background color, then simply click here. If you see the numbers here differently from mine, make sure to zoom out the timeline panel. Now you can hover your mouse here, hold down the control or a command key, and click on the numbers here. These numbers represent the duration of our composition timeline. We can see it in frames or in seconds. Then if you see the preview screen smaller or larger than mine, simply click here and select Fit. Finally, click here and change the preview quality here to full. All right, now let's make some changes to the software preferences to make our workflow smoother, just head over to Edit and go to Preferences. Mac users, you can access preferences this way. All right, now let's click on General and start adjusting the software preferences. Now set all the settings just like I did. You can pause the video if you need more time and continue when you're done. For now, I'm moving on to the next column, grid and guides. Change your settings to match mine. All right, moving on to the autosave section. In the autosave section, we can choose how often the software should save our project automatically. Basically, this feature saves your work automatically. At certain intervals, you don't lose any progress. If the program crashes or something crazy happens, I usually have it set to save every 5 minutes, but you can choose whatever time frame works for you. Next in the memory and performance section, we can check how much Ram our computer has. It could be 16, 32, or even more than 61. If you want after effects to run faster, you can give it more memory and use the rest for other stuff like surfing the web or running other programs. To make this happen, you must take some memory away from your computer. If you have 16 gigabytes, you can change this number to six or even four. The main idea here is to lower the power you give to other applications, and by this allow after effects to use the rest of the power of your computer. All right, moving on, make sure that in type all the settings are like mine. And finally, let's go to Script and expressions and select everything that's selected in my settings. It's important to note that you don't need to change these settings every time before starting a new project. Once we've set them once, there's no need to go back there again. Okay, so after we've created the first composition and defined the software settings, we need to save the project and give it a name for this. Let's go to File and click on Save. Now let's find the folder we created earlier for the lesson. Head into the AE folder and name the after effects file we are working on. It is important to understand that now we are naming the after effects file. Previously we gave a name for our first composition and not the name for this project. Now we are giving a name for our project file. You can name it the same as the main composition and add an underscore, then write the name of the logo. In our case, it's Athena. Once done, save it and our project will now have a name along with naming the project. We are also activated the auto save feature that we talked about earlier. This means that now after effects will save the project automatically every few minutes. All right, now it's time to import our logo into the project. We can do this in two ways. Either locate the logo on the computer and drag the AI logo file manually into the project panel like that. Another way to do it is by double clicking on the empty area in the project panel. After that, we just need to find the folder we made for the course. Next, locate the AI folder and select the first logo. Finally, make sure not to click on this function and then click on Import. Now a small window has popped up asking us how we want to import this file in composition or footage form. Let's see what the differences are between these two. For now, please don't do it with me at this moment. I want to first explain to you the differences between these two options. Don't worry, we will do it altogether shortly. First, let's see which options are available to us when we choose to import it as a footage. I'll choose the Merge Layers option and click Okay to see what it does. Now we can see the logo and the project panel as one layer. If we drag this logo to our composition, we'll see it as a single layer with all its sub layers stuck together. Which will make it not possible to animate the logo and all the layers from which is made to undo my action. I'll press control ZA few times. Now I'll import the file again. This time I'll click on Choose Layer. From here I can select a specific layer from the Illustrator file. All the names we see here are the layers names in the original Illustrator file. But in our case, I won't use this option because I don't need to choose a specific layer. In our case, I want to bring in all the layers when they are divided into separate layers. For this, I need to select composition here. In other words, after effects will import this file as separate layers into a separate composition. There are two options in this process as well. Let's start by understanding what it means to import the layers as document size. I'll click okay. And as you can see, a new composition will be created and a new folder will appear with all the illustrator file layers. Now when I enter the logo composition, I'll see that the logo is split into layers exactly as in the illustrator file. The background triangle and letters are all different layers. Now let's understand what it means for us when we choose document size. To help you understand this better, I will temporarily hide the background layer and the transparent background. I will select the triangle layer and hide the other layers as well. Now pay attention to the boundaries of this layer. Even though the object on this layer is quite small, the proportion or the size of this layer is large. In fact, they are the size of the original illustrator document. In other words, the document size. The same is true for this layer. The boundaries of this layer are larger, despite the smaller letter. Working with document size layers is not so comfortable because it will make it hard to animate the layers later on. Now let's move on to the second option for importing the file as composition and see if it will be a better option for us. But before that I will delete the folder and composition that were created earlier. I'll select them and press the backspace key and click delete. Now I want you to do it with me to bring the logo design into our project. Let's click here twice. Select the first logo file, ensure it's not highlighted, and click Import. Now select Composition. And this time, let's choose Layers, Size Together, and click Okay. Once again, a folder is created with all the logo layers and a new composition. Let's click on it twice to enter it. Here we see the design of the logo, again, just like before. But this time if we select the triangle layer, we'll see that the boundaries of this layer are adjusted to the size of the object on this layer. The same goes for the letter A. It'll be way easier for us to animate these layers now, when their size matches the object's size. Okay, now let's go back to our main composition from here and continue our lesson on creating our first logo animation. All right, so this logo animation is made up of five animated parts or scenes. The first part is the animation of the character silhouette inside the triangle. The second is the animation of the letter inside the triangle. The third one is the connection and transition between these two animations. The fourth part is the animation of the letters. And lastly, in the fifth part, we will create the outro animation. Alright, first things first, let's work on the animation of the silhouette within the triangle and we'll cover it in the next part of this lesson. It's going to be awesome. So see you there. 6. Importing new graphic assets to the project: Welcome back. As you can see right now, our workspace is empty and we cannot see anything on the preview screen. To see something on the preview screen and start to create our first scene, we can either create a layer ourselves or import a graphic asset from the project panel. Let's open the folder of logo layers and drag the triangle layer into our composition like this. Alternatively, we can copy a specific layer from another composition and paste it into the main composition. Let's delete this layer. And do that. Select it and press the backspace or the delete key to delete it. Now let's go back to the logo composition. Select the triangle layer from the preview panel or from the layer panel. Press control C to copy it and return to our main composition. Now press control V to paste the layer. Now let's learn about important tools and the basic layer settings in after effects. You can close this folder for now. All right, first let's learn how to center this layer in the composition. For this, we need to find where the center of the scene is. In this case, we can use the grids in after effects, which we can find here. In our case, we need to use a grid called Title Action Safe. But instead of selecting this grid from here, let's do it with a shortcut. Because we use this grid a lot, it can be annoying to come here every time and manually select this grid. Okay, so the shortcut for this grid is the apostrophe key. Let's click on the preview panel and press the apostrophe key. Now we can see where is the center of the composition. Now we can move this layer manually by clicking on it and dragging it to a desired location in the composition. Or we can open the transformed properties of this layer and change some parameters for different properties that we can see here. These are basic properties found in every layer and after effects. To move this layer, we can change the value of the position property. By dragging the values to the sides. Like this, we can move the layer left and right. From here, we can move it up and down. Next through the scale property, we can enlarge or reduce the layer. We can also set a specific value for this, Click the value and write 100. Then press Enter. Moving on from here, we can rotate the layer by changing the degrees of the rotation property. I will set it back to zero. Using opacity, we can control the layer's transparency. Now I want to talk about a property called Anchor Point. The anchor point which is represented by the small cross in the middle of the layer. I will zoom in so that we can see it better. Now let's understand its role. I'll close the zooming. Now pay attention to how this layer rotates. When I change the value of the rotation property, the layer rotates around its center. It rotates this way because the anchor point is located here. Now I will select the Anchor Point tool and move it to this corner. Now the layer rotates differently. It rotates based on its anchor point. Basically, the anchor point is what decides how the layer moves in response to certain actions. All right, let's undo the changes by pressing control Z a few times to bring the layer back to its original state, Set the rotation back to zero. And don't forget to switch back to the selection tool. Once you're done with the anchor point tool, now let's learn how to center the layer in the composition using the aligned tool. Which we can find here. If you can't see it here, you can find it under the Window menu. All right, to center this layer, we need to click here and here. Now let's say we need to enlarge this triangle. To do that, let's go to the scale property and change the value to 200. And there you go, the triangle is a bit bigger. Now let's close the layer for now. Now let's zoom in a bit to see it up close. You can do it using the mouse wheel or by pressing the keys, you see now on the screen. All right, now that we're looking at the triangle up close, we notice that its quality is not sharp. In other words, it's pixelated. Let's turn off the transparent background so that we can see it a bit better. Now I'll explain how we can improve the look of this layer to its maximum quality. As you already know, this layer was created in Illustrator, which is a vector based software. This means that no matter how much we enlarge this layer, it will retain its maximum quality and won't get pixelated. To preserve this information in after effects, we can apply the collapse function, which is located here. In case you can't find it, you can click here to show additional layers functions. Okay, let's activate the collapse function. There you go. The triangle is sharp and clean. Now let's use this opportunity to learn how to navigate in the previous screen while working with zoom like we are. Now to move the screen, we need to hold down the space bar and move the screen in any direction we want. Or we can use the middle click on the mouse for those who have it to set the preview screen back to normal. We can click here and select Fit. As a reminder, we are still in the process of creating the first animated part of the logo animation. In this part, we will show the character inside the triangle. It's worth noting that the silhouette of the female fighter is not a part of the original logo design. Sometimes including design elements that are not present in the original logo design can help us to tell a better story about the concept of the company. Nevertheless, it's essential to discuss any such ideas with the client before implementing them to ensure they agree with your ideas. All right, now let's learn how to add this cool character to our project. First things first, let's open up the Assets folder. Keep in mind that our project is super organized, so make sure to follow the same structure to avoid any headaches down the line. Let's go to the Assets folder and find the free Pick folder. A cool website where you can get tons of graphic assets for free. I named this folder free Pick, so I can remember where I got the asset from. Here you'll find all the assets I downloaded from this website. We want to open up the Silhouette folder. That's usually what you get when you download graphic assets from the web. Before we import the graphic asset into our project, we need to prepare it for animation. Let me show you how, Right click on the EPS file and open it with Adobe Illustrator. If you get this pop up, just click yes. Inside the file, there are additional layers besides the silhouette that we don't need for our after effects project. Therefore, it's essential prepare this file before animation. First select the unnecessary layer and press the backspace key to delete it. Then delete the small letter to. Now let's make the character bigger. When you select it, you'll see another layer with a white background. I can tell there's an extra layer behind the silhouette. Because I see large layers, borders that don't match the silhouette size. Therefore, I know that there is some layer behind the silhouette that I don't need for my animation. Select it and click on the trash can icon to delete it. Click yes to confirm the deletion. Now let's select the silhouette again and make it bigger while holding down the shift control keys so it grows symmetrically. Great. Now let's center it using the Align tool. Click here and here. Now, after we've gotten rid of any unnecessary layers and enlarge the figure, we can save it as a new Illustrator file. Let's open the File menu and click on Save As now choose to save it on your computer. Let's save it in the same folder as this file. If you are not sure, you can go back to the free Pick folder and enter the Silhouette folder. Make sure we save it as an Illustrator file. Next, change the name to Athens Silhouette. And finally, click Save. And okay. Now let's minimize this window and bring the new Illustrator file we created into after effects. Now let's choose how to import this file into our after effects project. Remember, this illustrator file only has one layer question. When we want to import an Illustrator file into the project and it consists of only one layer, which option should we choose? In this case, we can choose to import it as a footage, then we can choose to import it as merged layers because we only have one layer. In this file here we can see the Illustrator file in the project panel. Let's drag this file to our composition. Place it above the triangle layer. As you can see, this layer is quite large. Let's reduce it using the scale property to see only the scale property for this layer. We can select it and press the Skey. Now let's click on the Value and try to find a proper size. Maybe 50 or 20. Next, let's move this layer to the center of the composition to see if it's the right size. I think we can make it smaller and set it to, let's leave it like this for now and move on, because we know that this layer needs a scale animation. Later on, we will adjust the anchor point of this layer to the position from which the layer will grow, which is the center of this character's body. Currently, it's growing from the waste. Because the anchor point is here, we need to move it here. To do this, let's select the anchor point tool and move it here. Once done, let's go back to the selection tool and check how the scale behaves now. Okay, I think it's good. Let's bring it back to 15, Close the layer, and press the shortcut control less. To save everything we've done so far before we continue. Great, now let's bring back the transparent background. We can also apply collapse to this layer to preserve its maximum quality. Now let's learn how to make the character transparent within the triangle boundaries. To do this, we need to use an after effects feature called track mats. To see this feature, we need to click here, and here it is. If you can't see it fully, you can enlarge this area a bit by dragging the small line here. I will zoom in to show you the line you need to move. I'm talking about this one. Drag it to the sides like that. All right, what is the track mat function in Adobe After Effects? Track mattis are a feature used to control the visibility of one layer based on the content of another layer. There are two main mattis functions that we can use, Alpha and Luma. Alpha matte is a technique where you use the transparency of a layer to control what appears on the layer above it. It's often used when you want to create cool effects like revealing an image through the shape of other elements. Alumamt is a technique that uses the brightness or luminous information of the mat layer to control the visibility of the layer above it. The brighter areas of the mat layer reveal the content above it, while the darker areas hide it. The gray scale values in between create varying levels of transparency. Luma matte is often used for effects based on an images brightness. They help isolate and reveal parts of a video based on their brightness levels and can be used to create artistic effects track. Matt is a fascinating topic to explore. If you want to learn about them in detail and enjoy some engaging lessons, you can watch the free course I mentioned in the opening video. You can find the link to the course and the description below or in the PDF file in the main folder of the course that you downloaded from me. All right, let's get back to our project to make the character transparent within the triangle boundaries, we got to use the alpha matt function. For that, we need to drag the trac mattis, pick whip of the triangle layer to the character layer. This way we turn the triangle layer into the alpha layer of the character. Now the triangle uses the shape of the silhouette layer as a mask. Now we just got to make the triangle layer, use the silhouette layer as a cut out shape. To do that, let's click here to invert the alpha. There you have it. Now we can see the transparent character inside the triangle. With that, we're done designing the scene for the first animation part. Now let's move on to the next part. Start to animate this scene. See you there. But before you dive into the next lesson, I highly recommend that you take a ten minute break, get up from your chair, do some light stretching, and drink a glass of water. This will help you to recharge your brain for the next lesson. 7. Keyframes and Animation: Hey, welcome back. Now we're going to learn how to create an animation in after effects. The first thing we need to animate is the silhouette scaling from big to small. To make this happen, we got to animate the scale property. Let's select the layer and process to see it. But don't do anything yet. Just listen to what I'm explaining. Don't worry, we'll do it together in a second. Let's say I want the layer to stay the same size at the beginning of the animation, which is at 0 seconds. Then at second number four, I want the layer to scale to a larger size. Okay, let's see what we've got. As you can see, nothing happened. We didn't create any animation. I'll press control Z to undo my actions. Nothing happened because I didn't indicate to after effects, from what size to what size the layer should grow. In order to signal to after effects the change I want to happen to this layer, I need to create key frames. Key frames are markers used in after effects to specify changes that we want to happen to a layer at a particular time. By creating key frames, we can instruct after effects to transition the layer from one state to another at different points in time. Essentially, key frames allow us to create animation in after effects. Let's see how to create key frames. First, I will bring the time indicator to the beginning of the time line. That is to the second number zero. Now you can do it together with me. Let's decide that at this point in time, at the second number zero, this layer should be very big. Let's change the scale value until we get the size we need. Let's move the layer here, because we want it to enter the scene from the character's head. Now let's scale the layer a bit more. Once again, let's move it down a bit to see what we are doing. We can turn on this layer. For now, we need to enlarge and position this layer until the figure's head appears to cover the entire triangle. If it doesn't cover the whole triangle, then we'll see parts of it. And that's not what we want. Therefore, let's keep scaling the layer and moving it until we get the result we want. Let's just write 130 here. I think it's big enough Then move the layer here so it covers the triangle shape. Let's turn it off and check that we don't see the triangle. Yes, it looks good. Now we need to signal to after effects that the layer should appear and remain as it is at this moment. For that, we need to create the first keyframe at this point in time. To create the first key frame, we can click on the stopwatch of the scale property. Now let's move to the second number two. Why exactly is second number two? For no particular reason. Just because I decided that the length of this animation would be 2 seconds. We can change it later whenever we want. Okay, let's get a little closer to our timeline from here. Now let's move here to see the second number two place here, the time indicator. And now let's change the values of the layer until it is. As you can see, as soon as we change the scale values, a new key frame was automatically created for us, which is great. But the thing is that the layer is scaling down, but not in the right direction we need it to be. The reason for that is because it's scaling down based on the anchor points position. Let me turn on the layer for now so we can see what we're doing in this situation. We need to animate the position of this layer along with the scale animation. This means we need to create key frames for the position property as well. Let's go back to the beginning of the animation. That is the second number zero. Now select the layer and press shift to open the position property along with the scale. Since we are good with the position of the layer at this point in time, we can create the first key frame at this point in time to keep it that way. Now let's move the time indicator to the second number two while holding down the shift key. This way, the time indicator will snap to the key frames of the scale perimeter. Now let's move the layer here, drag it up, and move it a bit to the side. Now let's scale down the layer even further. Let's enter 15 for the scale. Then let's adjust the position once again. Now while it's getting smaller, the layer also moves to the right place to see how it looks. Bring the time indicator to the beginning of the timeline and press the Spacebar key. Great, you have created your first animation. Let's set the preview screen to fit and continue with the animation. Let's move to the second number four and set this layer to return to the position and size it had at the beginning. For this, we can simply select these two key frames. Copy them using the shortcut control C and press control V to paste them. They will adhere to the position of the time indicator. All right, let's see what we've got. We can turn off this layer so that the alpha effect can do its thing. Then let's check out the animation we made. Again, if you're hitting the space bar, but nothing's happening head on over to Preview. To change the settings here, we need to click on the Layers panel. After effects can know which composition you are referring to. If you don't see the preview panel, you can find it in window. All right, let's select the layers panel and change some preview settings. First, open the shortcut list and select Spacebar. Also, make sure to select the rest of the settings as I did. All right, let's move on. Now, I want to create a scale animation for the triangle as well. I want that at this point in time at 2 seconds, the triangle will be the size it currently is. Let's stand at 2 seconds with the time indicator. Then select the layer and press to see the scale property of this layer. Now let's create key frames with the current value. Once done, let's go to the second number zero and change the value to zero. Next, let's go to the second number four and set the triangle to be of size zero here as well. Now we have a slightly more interesting animation. When the silhouette gets small and the triangle gets big. Let's see how it looks altogether. As you can see, the movement of these layers is a bit boring. Everything moves at the same speed. It's because our key frames are currently linear key frames. To make these key frames a little more interesting, we need to convert them from linear key frames to as key frames. *** is a type of key frame interpolation that helps you achieve smooth and natural looking motion. When you apply *** to a key frame, it adds gradual acceleration and acceleration to the animation, making it appear more natural. To convert the key frames, we need to select all the key frames. Right click on one of them. Go to keyframe assistant and choose AsEEs, or use the very popular shortcut, the F nine key Mac users. You need to hold the FN key and press F nine. This time let's just click on it. And as you can see, our key frames have changed shape. Let's see how it looks now. Already looking better. And we can make it move even better by adjusting the easing. I'll explain what I mean in after effects. Key frames are points in time where you set a specific value for a property in your animation. Linear key frames create a constant and consistent change from one key frame to the next. This means the animation moves at a constant speed without any acceleration or deceleration. On the other hand, these keyframes create acceleration and acceleration in the animation, making it more natural and visually appealing. To control the speed of the animation, we can use the speed graph editor. Speed graph Editor is a tool that allows you to visualize and control the speed of your animation. It displays the speed of an animation property over time by adjusting the handles in the graph editor. You control the acceleration or deceleration of the animation ease and creates a slow start. While an ease out creates a slow end. Ease and out combines both, creating a smooth acceleration and deceleration. Now I want you to pay to influence percentages down here. Imagine each handle as a pair of hands influencing the motion. Adjusting the handles closer to the key frame increases their influence, creating a faster change. If you move them away, you decrease their influence, resulting in a slower change. But to change the influence of the animation using the graph editor and moving the handles can take too much time. Therefore, I want to show you a faster way to change the influence of animation. We can do it using the key frame velocity panel. The key frame velocity panel in after effects provides a numerical representation of the velocity and influence of your key frames. The panel shows separate values for incoming ease in and outgoing ease out velocities. The influence percentages we put here are the ones we saw earlier in the speed graph. If we want to create a nice ease in and ease out animation like we did earlier, using the handles in the graph editor, we can change the influence of the ease in and ease out animation to 85. The speed graph editor, it will look like that. This means the animation will start slowly. Then at second number one will increase its speed and after that will slow down. The most important thing to remember is that we didn't change the duration of the animation. The animation lasts for 2 seconds, just like in the beginning. We just changed the timing between the key frames by adjusting their influence. It's a process of trial and error. So don't hesitate to play around with different settings to see how they affect your animation. Since we already converted our key frames from linear to as key frames, we can now change the influence of these key frames to get much more interesting movement. And to do that first, we need to select the key frames that we want to change. It's important to remember that we can't change all the key frames for different types of properties at once. We need to change the key frames for each property type separately. As you can see in these two layers, we have key frames for the scale property. Since it's the same type of property, we can select these keyframes in both layers and change them together. Let's select all the key frames that belong to the scale parameter. Now hold down the alt key and click twice on one of the key frames. Now we can see the keyframe velocity panel for the scale property. Let's change the velocity of these keyframes to 85% at the beginning of the key frame and 85% at the end. Then click Okay. Now let's do the same thing for the position property. We can select the key frames from here or select the property from the layer. This way we will select all the key frames that we have for this property. Now hold down the Alp key and click twice on one of the key frames. Now we can see the key frame velocity panel for the position property. Let's change the velocity of these keyframes to 85% as well. Click Okay, let's see how it looks. Now the motion of the layers is much more interesting. Once we're done animating the first part, we can group these two layers together, just like we do in Photoshop or Illustrator, but in after effects we call it precompose. Precomposing is a technique used to group layers together and treat them as a single layer. One of the main advantages of precomposing layers is that it allows you to keep your timeline organized and easy to manage. It's pretty easy to do, just select the two layers and either right click and choose precompose, or hit Control Shift C on your keyboard. Let's give that a try. Let's press Control shift C together. Now let's call this composition icon animation. Make sure both of these are selected and then hit Okay. Now we can see the composition we created in the composition panel and also in the project panel. To enter this pre comp, double click on it. And there are two layers that we animated a minute ago. All right, let's go back to our main composition and turn off this pre comp for now so we can focus on creating the second part of this logo animation. We are going to create similar animation but with the letter A instead of the silhouette. To do that, let's go to the logo design composition. Select the letter A. Hold down the shift key and also select the triangle. Now press control C to copy these layers. After that, navigate back to the main composition and press control V to paste them. It is possible that the letter A may not be visible after pasting the layers. This could be due to the layer being stuck underneath the triangle layer. All you need to do is move the A layer above the triangle layer and it will become visible. Now let's select these two layers and center them in the composition. However, this time we won't use the aligned tool. We will use a cool shortcut control home. Now let's make these layers bigger press S to see the scale property for the layers. And change the value to 200, just like we did with the triangle earlier. Now let's click here to see the collapse function and apply it to these two layers so that they are in their best quality. We can turn off the background to see what we're doing a bit better. Now let's close the layers and start to animate the letter A. Start. Move the letter down here. You can do it with the arrow keys on your keyboard. Then click here to see the track Matt function. And drag the pick whip of the triangle onto the letter layer to use it as an alpha. After that, click here to invert the alpha mat so that the triangle will use the letter layer as a cut out shape. Awesome, Now let's animate this scene. We will start by creating a scale animation for the letter A, select it and press S to see the scale property. We know that the letter should be the size it is now later in the animation therefore. We can get to the second number two and create the first key frame with the current value that is now. Now let's get to the beginning of the timeline and scale the letter layer up to 500. We can drag the value manually or just enter 500 here. Let's see how it looks. Now let's animate this triangle layer like we animated the first one earlier using the scale property. Select the layer and press. But this time to create a slightly more interesting animation, we can choose the anchor point tool and move the anchor point of the triangle down here. Let's hold the control key while moving the anchor point. That way it will snap to this point. Once done, let's go back to the selection tool now. When we animate the triangle, it will grow and shrink in relation to its anchor point. Okay, press control Z. And let's stand at the second number two because we know that at this point in time, the triangle should be the size it is right now. That's why we will create a keyframe here with the current value. Now let's get to the beginning of the timeline and set the scale to zero. Let's see how it looks. Now we can improve our animation even more by converting the key frames to ***. Let's select the key frames and press F nine. Now let's also change the velocity of these key frames like we did before, because all the key frames belong to the same property, we can do it for all of them at once. Let's hold the Alt key and double click on one of the key frames, set it to 85, and click. Okay, let's see it one more time. That looks great. Now, after finishing the animation of these layers, let's put them into pre comp. We will use the shortcut control, shift C. This time we will call it a animation. Make sure both of these are checked and click okay. Now let's combine the two pre comps we created. Turn on the first animated part, and let's find a good time to start the second one. We can turn off this pre comp for now to focus on finding a perfect timing. Okay, this seems like a good time point, let's check it out. Now, turn on this pre comp and move it to the time indicator position. Now move the time indicator back and forward to see that the two parts blend well together. Let's continue doing that until we find a good timing. All right, I think we should start the letter animation from the second number two. Let's see what it looks like together. Yes, it looks great. Let's see it one more time. Awesome. Let's press control S to save the project before we move on to the next part and start to animate the third scene, which is the animation of the rest of the letters of the logo. It's going to be awesome. So see you in the next part. 8. Revealing text effect: Welcome back. Let's start to animate the third scene. First, let's go to the beginning of the timeline and turn off both of these layers. Now, enter the logo design composition and copy the layers of the letters. From here, select the first layer, hold the shift key, and select this layer. Now press control C to copy them. Next, go back to the main composition and press control V to paste the layers. Now let's move the layers to the center of the scene. We can zoom in a bit. You can turn off the background so we can see what we're doing. The black color is too dark in this case. Let's change that. To change the background color of the preview screen, we need to access the settings of this composition. To do this, we'll use the shortcut control K. Now we see the settings of our main composition, which is called logo animation One, we can see the changes that we are doing. Make sure to check the preview box down here. Now let's click here and change the color to gray. Pick a brighter, gray, so we can see the letters. Once done, click okay, here and here. Now let's learn how to animate these letters. Let's start with the first letter, t. Let's turn off the other layers to focus only on the letter. Now to create the effect of exposing the letter, we need to start by creating a mask for the layer in the shape of the letter. We can achieve this by selecting the pen tool and creating the mask from top to bottom in the direction we want it to be revealed. This step is crucial, as it will determine the direction of the letter's exposure later on. To begin, make sure that the layer is selected. Now create a point at the top of the letter, followed by points along the way until you reach the bottom to round the corners. Click and hold on the Pen tool to open its menu and select the Vertex Tool. Alternatively, you can hold the Alt key and click the point once to round the corner. Once done, adjust the handles to create a smooth curve. Next, create another mask for the remaining part of the letter. Start by creating the first point here. Now hold the shift key to make the line straight. And create the second point by clicking at the end of the segment. After that, we need to apply a stroke effect on this layer. Let's open the Effect and Presets panel. If you can't see this panel, you can find it under Windows. Now search for the stroke effect. This effect will help us create the reveal of the letter, select the stroke effect, and drag it onto our layer. Now if we open up the path parameters, you'll notice that the effect detects two masks on this layer and we need to apply it to both of them. To do this, click on all masks. Next, increase the brush size until the letter is no longer visible. Change the brush hardness to 100% Now we can animate the end property to create the reveal animation. To get the reveal effect, we need to change the paint style to original layer. When you change this parameter, the letter will be revealed. All right, so now let's animate it. First, let's make sure that we are at the beginning of the timeline and create the first key frame for the property with a value of zero. In order to see the key frame we've created for the effect, we need to select the layer and press you. There it is. We see the key frames for the property belonging to the effect named stroke. That's exactly what we see here. Okay, now let's move to the second number two and change the value to 100% Great, let's see what we've got. You might notice that some parts have an overlap, where the two shapes which looks bad. To fix this, we need to adjust the parameter that controls the stroke thickness. Moreover, we can animate this property as well. Let's set it to two. Now go to the beginning of the timeline and create the first key frame with the current value. To view the key frame we created, press U. Now go to the second number two and adjust the value until the whole letter is visible. A value of ten should work. Let's see how it looks. Now let's improve the animation. We can do it by converting the key frames to As. The first thing we need to do is select all the key frames and press F nine to make them as. Then we will change the velocity for the property. Let's click on it twice while holding the Alt key. Change it to 85, 85, and hit. Okay, let's see it once again. Awesome, and with this, we have finished animating the first letter. Let's move on to the next one while repeating the same actions. First, let's start by creating a mask. Select the pen tool, pick the right layer, and start creating the mask. I want this letter to appear from this direction. So I'll start creating the mask from here. Create one point here and one point there. Now to create a new mask on the same layer, click on this layer first and then start creating a new mask. Create the first point here, the second one here, another one here, then here, the last one here. Lastly, to round the corners, hold the Alt key and click on the points you want to round, and then adjust the handles to get a nice curve. We don't need to round this one, We can round this point and adjust it a bit. You can hold the shift key while moving the handles to get a straight alignment. Okay, so the mask is ready. And now instead of recreating the stroke effect, we can simply copy it from this layer. Let's select it now. Let's select the effect from here. Press control C. Then select this layer, make sure we're at the beginning of the timeline. And press control V to paste the effect. Once done, press you to see the key frames of the effect. Basically, we don't even need to create new key frames for the effect. Let's see how it looks great, And now let's close this layer and turn on the next letter. Once again, choose the pen tool and create a mask. Remember, the first point you will create will affect the revealing animation. If I want, the letter will start to reveal. From this area, I will start to create the mask from here. Now let's round the corners. Next, copy the effect from the previous layer and paste it onto the third letter. Just don't forget to go back to the beginning of the timeline before passing the effect. I think it looks good. Now let's turn on the next letter and repeat the same actions. A quick reminder to start a new mask for this part of the letter, Let's click on the layer once and continue creating the second mask. Don't forget to round the corners. Okay, and now let's select this layer again and press control V to paste the copied defect on it. Finally, let's do it for the last letter I want to reveal the letter from here. I'll start to create the first point of the mask here. Now to create the second mask for the second part of the letter, I'll click on the layer and start to create the second mask. Now let's round the corners. I'll move this point here a little bit. We can also round this point and this one as well. Now select the layer and press control V to paste the effect on it as well. I see that I didn't round the corners here. Let's do that now. We can also round this point. I'll move this point here a little bit. That's good enough. Let's see how it looks. Excellent. Let's press control S to save the project, then we can set the preview to fit. And switch back to the selection tool. Now let's select all the layers and add a scale animation to them. Let's go to the second number two. Now to create a scale animation, we need to open the scale property. Let's press S to see the scale for all the selected layers. We will create key frames at this time point with the current value. Let's go to the beginning of the timeline and change the value to zero. I want the letters to move to the left after the scaling animation. I know that at the second number two, I want the letters to stay where they are right now. Therefore, let's press P and create the first key frames with the current value. Now let's go to the second number four and move the letters to the left using the left arrow key on the keyboard. Hold down the shift key while doing so to move the letters in bigger increments. Great. After that, let's enlarge this panel. Now let's select all the key frames and press F nine to make them easy. Then hold the Alt key and double click on one of the key frames to enter the velocity panel. Change it to 85, 85, and hit. Okay. Now let's do the same thing for the scale animation. Let's press S to see the scale property. Select all the key frames and press F nine. Now hold the Ob key, double click on one of them and change it to 85 as well. Just a quick reminder, if you want to see all the key frames on the layers, press the Ukey. But we don't really need to see those key frames right now to hide them. We need to press the Ukey once again. All right, let's check out what we've done so far. Great job. Now we can nest all these layers into one pre comp. Let's make sure we are selecting all the letter layers. And then press control shift C. We can name this pre comp text Animation. Awesome. Now let's start timing between the three animated scenes we've created so far. We will do it in the next part, so see you there. 9. Adjusting the animation: Welcome back. Let's start to time and synchronize between all the animation scenes we created. First, let's move this layer forward in time to integrate it with the other animations we've created. Let's turn on the other layers so we can see what we're doing. Let's turn on the transparent background. As you can see, we'll need to synchronize the animation of the letter A with the animation of the other letters. But before that, I want to show you how to organize the compositions we have in the scene. I'll show you what I mean. First thing first, let's turn off this pre comp for now. Now let's talk about this composition that we have in the scene. And learn how we can resize the dimension of this pre comp. Because right now, if I move the pre comp here, we can see that the boundaries of this pre comp are the same as the size of our main composition. In other words, we have a lot of empty space that we don't really need. I don't want it to be so large. This means that we need to crop the unnecessary space that we have in this pre comp. In order to do this, we need to enter it. As you can see, we got all this empty and unnecessary space here. To get rid of it, we need to access the settings of this composition. For that, press the shortcut control K. Now we can see the settings of this composition. We can now decrease its width. Let's try to find a good size for the width. Let's set it to 600. We can also reduce its height. Let's set it to 600 as well. Once done, click okay. Now let's go back to our main composition. And we can see that the boundaries of this composition have now become smaller. Now let's do the same for this precomp as well. So the first thing we need to do is to enter the precomp. Now press control K and change the dimensions to 600 by 600 here as well. Hit Ok and return to the main composition. Now let's animate the letter a and synchronize it with the animation of the letters. But first, let's animate the size of this precomp at this point in time, at the four second mark, when the letter is fully in frame, let's press S and create the first K frame with the current value. Now let's move to the six second mark and scale it down to 50. After that, let's select all the key frames and press nine to ease them. Then hold down the Alt key. Double click on one of the key frames and change the velocity to 85 by 85. Great. The next thing we should do is to find the right moment in the timeline to start the animation of the other letters. Let's turn on this pre comp. Now I see that we need to animate the position of the letter pre comp to match the position of the letters. But before that, we can adjust the size of the text pre comp because there is a lot of empty space in it. We will do it just like we did with the other pre comps. Let's do this quickly. Let's get inside it first. We can close the layers. All right, and now press control K, change the dimensions to fit the animation happening here. I think 1,200 in width should work for the height. We can try 600, maybe 300, that's better. Press okay, and return to the main composition. Now let's go to the point in time when the letters finish their animation to see their final position. Now we need to adjust the text precomp and the letter of precop's position, because right now they're not centered in the scene and that looks weird. Let's go to second eight where the text finishes its animation. Now let's try to find a good place for it in the scene. You can bring it down a bit. Now let's time the animation of the letter A to the position of the other letters. When the letter A finishes the scale animation at second six, let's create an animation for the position property and move it to the left, press P to see the position property. Now we'll create a keyframe at this time with the current value because up to this point we want this pre comp to stay where it is currently located. Now let's move to the second number eight and move it to the left while holding down the shift key. Let's position it here. We'll move this pre comp here, so that this whole scene is in the center of the composition. We can move this pre comp a bit to the right. Once done, select all the key frames and press F nine. Then hold down the Alt key and double click one of the key frames to change the velocity to 85 by 85. Now as you can see, the letters currently appear above the letter A. This means that the letters are where they're supposed to be at the end, but they weren't in the best starting position. Let's enter the text pre comp and adjust their initial position to see the position key frames for all the layers we need to select them. Press. Then to change the starting key frames, we must be right on them with the time indicator. Otherwise, if we move the letters around without standing on them, the animation will get messed up. Since we'll create new key frames, it's super important to stand on the right key frames when we're changing them. To do that, we can hold shift while moving the time indicator. This way it will snap to the nearest key frame. Okay, now let's change the position of the letters in these key frames. Let's move all the layers to the right, using the right arrow key on the keyboard. Hold down the shift key so that the layers move in larger increments. Let's go back to the main composition and see how it looks. I think I moved them too much to the right. I'll go back to the composition and move them a bit to the left this time. Let's see how it looks now. It's already better. Now we can move the time indicator to see the timing between these two pre comps. I think the text should start to move after the letter moves. This means we need to move the text precomp a bit farther in time. Let's see that once again, In my opinion, it's excellent. But now I notice that the revealing animation of the text is happening too fast. Let's go into the composition of the letters and fix this. To do that, we need to find the key frames of the effect we have on the layers. First, we need to display all the key frames of all the layers. To do this, let's select all the layers and press you. Let's enlarge this panel. Here we see the stroke effect and the two parameters we adjusted in this effect. Now in order to slow down the animation that triggers this effect, we need to extend the duration of this animation. In other words, let's select the last key frames of the effect and move them further forward in time. Let's place them at second number four. Great, now let's extend the animation for the reveal of all the layers. To do this, let's select the key frames of the stroke effect in this layer. Hold down the shift key, and select the rest of the key frames of the effect in the other layers. Now let's drag these key frames while holding the shift key. This way they will snap to the key frames located at 4 seconds. Let's see how it looks now. I think it's much better. Okay, now let's close all the layers. To do that, we need to make sure we're not selecting any layer. You can click here or here. And now press the U key. Let's shrink the composition panel a bit. Now let's create an offset between the layers. In other words, let's make the letters appear one after the other with a slight delay. Currently, they all appear at the same time. Let's select all the letters except for the letter and move them three frames forward in time. Now to unselect this layer, hold the control key and click on at once. Great, let's move these layers, three frames forward in time. Now, hold the control key and click on this layer once to unselect it. Now let's move these layers, three frames forward in time as well. Let's do this again and see how it looks. Now I think we can increase the offset we created a bit. Let's select these layers again and move them two more frames forward in time. Now let's move only these layers, two more frames forward. Let's do this for all layers up to the last one. Let's see how it looks. Now I think it's better. Now let's go back to the main composition and see how it looks with the letter A looks nice. Now let's learn how to shorten the duration of the pre comps we have in the scene. I'll explain what I mean. As you can see, the duration of this composition is very long. But if we enter it, we can see that the animation inside this precomp ends at second number three. In other words, this whole section is really unnecessary because nothing is happening here. We can shorten the length of this composition up to the point where the animation ends. In order to see where the animation ends, we need to see where the last key frames are in these layers. Question, what is the shortcut key to view the key frames on the layers in order to see all the key frames of all the layers, we'll make sure that no layer is selected. And then press the U key. Now we can see that the last keyframes are here, meaning the animation ends at this point in time. Let's stand here with the time indicator. Now we need to trim the timeline or the work area to the position of the time indicator. We can do this manually, like this or use a short cut by pressing in. Now to cut it, we need to write. Click on the work area and select Trim Comp Two Work Area. Great. Now the length of this composition is 4 seconds. When we go back to the main composition, it seems that the length of this pre comp has indeed been shortened. We don't need to cut this pre comp, because we need to see the letter A until the end of the animation. The same goes for this pre comp. Okay, now before we move on, let's zoom out on the timeline and press control to save everything we've done so far. Now I want us to discuss a very important topic, which is how to modify the animation we've already created. In other words, how to change key frames. We will do that in the next part. It's going to be a super interesting lesson, but before you dive into the next lesson, I highly recommend that you take a ten minute break, get up from your chair, do some light stretching, and drink a glass of water. This will help you to recharge your brain for the next lesson. 10. Final touches: Welcome back. Let's learn how to adjust the key frames. Let's say I'm not satisfied with the last position of the pre comp, of the letter A. I want to move this prepa bit to the left. If I select the layer at a random point in time and then move it to the new position I want, I'll mess up the animation. If I press the U key to see the key frames on this layer, I will see that an unnecessary key frame is created at this point in time. At the point where I stand with the time indicator, And that's not what we want. This happens because we already have key frames in the position property. All right, I will delete this keyframe and let's learn how to do it. In order to change the last position to where this pre comp should be, we need to focus on the specific key frame we want to change. In our case, it's this key frame. We have to stand on this key frame and only then move the precomp to any other position we want. Now when we are on this specific key frame, we can press the left arrow on the keyboard while holding down the shift key to move this layer to the left. Now let's adjust the position of the text pre comp according to the new position of the letter A. Select this precomp and move it to the left. Let's see how that looks. I think we move the letter too much to the left. So let's stand on the last key frame. Once again, select this pre comp and only then adjust the position. Let's move it to the right a bit. Now move the text pre comp to the right as well. Let's see how it looks. Okay, now I see that the letters are moving too fast to the left. Pay attention to the text. When I move the time indicator, it's colliding with the letter A. Let's change that. To do that, let's go into this composition now. Select all the layers and press P to see the position property for all of them. As you can see, the movement to the left takes 2 seconds. If we focus on just this layer, you can see that the animation starts at 2 seconds and ends at 4 seconds. In other words, the duration of this animation is 2 seconds. To slow down the animation, we need to move the last key frames forward in time to make this animation last longer than 2 seconds. Let's select all of these key frames. Let's move the key frames according to the animation of the last layer. It currently ends at the second number four. We need to move the key frames to the second number five, hold the shift key while doing this to ensure that the key frames snap with the time indicators position. Great. Now let's go back to the main composition to see how it looks with the letter A. I think we can start this pre comp a bit earlier. Let's move it backward in time, a few frames. Try adjusting the timing between pre comps and check the animation to make sure it's what you want. I think we should start it from the fourth second. This is a regular working process in creating animations In after effects, we create an animation. We often have to make adjustments to the timing of each layer's key frames until we are happy with the final result. For instance, at the moment, I think that the letter A stays for too long in the scene and needs to be adjusted. I would like the letter A entered the scene a bit earlier. For this, I will select all the key frames on it. That is the entire animation. Now I will find a time point that I think works, for example, at the third and 15th frames. Now I'll move the key frames here and see what I get. Now because we've moved the animation of the letter A, we need to move the animation of the other letters accordingly. This means we need to move this pre comp to a slightly earlier time point as well. For example, here, let's see how it looks. Now I like it. Now it's time to create an exit animation for the logo. Let's get started. First, we need to select all the layers and place them in a single composition, press control shift, change the name to main animation, select both, and hit Okay, now we need to create a background for our scene using the background color from the original logo design. To achieve this, let's go back to the project panel. Open the folder with the logo design layers. Locate the background and click on it to view its color. Next, we'll create a new background. After effects, we can create a layer called Solid for this purpose. To create a new solid, right click here on the empty area in the Layers panel. Go to New and select Solid. Now select the eye dropper and sample the background color from the design. Before clicking okay, we can change the name to BG and ensure that the size of the solid matches the composition size. Then click Okay. And there it is, we got a real background. Let's just bring it down. Now, let's learn how to create this cool disappearing effect as seen in the example. The first thing we need to do is create an adjustment layer. Adjustment layer is a special layer in after effects that allows you to apply effects and adjustments to multiple layers simultaneously. Instead of applying the same effect to each individual layer, you can add an adjustment layer and apply the effect to that layer. The effect will then be applied to all layers below it in the layer stack. The benefit of using an adjustment layer is that it allows you to make global changes to your composition quickly and easily. So after understanding what the adjustment layer is, let's create one and see how it can help us to create the disappearing effect we need. In order to create a new adjustment layer, we need to right click here, go to New and select Adjustment Layer. Now let's bring this layer to the top. You can close the folder now. Now I will hide all the layers. Just to show you that the adjustment layer is an empty layer created in the size of our composition. On this layer, we can add effects and create a kind of filter that will affect all the layers below it. Okay, so I will turn the layers back on, and let's add the first effect to the adjustment layer. The first effect we will use is called turbulent displace, drag it onto the adjustment layer and start adjusting the parameters. You can see that it creates a wavy distortion on the scene. Let's tweak the parameters until we get something interesting. Let's start with the amount. I think we can set it to 30 for now. Next in size, let's set it to 20. On second thought, let's set the amount to 60. All right, and now we can make it even more interesting by animating this distortion. We can do it by rotating the evolution. But instead of animating his property manually, we can use an expression to make this rotate without creating a single key frame. Expressions are a powerful feature that allows you to automate and control different aspects of your composition. Expressions are essentially small pieces of code that can be added to various parameters of your layers or effects. Expressions and after effects can be created using Javascript or the extend script language and can be accessed and edited through the expressions panel. In order to create an expression, we need to hold down the Alt key and click on the stopwatch of the property we want to animate. Now a code line opens for us, in which we will write a very simple expression, time asterisk 100. To finish the action, click somewhere outside the expression box. Now this parameter will rotate without us creating key frames for it. If you want this motion to be faster, you can change the time expression to 500. For this, click on the expression to open the expression line and change the number I think is too fast. Let's set it back to 100. Now let's move to the second number ten and create an animation for the amount property. We'll set that at this point in time, the value will be zero and create the first key frame. Now let's move to the second 16 and increase the amount to 100. Let's see how it looks great. We can now select all the key frames and press F nine to convert them into CEs key frames. I think this animation is a bit too slow. Let's move the last keyframe to the second 14. Let's see, it now looks good. Now we can close the layer and add another effect called fast box blur. Search for the effect in the effects panel and drag it onto the adjustment layer. Now let's press to see the key frames of the previous effect and time the animation will create for the blur effect to match the animation of the previous one. Let's stand at this point in time and create the first key frame for this effect with a value of zero. To see the key frames we've created on the layer, let's press you once, and then once again there we can see the key frames for the blur effect. Now let's move to the 14th second and increase the blur to 30. Let's see how it looks. 30 seems a bit too much. Let's stand on this keyframe and change it to ten. That looks better. Now let's select these keyframes and convert them to easy's as well. Let's see how it looks. It looks excellent. We can close this layer. Now finally, we can label this adjustment layer, select. Press Enter and change the name to blur effect. Press Enter once again to finish the action. Now let's find a good point in time to make the logo disappear. Let's say the logo will start disappearing at the second ten. To make it disappear, we need to access the Opacity property for its pre comp. To do that, press the key. Now create a key frame at opacity 100. Then move to second 12, and change the opacity to zero. Let's also ease these key frames. Let's see how it looks. In my opinion, the logo disappears too early. Let's select these key frames and start the disappearance from the second 11. Let's see it now let's try the second 12. I think that's better. Now if we select the adjustment layer and press you to see its key frames, it seems that the timing of the logo's disappearance matches the end of the effect animation. Which is great, but I think we can increase the size of the distortion even more. Let's try 30. Looks great. With this, we finished creating the animation. We are ready to render it. Now, before we render the project, let's review everything we've created from the beginning to the end to check for any glitches or errors. I notice that the letter A is moving to the side in a weird way. Let's try to find the problem and fix it real quick. Let's enter the main animation pre comp. Now select the A, animation pre comp, and press you to see the key frames on it. Let's take a look at it again. You see the letter A is not moving at the same velocity as the other letters. To check this, we can select the key frames for the position. Hold the Alt key, and double click on one of the key frames to access the key frames. Velocity panel for this property. There we can notice that the velocity of this animation is different from our other animations. If you remember, we had set the velocity of all the key frames of the position parameter to be 85, 85 for all the letters. Let's make the same here as well. Now let's return to the main composition and check how it looks great. Now it seems like the animation is in the same motion. However, I think that the letters animation is a little too slow. Let's learn how to speed it up. First, let's enter this pre comp again. Now enter the text comp. Stand with the time indicator at the fourth second, and move the last key frames here. If you don't see the key frames, you can select all the layers and press P. Let's move these keyframes to the position of the time indicator while holding down the shift key. Now let's return to this composition and see how it looks along with the animation of the letter A. Looks good. Great, let's go back to the logo animation comp. Now, since we've shortened the logo animation, we need to make it disappear faster too. To do this, we'll select the adjustment layer and press you to see its key frames. Then we'll move all the key frames to the ninth second. Now let's reach the 13th second when the logo has vanished completely and learn something cool you can do with after effects. In after effects, you can create markers within your composition to identify important points in the timeline. These markers are extremely useful and I'll show you how to use them in the next part. See you there. It's going to be awesome. 11. Render time: Hey, welcome back. We're almost done with our animation. Let's check out some cool features and important notes to make sure we're all set for the final render. To begin, let's learn about markers in your project. Make sure that you haven't selected any layer before creating a marker. Markers can help us to create a note at important points in time. For example, we know that our animation ends here at the second number 13. I can create a note to myself that this is the point up until I need to render my project. And I can do it by creating a marker for this. Click on the small icon found here on the right side of the timeline. Once you click it, a new marker will be created at the point in time where the time indicator is placed. Now double click on the marker and type, and this will help you identify where the animation ends. This step is optional and you don't have to do it, but it's good for you to know about this cool function. All right, now let's move on to the rendering part. The first thing we need to do before rendering any project is to ensure we are not rendering unnecessary parts of the animation. For this, we need to shorten the work area to the moment when the animation ends. You can do this manually or press the N key. As a result, after effects will only render the scene up to the end of the work area. The next thing we must ensure before rendering is that all our designs are of the highest quality. We can achieve this by using the collapse function. Let's enter this composition and apply the collapse function to all the precomps and all the layers within those pre comps. Because right now if I zoom in, you can see that the objects in the scene are a bit blurry and not sharp. They are pixilated. All right, let's start with the text composition. Move the time indicator forward in time to see all the layers. Now click here to see the collapse function. Apply it to all these layers so we can see all of them at their highest quality. Now let's go back to the main composition and apply collapse to all the pre comps. We don't need to re, enter and select the layers for the letter A and the character. We have already done that at the beginning of the lesson. But we do need to activate the collapse for this precomp. Then activate the collapse for the rest of the precomps. Now we can set the preview to fit and make sure the animation still looks good after we collapse the precomps. Once we've done that, let's head back to the logo animation comp and apply the collapse there too. Click here to see the function and activate it. Now let's take a quick look to ensure the collapse function didn't affect our animation. Everything looks good. Finally, we are ready to render the scene. To render the composition we are currently in, we can go to Composition and choose Add to render Q. Alternatively, we can use the short cut control M. Let's use the short cut and press control M. Now we are in the render Q panel of after effects. Here we can see which composition we are rendering, which is this composition. Now in output mode, we can select the file format we need. We will choose Ho 0.2 64, 40 MBPS, which is a high resolution MP four file. Then we need to choose where to render the video. Click here. Let's find the folder that we created for this lesson. Let's choose to save it in the renders folder. Now make sure the name is good. The name that appears here is the same as the name of the composition we are rendering. Next, we can press Save. Finally, click on the render button. Now let's wait a couple of minutes. Keep in mind that the animations rendering time is not the same for everyone. Your computer's power is what determines how fast or slow it will be for you. Some of you may need to be more patient, while others might see it finished in no time. Once the render is complete to see the render, we can either find the folder manually or click on the link here in the output mode. This will take us directly to the folder where the video is rendered. Let's open the video and see how it looks. Awesome work. You can now show off the animation you made on your social media platforms and your portfolio website. If you like the course, it would be awesome if you could give it a rating based on your experience. And don't forget to leave some feedback so I can know if you learn anything cool from the chorus or not. All right, now let's return to our project and learn how to render the animation without any background. This is useful when we need to integrate the logo animation into different backgrounds or when we have a video playing in the background. Let's see how it's done. First of all, we can close this and exit the render panel. Now let's go back to our main composition and turn off the background here, select the BG layer and turn it off. If you don't see the transparent background and you do see the gray background, that's perfectly fine. This gray background is not real. It's just a preview screen background. Now let's press control them again. This time, click here and change the format to quick time. Next in the format options, select animation. Now in channels we need to choose RGB plus alpha. This tells after effects to render this animation without a background, meaning with a transparent background. Now let's choose where to render the animation. Let's also render it to our renders folder. This time, add underscore Alpha or underscore BG at the end of the file name, you can differentiate between the files. Now press save and render. Once again, let's wait a couple of minutes. All right, let's see what we got here. Don't freak out if the video looks a bit choppy. It's just a file format thing. To check this video and ensure that it has been rendered without a background, we can drag it into our project. First, we can go back to our logo animation comp. Now open the render folder and drag the MOV file into the project. Let's turn off all the layers. There you have it. We got an animation without a background. Of course, you can also find the file in the project panel. Since we don't really need this file in the project, we can select it and press backspace to delete it from here. Let's also delete it from the project panel. Let's turn back on all the layers in our scene. You can also close this panel. Now let's learn how to organize our project in the project panel. Before we close it, it's super important to keep your project organized in the project panel so that you can easily find everything. This will save you a lot of time when you return to work on the project later. Having an organized project is also essential when working with other animators. They'll need to access your project and you want them to be able to navigate it easily. If clients ask for the project file, it's much easier to share it with them when it's organized. We can organize our project by creating folders just like the folder that popped up when we imported the logo from Illustrator and the folder that appeared when we created the solid and the adjustment layer that we have here in our composition. All right, To create a new folder, ensure that nothing is selected in the project panel. Next, click on the icon to create a new folder. Now name it Assets, and press Enter to confirm. After that, drag all the graphic assets, including the folder with the logo layers, character layer, and solids folder into this newly created folder. Now let's create another folder. When you're creating a new folder, make sure you don't select anything in the project panel. If you do, the new folder will be created inside the selected folder, which is not what we want. Just double check that nothing is selected before you create the new folder. All right, let's click here and name this folder, Precomps. Now let's drag all the precomps we created during the project into this folder. Except for the main composition, we can tag the main composition with a different color from the other precomps. Next, let's put these two precomps into the folder, and this one as well. Okay, we're almost done here. Let's close all the precomps we opened and save the project by pressing control. You can also turn off the grid from the drop down menu or just hit the apostrophe key. Now let's not forget to close the Illustrator files to now. We can close this After effects project. That's it for our first lesson. Hope you had fun, and I can't wait to see you in the next lesson when we will create a funky logo animation for a made up Youtube channel for motion designers. And learn how to create an advanced stretch text animation. It's going to be awesome. So see you there. But before you dive into the next lesson, I highly recommend that you take a ten minute break, get up from your chair, do some light stretching, and drink a glass of water. This will help you to recharge your brain for the next lesson. 12. Logo #1 Home task: Hi there. I hope you found the lessons helpful and learned some new and interesting things. To better remember everything we covered, I highly recommend practicing by completing this homework assignment. Your task is to recreate this cool animation. You have the freedom to change the colors and add any additional graphics you like whenever you face any issues or have some questions. Feel free to check the AE project file to see the steps I took. Additionally, you can always reach out to me for help. Good luck. 13. Logo #2 - Animating a logo for a YouTube channel: Hey there and welcome back. In this lesson, we will be creating a funky logo animation for a made up Youtube channel that can be used as a cool logo bumper. A logo bumper is a short animated sequence that serves as an introduction to a video. Or can be used as a transition from one scene to another. We'll be focusing on a really cool technique called stretch text animation. By the end of this lesson, you'll know how to create an awesome logo animation that will blow everyone's mind. Let's get started and have some fun. 14. Stretched text animation: Hi there and welcome back. Let's start by checking out how this logo was made in Illustrator. For this head to the AI folder in the main course folder and open the second logo. Let's imagine this logo is for a Youtube channel that talks about motion design and animation. As you can see, this design is also divided into several layers. There's a layer for the main text, a layer for the slogan, and these icons represent different key frame types found in after effects. Later on, we will learn an interesting way to blend them into the logo animation. Instead of just leaving them as they are in the original design we see now. And now let's look at the storyboard I created for this logo design. Since we're talking about a Youtube channel, that's all about motion graphics. I was thinking we could start off with a stretched out text animation of the logo letters, because stretch text animation creates a great sense of motion. Then I thought about an interesting way to combine all the icons with the text. I want the icons to enter the scene and move the rest of the text to increase the sense of motion in the scene. All right, enough with the talking. Let's get started in lunch, after effects together, we can close this window now so that we all see the same panel layouts. Let's click on Default here. Now let's create our first composition by clicking on New Composition. We'll name it Logo Animation two. Moving on to the resolution, we'll work in full HD format, which is 1,920 pixels in width and 1080 pixels in height. Next, let's set the frame rate to 24. This time, the duration can be 20 seconds this time. Finally, let's choose the background color for the composition. Let's go with black. Now, click okay. Here and here. And before we start working, I want to teach you about a very important action in after effects called purge. When you work on a project. In after effects, it stores a bunch of data and info in its memory cache. And sometimes that cache can get all clogged up with old or unnecessary stuff, which can slow down the program and even cause errors or crashes. When that happens, you can use the purge function to clear out the cache and free up some memory. It's super helpful when you're having performance issues or running into errors, just clear out that cache and you'll see a big improvement in how the program runs. As we did some pretty complicated stuff in the last lesson. Smart to help after effects perform better by getting rid of any unnecessary data. This way we can work on this project without any annoying problems. Let's go to Edit, Purge, and select all memory and disk cache. You'll see how much junk you've collected. The number may differ for you. Anyway, hit Okay, and wait a few seconds for everything to be cleared out. Okay, and now it's an excellent time to save the project and give it a name. Let's go to File and click on Save. Now let's find the folder we created for the lesson. Enter the AE folder and name the after effects file we are working on. You can select this project to sample the name, then change the number to two and the name of the logo to design in motion. Once done, click on Save. Now let's import our logo into the project. Double click in the empty area in the project panel. Then enter the AI folder and select the second logo. Make sure we don't select this function. Then click Import. As we learned, we need to import it as a composition because we want this file in separate layers. Here we choose layer size, because we want the layer boundaries to match the objects size and not the documents size. Finally hit. Okay, there it is. We've created a new folder containing all the layers of the illustrator file plus a new composition with the logo layers inside it. When we open it up, we'll see the logo split into layers, just like it's structured in the original Illustrator file. All right, let's close this pre comp and we're good to start the lesson. First, let's open up the logos layers folder in the project panel and drag the main text of the logo into the composition. Now to create the stretched animation we see in the example, we need to convert this Illustrator layer into a shaped layer with a path similar to how we convert a text layer into Create Outlines in Illustrator. This way we create a shape with a path that we can move and modify to any other shape we need in after effects To convert this layer into a shape with a path right click on the layer. Go to Create and select Create Shapes from vector layers. The original Illustrator layer will automatically be turned off. Since we don't need it now, you can delete it by selecting it and pressing backspace or delete keys before we move on, here's a helpful tip for you guys. When creating a stretch text animation, it's best to use sand sera fonts, which are those without the small decorative strokes at the end of each letter known as seras. This way it will be much easier to animate the text. All right, so now we have a shape layer. And we can use the pen tool to play around with the path of the letters. But before we dive into it, let me give you a little tip. If you want to add a stroke to your design, you might think that you can just choose a color and make it thicker. Well, it won't appear, that's because there's no stroke in the original illustrator design. However, luckily there's a cool way to add stroke directly in after effects. Here's how to do it. Open your layer and check out its contents. You can see all the shapes that make up the layer, which means all your letters. To add a stroke to each letter, select Contents. Then open the Ad menu and select Stroke. Now you can adjust the thickness and color of the stroke to match your preferences. But if you're not planning to use stroke, just select this parameter and hit backspace or delete to remove it. Okay, as I mentioned earlier, those groups you're seeing on the screen, they're all letters. To make things easier, let's rename these groups to match the letters they represent. For example, if this group represents the letter D, let's select it, press Enter. Hold down the shift key and type D. Now let's select this group and change the name to upper KC. Do the same thing for other groups and name them according to the letters they represent. Now let's learn how to stretch the individual letters in a design. If I click on one point and try to move it, nothing happens to move the points of the letter path. We first need to open the shape and select the path that makes up the letter. This letter, for example, is made up of two paths. One for the inner part of the letter and another for the larger part. Once we select the path through the layer, we can then choose the points and move them around to stretch or adjust a letter as needed. In order to create an animation for the path, we need to open it up. This will allow us to see its stopwatch and create key frames for this path. But rather than manually opening all of the necessary paths, we can simplify the process by selecting the layer and typing path in the search bar after effects will then display all of the paths associated with this layer. You may notice that for each shape in this layer, there is an additional property called merged path. However, we don't really need this one, so we can select it and delete it from all the shapes in this layer. Let's find all the merge paths and delete them before animating the layer. All right, once we have done this, we are ready to move on to the animation phase first. Because we already know that all the shapes here need to look like they do. Now, at some point in the future, we need to create the first key frames without changing anything. We don't know when this will happen, but we know it needs to happen. We need to create key frames for all the paths in this layer. Let's do it now. To make things easier, we can select the layer and press the U key to hide all the unnecessary properties and see only the paths with key frames. Now let's make our workflows smoother by learning how to move the panels around in the software. This is particularly handy for those of you working on laptops with smaller screens. Let's close the folder and adjust the panels to suit our animation needs. First, let's shrink the project panel and the workflow panels. Then we'll grab the composition panel and drag it here We can enlarge the screen a bit more. Let's zoom out a bit now to see more of our timeline. We can right click here, go to columns, and click on Stretch to hide this function. For now, let's hide this feature too, Right click here, go to columns and click on parent and link. Don't worry, we can always bring these functions back later. Additionally, we can minimize this area even more by dragging the small lines here to the side. By doing this, we have more space and can continue with the project. Now let's get closer to our timeline to see the key frames up close. By the way, if you see the seconds here represented differently, just head over here, Hold the control key, and click on the numbers until you see it in seconds. All right, After we've learned how to organize the panels, let's bring everything back to its original position. For those who prefer to work in this panel arrangement, you can stick with it. Okay, let's grab the composition panel here and drag it to the bottom of the software. Now let's bring back the hidden functions. Right click here, go to columns, and select parent and Link. Let's also bring back the stretch function. Great, now we are ready to animate the text. We're going to create three different shapes at three different time points for the letter design. We'll do this by creating key frames and adjusting the path of the letters. This way we show after effects, how the shapes of the letters need to look at specific points in time. Then after effects, we'll connect the different forms that were defined, creating the stretched animation for us. As we said before, we know that the letters need to appear as they are right now at some point in the animation. In the meantime, let's say they should look like this at second number two. Let's go to second number two with the time indicator. Select the key frames and move them while holding the shift key. Now let's move 1 second back in time to second number one and change the appearance of the letters. In other words, let's show after effects how these letters should look at the second number one. For convenience, let's hold the space key and drag the screen towards the first letter, the letter D. Then let's change the shape of this letter to the way we want it to appear at the second number one. Let's select these two points and drag them outside the scene while holding the shift key to move them on the straight axis. Now let's click on this point, hold the shift key, and select this point as well. Next, let's drag these two points here while holding the shift key. Now let's select all the points on this side, being careful not selecting the points of the letter. All right, let's bring them here. Next, let's move to the beginning of the timeline. Select these points, move them a bit to the left. And then select all these points and move them outside of the frame. Now after effects, we'll know how this letter should appear at three different time points. In the second number zero, the letter looks like this. In the second number one, the letter looks like this. In the second number three, it returns to its original shape. Now let's do the same thing for the letter. As you can see, we got the first key frame at the second two which indicates to after effects how this letters path should look at this point in time. Now let's do the same for the letter, but before that, let's turn off the letter D so that it doesn't interfere with us working on the letter. To hide the letter D, we need to close the layer and reopen it to see all the groups inside it. To close all the open groups and find the letter D faster, we can close the contents while holding the control key. Now if we open it again, we will see the letters more conveniently when all the parameters are closed. Here is the letter D. Let's click on the icon to hide it. Now to go back and change the path of the letter E, we need to see our key frames again. Let's select the layer and press you. It's important for me to show you all of these steps because this is the working process for creating complex stretch text animations. All right, now to be able to select the points, we need to click on the path of this letter. Then let's select these points and move them outside the frame. Now let's zoom in a bit, either with the mouse wheel or using these keys. Be careful not to select the points of the letter S. Let's move it here. Maybe here we can select these points and move them here to create a more interesting motion. Finally, let's go to the beginning of the timeline. And adjust the point in that way so we can get them out of the frame. Now after effects knows that in second zero the path should look like that. At second one, the path will look like that. At second three, the path comes back to its original position. Let's see how it looks. I think we can create a more interesting animation for this. Let's move to second one and change the way the letter looks at this point in time. In other words, let's change the key frames we have. Now, it is crucial to position the time indicator on the key frame accurately. To achieve this, you can move the time indicator and hold down the shift key. This will enable it to snap to the key frames close to it. Okay, now let's get closer to this part of the letter. Select this point, hold down the shift key, and select these points as well. Now let's drag them here. Basically, we've changed the design of the letter to how it should look at this point in time. Let's go back to this key frame one more time and adjust these points once again. Move these points a bit to the right. I think it looks better. All right, moving on, let's return to the second one and start working on the next letter. We won't use the stretch text style for the letter S. Let's delete the key frames we created for its path. We'll shape this letter differently later. Select his key frame and delete it. Now let's select the path that above it, which is the path of the letter I. This time, we'll stretch this letter from above to work comfortably. Let's set the preview screen to fit. We can enlarge the preview panel a bit. Now let's select the upper points. We can get a bit closer. Make sure we are at second one now let's move them up next. Let's select the lower points of this letter and move them here. Then let's go to second zero and take these two points out of the frame. We've created three key frames, each with a different design for the letter. But before moving on, let's go back to the second number one and adjust the design of this letter at this point in time, select the lower points and move them down a bit. Let's see what we've got. I think it looks better. Now let's move on to the letter G. This letter, unlike the others, has a rounded portion, which requires us to handle it differently. Let me explain what I mean. Let's go to the second number two and zoom in a bit. Don't do it with me for now. I want to show you what would happen if I tried to select these points and move them downwards. As you can see, the letters shape will change and look weird. This happens because this area is rounded. When working with letters that have rounded areas, we might need to add more points to the path. Now you can do it with me. To do this, let's select the pen tool, get closer to the path, and create a new point here and here. Now let's switch back to the selection tool and select all the points that make up the bottom part of the letter without selecting the two new points we created. Now let's go to the second number one. And when we move the selected points downwards, the shape of the letter will be preserved as needed. This is because we created those two additional points. Okay, let's move back a bit and continue shaping the letter. At this point, you can also move the selected points by pressing the arrow keys on the keyboard while holding down the shift key. This way the movement will be in larger increments. Now let's select these points and find a different place for them, somewhere around here. That's fine. Next, let's go to the second number zero and adjust the design of the letter one more time. Once done, let's check how it looks. All right, let's place the time indicator at the second number two and move on to animate the path of the letter. Since I want to animate the path to enter the scene from the left, I will turn off the letter before it. To do that, we need to see all the groups inside this layer, because right now we can't see the icon from which we can turn off the groups. Let's close the layer and reopen it to see all the groups inside it. Now to see all the groups in a more convenient way, we need to close the content section while holding control. And then reopen it one more time, but without holding the control key. Now we can easily turn off the groups we already animated. Focus on animating the path of the letter. To select its path and move it, we must press the U key and see its key frame. Here we can select any path we want. All right, let's go to the second number one and start to design the path and the way we want the letter to look at this point in time. First, let's select this area and move the selected points somewhere here. Then select these points and move them out of the frame. Next, let's move this area here. This one here. I think we should move this point a bit to the right. Once done, let's go to the beginning of the timeline and design the path at this point in time. Don't forget to hold down the shift key while moving the points. I think it looks good. Let's hit control S to save the project. Then move on to animating the next path first. Make sure you stand at the second number one. This time, let's make the letter. I enter the scene from down here. Let's grab the bottom points and move them down here out of the frame. Now we need to select all the upper points and move them here. We can zoom out a bit. All right, next let's head over to the beginning of the animation and get these points out of the frame. Now the path looks different at three points in time, creating the cool stretch text animation from the bottom. All right, we are moving on to the next letter. Let's make it enter the scene from above. Go to the second number one and design the path as it should look at this point in time. First, let's select the upper points and move them up here of the frame. Now select the bottom points and move them somewhere around here. I accidentally selected one of the points on the path of the letter M. It happens sometimes, but no need to worry. Just hit control Z to undo the action. All right, now I will re select these two points and move them here. Once done, let's go to the beginning of the timeline and get all the points out of the frame. Now, set the preview to fit, and let's see what we got. I think it looks good and we are ready to move on to the next one. So let's go to the second number one. We can zoom in a bit to see the letter M up close. Now let's click on one of the points. Zoom in a bit more and select the bottom points to make this letter enter the scene from the bottom. But be careful not to select these two points, because when we move all of them together, the path will look weird. Make sure you select the right points. All right, after selecting the right points, let's move them down out of the frame. To make the animation interesting, let's move these two points here. Next, select the upper area of the path, and move it somewhere around here. Great. Now go to the beginning of the timeline, and let's get this path out of the frame. It looks great. Let's move on to the letter. But instead of animating it in a stretchy way, we will create a scale animation for it later. Therefore, let's hide this letter for now and focus on the path of the letter. To do that, we need to see all the groups inside this layer. Let's close the layer and reopen it to see all the groups inside it. To close all the open groups, we need to close the content section while holding control. And then reopen it one more time, but without holding the control key. Now we can easily turn off the group of the letter O. Great. And now let's select the layer and hit the U key to get back to see the key frames. So we can animate the path of the letter T. Let's make it to enter the scene from above. Let's go to the second number one and design the path as it should look at this point in time. First, let's select the upper points and move them up here out of the frame. For a more interesting look, let's select only these two upper points and move them out of the frame. Now select the bottom points and move them somewhere around here. And now let's go to the beginning of the timeline and get all the points out of the frame. All right, now let's animate the letter I first. Let's stand on the second number one and decide that this letter will enter the scene from the right. To make it easier to work, let's hide the rest of the letters. Once again, close the layer and reopen it to see all the groups inside it. Now turn off the letter in letter. Once done, select the layer and hit the Ukey. Great. Now let's select the points in the right side of the path and drag them to the right outside of the frame. Let's also move these points here to create a more interesting look for this path at this point in time. Then go to the beginning of the timeline and drag these points out of the frame. I think it looks nice. Now, let's bring back only the letter in. Because we will animate the letter O differently later. We can animate the path of the letter in. We need to turn off the path of the letter I. Let's do it. There it is, great. Now select the layer and press you go to the second number one click here to highlight the path. And let's design this path to how it should look at this point in time. Now go to the beginning of the timeline and get this path out of the frame. Let's see how that looks. We can adjust the path at second number one. That's better. Once done, it's a great time to save the project before we move on. All right, now let's start to animate the letters that we didn't stretch. But first, let's delete the key frames on these paths, because we will create a new one in a minute. Select them and hit backspace or delete. Great. Now to turn back on the hidden letters, we need to see the groups of this layer. For this, let's close the layer and reopen it to see all the groups inside it. Now to see the groups clearly, we need to close the content section while holding control. And then reopen it one more time, but without holding the control key. Now we can easily turn back on all the letters, including those we need to animate. Once done, set the preview screen to fit. And bring the layers panel down a bit. Now let's animate the letters and the two O's. I want to create a scale and a rotation animation for these letters. Let me show you how to do it in the best way ever. First thing first, let's select the letter S, hold the control key, and select the two O's. Now let's open their properties. We can enlarge this panel a bit. Now, open the transformed properties for the letter O. Go to the second number two and create the first key frame for the scale property, because we've got all three groups selected after effects has taken care of the rest and automatically created key frames for the other selected letters. Which is exactly what we need. That's why I pick these three letters all at once. Now we let after effects know that at the second number two, the three letters should stay the same size they are right now. Now let's go to the second number one and decide that at this point in time, the scale value should be 250 or maybe 200. Then let's go to the beginning of the timeline and set the scale to zero. All right, now let's do the same with the rotation property. That is, let's add a cool rotation animation to these letters while they scale up. But let's do it for the letter S. Only first we can go to second number two. Now click here on the empty area to deselect the two O's. Great. Now select the rotation property for the letter S as we did earlier. Since we know that the rotation of the letters should look as it is right now, let's create the first key frame with the current value of zero degrees. Now let's stand here with the time indicator, so we can see the letter. And set the rotation value to -180 Finally, let's move this key frame to the beginning of the animation. With this, we have finished to animate all the letters. The hardest task is behind us. Now we can close the contents. Then select the layer, and press you to see the key frames only. And focus on improving the motion. We will learn how to do it in the next part. It's going to be super fun. See you there. 15. Ofsett layers and create a delay in the animation: Welcome back. Let's learn how to make this animation move in a much more exciting way. First, we will begin by changing all the key frames to *** select all the key frames and press F nine. Let's see how it looks now. Next up we'll take the motion to the next level by tweaking the keyframe velocity for all the key frames, just like we learned in the previous lesson. Remember, we can change the velocity for one property type at a time. As you can see, we've got multiple key frames for different properties, path scale, and rotation. Let's start by adjusting all the path key frames. Let's select these key frames. Now, hold the shift key and select the other key frames of the same property. Here we can see that it's a different property. I didn't select it. Let's select these also. This is a different one, so we won't select it. Okay, finally, let's select these. Once that's done, we can hold the Alt key and double click one of the selected key frames. Let's see how the animation appears with a velocity of 85 on both axes. I think we can change it to 95 on both axes, which adds more interest to the animation. Let's do it right now and see it one more time. Awesome. Now let's move on to the scale property key frames. First we'll select these key frames, hold the shift key, and continue to select the other key frames of the same property. Now hold the Alt key and double click one of the selected key frames. Change the velocity of 95 on both axes here as well. And hit, okay. We don't have to mess with the S letter keyframes for the rotation property because they look good already. Okay? And with that, we fine tune the letters. And now we're ready for the next step, which is creating offsets for each animation. I'll explain what I mean right now. All the letters enter the frame at the same time. To make the animation more interesting, we can stagger the entrance of each letter one after the other. For this, we need to move the key frames we created and create offsets in the animation that is delaying the animation for the path key frames. This will make the letters enter the scene one after the other rather than entering the scene all at once. But before we do that, we need to make sure that each letter is on its own separate layer. This will make it easier to adjust the offsets later on. Don't worry, I'll show you exactly how to do it. First, we need to see all the letters in this layer. To do that, let's close the layer and reopen it to see its contents. Now, hold the control key and close the contents. Now open it again without holding the control key. Here we can see all the letters in this layer. Because we have 14 letters, we must create 14 separate layers, each containing only one letter. To do this, let's close the layer. And now let's duplicate it using the short cut control D 13 times, so that we end up with a total of 14 layers. Before we press the short cut, I want to remind you that all the shortcuts and after effects will work only when your keyboard language is set to English. Okay, now let's select the layer and duplicate it 13 times. Once done, let's open the contents of this layer, and we'll keep only the letter D on it while deleting the rest of the letters. Let's select the letter in, hold the shift key, and select the letter E to select all the letters in between. Now press Backspace or delete. To delete them, then press Center on this layer and rename it to the letter D. Finally, let's close it and move on to the next layer. Open its contents and keep only the letter and rename the layer accordingly. In this layer, we'll keep only the letter S. Of course, rename the layer accordingly. Let's continue doing this for the remaining layers here. We'll keep the letter I here, we'll keep the letter G and so on. The process of creating this stretch text animation style can be quite manual and time consuming. But remember that our logo consists of many letters. You won't need to create this type of animation for a quantity of letters this large every time I chose to work with many letters in this lesson so that you can practice these actions as much as possible. This way you'll get used to them and understand the steps in creating complex stretch text animation. Be patient and enjoy the learning process because after finishing this course, you will get the confidence to create a variety of premium logo animations for your future clients. Okay, once we have finished dividing the letters. We should save our project by pressing control less To make our work easier, we can tag the layers that belong to the same word with a different color than the others. For instance, we can tag the two layers that form the word in with one color and all the layers that make up the word motion with another color. Great, It looks good. Now if we isolate this layer, we'll see that it's anchor point ain't centered. This can mess up the animation, especially if we want to rotate the letter. To avoid this, we can select all the layers and center their anchor points at once using the control alt home shortcut. Let's do it for all the layers at once. Select all of them. Press control all tone. This will make sure that all the anchor points are now perfectly aligned on each layer. Now let's start to improve the animation. First thing first. I think the animation is too slow right now. Let's learn how to speed it up very quickly. Let's enlarge this panel and see the animation one more time before making any changes. First of all, in order to speed up the animation, we need to see the key frames of the layers. To do that, let's make sure we don't have any layer selected. And press the Uk now to see all the key frames, let's enlarge this panel. Now we can see that the animation for all the letters takes 2 seconds. Now I want the animation for the letters to last only 1 second. To do that, I can move this keyframe closer to the one before it. Then I can also move the last keyframe a bit closer as well. But instead of moving the key frames one by one, we can do this in a much smarter way. To do this much quicker, let's select all the key frames, then let's place the time indicator at the second number one. Now while holding the alt key, let's drag one of the last key frames to the position of the time indicator while also holding the shift key. This way, we've shifted all the key frames to the new time point we chose and maintained an equal distance between them. If we had done it manually, it would have taken forever. All right, let's see how it looks. Looks awesome. Now let's press you to hide the key frames for all the layers, and finally, start creating the offset we planned. Let's begin by creating the offset for the layers that make up the word design. Let's turn off the other layers for now. Now let's decide that the first letter to enter the frame is the letter. We won't touch this layer and we'll leave it where it is. Now the letter that needs to come after it is the letter. Let's grab this layer and move it forward in time. Let's make sure that the letter doesn't overlap with the letter that looks good. Now let's move on to the next letter. The next letter that should enter the frame is the letter I. Let's move it forward in time. It enters after the letter G. Let's create this offset for all the layers of this word. Try to maintain the same distance between the layers for now. Soon we will adjust the distance to get a more interesting result. Once done, make sure no letter is colliding with another. I see that the letter S is colliding with the letter I. Let's move this layer further ahead in time. Next, let's adjust the timing for the letter E and the letter D. Let's see what we've got. I think it looks good, but I think we can adjust the timing for the letter E and D one more time. I want them to enter the scene a bit earlier. This is the process of creating the offset for this animation style. We always move the layers and check how they look in relation to the rest of the animation. Keep moving around with the time indicator and check for the animation after moving and adjusting the timing of the layers. All right, I think it looks good. Let's continue with the next word. Turn on these two layers and time their entrance. Now let's find a good time for these two layers to enter the scene. Let's decide that these letters will enter. From this time point, we can delay the letter N bit. Looks nice, we can move on. Now let's create the offset for the word motion. Let's decide that the letter will enter from the beginning of the animation. So we won't move this layer. Let's move the other layers forward in time. So they enter one after the other. Keep moving the layers in the timeline panel while checking the timing between the layers in the preview panel. Now let's see how it all looks together. I think the letter end should enter the scene a bit earlier. Let's move this layer here. Once we're done timing the layers, let's put them all together into a pre comp for a neater project. This way we can easily control the animation later on. Let's select all the layers and hit the shortcut controls. Shift C, call this pre comp text animation. Make sure both of these are checked and hit. Okay. Now we have the entire animation in one layer. Before we move on, I want to show you what happens if we want to scale this layer later on. As you can see, the larger we make the layer, the lower the quality becomes. To prevent this, we can apply the collapse function found here. If you can't see it, you can click here. Okay, let's apply the collapse to this pre comp. As you can see, the quality has significantly improved. Now let's bring the size to 100% set the screen preview to fit, and continue to create the second part of the animation, which is the icon animations. And we will do it in the next part. See you there. But before you dive into the next lesson, I highly recommend that you take a ten minute break, get up from your chair, do some light stretching, and drink a glass of water. This will help you to recharge your brain for the next lesson. 16. Advanced animation techniques: Welcome back. Let's get started with creating the icon animation. First things first, we got to find those icons in the project panel, which you can find in the folder with all the logo layers. Once you've spotted them, just select all of them and drag them into our composition. Remember, we need to make sure that the icons move as a single layer. Later on, we need to nest them in one group. After effects terms, we call it to precompose these layers. To do this, press control Shift C. Let's name it icons comp. Make sure both are selected and hit. Okay. Now let's enter the composition we just created. As you can see, we have a lot of empty space here, meaning the composition size is too large. To resize this composition, we need to access the composition settings. To do that, press control K. As you can see, we're inside the settings of the icons comp Composition. Now make sure preview is selected so we can see the changes we made in real time. And let's reduce the size. Let's try 200 by 200, or 100 by 100, that's better. Now let's return to the main composition. The composition size is smaller now, which makes things easier to work with this layer later. Next, we can apply the collapse to this composition, and of course, to all its layers. If you can't see this icon, you can click here. Great. Now let's turn off all layers except for this one on. Second thought, let's leave only the last layer turned on and start making the entry animation for this composition based on what's happening in the text animation. As you can see, this icon is supposed to replace the top part of the letter I. This means we don't need this part right now. Let's learn how to turn it off. First, let's enter this composition. Select the letter I, open its contents and see from which paths it is composed. There's the second path, which is the circle, and the first path which is the line. We want to turn off the second path. Great. Now you can close this layer and return to the main composition. Now let's turn on this layer. Now, when we're not sure how the animation should begin, we can animate our objects from the end to the beginning, just like we did with the letters. Since we didn't know how the letters should look at the start, we made key frames for how they should appear at the end of their animation. We'll do the same thing here, by placing the icon at the time when we know how it should look at the end, we want it to be in the same position as the circle of the letter I. Let's start by pressing As to scale down the layer a bit. And moving it lower. You can use the down arrow key to lower this layer. Now let's give this layer a different color for easier differentiation. Now let's animate the icons precomp position. We'll stand at the second number three, that is when the text animation is completed. And set the first key frame for the icons precomp, That is, the icon should be at this size. Let's create key frames with the current value. Now let's set a key frame for the position property. At this point in time, let's press Shift to add the position property. Now, create the first key frames with the current value. Basically, we've indicated how the icons precomp should look at this point in time at the end of the animation. Now let's decide how and where the icons precomp should be before it enters the scene. Right now, we don't know the exact second when it should enter the scene. So for now, let's say it should start entering from the beginning of the timeline. Later we'll adjust the timing of the animation and its duration. Okay, so let's say that at this point in time, the icon should be here outside the scene. A new key frame with the new value of the position property is automatically created. This means that from second zero to second three, the layer will move in a certain way. Now let's stand at the second 1.12 frames and place the precomp here to tell after effects that at this point in time, we want this precomp to arrive here before it reaches its last position. What will happen now is that the icon will come from below, rise up, and then reach its last position. Now let's decide when the icon reaches this point. Its size should be 100. At the start of its animation, its size will be 20. Let's see how this looks. To focus on the icon animation, we can turn off the text animation for now, let's do it and see it one more time. All right. In my opinion, this animation is super slow, which makes sense because the entire animation is 3 seconds long. Let's shorten it to 2 seconds. To do that, we'll stay here with the time indicator. Then select all the key frames. Now hold the Alt key and move the last key frames toward the time indicator while holding the shift key as well. Now let's improve the animation by easing those key frames because right now the motion is linear and boring. Select them and press F nine. Let's see how it looks now. Now I want the icon to hang in the air a bit longer when it reaches this point. To do that, we need to adjust the velocity of the key frames. This time we'll do it through the graph editor, not the key frame velocity panel, while all the key frames are selected. Let's go to the graph editor now. Right click to ensure we're in the speed graph and make sure snap is enabled. If you can't see the key frames and curves, you can click here and zoom out a bit. Okay, Now let's select these key frames in the middle, and drag their handles to the left without leaving a straight line. Now select them again and move these handles to the right. By doing this, we have changed the speed between the key frames. The duration of the animation hasn't changed. It's still within 2 seconds. We've just made the layer enter faster, hover in the air longer, and then quickly reach its final point. This way we can take full control of the key frames and create a more interesting animation. All right, now let's make the icon drop a bit faster to its final position. To do that, let's select the last key frames and drag these handles here according to this curve. We can see that the speed of the key frames will be very high at this point in time. Let's see how it looks. Looks awesome. All right, now let's click here to return to our regular timeline and start creating the icons swap animation. We want this animation to happen when the icon pre comp is hovering in the air. For this, let's go into the icons precomp. Let's zoom in on the time line until we see the numbers here as frames. Now let's learn how to create the swap animation between these layers. First, we need to decide how many seconds or frames we want to see these layers for. Let's say we want to see these layers for just five frames. Let's stand here with the time indicator. Now, turn on all the layers, select them. The next thing we need to do is to cut them to a length of five frames. For this, we can use a shortcut alt and the right bracket. This way the layers will be cut to the time indicator position. Now we need to create the transition between the layers. Instead of moving these layers one by one manually, we can use the sequence layers function. To do that, we can select the last layer, hold the shift key, and select the first layer. Now right click on one of the layers, Go to Keyframe Assistant and choose Sequence Layers and hit Okay, here we can see that the layers are placed one after the other in the order we selected. I'll explain what I mean. Let's press control Z to undo the action. This time, select the layers from the top, not from the bottom as before. Now, when we create the sequence, it will start with the first layer we selected. This is better for us because we want the last icon to be seen is this one. All right, now let's go back to the main composition. Now if we check the animation up close, it looks like the icon swap animation begins too early and the last icon disappears at the end of the transition. If we go back to this pre comp, we can see that the layer ends here. That is why we stop to see it in the main comp. Let's extend it so we can see it until the end of this composition. Okay, now let's go back to the main composition and find a point in time where we want the icons swap to start. I'd like it to start from this point around frame 18. Let's stand here with the time indicator. Go into the icons pre, comp, select all the layers and drag them to the time indicator position. Now if we move to the beginning of this animation, we will not see the first icon here. To see the first icon until that moment. We need to select this layer and extend it like this. Let's see how this timing looks in the main composition. All right, I think we can delay the icon transition a bit. Let's go back to this pre comp, Select all the layers and move them here. Let's check the timing again. I think it should start earlier. Let's go back to the icons pre comp and move the layers here. Great, I think it looks better now. Now let's press control to save the project before we move on. Now let's add a cool rotation animation to the icons precomp. Let's go to the beginning of the animation and press R now. Create the first key frame for rotation at the current value. Now let's press you to see the other key frames on this precomp. Then go to the end of the animation and change the rotation value to one full rotation. Let's hide this layer for a moment. During the motion, the icons also rotate. Next, let's convert the key frames as. Let's synchronize the icons animation with the text animation. To understand from which point in time the icons should enter the scene, we need to move forward and backward with the time indicator while watching what is happening in the scene. I'm trying to find a moment in time when the text almost completes its animation. Let's decide that the icons will enter the scene at second one. Let's see how it looks together with the text. All right, I think the timing is excellent. Now we are ready to work on this part of the animation where the letters react to the icons movement. For this, let's enter the text pre comp. We can enlarge this panel. Now, place the time indicator at the second 3.3 frames where all the letters complete their animation. Now because we know we're going to animate the position property, we need to make sure that all the anchor points of the layers are centered. I'll select this layer and zoom in a bit so you can see it better. As you can see, the anchor points of the layers are not centered. This happened because when we centered the anchor points of the layers, we were at a point in time when the letters hadn't finished their animation. Therefore, after effects centered their anchor points relative to the layer boundaries at that moment, it's very important to be at a point in time when the letter animations are completely finished. Somewhere after the third, second. Anyway, let's select them and press the shortcut control Alt home to reposition the anchor points. All right, now all the anchor points are centered in the layers center. Let's go to second number three, press P, and start animating the position of these layers. Let's create the first key frames for all the layers, because we know that at this point the letters need to be where they currently are. Now let's move on to second number four. Hold down the shift key and move the layers up using the arrow keys on the keyboard. Move the layers up until the point when you've got enough room to insert another letter beneath the existing one, somewhere around here, That's enough. Now let's go back to the main composition and synchronize the two animations, the icons and the letter animations. Let's delay the entrance of the icons a bit in the scene. Move the icons, pre comp across the timeline while checking how that looks with the text animation. My goal is to start the animation of the icon a few frames before the text has completed its animation. All right, this looks like a nice timing. Now let's time the up animation of the text so it will feel like it's affected by the icons motion. This is a great point in time because the icon is just about crossing the text. So let's enter the text composition and adjust the animation we created to match this moment. Select all the key frames, we can enlarge this panel to ensure we selected them all. Now move them to the position of the time indicator. Let's see how it looks alongside the icons. Awesome, I think the timing is excellent. Now let's find a point in time when we want to move the letters down to get the illusion that they are all affected by the icon movement. I see that at this point in time, the icons have already landed. This means that at this moment, we can start creating the animation for the letters dropping. Let's go into the text composition and move the layers below to stand under this point, because this point represents the initial position of the letters. In the meantime, we don't want to return them to their original position because we're creating the animation of them going down and then returning to their positions. Let's use the arrow key to bring the layers below their initial position. That's enough. Now let's move on to the fifth second and bring the letters back to their original positions. You can use these points as a reference point to know where is the right place to move the layers, since these points represent the initial position key frames for these layers. All right, after creating the position animation, let's see how it looks with the icons. In my opinion, it looks good for now. Now let's go back to the text comp and improve the motion we've created for the text. We can make this panel a bit larger. First, let's select the key frames we created for the position and press F nine to ease all of them. Now I want the rise motion of the letters to be very fast. To do that, let's select these key frames and go to the graph editor. Now, drag these handles to the left. This makes the animation fast at this point. Now I want the drop of the letters to be fast too. To achieve this, let's select these key frames again and drag these handles to the right. Now the text drops faster. Now let's go back to the main composition and see how it looks with the icons. I think it looks great. Now let's create an offset in the animation we've made. This means the first letters that start going up should be closer to the icons. To do that, let's go back to the text composition now. Let's exit the graph editor to see all the key frames. We can enlarge this panel a bit. Now, since we know that the letter closest to the icons should start its animation, first we won't touch its key frames. They are already in the perfect timing. Let's select the rest of the key frames and move them forward in time. But instead of doing it manually, let's do it with a super useful shortcut. Hold out, use the arrow keys. In our case, it's the right arrow key, because we want to move these key frames forward in time. After the key frames of the letter, I hold out and press the right arrow key. Once we've moved these key frames one frame forward, now let's select only these keyframes and move them one frame forward as well. We'll keep doing this until we reach the key frames for the letter. Once done, let's do the same for the layers that make up the word motion. Select these key frames and move them forward in time using out and the right arrow. Now if we zoom in a bit, we can see that we've created an offset between all the key frames. Let's see how it looks in the main composition. We can shrink this panel to see the scene better. In my opinion, the letters should start to move up earlier. To do that, let's go back to the text composition. Let's scale up this panel. Now, select the key frames that make the letters go up. And move them earlier by four frames. Let's check it now. It's too early. Let's delay it by two frames. Let's check it again. Awesome, it looks great now and now. Before we move on to the next part, don't forget to save the project by pressing control as great. In the next part, we're going to create a super cool background animation for this scene and much more, it's going to be awesome. So see you there. 17. Slogan animation: Welcome back. Let's create the background for our scene. For this we can use the layer of the illustrator file, or we can create a new solid layer. Let's do it by creating a solid layer, but this time we'll use a shortcut control y. Now let's select the eye dropper and sample the blue color from the background layer of the illustrator layer. Next, let's change the name to BG and click Okay. Finally, let's move it to below all the layers. Now let's create the entry animation for our background. For this, we need to create a circular mask for our solid. Let's see how to do it First, we need to ensure that the solid layer is selected. Now long, press the rectangle tool, select the ellipse tool, and create a perfect circle by holding the shift key while doing so. Now let's move our mask to the center of the scene. To see the center, you can press the apostrophe key to show the grid. This way we can see where the composition center is. Now let's go back to the selection tool. Double click on the mask path and move it to the center. You can also move it using the arrow keys on the keyboard. Now our mask is hiding the background, but we need it to reveal the background. Do this, we need to invert the mask. Once done, let's animate this mask. Let's open the mask and adjust the mask expansion stand at the zero second mark. And change the value until the back ground is fully visible. Let's create the first key frame for this value so that at this point in time, the mask should look like this. Now move to the two second mark and change the value so that the entire back ground is visible. By bringing down the value of mask expansion, we can set it to -450 or maybe -480 Let's see what we got. Let's solar the background. To see that the mask is fully closed, press the apostrophe key to turn off the grid. I can see that the mask is completely closed. If you don't close it all the way, you'll have a little gap in the background, make sure your value is correct. Okay, now let's select the key frames and press F nine to ease them. Then hold the Alt key and double click on one of them to adjust the velocity. Let's set it to 85 by 85. Now let's see how it looks. I think it's a bit slow. Let's move the last keyframe to the 1 second mark. That looks better. Okay, now let's unsolo this layer so we can see all the layers. We can also turn off the transparent background. Now let's time the background animation we just created with the rest of the scene. I want the background to enter the scene shortly after the entrance of the text. Let's move it here and see how it looks. I think it's excellent. Now we're ready to move on to the next stage to improve the look of our scene. For this, let's select the text animation composition and duplicate it with control D. Now select this new composition and change its color using the fill effect. If you can't find the effects panel, you can locate it under window. All right, let's drag the effect onto this layer. We don't see anything because this layer is below another one. If we isolate this layer, we can see the effects color. Let's change the color of the effect to the blue of the icons. Let's navigate to the point in time where we can see them. Now, sample this color using the eye dropper. And if I solo this layer, you will see that the color is indeed changed. Now to make it look more interesting, we can create a little offset for the two text precomps. I'll show you what I mean. First, let's stand at the moment where the text is going up. Now, move the new text, precomp one frame forward in time. Once done, let's duplicate this comp again, and move the Button 11 frame forward. Then change the color of this comp to the yellow of the slogan. To see the yellow color, go to the project panel. Drag the slogan to the scene. Then let's go back to the effects controls panel. Now select this composition and sample the yellow color from here. Now let's turn off this layer and see how it looks. Okay, I think we can create a slightly larger offset between the text compositions. Let's move the button Comp one frame forward and see how that looks. I think we can move this pre comp, one frame forward as well. And the bottom 12. I think it looks better this way. Now let's work on creating the animation for the slogan. I want the slogan to enter the scene just before the text completes its animation, somewhere around here. First, let's turn on the slogan layer. We can align it to the center of the comp using the aligned tool. Now as you can see, the slogan is one layer. It would be very complicated to separate all these letters into separate layers and animate them manually. To animate the slogan in a smarter way, we can use the text animators of after effects. I'll show you what I mean. First, let's select the text tool and type the word learn. But before that, I want to give you a small tip about integration when working with After Effects and Illustrator. As you can see, the first letter in the word learn is currently in lower case. Let's say we didn't notice this when designing the logo and illustrator, we only noticed it in after effects. To fix this quickly, we can write, click on this layer, go to Reveal, and select Reveal and Explorer. This way After Effects will show us which file on our computer this layer is in. In our case, the file is already open. Now we can delete the letter and type a capital L. Once done, we can go back to the selection tool, then press control to save the changes we made for this Illustrator file. Now when we go back to after effects, we'll see that the letter has also been replaced here. Anyway, let's go back to animating the text First, let's write the first word for this. Make sure you are using the text tool. Then click here once to open a text line and type space period. Next, double click the text to select it and change the font. Look for the font Monserrat, and select Monserrat, extra bold. Then change the color to yellow from the original layer and change the font size to 50. Also, don't forget to go to the paragraph to ensure that the text is centered and aligned from left to right. All right, now let's go back to the selection tool and place this word here. For now, we can turn off the slogan layer. Now let's learn how to animate this text layer using animators. First, let's open the layer and select the text here. Next, click on the small arrow for animate and choose position, because we want to create a motion animation for this text. Now you can see that a new animator has been added to this layer. Next, we need to set the point of change for this text. In our case, the text should come in from the bottom. Let's set it to stand here. You can write 60. Now, open the range selector and advanced. Let's enlarge this panel to see all the parameters and adjust the preview screen to see the text better. Now here we need to change the animators shape. This way the text animation will start to move from the first letter. Now using the offset parameter, we can control the position between the original position of the text and the changing point we set for this animator. Now let's animate the offset to get a cool text animation. Let's go to the beginning of the time line and create the first key frame for offset with a value of -100 which is the changing point we set for the position property of this animator. Now move to the second number one. Before we continue, let's isolate this layer so that we only see it. Okay, at this point in time, let's change the offset to 100, which is the original position of this text layer. Now let's improve this animation by changing the velocity of these key frames. When using animators, we don't need to go into the key frame velocity panel or the graph editor, we can control it directly from the animator. Let's write 20 and E is high, and 80, and E is low. Great, Now let's hide the text when it's at the bottom. For this, we need to stand at the point in time where the text has already moved up. Now all we need to do is right click on the layer, go to Mask, and select New Mask. Let's see how it looks. Awesome. Now let's close this layer and let's add a cool scale animation to it. To do this, select the layer and press. Now I want you to pay attention to how the layer is getting big. This is happening because the anchor point is here. Let's grab the anchor point tool and center the anchor point of this layer while holding the control key. This way the anchor point will snap to the layer's center. All right, now let's not forget to switch back to the selection tool and start to animate the scale property. Make sure you're at the beginning of the timeline. And create the first key frame with a value of zero. Now move to frame 12 and change the value to 200. Or maybe 150. Now go to the second number one and set the value to 100. Next, select the key frames and press F nine. Finally, hold the alt key and double click on one of the key frames to change the velocity. Set it to 85 and hit okay, let's see how it looks now. I think it can look better with a different velocity. Let's press F nine to reset the keyframe velocity and bring them to regular as key frames. This time change the velocity using the graph editor. Let's select these keyframes and drag the handles to here and these handle to the right. Let's see how it looks now. I think it looks better this way. I did this to remind you that sometimes it's better to control the velocity of key frames through the graph editor. All right, let's move on. Let's unhide this layer, press and reduce the opacity to 30 to make it easier to work with it as a reference. Let's also lock this layer so it won't interfere as we create the second word. Now we can simply duplicate this layer by using the shortcut control D. Then move this text here. Now double click and change the word to create. Don't forget to create a space and the dot after writing the text. Next, let's adjust a mask for the new word. Select the layer. Press M to display the mask. Delete it, and create a new one. Next, let's use a line to center this layer in the composition. We can move this word a bit to the left. You can delete the reference now and move on. Now, duplicate this layer, then select the selection tool and move it here. Next, double click and change the word to enjoy. Once again, select the layer, press M to display the mask, delete it and create a new one. Once done, we can move this layer a bit to the left. Now let's create an offset between these layers. Let's decide that the word learn should come first. Let's leave it in place. Next, we'll start the word Create. 12 frames after learn the word enjoy. 12 frames after create. Let's see how it looks. I think it looks great. Now you can press control to save the project before moving on. All right, now let's go back to the selection tool. Islowlate these layers to see the rest of the scene and close them. We can also shrink the composition panel. Now let's set the preview screen to fit and find the time when we want the slogan words to come in. I think it's somewhere around here. Let's select these layers and move them here. Let's check how it looks. I think the timing is good, but I think we need to raise these layers a bit closer to the main text. Let's do it while the text layers are selected, Hold the shift key and use the up arrow key to move them up somewhere around here. Okay, let's check it again. It looks excellent and we're ready to move on. In the next step, we'll create a cool motion trail for our icons. For this, go to the effects panel and look for an effect called echo. Drag this effect onto the icons pre comp. Now set it to -0.001 and set numbers of echoes to 30. Finally, choose maximum for echo operator. Now when this layer accelerates, we'll see a cool motion trail that looks like this. You can enlarge it using this parameter, but remember that the more numbers of echoes you add, the harder your computer will have to work to render the scene. Don't overdo it with this effect. I'll change it to 50. I think that's enough. Now we're ready to move on to the next part where we'll create the outro animation for our scene. See you there. But before you dive into the next lesson, I highly recommend that you take a ten minute break, get up from your chair, do some light stretching, and drink a glass of water. This will help you to recharge your brain for the next lesson. 18. Outro animation: Welcome back. Let's get started with creating the outro animation. First off, let's select the text layers and give them a yellow color so we can easily identify them. Now let's create the outro for the icons pre comp. First we need to decide when we want the icons to leave the scene. Let's say it happens around the six second mark. To make this happen, we need to select the icons composition and press to see all the key frames for the position property. Now pay attention, we simply move it away and check the animation. It will immediately start moving to its new position, but that's not what we want. We want it not to move up until the second six. We want it to start exiting the scene from second six. That is after all the letters finish their animation. This means we need to create a pause in the animation for a couple of seconds. Creating a pause in an animation is super easy. All you got to do is create key frames with the same value as the last keyframe. To do this, click here. Now we created a new key frame with the same value as the previous one. Which means that the layer will not move during this period of time. This will create a pause in the animation. Now let's move to second seven and move the layer here. Then let's move to the second eight and move the layer here. Finally, let's move to second nine and drag this layer from the scene. As you can see, we've created a path for the exit animation of the icon. Now let's round the corners of this path to make the motion of the layer move smoother. To do that, hold the Alt and Control keys and click once on the point you want to round. You can also round the corners using the vertex tool found under the pen tool. Select the vertex tool and click once on the point you want to round. After we finish with this tool, let's not forget to go back to the selection tool now we can tweak the handles and points of the path until we achieve the movement we want. Let's design the path in a nice curvy look. The motion of the icons will look nice and natural. Let's also round this point. But first, move the time indicator here so the icon doesn't get in the way. Now hold down the Alt and control keys and click once on the point. Let's move this handle like this to see the path better. We can isolate this layer to see only it in the preview screen. Now let's see how it looks. The path we made for this layer looks great. Now let's make the animation even better. I want this layer to start moving very quickly as it exits. To do this, let's select these key frames and go to the graph editor. Now let's move these handles here to change the velocity of these key frames. Moving these handles like this, we'll make this layer start to move very quickly at this point in time. Now let's make this layer exit the scene very quickly. To do that, let's select these key frames and move this handle here. Let's see how it looks okay. The start looks good and the exit looks good. But as you can see, the icon has a couple of strange pauses in the middle of its motion. Let's return to the regular timeline and see how to fix this. This is happening because of the key frames. To fix it, we need to change those key frames to continuous key frames. To do that, you just have to select them, the control key, and click on them twice. This will transform the key frames into continuous key frames. And you'll see that the animation flows smoothly without any weird pauses. All right, now let's bring this keyframe closer to the previous ones and make the animation faster. At this point in time, we can speed this up a little more. Let's drag this keyframe closer to the first one. That's better now let's adjust the other key frames accordingly. Let's get a bit closer and fine tune the key frames. Playing around with the key frames will give you a better understanding of how to control your animation. If you feel like you need to learn more about it, you are more than welcome to watch my guide to After Effects for beginners for free. Find the link in the PDF file found in the main folder of this course. Okay, I think that looks great. Now let's isolate this layer and continue to create an outro animation for the other layers. Let's create the exit animation for the main text. For this, let's go to the point where the text animation ends. For example, here at second six. Now press Alt and the right bracket to cut these layers to this point. Now let's find a better time for the text to finish its animation. Move around with the time indicator while watching what is happening in the scene. I see that at this point in time, the text is finished with the animation. Next, let's cut these layers again using Alt and the right bracket. Let's zoom out a bit in the time line. Now press control to duplicate all these precomps. After that, let's move them here so they are side by side. Then let's make these precomps play from the end to the beginning to create a reverse animation. To do this, right click on one of them. Go to Time choose Time reverse layer. Now we need to align these layers so they all start from the same point in time. You can hold the shift key while moving it to snap it exactly with the other layer. Now place them exactly where we cut the original three layers. It's important to zoom in and check that there's no gap between the layers. With this, we have finished creating the outro animation for the text of the logo. Now let's sync the outro of the icons with the text out. To do this, select the icons composition and press P to view the position key frames. Let's start moving the icon from this point in time. Just a moment before the letter. I start moving upwards. Select these key frames and move them here. Let's get closer to the timeline and see how that looks. I think it should happen sooner. I think the timing is great now. Now I want the icon to hover more time in the air before exiting the scene. For this, we can move the last two key frames a bit forward in time. Now there is a larger distance between these two key frames. That means that it will take the icons more time to get from this point to this point. Which creates a longer animation of the icon hovering in the air before exiting the scene. Great, now let's create an ultra animation for the background. First, we need to decide when we want it to happen. For now, let's say that here at the second 9.12 frames is a good time. First, select the background and hit you to see its key frames. Now copy these key frames with control C and paste them here using control V. Now we can reverse these keyframes to get a reverse animation. To do that, right click on one of them. Go to keyframe assistant and choose time reverse key frames. Now let's find the right moment for the background to exit. I want the background to start exiting when the icon leaves the frame somewhere around here. Let's see how this looks. Okay, now since the background here has already done its job, we can cut this layer question. What is the keyboard shortcut to cut the layer from the right side, we can do it by pressing Alt and the right bracket. Now let's create an outro animation for the slogan. Let's say we want them to exit the scene from second number seven. Let's use the scale animation to create the outro animation for that. Select all the text layers and press. Let's create key frames with the current scale value as we want the text to stay the same size until this point in time. Now let's move to second eight and change the scale to zero. Next, let's select all the key frames and adjust the velocity using the graph editor. Like this. Once done, exit the graph editor and let's create an offset for the exit animation of these layers. It looks good, but I think it should happen sooner. That's better. All right, now let's hit control to save the project. We can close all the layers and move on to the final part of this lesson, where we will learn super cool tricks to make our animation look unique. And we will do it in the next part. See you there. 19. Handy tricks and rendering: Welcome back. Let's learn how we can make our scene look more visually interesting. The first thing we're going to do is create a new adjustment layer. Then let's search for the effect called CC lens and drag it onto it. Now let's increase the size here. As you can see, this effect makes the scene look more interesting by distorting it slightly. Let's set the size to 150. Now we can make it even more interesting by animating this property. Let's go to the beginning of the timeline and create the first key frame with the current value. Now press you to see the key frames we've created for the effect. Next, let's move to the second number two and change the size to 500. Then convert the key frames to ***, and let's see how it looks. We can move these key frames forward in time. Let's say to the second number one, the effect stays a bit longer in the scene. I want the effect to end when the last letter finishes its animation. Great, now let's select the effect here, press Enter and copy the effects name using control C. Once done, select the adjustment layer, press Enter and paste the name. This way we'll know which effect is on this adjustment layer. Okay, now let's create a cool zoom in animation when the icon hovers in the air. To do this, we'll need to create another adjustment layer above all the layers, and apply a transform effect. Let's create a new adjustment layer now, search for the transform effect and drag it onto the new adjustment layer. Now we need to stand at moment when the icon enters the scene and create a keyframe for the scale property of the transform effect. After that, press you to see the key frame and move to the moment when the icon is already landing. And create another key frame with the same value as before. Finally, let's go to the middle of these keyframes and change the value to 130. With this, we have created a zoom in and zoom out for the scene from the moment the icon enters until it lands. But as you can see during the zoom, you might notice that the icon goes outside the frame. But don't worry. We can fix it with the transform effects position property. This means we can adjust the position relative to what's happening in the scale animation al, right at this point in time we are good with the position of the scene. So we'll create key frames with this value. Now press you to see the new key frames. Then go to the moment of the zoom in and move the scene downwards. Next, let's go to the end of the zoom animation. Copy the first key frame and paste it here. Now let's select all the key frames and hit F nine to convert them to Z's. Let's see how it looks. Now looks nice. Now while all the key frames are selected, let's go to the graph editor and adjust this animation. Let's select the middle key frames and drag this handle to the left. Then drag these handles to the right. I love it. After finishing creating the zoom in and out animation, let's exit the graph editor. Now let's copy the effects name and paste it on this adjustment layer. Great. Now let's go back to our icon and improve its animation a bit. Let's make the icon grow when it hovers in the air before it exits the scene. Let's select this layer and press S to see the scale property. Actually, we can press the Ukey to see all the key frames on this layer so that we can time the animation we will create with the position animation we already have. This means from this point when the icon starts to exit, we'll set it to be the current size. When it reaches this area, we'll increase it to 100% or even 150. Now let's shrink this layer, it exits the scene. Let's set the size to zero and see how it looks. Okay, I think we can start the shrinking a bit earlier. Let's move this keyframe here. Now let's select all the scale key frames and change the velocity through the graph editor like this. Let's see how it looks. I think we shouldn't reduce it to size zero at the end. Let's stand at the last keyframe and change it to 50, but I think the icons exit animation happens too slowly. To speed this up, we can select the last key frames and drag them here. Let's also adjust the position of this keyframe and see what we've got. I think the up animation of the icons is happening too fast. Let's get closer to the timeline and move this key frame a bit to the right. Let's see how it looks now. All right, now after finishing adjusting the icons animation, let's adjust the timing of the exit animation of the background. For this, select this layer and press you to see its key frames. Now move them to the point in time when the icon has almost exited the scene. Okay, now let's step back a bit. Close all the layers and create an additional effect called posterized time. With this effect, the motion in the footage becomes more stuttered and choppy, similar to the look of an old fashioned animation. For this effect to affect all the layers, let's create a new adjustment layer above all the layers. Now let's go to the effects panel and type posturized time, drag the effect onto the adjustment layer. Now change the value to 12. If we see the animation now we can see that the animation is a bit choppy. Let's see how all the animation looks with this effect. If you like this style, you can lower the frame rate to eight anyway. I prefer to keep it at 12. Now let's just copy the name of the effect and paste it onto the adjustment layer. Okay, now I want to teach you a cool that you can use when working with adjustment layers. As you can see, the posturized time effect is on the adjustment layer. This adjustment layer affects everything beneath it. This means we can create a mask for this layer and choose which parts of the scene will be affected by the effect and which ones will not. Let me show you what I mean. Let's select the ellipse tool. Press and hold. And now choose the rectangle tool. Make sure we are selecting the adjustment layer with the posturized time effect. Now let's stand in a frame where we can see most of the letters somewhere around here. Then let's create a mask like this. Now we've created a small glitch in this part of the scene. This happens because only this area is affected by the posterized time effect. Now we can mask other areas in the scene to create a more interesting look. For example, we can create another mask here and another one here. In these parts, the animation moves at 12 frames per second. And in other parts, it moves at 24 frames per second, which is the original frame rate of the composition we started with. All right, let's see how it looks altogether. Now if we want to change the shape of the mask, we can switch to the selection tool. Double click the mask and then change its shape, or move it to a different location to move to the next mask, press Enter and then select the second mask. You don't have to create these masks if you don't love the overall look they create. All right, so after we've prepared all the effects, we're ready to render our animation. But before that, let's do one more thing. I want the zoom animation to start only after the last letter finishes its animation. To do that, let's select the adjustment layer with the transform effect and delay the start of the animation on this layer. Move with the time indicator while watching the preview screen to find a moment in time when the last letter is already in the scene. Let's move these key frames here. Now the letter finishes its animation. And only then the zoom animation begins. Let's see, the entire animation one more time before rendering the project. Okay, now we're ready to render our project. First, let's go to the time point where the animation is fully complete, which is around second 11. Now let's trim the work area to this time point to avoid rendering unnecessary parts. To do this, press N key. Now let's learn how to render this animation with a transparent background. You can turn the transparent background back on to render it with a transparent background. First we need to go to the render panel. To do this, press control M. Let's click here to change the final output to quick time in format options, select animation, then click okay. Now in channels choose RGB plus alpha. This tells after effects to render the animation without a background. Once done, click okay. Now let's choose where to render the animation. Render it to our renders folder now make sure the name is good, then click Save and Render. Now let's wait for a moment. Awesome. Now let's go back to our main composition and learn how to combine our render with other videos. If we want to create a transition between two videos and use it as an animated bumber, you don't have to do this with me. I just want to show you the process so you know how it's done. First, let's go back to the project panel and press control to create a new composition. Now name a test comp. Next, change the dimensions to full HD. 24 frames per second and a duration of 20 seconds. Click Okay. Now let's import two videos into our project. I'll choose videos I used in one of my courses, but you can choose any video you have on your computer. All right. I'll drag one of the videos into the composition and scale it down. I'll import the video we just rendered. Now place it above the video in the composition and move our render to the second. Number one, when we see the background of our animation is about to open up, we can cut the video layer and add another video. Let me show you what I mean. I will stand here with the time indicator at the moment when the background needs to open up. Then I will crop the video footage up until this moment. Now I will insert another video to start exactly from this point in time when the background opens up, we will see the second video. This way we've created a cool logo transition. Let's see how that looks altogether. All right, so after showing you this process, I'll delete this composition because I don't really need it. I'll also delete both videos and the render of the animation. Now let's render it as an MP four file. Let's use the shortcut and press control M. Now in output mode we will choose H 0.264 40 MBPS. Then we need to choose where to render the video. Now make sure the name is good. Next we can press Save. Finally, click on the Render button. Now let's wait a couple of minutes. Let's see what we've got. Great, looks awesome. Now let's go back to our main project and organize it. Before we close it, we can close these panels and the open pre comps. Now let's start by creating a new folder in the project panel called assets. Drag the folder with the logo layers and the solids folder into it. Now create another folder called precomps. You can label the main composition with a different color than the other precomps. Now drag all the precomps we created during the project into this folder, except for the main composition. Finally, to make it look more organized, click here and here you can close the effects panel now and press control S to save the project. You can also exit Illustrator. Before we finish, let's reset the tools to their original state. Now you can exit the project. I hope you enjoyed this one, and I can't wait to see you in the next lesson when we will create a super interesting logo animation for an imaginary tech company. It's going to be awesome, see you there. But before you dive into the next lesson, I highly recommend that you take a ten minute break, get up from your chair, do some light stretching, and drink a glass of water. This will help you to recharge your brain for the next lesson. 20. Logo #2 Home task: Hi there. I hope you found the lessons helpful and learned some new and interesting things. To better remember everything we covered, I highly recommend practicing by completing this homework assignment. Your task is to recreate this cool animation. You have the freedom to change the colors and add any additional graphics you like whenever you face any issues or have some questions. Feel free to check the AE project file to see the steps I took. Additionally, you can always reach out to me for help. Good luck. 21. Logo #3 - Animating a logo for a tech company: Hey everyone and welcome back. In this lesson, we'll create an impressive logo animation for a fictional IT company focused on data collection. The animation includes four key animated scenes that will create individually before stitching them together seamlessly with perfect timing. Throughout this lesson, we'll use a very handy built in script in after effects. We'll use some expressions, create complex key frames, and learn many valuable techniques for working efficiently with after effects. I'm sure you're going to love this one, so let's not waste any more time and dive right into the lesson. 22. Diverging paths animation: All right, so let's start with the lesson. I hope you're ready for this because this lesson is going to be super interesting as always. Let's start the lesson by taking a look at how the logo was made in Illustrator. For this, let's open the main folder we created for the course and enter the AI folder. Now let's open the third logo design to see the same panel arrangement. Let's go to Window Workspace and select Automation. Great, and now as you can see, this design is also divided into several layers. There is a background layer, an icon layer of the logo, and a layer of the main text. The text layer is a regular text layer written in the Ezra font. Now, before we proceed to create the logo animation, we need to think of an interesting way to animate it. That's why, as I always say, it's very important to create an initial sketch of the idea that can connect with the concept of this specific logo. Let's open the sketch idea for this logo and see how I planned it. Since it's a logo for an imaginary tech company dealing with data collection, I thought it would be cool for all the data to converge to a single point and create the logo icon, which is the sphere. Then this sphere opens a portal from which all the letters of the logo comes out. All right, enough with the talking. Let's open after effects, we can close this window. Now let's click on Default for all of us to see the same panels. Now let's create our first composition. We'll name it Logo Animation Three. We'll work in the full HD format, set the width to 1920, and the height to 1080 pixels. Change the frame rate to 30, and set the duration to 20 seconds. Finally, let's choose the background color for the composition. Let's go with black. All right, now let's import the logo design into the project. Now. First double click in the empty area in the project panel, then to the AI folder, and select the third logo design. Make sure not to select this function and click Import. Now as you already know, we need to choose composition, because we want to import this file with separate layers. Here we select layer size because we want the layer boundaries to match the object size, not the document size. Great. And now we can see the folder including all the illustrator file layers. Moreover, you can see the new composition with the same name as the illustrator file created automatically. When you enter the composition, you'll see the logo separated into layers exactly like in the original Illustrator file. All right, let's close this pre comp and start the lesson. But before that, let's not forget to save the project and give it a name. Go to File and click Save. Now let's find the folder we created for the lesson. Go to the AE folder and name the project file we're currently working on. We can click on this project to sample the name and then adjust the name to logo. Animation three underscore into data, then click Save. First, let's create the animation for the data lines we see in the example. To make it easier to work, let's show the compositions grid for this, the apostrophe key. Now let's start creating the data lines. First let's select the pen tool. Next, turn off the fill, and change the stroke color to gray press. Okay, And leave the thickness at five for now. Then let's create the first point here. Hold down the shift key and create another point here. This will make the line straight. Now let's increase the line thickness to ten. Next, center the anchor point of this layer using the shortcut control at home. Now let's center the layer in the composition center using control home. Once done, let's create the small sphere that's supposed to move along with the line. To do this, press and hold on the rectangle tool and select the ellipse tool. Now let's ensure we're not selecting any layer. And create the sphere while holding the shift key to keep it symmetrical. Next, let's color it gray and remove the stroke. Great. Now we can close the layer selected and press Enter to change the name to sphere. Then change the name of this layer to stroke. Now let's tag this layer with a different color so we can differentiate it from the others. All right, now let's learn how to make the sphere move along the lines path and animate it during the motion. For this we'll use a built in script in after effects. Let's see how to do it. First, we need to open the layer. Go to Contents, open the Shape, open the path, and select it. If you don't select the path, the script won't work. To open the script, go to Window, scroll down, and click on Create Nulls from Paths. This opens a small panel for this script. In our case, we'll use the trace path function. You can close it, and as you can see a new null object has been created in the scene. Let's go back to the selection tool and understand what's happening here. But first let's understand what is a null object in after effects. A null object is a type of layer that does not render or appear on the preview screen, but can be used as a reference point for other layers in the composition. It's an invisible layer that can be used to control the position, rotation, scale, and other properties of other layers in the composition. One of the main advantages of using a null object is that it allows you to control multiple layers at once rather than having to adjust each layer individually. For example, you can parent several layers to a null object and then control the layers with the null. As we move along the timeline, you'll notice that the null object is following the line's path. It's cool, but the object keeps repeating this motion each time it reaches the end of the path, which is not what we want. Let's stop the null object from doing this First, let's try to understand what makes him do this. Let's open the null layer, go to effects, and you'll see an effect called trace path on it. Inside this effect, there are two key frames in the property called progress. The null layer is repeating due to an expression on this property. You can spot the expression by the red color of the property's value. Let's adjust the expression on this property and stop from the null to repeat its movement. To access the expression panel, select the layer and press the Ekey twice. Now let's select the first line and delete just this part. This line of code makes the null loop endlessly. Click here to finish the action. Make sure you delete exactly what I've deleted, otherwise it won't work. As you can see, it moves from the start to the end of the path for 1 second. It's too fast for us. Let's go to the second number three and move the last keyframe here. Now this animation lasts for 3 seconds, not 1 second as before. Awesome. Now let's learn how to connect the sphere to null. We can do this with the help of the parent and link function which is located here. Parenting is a relationship between two layers and which one layer the child is attached to and follows the motion of another layer, the parent. When you parent a layer to another layer, any motion or transformation applied to the parent layer is also applied to the child layer. This is useful for creating complex animations such as characters or vehicles, where the movement of one part affects the movement of another. Linking on the other hand, is a more flexible relationship that allows you to control one property or parameter of a layer based on another. All right, now let's parent the sphere's layer to the null layer. To do this we will drag the pick whip of the sphere's layer to the null layer. This will ensure that when the null moves, the sphere will move with it. If we want to disable the parenting, we can click here and select none. As you can understand, we need the sphere to be placed in the area of the null here, and then connect it to null. But if you don't want to make it manually, you can link the sphere in a way that it automatically attaches to the position of null. Let's see what I mean. Let's hold the shift key and now drag the pick whip of the sphere to null. Now the sphere is positioned at the anchor point of null, which means it's at the location of null. In the next step, we need to create a more interesting path for our line. To do that, let's select the layer of the line. Choose the pen tool, get closer, and create additional points in these areas. Let's create one point here, one here, another one here, and the last one here. Now let's select this point, hold the shift key, and select this point next. Let's lift both of these points up. If we want to change the shape of this part, we need to select this point and move it to select it, hold the Alt key and select it like this. Let's move it here. Let's select this point. And move it as well. Great, Now let's do the same on the other side. Let's create four points in this area. Now select the two middle points, and this time move them down. Let's rearrange the points a bit. Awesome. We can step back a bit and continue adjusting the form of this line. For this, let's hold the Alt key, select these points, and move them here. Next, let's move these points here. Maybe we can move the bottom points up a bit. Let's do the same with these ones, okay? Let's see how it looks. Looks good. Now it's an excellent time to press control as to save the project before we move on. Now let's learn how to make these corners rounded. To do that, let's open the layer of the line. You can close the shape. Now. Next let's select Contents and add a new effect to the contents of this layer called round corners. If you zoom in a bit, you'll see a significant improvement in the corners. Let's open the new property and increase the radius. Set it to 20. Great. Now let's learn how to make the sphere reveal the line during the motion. Let's set the preview screen to fit. Now, select the shape within the contents of this layer and add the trim paths effect. Next, enlarge this panel a bit and then open the effect. Now by changing the value of the property called end, we can control the line drawing. Connect this property to the sphere's motion. We need to access the progress property under the trace path effect that is found in the null layer. Let's close all the parameters and then open just the progress property to see only it. Now, since our sphere is connected to the null, it will appear as if the sphere is revealing the line. To make this work, we must link the end property of the effect to the progress property of null. Now when the null is moving, the sphere is moving with it and the end property of the trim path effect moves with the sphere. Looks great. Let's move on. We can set the preview screen back to fit. Now to make this animation look more interesting, let's make the back part of the line disappear in relation to the sphere's motion. We can do it using the start property of the trim path effect. Let's decide that the line will start to disappear from the second number one, let's create a key frame for the start property with the current value. Now let's go to the end of the sphere's animation at the third second and change the value to 100. Let's see how it looks. It looks fine. Now let's close the layers and improve the animation. First, to improve the animation, we need to see all the key frames we have in this scene. Let's make sure we're not selecting any layer and press you. Now let's start improving the motion of the sphere. Let's select these keyframes. Press nine and change the velocity through the graph editor. Right click here to make sure we're in the speed graph. Now let's select these keyframes and move the handle here to make the sphere move slowly at the beginning and then increase speed towards the end. Let's turn off the layer for the line and see how it looks. Now let's move on to improve the motion of the line animation, because now the motion of the line is not synchronized with the motion of the sphere. Let's go back to the timeline. Select these key frames. Press F nine and change the velocity through the graph editor. Let's select these key frames and move the handle here to make the line disappear slowly at the beginning and then increase speed towards the end. Now I want to adjust the look of the path we got here. And to do this, let's select the pen tool and adjust the shape of the line a bit. Click on one of the points, now hold the Alt key and select the points in this section. Let's move this part here. Now let's move this part a bit to the left. Let's see how that looks now. Okay, now let's adjust a very small detail that nobody will see, but it's important to know about it. Let's zoom a bit and see how the end of this path looks. As you can see, the line ends in a straight line. Let's learn how to round it. To do this, close and reopen the layer to see all the parameters. Now, open stroke and change the line cap to round cap. Now it looks better. Let's also change round join here. Okay, And now we can close all the parameters and layers. Set the preview screen to fit, switch back to the selection tool and move on. Now let's create a scale animation for the sphere. Go to second zero, select this layer, and press S to see the scale parameter. Now change the value to zero and create the first key frame with this value. Next, let's move to frame 15 and set the scale to 100. Then let's copy these key frames. Go to the second three and paste them here. Now right click on one of the key frames. Go to keyframe assistant and select time reverse key frames to reverse this animation. Now the sphere will shrink when it reaches its last point. I think it should shrink before reaching the end to see when the sphere reaches its last point. Let's select the null layer and press you next. Let's move the scale animation of the sphere here, so that the sphere will disappear just before finishes its motion. Now let's select these keyframes. Press nine and change the velocity through the graph editor. In this way, let's see how it looks. Excellent, we can go back to the timeline. With this, we're done with the first part of our animation. Since we know that in the future, we will need to duplicate this animation a few times. Best to nest all the layers into a single composition. It would be a hassle to duplicate the layers one by one. Okay, let's select all the layers and press control shift C, we'll call it data line one. Make sure both of these are checked and hit okay. Now let's enter this pre comp and adjust the size and length of this composition. To do this, we need to enter this composition settings. Press control K. Now adjust the height dimensions of this composition. Make sure preview is checked to see what you are doing. Let's set it to 400. Now let's shorten the composition duration to 1 second because we know that our animation ends at second three. There you go. Our composition is ready and we are ready to move on. Let's go back to our main composition. In the next part, we'll make another animation similar to what we did, but with some small tweaks. We will play around with the sphere's size, line thickness, and the colors of the objects. See you in the next part. 23. Duplicating layers techniques: Welcome back. Let's learn how to duplicate comps like a pro. First, it's important to know that in order to successfully change the design within the duplicated composition, we need to duplicate this composition through the project panel and not through the layers panel. This way we can make changes inside the duplicated comp without affecting the original. I'll show you what I mean. Let's find our composition in the project panel, select it, and press control D to duplicate it. Now we have created a new composition and its suffix has been automatically changed to two. Now let's enter this new composition and make some design changes. We'll start by changing the color of the stroke layer. Let's make it white. Next, let's change the color of the sphere to white as well. Now let's bring this composition into our main composition. And see that the changes affect only the new composition. Which is great because we want to have some varieties of this data animation. All right, now let's arrange this pre comp in the scene. First we can process and set the size of this composition to 70. Then right click on it to transform and choose flip vertical. Now I want the sphere to reach the center of the scene in the end. To do this, let's go to the end of this animation to see the last position of the sphere. Now let's drag this pre comp to the place where we will see the sphere in the center, Somewhere around here. Let's check that the sphere reaches the center. Exactly. Great. Now I want the large sphere not to be visible in the scene when it is created. To do this, let's move this composition here. Let's see how it looks. It looks great. Now let's tag this layer with a brighter color so we can differentiate it from the other compositions. Now let's create a similar animation from this side. To do this, we'll duplicate these two compositions using control D. Next, bring the new compositions here, side by side. And to flip both of them precisely, right click here and create a new null. Now connect the two new compositions to the null using parent and link. Then select the null. Right click, go to transform and choose Flip Horizontal for randomness in the scene, right click on the null and go to transforms once again, but this time choose vertical. This looks a bit more interesting. Okay, now let's unparent these two compositions from the null, and let's create a similar animation from this side. For this, we'll duplicate these compositions once more. Move them up and connect them to the null. Now select the null, Press R to display the rotation property, and rotate it to -90 degrees. Looks good. Once done, unparent these compositions from the null and duplicate them one more time. Move the new ones up, connect them to the null, and rotate the null to -270 degrees. Basically, we've used the null and the parent and link function to design and position our layers in the scam. Now that we're done with that, we no longer need the null, let's select it and delete it by pressing backspace or delete. Now let's create a small offset between the white data lines and the gray ones. Let's select all the data line, two compositions at once. For this, click here and choose select Label Group. We can zoom in on the timeline. Now let's move the selected preps for frames forward in time. Let's see how it looks. Awesome. Now let's create another version of the data line animation. That is, we need to create the same animation but with a couple of changes in the design question. Where should we copy the composition from so that we can make changes without messing up the previous ones? To do this, we'll duplicate the data line two pre comps through the project panel. Let's select it. Press control D. Now let's enter the new composition and make some design changes. We'll begin by changing the color of the sphere to a darker color. Next, let's change the color of the stroke line to a darker color as well. Now let's bring this precomp into the main composition and position it in the scene. Let's place it in a way that when the sphere reaches its final position, will be in the center of the scene. Next, let's tag this layer with a different color to separate it from the other compositions. Now let's isolate this layer to see only it. And now let's reach the point where the sphere reaches its last position and move this precomp accordingly. Once done, press R to display the rotation of this layer. Now I want this composition to be positioned diagonally in the scene. However, if I rotate this composition, it will rotate from its center because the anchor point is in the middle. That means we need to move the anchor point here. Let's grab the anchor point tool and move it here. Once done, don't forget to switch back to the selection tool. Now, when we rotate the layer, it will rotate correctly. Let's move to the point in time where we can see all the layers to see what we are doing. Now let's set it to 45. Now press to display the scale of this layer. And scale it down a bit, as you can see the layer getting smaller relative to its anchor point position. Let's set it to 50. Now let's create additional copies of the pre comp and arrange it to cross the scene. Let's select this pre comp and duplicate it next. Let's rotate it. I think we can set it to 135. Now let's duplicate this one more time and rotate it as well. 224 degrees, looks fine. Now these two pre comp are symmetrically placed. Now let's duplicate this pre comp one last time and rotate it relative to the pre comp in front of it. 310 looks good. Now let's check that everything looks fine. Okay. Now let's close all these layers, isolate them, and move on. As you can see, we've got a ton of precomps in our layer panel, making it hard to navigate. To save some time and make things easier, we should organize our layers. First, let's enlarge this panel and select only the data line two precomps, Now move them up so they stand side by side. Next, let's create a slight offset for the data line three compositions. To do this, let's stand at a point in time where we can see all the precomps Now select all of them and move them a few frames forward. Let's see how it looks. I think it looks great. All right, we have completed designing the data lines scene. It's a great time to press controls to save everything we have done so far. Now to keep our main composition organized, we will select all the pre comps and nest them into a single composition. You can do this by pressing control shift C. Now rename the composition to data lines main and click okay. Now to maintain the highest quality, if we want to scale this composition later, let's activate the collapse function for this precomp and all the precomps within it. Click here if you don't see the collapse function. Awesome. Now it's an excellent time to press control S to save the project. Before we move on to the next part where we will animate the main sphere and create a super cool portal animation. It's going to be awesome. So see you in the next one. 24. Advanced timing: Welcome back. In this part, we will animate the colorful sphere, create cool ripple animation behind it, and learn how to make a portal. Let's start with the colorful sphere animation. To do this, let's find it in the layers of the logo design and drag it into our composition. Now let's go to the beginning of the animation. Turn off this pre comp press, create a scale animation for the sphere. Let's change the value to zero at this point in time. And create the first key frame with this value. Then let's move to the second number one and change the value to 100. Now let's convert these keyframes. To *** select these key frames, press nine and adjust the velocity through the graph editor. The layer starts growing quickly and slows down towards the end. Let's see how it looks great, and now let's add a rotation animation. Let's select the layer. Now press R to see the rotation property. Let's learn how we can rotate the sphere without creating key frames. We can do this with a simple expression First, to create a new expression for this property. Hold the Alt key, and click once on the stopwatch. Now let's write time multiples 100, and click here to finish the action. There it is. Our sphere will rotate without key frames. Now I'll teach you a cool trick to create a cool highlight effect on the sphere. To give it a more three D look. First right click on the layer, go to Layer Styles and select Inner Shadow. If you zoom in a bit, you'll see we now have a shadow in this part. Let's open the effect, change the color to white. Then set the blend mode to screen. As you can see, we are already getting a nice high light around this area. Now let's set the opacity to 100% distance to eight, and size to 15. Once done, let's change the position of the high light we created. To do this, we need to rotate the angle parameter. Let's set it to 340. Finally, to keep these layers in the best quality, activate the collapse function for this layer and close it. Okay, now let's go back to the beginning of the animation and create the ripple that should be behind the sphere. To do this, select the ellipse tool. Now click once here to ensure we're not selecting any layer. Now turn off the fill color. Then change the stroke color to white and create a circle while holding the shift key. Now let's center this layer in the scene using control home. Instead of creating a scale animation for this layer, we can simply select the sphere layer, press S, select the property, and hit control C to copy the key frames on it. Now select the circle and press control V to paste the key frames. Press you to see the key frames. Let's animate the stroke thickness of this circle as well. Let's open and close the layer to see all the parameters we can transform. And now open contents ellipse stroke. Now let's change the width to 40 and create the first key frame at this point in time. Now move to second one and change the width to zero. Once done, convert these keyframes to easyE's and see how it looks awesome. Now let's move the ripple layer a bit forward in time to create a gentle offset between the sphere animation. It looks great. We can turn on this pre comp for now. After we finish animating the sphere and the ripple, let's put these two layers into one pre comp to maintain order in our main composition. Let's change the name to Big Sphere Comp and press Okay, now let's enter this pre comp and resize it, because right now we have a lot of empty and unnecessary space here. Press control K to access the composition settings. Resize it to 600 by 600. This is much better. Now select this layer, press you to reveal its key frames. And cut the layer to the point where the animation ends. Stand here with the time indicator and press Alt and right bracket to do that. Let's see how it looks before moving on. Great, now let's go back to the main composition and activate collapse for this precomp. Now go back to the selection tool and tag this precomp with a different color so we can distinguish it from the data lines comp. Now let's move this layer forward in time and find the point where the big sphere is supposed to enter the scene. It should happen here when all the data spheres join in the center. Let's position it here and see how it looks. It looks good, but now I notice that the ripple is above the big sphere. I'll zoom in a bit to show you what I mean. We don't want the ripple to be in front, we need it to be behind the sphere. Let's enter this pre comp and move this layer below the sphere layer. Okay, let's go back to the main composition, set the preview screen to fit, and move on to the next part where we'll learn how to create the portal and the text animation scene. Let's start with the portal first, let's turn off the layers and open a grid for a better workflow. You can activate this grid from here or open it with the shortcut Alt and apostrophe key. Let's select the pen tool. Then click here to make sure we're not selecting any layer. Now turn on the fill and leave it temporarily in gray. Leave the stroke and white with the thickness of ten. We can change it later if needed. Now let's start creating the portal. Create the first point here and continue shaping it. Next, double click on the path of the shape. And while holding the shift and control keys, resize it symmetrically from all directions. This should be enough. Then press Enter to finish the action. Now let's animate it, but before that, press Alt, an apostrophe key to turn off the grid. Now open the layer and the shape properties. To animate this layer, we need to create key frames for the path of this shape. For now, let's go to the second number one. Because we know the shape of the portal should look exactly as it does now. Therefore, we can create the first key frame and tell after effects at this time point. This shape should look like this. Now let's go back in time and adjust the shape to how it should look at the beginning. First, let's select this point. Press the apostrophe key to see the center of the scene. Now let's move this point to the center. Then let's select this point. And move it to the center as well. We can adjust it a bit with the arrow keys. Next let's select the key frames and press F nine to convert them to easy. E's finally hold the alt key and click on one of the key frames to change the velocity through the keyframe velocity panel, set it to 85 for both values. Hit okay, and see how it looks. Great, now let's create a reveal animation for this path. To create this reveal animation, we can create a mask for this shape. And then animate the path of the mask to reveal the shape. Let's see what I mean. First, select the layer. Then click and hold the ellipse tool to select the rectangle tool. Now make sure we have this layer selected and create the mask. But pay attention to what happened. Instead of creating a mask, we just created a new shape. Let's press control Z to undo the action and try to understand why it happened. To create masks on shape layers, we need to select this icon here. This way, after effects, we'll know that we want to create a new mask on this shape layer and not create an additional shape inside of this layer. Okay, after selecting the icon, let's create the mask. Now what we need to do is animate the masks path. But before that, let's move the key frames for the portal opening forward in time. Because before the opening, we need to create the key frames for the reveal animation of the stroke. Move these key frames to the second number one. Now let's create an animation for the mask path. To see the path of the mask, select the layer and press M. Now at this point in time, which is the second number one, the mask should look like it does. Now let's create the first key frame when the path looks as it does currently. Now go back in time to the beginning of this layer. Let's change the path of the mask until we don't see the white stroke of the portal. To do this, let's switch back to the selection tool. Now select the two bottom points of the mask and move them to the center of the layer. Now select the points of the upper part of the mask and move them to the center of the layer as well. Be careful not to select the path point of the portal. Select only the mask path. Now let's get closer and move the points using the arrow keys on the keyboard until we won't see the layer. Then select the key frames and press F nine. This time we'll change their velocity using the graph editor to make the mask open quickly at the beginning of the animation. Okay, now as you can see when the shape opens. We have a minor issue with the corners. If I move back and forth, you can see the corners getting sharp. To fix this, let's close the layer and reopen it. Close the mask. And now let's access the stroke of this shape here. Change the line join to round join. Once done, close the stroke and let's move on. Now let's create a nice animation for the stroke width. First, let's find a point in time where we want to start the stroke with animation. Let's go to the second number one after the revealing animation. Now open the stroke and let's animate this property. You can enlarge this area a bit to see it better. Now I want the thickness to be ten before the portal opens up. At the second. Number two, when the portal opens, the thickness should be zero. Now let's ease these keyframes and see how it looks. I think it looks awesome. We can close the parameters of this layer. Now let's time this layer with the rest of the animation. First, we can select this layer and press you to see the key frames before timing the portal animation with the rest of the scene. Press enter on this layer and change the name to rhombus because that's the official name for this shape. You can also write Portal if you want, it doesn't really matter. Now let's close the layer, set the preview screen to fit, and move on to time this layer with the rest of the animation. I think the portal should enter the scene somewhere around here. Let's turn on the rest of the layers and drag the portal to the location of the time indicator. That doesn't matter for now, because before the portal opens, we need to make the sphere touch the portal line. Let's move it here for now. And create a touch animation for the sphere that's supposed to start the animation of the portal. For now, let's decide that the touch animation should start from the second number four, we can also move this layer forward in time for now, so it doesn't interfere with us. Now select the big sphere and press P to see the position property. Now let's create the first key frame with the current value, because we're happy with the position of this layer up to this point. Now let's move 15 frames forward and move this layer here. Now let's move 15 frames forward again, And move this layer here, because this is where the line of the portal will start to reveal. Now let's move to second number six and move the layer here. We'll understand why in a moment. Next, let's find a point in time when the portal should start to open. It should happen when the sphere does the touch animation. Let's move back and forward in time while trying to find the perfect time for the portal to open up. I think we should start the portal from the second number four. Let's drag it here and see how it looks. This looks like good timing in relation to the animation of the sphere. Now let's improve the animation of the sphere. Let's select all the key frames and press nine. Now let's make the sphere reach this point quickly to create an illusion of the sphere touching the line. To do this, let's select this keyframe and go to the graph editor. Now let's drag this handle here and this handle here so that the sphere will move quickly in this part. Now let's select this keyframe and move its handle like this. Let's see what we've got. That's a bit too fast. Okay, that's better. The touch motion still doesn't feel realistic enough to me. Let's tighten it a bit more now, let's move the handle of this keyframe here so that the ball quickly bounces back after touching the line. Let's see how it looks. Looks great. Now let's go back to our timeline and continue timing between these layers. Right now, the line of the portal starts its animation too early and it collides with the sphere. Let's move the portal forward in time. Now let's adjust the opening animation of the portal, because right now it's not synchronized with the touch animation of the sphere, which happens at the second number five, press on the portal layer and select the key frames for the shapes opening and the thickness of the line. And move them here. Let's see how it looks. All right, looks good, except the ball moves too much to the side after the portal opens. Let's stand on this keyframe and adjust it. Let's move it here. That's better. Press control as to save everything we have done so far. Now let's step back in the timeline, close the layers, and move on to the next part where we will create the text animation that is going to get out from inside the portal. See you in the next part. It's going to be awesome. But before you dive into the next lesson, I highly recommend that you take a ten minute break, get up from your chair, do some light stretching, and drink a glass of water. This will help you to recharge your brain for the next lesson. 25. Text from tunnel animation: Welcome back. Let's get started with a lesson on how to create a cool text animation that comes out of the portal. And to make our work easier, we can create our text in a separate composition. That way we won't have to worry about the other layers messing up our work. Plus, it'll be a lot simpler to add the text animation to our scene later on. Let's create a new composition. We can do this through composition. New composition or use the shortcut control end. Let's call it text comp, set the dimensions to full HD for now, we might adjust it later. We'll keep the other settings as they are and hit. Okay, there you go. We've just jumped to the new composition we created. You can also find it in the project panel. Great. Now let's drag the original illustrator text layer into our comp to use it as a reference. Then select the text tool and write the company name. Now double click on the text and change the font to Ezra Irregular. Then color the text in white and change the size to 100. Now let's select just the letter O and sample the color from the original layer. Once done, we can delete this layer. And don't forget to go to paragraph to ensure our text is centered and written from left to right. All right, now select the text layer. Press control Alt to center the anchor point to the center of the layer. And then control Home to center the layer in the composition. Now switch back to the selection tool and let's animate the text. Instead of manually splitting and animating each letter one by one, which would take a lot of time. We'll use the layer animators and after effects to do this. Select the text through the layer and create the first animator which should be of type position, because this is the animation we want to create. Now let's get closer. You'll see small red crosses here. These are actually the anchor points of each letter currently located at the bottom of the letter. Let's learn how to move it to the center of the letters. For this, open more options and change the value from grouping alignment in our case. -30 is excellent. Now let's close it and move on. Now let's decide where the point of change in this text will be. In our case, it's where it enters the frame. Let's decide that the text should come in from the left. We'll write -600 here. Now let's open the range selector and advanced. Now let's change the animators shape to ramp down. Why ramp down and not ramp up? Because we want the last letter to move first. Okay, let's go to the beginning of the animation and create a key frame for the offset property with a value of 100. Now let's move to the second number three and change the value to -100 Now let's improve this animation by changing the velocity of these key frames. When using animators, we don't need to access the key frame velocity panel. We can control it directly from the animator. Let's set it to 84 Es high and 84 Ease low. Let's see how it looks. Looks good. Now let's add a rotation animation for the letters. To do this, let's select the animator. Click the small arrow next to the word ad to property and choose rotation. Now we have a new property in the animator. We can set that at the starting point of the animator. The letters will be rotated by -90 degrees. Now the key frames we created for the offset will be affected by both properties in this animator. The position and the rotation. It looks great. Now let's go back to our main composition and insert the text animation we just created into it. Let's move this layer forward in time and time, the text entrance in relation to what's happening in the scene. The text should start at this time from the second number six where the portal is open. But as you can see, it's not positioned where it should be. The text should be positioned somewhere around here. That means we need to go back to the text comp and adjust its final position. Let's learn what we should do in situations like this. So first thing first, we can lock the panel of the main composition here. Now let's go inside the precomp of the text. Now drag this precomps panel. Here on this side we see the precomp of the text from the inside. And here we see our main composition, which is locked right now. That means that all the layers we see in this panel belong to the text composition. All right, now when we move the text, we immediately see how it looks in the main composition. Okay, let's find a good position for the text, somewhere around here, because we move the text. We go to the beginning of the animation, it seems like part of it is in the wrong place. Because right now we can see it before it goes out from the portal. That means that we need to adjust the changing point we set for the position property of our text animator. That's not a problem, we just need to change the starting point of the text in our animator. Let's go to the position property of the animator and change it to -700 As you can see now everything is in the right place. Once done, we can unlock this panel and close one of them. Okay, so we're back to the text composition. After we've positioned and adjusted it, let's press control K to resize it. We have a lot of empty space here, so let's scale down the height until we find the right size. I think we can set it to 250. Finally, let's go back to the main composition and apply collapse for this precomp. Now we need to create a reveal effect where the text emerges from our portal. That means we need to create the illusion that the text is going out from the portal. And we can do it using the track matt function. That is, we can use the portal shape to act as a mask for the text precomp. I'll show you what I mean. First, let's duplicate this shape. Move it above the text. Change the name of this layer to mask for text. And now make the text visible only within the boundaries of this shape. We can do this using the track matte function. Let's click here to see this function. Now let's drag the pick whip of the track mat of this layer to the portal layer. Let's select it and press M to delete the mask on this layer. We don't need it right now. Now, as you can see on the side of the portal, we can't see the letters. And that's exactly what we need to create the illusion of the text going out of the portal. But at the same time we also can't see the letters that are supposed to come out of it. Fix this, We need to change the path of this shape. Before doing that, let's temporarily turn off the layer of the real portal so we can see what we're doing. As you may already know, there are key frames on the path that change its shape. The first key frames don't bother us. What bothers us is how the portal opens. That is the second key frame. That means we need to focus on the last key frames of the path and change it. Let's stand on the key frame we want to adjust. Now to see the points of the path of this shape, we need to select the path through the layer. Now we can select this point and move it to the right to change this path animation. Now the text will be visible because we've expanded the area of the layer that functions as a mask. Okay, let's turn the O portal back on and see how it all looks together. It looks great. Now let's create a closing animation for the portal. First, let's find a point in time when it should happen. Let's say around here. Now select this layer and press you to see the key frames on it. Next, let's create the same animation as in the beginning, but in reverse. We can select all of these keyframes, copy them, and paste them at the time indicator position using control V. Now right click on one of the key frames. Go to keyframe assistant and choose time reverse key frames. Once done, select the key frames for closing the portal. And move them here because they need to start closing before the mask closes. Let's see how it looks. Great, so after the text is out and the portal is closed, let's bring the sphere closer to the text. That means we need to create a position animation for it. First, select the sphere comp and press P to see the position parameter. Now let's find a point in time when we want the sphere to start moving towards the center of the composition, say at second nine. Just a moment before the portal line closes. Now let's create key frames with the current value until this point, We want the sphere to stay where it is right now. Now move to second ten and move the sphere to its final position, somewhere around here. Now let's go back to the point where the sphere starts moving. And also adjust the text position to move towards the center. From this point in time, select the text comp, press P, Create key frame with the current value. Move to second ten and move this layer here. Now select all the key frames we've created for the position. Press nine, hold the Alt key, and click twice on one of the key frames to change their velocity through the keyframe velocity panel, set it to 85 on both. Okay, let's see how it looks. I can see that the white line hasn't finished its animation yet. Let's move these key frames a bit forward in time. This way, the sphere and text will start moving when the line has completely disappeared. Let's see it once again. I think it's great. Now let's create an outro animation for this logo. This time, let's make them disappear using the Opacity property. But first, we need to find a point in time when we want it to happen. Let's decide that it's going to happen from the second number, 12. Let's select both layers and press to open the opacity. Now create key frames with the current value which is 100% Then move to second 13 and change the opacity to zero. Next, select all the key frames and press nine. Let's see how it looks. You'll notice that the sphere doesn't disappear like the text. This is because within this pre comp there is a layer style. Remember the inner shadow. That's why to solve this problem, click here and turn off the collapse function on this precomp. Now the opacity animation works correctly, but in case we want to keep the pre comp at the highest quality and still enable collapse, we need to go into this pre comp, select the layer with the layer style and press you twice to quickly find the layer style. Now let's select the layer style and press control X to cut it from here. Then let's go back to the main composition. Select the precomp of the sphere and hit control V to paste the layer style onto it. This way we preserve the highlight we created and we can still enable collapse for this layer. Great. And now it's a good time to press control and save the project before moving on to the next stage where we'll color our objects in the scene and make it look really awesome. It's going to be a fun one. So see you in the next part. 26. Coloring and rendering: Welcome back. Let's start to stylize and give colors to the objects in the scene. The first thing we're going to paint is the portal. Let's select this layer. Click on the word fill and choose to fill this layer with a gradient. Then click Okay. Now let's learn how to control the gradient we created. To find it quickly, select this layer, type the word gradient in the search bar, and press Enter. Now let's open this parameter and click on Edit Gradient. Now let's paint it with the right colors. Let's click on this color and change it to blue. As you can see, we can't see the color because its opacity is set to zero. To change it, click here and set it to 100. And now we can see the blue color. Now we can go back to this color and choose a different color. Let's choose a darker blue. Now let's click on the second color and paint it with a lighter blue. Next, let's check its opacity. It's currently at 50% Change it to 100 and click Okay. Once done, let's change the position of the colors. To do it, we can drag these handles to the sides. If you can't see these handles, you can adjust the color position from here. You can also place it up and down if you want. Okay, I'll leave it like this. If you want to change the colors later, you can simply click here and access the gradient editor as before. Now let's move on to the beginning of the animation and change the colors in the data lines pre comps. Let's enter the data lines pre comp and start by changing the colors for data line one. First let's select the stroke layer. And then click here on Stroke to fill it with a gradient color. Once we've chosen the gradient color, after effects will display the last settings we used for the gradient, that's not a problem. Tight gradient in the search bar. And press Enter. Now open the gradient, change the colors. Let's drag the layer of the big sphere into this comp so we can see the colors in it. Now let's enter Edit, Gradient, and change the colors. But before that, let's make sure the opacity for all colors is set to 100% Okay, now let's go back to the colors and change them using the eye dropper. All right, now let's click here to set the second color for the gradient. We can sample this color and darken it a bit. Now let's move the time indicator to see how the stroke looks along the animation, I see that the distance between the color points is too close. Let's move the end point here and see how it looks. All right, now let's adjust the start point either by changing the value from here or moving the point manually. While holding the shift key, I think the line should be brighter at the start and darker at the end. To do this, enter the gradient and reverse the colors. We can brighten this color a bit. Let's see how it looks. I think we need to darken the darker color a bit more. Now let's select the second color and copy the colors info, because we will use it to fill the small sphere. Now select this layer. Go to the fill and press control V. Now I want to talk about an important topic. Let's say we decide to scale down this sphere. I'll press S to open the scale property. As you can see, we already have key frames here. This means that if we scale down the sphere, we will create new key frames and mess up the animation to scale it down without messing up, the animation can scale it down using the transform properties of this shape. I'll explain what I mean. Let's open this layer, close its transformed properties and open the contents and the ellipse. As you can see, for shape layers, there are additional transform properties that belong to the shape itself. These are the transformed properties of the layer. Here we already have key frames. These are the transformed properties of the shape. There are no key frames here. We can shrink this sphere using the scale property that belongs to the transformed properties of the shape. Let's set it to 80. You should remember this especially when working with shape layers. All right, let's close the layer and delete the big sphere from here. Now let's go back to the composition of all the data lines and check that all the pre comps named data line one have been updated. Excellent, now let's change the colors for the next compositions. Let's enter data line two. First, we'll resize the sphere through the transformed properties of the shape, not from the transformed properties of the layer. Let's open the content and the ellipse. Now let's open the transformed properties of this shape and change the scale from here. Let's set it to 70. This time, we will leave the color of the sphere and the stroke in white. Now go back to the composition of all the data lines. Let's focus on data line three. Let's put the big sphere here to sample its colors. Now let's color the stroke layer here with some nice bright color from the sphere. Next, let's copy the data for this color and paste it as the fill color for the small sphere. You can delete this layer now. Great, let's go back to the composition of all the data lines and see how it looks. Now let's improve the look of the precomps name data line two with an effect called glow. Let's drag the effect onto this composition. We can turn it on and off to see to which composition we applied the effect. It's this one down here. Let's go to the point in time when we see this layer fully. Now let's set the glow radius to 60. Once done, let's copy the effect from here. Using control C, select the other precomps, name data line two, and press control V to paste the effect. It looks great. Once done, let's go back to our main composition and paste the effect on the ripple as well. I'm referring to the ripple layer that pops out behind the big sphere. Let's go into this composition. Select this layer, and press control V. Now let's return to the main composition and see how it all looks together. I think it's perfect. Now we're ready to move on to the next stage, which is creating the background for this. Let's go back to the project panel and drag the background layer into our scene. You can see this layer is the same size as the original illustrator design. Let's learn how to create such a background directly in after effects. First, let's create a new solid using the short cut control Y. Now change its name to BG. Make sure the solid matches the size of our composition. Leave the color black and hit okay. Now move the solid below all the other layers and apply an effect called gradient ramp to it. Solid layers don't have a built ingradient, We need to add the effect. Okay, now let's change the colors of the effect. As you can see, the shape of the gradient in the original design is circular. Let's make our layers gradient circular as well. You can delete this layer from here. Now change the ramped shape to radial. Now we have a circular type gradient. Now let's move the position of the white color slightly up and the position of the black color slightly down. Now let's set the preview screen back to fit and turn off the grid. With this, we have finished creating the animation and we are ready to render this piece. But before rendering, let's set the work area to the point in time where we want to render this composition. We can see that the animation ends at 13 seconds. Let's press in to shorten the work area to that time point. Now let's watch the animation one more time before rendering. Okay, I think the color of these data lines blends too much with the background. Let's change this color a bit. To do that, let's go to the composition of all the data lines and enter data line three from here, or from here, because this composition is already open. Now let's change the color of the stroke and the sphere. Let's change it to this color. Now copy the data for this color and paste it as the stroke color. Great, I think it looks much better. Now let's press control to save the project before rendering it. Okay, now let's press control M to access the render panel. For the output mode, we'll choose her 0.264 40 MBPS. Now let's select where to render the animation. We'll render it to our renders folder, make sure the name is right now. Click save and render, and wait for a moment. Once the rendering is done, we can open the output mode and click on the link to go to the folder where we saved our animation. Let's open the video and see how it turned out. As you can see, we have a small issue here. Our gradient doesn't look so good. You can see the color bands. Let's go back to our project and try to fix it as much as we can. Let's go to the main composition. Select the background layer. And here in the gradient effect change the ramp scatter to 100 should soften the color bands and the gradient. We can zoom in a bit to see it up close. Okay, now let's press control M again and render it one more time. You can close the previous render. Select H 0.264 40 MB Gus again. Now select this render for rendering in its place. Click Save and then replace. Now hit the Render button. Click okay and wait for a moment. Now let's go back to the folder and check the new render. As you can see, it's better now. Awesome. Now let's go back to our project and organize it before closing it. And to organize the project, we need to create folders in the project panel as we did in the previous lessons. First, you can close this panel. Now let's go to the project panel. You can close all the open compositions. Let's create a folder called Assets. Drag the folder with the logo layers and the solids folder into it. You can tag the main composition with a different color than the rest of the compositions. Now let's create a new folder called precomps. Drag all the precomps we created during the project into this folder, except for the main composition. Now since we worked on a relatively complex project, let's clean up the software. Go to Edit, select Purge, and choose all memory and disk cache. Here you can see how much junk has been collected. It may be a different number for you. In any case, let's click Okay and wait for a few seconds. Now you can press control S to save the project. You can also exit Illustrator finally, close after effects. I hope you enjoyed this lesson and I can't wait to see you in the next one, where we create an epic logo animation for a made up strategic game company. And explore the three D world in after effects. It's going to be awesome. So see you there. But before you dive into the next lesson, I highly recommend that you take a ten minute break, get up from your chair, do some light stretching, and drink a glass of water. This will help you to recharge your brain for the next lesson. 27. Logo #3 Home task: Hi there. I hope you found the lessons helpful and learned some new and interesting things. To better remember everything we covered, I highly recommend practicing by completing this homework assignment. Your task is to recreate this cool animation. You have the freedom to change the colors and add any additional graphics you like whenever you face any issues or have some questions. Feel free to check the AE project file to see the steps I took. Additionally, you can always reach out to me for help. Good luck. 28. Logo #4 - Animating a logo for a video war game: Hi and welcome back. In this lesson we will create a super cool logo animation for a made up video war game. We will focus on learning the three D world and after effects and delve deep into the cinema. Four D render a feature. We will also install a free plug in to help us create super cool neon stroke animation. Additionally, we will learn how to create exciting backgrounds using simple effects. There's a lot to cover, so let's not waste any time and jump right in. 29. Designing a logo from scratch in After Effects: Hey there. Let's start by checking out how this logo is made in Illustrator. Open the main folder we created for the course, then go into the AI folder and open the fourth logo. Now to get the same panel arrangement, go to Window, then Workspace, and choose Automation. This design is split into different layers, just like the rest of the design we saw in this course. There's a background layer and a main text layer with a three D effect. This is a regular text layer written in the belly font. If you didn't install it before the course, no worries. You can also use the Ezra or Monserrat fonts. Now, before we create the logo animation, as always, we need to think of an interesting way to animate it. That's why, as I always say, it's very important to create a rough sketch that matches the logo concept. Let's open the sketch idea for this logo and see the short storyboard I created for this logo design. Firstly, I wanted to create a dramatic tone for this animation. Therefore, I decided to enter each letter, one after the other, and not show the all logo at once. Since this is a logo for a video game about wars and battles, I thought it could be cool to create a dark atmosphere of war and fire Al right after we plan the animation. Let's open up after effects and start designing the first scene. As always, we can close this window. We can all see the same panel layout. Let's click on Default. Now let's create our first composition. We'll call it logo animation. Now go to three D Render. Since in this lesson we will create real three D objects, we need to change the render settings from classic three D to cinema four D. This way we can give some depth to the text layers in the scene. Soon you will understand what I'm talking about. For now, let's go back to Basic and continue with the composition settings. We will work in the full HD format, which is 1,920 pixels in width and 1080 pixels in height. Next, change the frame rate to 24 and the composition duration to 20 seconds. Leave the composition background in black and click okay. Now let's import our logo into the project. Click twice on the empty area in the project panel, enter the AI folder and select the fourth logo. Now let's ensure we don't check this function and click on Import Here, we already know that we need to choose composition, because we want this file in separate layers. Here we choose layer size, because we want the layer boundaries to match the objects size, not the documents size. Now click Okay. There you go. A new folder has been created with all the layers of the illustrator file. Also, a new composition with the name of the illustrator file was created automatically. When we enter it, we will see the logo divided into layers and organized exactly as it is in the original Illustrator file. All right, let's close this pre comp and get started with the lesson. But before that, let's not forget to save the project and give it a name. Now let's find the folder we created for the lesson. Go into the AE folder and give a name to the after effects project we are currently working on. You can click this project to sample the name and change the extension to four underscores, Rise of Vikings. Once done, click on Save. Now I want to mention a few important notes. If you see the preview screen like this, don't worry, you see it this way because your caps lock key is on, turn it off, and it'll go back to normal. Finally, make sure your computer is set to English. So the keyboard shortcuts we use in the course work properly. Great, now I want us to insert the design logo comp into our composition. Scale it down, then move it here and lock this layer. We will use this comp as a reference to create the logo and after effects. Great, now let's start designing the scene. We'll begin by creating the text layers for the logo. For this, we'll select the text tool and type the word rise. Now let's double click on the text to select all of it. Now let's change the color of the word to this color. Next, let's see the details of this text in the original design. Let's go back to Illustrator and select this text to see its info such as the font, font weight, and font size. All right, now let's go back to after effects. First of all, let's change the font to belly bold. For those who don't have this font, you can also use the Ezra or Monserrat font. Now let's change the font size to 150. And click here to make all the letters uppercase. Click here as well to make them even bolder. Now let's go to Paragraph and make sure our text is centered and the writing direction is left to right. Now let's select the layer and press control D to duplicate it. Move this layer down using the down arrow key while holding shift. And change the text to Off. Then let's set the font size to 80 and change the color to white. Next let's select the rise layer again and duplicate it using control D one more time. Move this layer down and change the text to Vikings. Now let's change the color to match the red from the logo and set the font size to match the logo design. First, let's select the letter and set its size to 180. Now select the letter S and set its size to 210. Finally, repeat the same on the other side of the text. Great, now let's switch back to the selection tool and center the anchor points on all the text layers. To do this, select all the layers and press Control All Tome. Next, let's go to a line, change it to Composition, and click here. Then select only this layer, and click here to center it within the composition. Now press the apostrophe key to show the grid. Finally, let's move the rest of the layers in relation to the word, so that all the layers are centered in the scene. Now let's switch around the layers in the layer panel to match the order in the scene. In other words, the word Vikings will be at the bottom, the word rise on top, and the word in the middle. Now let's create the two orange arrows in the logo. To do this, select the Pen tool. Now click here to ensure no layer is selected. Then create a straight line in this area. Click once here, hold shift, and create another point here. Then let's change the color of the line to the orange from the logo. Grab the eye dropper and sample this color. Hit okay, and change the stroke width to 25. Next, let's click here to remove the fill for this shape. Now let's learn how to make the end of this line sharp. To do this, open this layer, open Contents, Open Shape, open stroke. Now let's scroll down a bit until we see the property called taper. Let's open it. Let's set the end length to 100. Okay, now let's close this layer, press Enter and change the name to stroke. Now let's duplicate this layer by pressing control D, right click on it, go to Transform, and select Flip Horizontal. Next, let's go back to the selection tool and move this layer here. With that, we've finished designing the logo from scratch and after effects. Let's press control S to save the project before we move on to animate the text layers. Before we animate the text, let's organize our composition. For example, we can select these two layers and nest them into one composition. To do this, press control shift C. Let's call it Strokes comp. Ensure that both are selected and hit okay. Now let's enter this composition and resize it because we got too much empty and unnecessary space. Here, question, how can we adjust the size of this composition? To do this, we need to access the composition settings. We'll do that using the short cut control K. Now make sure preview is selected so we can see what we're doing. Now let's resize it 600 by 100. Looks good. Press okay. And return to our main composition. And apply the collapse function to this composition. In the meantime, we can turn off this layer so it won't interfere with us. We can also hide it from the layer panel using the shy function here. If you don't see this icon, you can click here. All right, let's hide this layer and activate the function by clicking the icon here. Now we can't see this layer here, Don't worry, we can bring it back at any point in the project. Okay, let's set the preview screen back to fit and start to animate the text layers. And we will do it in the next part. See you there. 30. Cinema 4D Renderer and 3D animation: Welcome back as in our previous lessons. This time as well, we will animate the text using the text animators in after effects. First, let's turn off both of these layers and start with the word vikings. But before that, we can unlock this layer and hide it from this panel as well. Now to make the letters go outside of the scene, we need to open the layer, select the text here, open the animate menu, and select this function called enable per character three D. As you can see, we have a small icon here that symbolizes that all the letters will now behave as three D layers. Let's see what I mean. Click here and create a new animator with the position property. As you can see, besides the value that moves the layer left and right up and down, we have a new value with which we can move the layer backward and forward. If we hadn't selected the enable per character three D function, we wouldn't have gotten this movement axis. In order to make the letters move in three D space when animating text with animators, we must enable this function. Great. Now to animate the text, we got to set the changing point for the position property, change the values of the Z axis of the position until the text goes outside of the scene. You can hold down the shift key for larger movements. For me it was -23 80. But you might need to adjust this value depending on the font you're using. The main thing is to make sure the text is outside of the scene. Okay, And now let's open the range selector and Advanced. Let's change the animators shape to ramp up. That means when the offset is at a value of -100 the letters will be at the changing point we set. And when the offset is at a value of 100, the letters will be in their original position and they entered the scene from the first letter. Great. And now we are ready to set key frames and animate the text. Let's start at the beginning of the animation now, change the offset to -100 and create the first key frame. Next, let's move to second four. Why specifically second four? There's no special reason, just a personal preference. I just decided that the text will take 4 seconds to complete its entrance. Okay. And now at this point in time, we'll change the offset to 100. Let's see what we've got. As you can see, it's challenging for after effects to preview the scene because we're currently working with the Cinema four D renderer to make it easier for after effects to display our scene. We can reduce the preview quality from here to third or even quarter when we watch it again, it will render much faster. Okay, now let's change the velocity of this animation. As we've already learned when working with text animators, we can do this by entering the numbers in these parameters Is high, we'll write 20, and as low we'll write 80. Let's see how it looks. Looks nice. Now let's add a nice rotation animation to the text. For this, we need to add additional properties to this. Animator. Select it, go to add, then property, and choose rotation. Now let's set the changing point. As you can see, when I rotate the text, it rotates from its bottom part. This happens because the anchor points of all the letters in this text layer are located at the bottom. To change this, let's open more options and change the position of the anchor point. Let's look at the letter V As we do this, because it's already at the end of its animation, let's set it to -40 Once done, we can close this and go back to rotating the text. Now the letters rotate as they should, but I don't really understand in which direction they are rotating. To see what we're doing a bit better, we can change the scenes view for this. Let's click here and select Custom View One. Now we see the entire scene from an angle that makes it easier to see where the text is rotating. I want the text to rotate from the bottom, so let's write -180 here. Now let's go back to active camera now, because we have already animated the offset. This animation will also apply to the changing point we set for the rotation. Let's set the preview screen to fit and see what we've got. I think the text is rotating too much. That's not a problem. We just need to reduce the rotation. Let's write -90 and see how it looks. Great, that's already better. Awesome, We've just finished making the text move in three D space and now it's time to give it a more realistic three D look. To make things easier, we'll go back to custom V one again, then we'll move to the point where we can see all the text in the frame and switch the quality to full to see our work better. Next we'll open the geometry options and increase the extrusion depth to 80. Now let's change the color of the sides of the text. To do this, we must select the text and create an additional animator. So go to side, then color, and choose RGB. Let's color the corners the same color as the text, and then darken it a little. Now we can add some shadows to the text to improve the look of it even more. For this, open the material options and adjust the following parameters. Let's return to active camera, set the preview screen back to fit, and see how it looks. Let's place the time indicator here. Now as you can see here, we created subtle shadows on the text. I think it looks great. All right, and now we need to create a similar animation for the next text layer. But instead of doing the process from scratch, we can copy the two animators that we created, then paste them onto the word rise. But before that, let's go to the beginning of the animation. Because one of our animators has key frames. If we want the key frames to start from the beginning of the timeline, we must stand with the time indicator here. Now let's press control V. There it is. We can see that this text is already animated as needed. Let's just change the rotation direction for this. Let's go into the first animator and change the rotation to 90 degrees, which is the opposite of the bottom text. Great, now let's add a three D depth to this text, as we did for the first one. First let's go to geometry options and add some three D depth to this text. Now let's go forward in time to see the text in the scene. Now let's go into the second animator and change the color on the sides. Let's choose the red color from the first text. Looks nice. Finally, let's also set the material options for this layer as for the previous one. Now let's move to the last text layer, select it, turn it on. Go to the beginning of the animation and press control V to paste the two animators onto it. Now let's enter the first animator and change some parameters. First of all, we don't want this text to rotate at all. Therefore, we can delete the rotation. Now I don't want this text to enter letter by letter. I want both letters to enter together. For this, we need to go to Advanced and change it to words. Now this text will be entered as a single word, Okay? And as you can see, the position parameters changing point is not good. We know that because right now we are standing at the beginning of the animation and we can see this text, which is not what we want. We want this text to be out of the scene at the beginning of the animation. Therefore, we need to change the changing point of the position property in the first animator. Let's close advanced and change it. All we need to do is change the value we set to position. Let's change the value so that this word enters the scene through the letter O. For this, our changing point needs to move a bit to the right. Continue to adjust both axes until it looks like the text has exited the scene through the letter O. All right, now let's add a three D depth to this layer as well. But this time, since the text is smaller than the other texts, let's set the extrusion depth to 40. Let's see how that looks. Looks great. Now let's change the side colors. Finally, add some shadows to the text by adjusting the material options parameters. Now we have some cool shadows. Now let's close the layers and press control to save everything we've done so far. And now let's change the quality to quarter and see the entire animation. I think we need to move the word vikings a bit forward in time to create a small offset in the animation. For this, let's select this layer and drag it to frame number six. Let's see how it looks. All right, now let's make our scene look even more interesting by creating a new camera to create a new camera. Right click here, go to New and select Camera. For the camera type, choose one node camera and for the lens size, select 15 millimeters. Then click okay. Now let's activate the transparent background of the previous screen and set the quality to full so we can see what we're doing a bit better. Now if I turn the camera on and off, you will notice that now thanks to the camera, we get a slightly more interesting angle for our text. You can notice this in the parts where the text enters the scene. All right. Now, as we can see in the original logo, the word vikings appears at a slightly different angle than ours. Let's adjust that. To do this, let's select this layer, press R to see the rotation properties. Now let's rotate the layer on the X axis. Let's enter minus five. Next, let's also rotate the word rise. This time we'll enter five on the X axis. Okay, this looks great. It's a good time to press control S to save the project one more time before moving forward. Now let's animate the orange arrows for this. First, let's click on the shy function icon to reveal the hidden layers. Let's disable the function for the layers, we can delete this layer. Now let's bring the black background to see what we are doing a bit better. Now let's turn on this pre comp and learn how to animate the arrows. First things first, let's enter the composition. Now to animate strokes and after effects, we need to select the contents and add an effect called trim paths To this layer, open the effect, make sure you're at the beginning of the time line. And change the end parameter to zero. And create the first key frame with this value. Now let's move to the second number two and change the value to 100. Now select the key frames and press F nine. Then press the Alt Key and click on one of the key frames twice. Here we'll write 85 for both the width and height. And hit. Okay, let's see how it looks now. Okay, now let's apply this effect to the second arrow. Select the effect, Press control C. Now select the second arrow. Make sure you at the beginning of the timeline and hit control V to paste the effect on this layer. You can press you to see the key frames. There it is, We finished creating the animation for the arrows. Okay, now let's go back to the main composition and time the arrow animation to match what's happening in the scene. Let's start the arrows just a moment before all the text finishes its animation. At the three second mark, we can lower the quality and see how it looks. The entry of the arrows looks good, but I noticed that the entry of the word off isn't good. I'll explain what I mean. Let's go to the point in time when this word starts entering the scene. As you can see, the entry of this word doesn't happen through the letter O as we want it. But why is this happening? Position the letter correctly earlier. It's happening because we now have a camera with a 15 millimeters lens in the scene, which causes a slight distortion of the letters. To fix this, all we need to do is go back to the first animator of this layer and slightly adjust the change point in the position parameter of this animator. First, stand at the point in time where you can see the text. Now move this layer a bit to the right. Let's see if the problem is resolved. Looks better. You can change this value a bit using the arrow keys on the keyboard. Okay, that's good enough. Now, once we're done with the animation and have resolved any issues, we'll need to put all the layers into one composition. This way we can easily add more layers and effects to the main composition. Later on, select all the layers and hit Control shift C. Then name the composition main title Animation. Make sure both options are selected and click okay. Now for faster work and after effects, we can change the settings of this composition back to classic three D. This is because we won't create objects with three D volume in this composition, so there's no need to continue working on this composition with the Cinema Four D renderer. Let's press control K to enter this comp settings. Now let's go to Three D Renderer and change it back to Classic three D. Now this comp has a Cinema four D render. This comp has the Classic three D. With this done, let's move on to the next part and learn how to create some awesome fire strikes. See you in the next one. 31. Fire strikes animation and free plugin installation: Welcome back. Now we will learn how to create the fire sparks Absolutely. From scratch. First, let's turn off this layer for now, set the quality to full and start creating the fire sparks. To create this effect, first we need to create a new solid. Right click here, go to New and select Solid. Let's change the name to Sparkles. Adjust its size to match our composition, color it black. And click okay here and here. In the next step, we go to Effects and search for CC snowfall. Add it onto the solid layer. Now let's adjust the effect parameters until we achieve the desired result. Let's zoom in a bit so we can see what we're doing a bit better. Okay, so first let's lower the birth rate to 500. Next, change the size to 15. Then in variation we'll type 100 for maximum randomness in the sparkle sizes. After that, we can significantly increase the scene depth. Let's enter 21,000 here. Great. Let's see what we have so far. Okay, as you can see, the particles are moving very slowly. Let's increase the speed to 1,500 This looks better. Now let's add maximum randomness to the particles speed. That way, some will move fast and some will move slowly. All right, looking good so far. Next let's set the wind to 1,000 so the particles move to the side. Let's change the randomness of the wind to ten. This creates a sense of movement and motion like real fire sparks. All right, moving on now four, spread. Set it to ten. Okay, now let's turn on this pre comp. And to see the pre comp with the effect we need to uncheck this check box. Now we'll see the effect along with the scene. All right, let's turn off the scene again. And now let's go back to the effect and under extras, let's change the ground level to ten. This way the particles will only fly up to the middle of the composition. Soon when we color them, you'll understand what I mean. Okay, and now let's set the random seed to ten for a more random motion. Now we can color the sparkles. We'll do this using degradient ramp effect. Let's add this effect to our solid and change the colors. We can color the first color in red, the second one in yellow. Now let's position the yellow color here. Let's see how it looks. Looks nice. Next, let's improve our sparkles. Look even more with another effect called glow. We can close these settings and adjust the two parameters of the glow effect. Set the radius to 15 and the intensity to two. Zoom in to see how it looks up. Now let's select the glow effect and press control D to duplicate it. But here we'll change the glow radius to 50. Now let's close all the effects and see what we've got. All right, this looks good. The last thing we need to do is flip this layer. Right click on it. Go to Transform and select flip Vertical. This way we get the illusion like the sparkles going from the ground up. Now let's enhance the look of it even more with the CC lens effect. Find the effect and drag it onto the solid. Now change the size to 170 and see how that looks. Now the sparkles look a bit distorted at the edges of the scene. However, it's important not to overdo this effect, or it might make things look weird. Our maximum this time is 170. I think it looks great, but I think we need to darken the edges of the sparkles. For this. Let's open the gradient and move the red color point slightly upwards. I think we can also tone down this color a bit. Something like that. Okay, now let's turn on this pre comp. And there you have it. The fire sparkles blend perfectly with the text animation. Now let's move on to the start of the animation and animate the sparkles for temporarily turn off this pre comp. Now let's open the snowfall effect and adjust this parameter. Let's set it to zero at the beginning of the animation. Now let's create a key frame with this value. Next, press you to see the key frame on the layer. Now let's move to the second number two and change the value to 300. Let's see how it looks. All right. I think it looks awesome. Now let's turn on this pre comp and learn how to create the Viking symbol animation. We'll create this animation using a free plug in that will download and install together in just a few moments. Let's say we've decided to add a cool design element to our animation that we found on the Internet which relates to the concept of our company branding and its logo. After the clients approve adding a new graphic that does not exist in the original logo design, we can download the graphic asset from the Internet and save it in our Assets folder. Now let's go to the Assets folder and enter the Free Pick folder. Here we'll enter a folder called Viking Symbol. Right click on the EPS file and choose to open it in Illustrator. Now let's get this design ready for some animation. First, let's get rid of the black background because we don't need it. Now let's select the entire shape and color it in black. Next, let's change the name to something more standard so that we won't have any issues in the animation. Let's call it Viking Ziconw. Let's go to File. Click on Save as choose to save it on your computer and save it in the same folder of this asset. Just make sure to save it as an Illustrator file. Finally, let's change the name and click on Save. All right, now let's get back to our project and import the file we just saved, head over the project panel and double click on the empty space here. Now let's locate the folder of this graphic asset. Now as you can see, we can't see the file we saved right now. If you can't see the file, I'll explain how to solve this problem in a minute. Those who can see the file, it's the new Illustrator file. Simply select it and click Import. Then wait until we reach the same point as you. It'll take just a couple of seconds. All right, let's move out of here. Sometimes, even though everything seems fine in Illustrator, the saved file may malfunction. In such cases, you can simply delete the problematic file Next, go back to Illustrator and save it again as an Illustrator file, but this time in a different folder without changing the name. Now find the folder where you save the file, and there it is. We can see that the file is valid. And before importing this into our project and after effects, let's change the name. Once done, switch back to after effects. Before importing the file, ensure that you've put it in the intended folder. Finally, you can conveniently drag the file into your project. Great. And now we have all come to the same point. And here in this case, we can choose footage. As there is only one layer in this document, we don't need after effects to create a separate composition for a single layer. Next, choose merge layers for the same reason. Here we see the Illustrator file in the project panel. Let's drag this file to our composition. Turn off the other layers, turn on the transparent background. And you can close this panel as well. Now we are going to learn how to animate it using a very cool plug in. But before we install the plug in, let's go to Edit, then Preferences, and Enter Scripting and Expressions. Now let's make sure all the settings are exactly like mine. If they are hit okay, save the project with control S and close it so the plug in will work properly. Okay, and now let's find the plug in we need to install. You can click the link in the PDF file located in the folder of this course. Or open Google and search for Saber after effects. Now go to the first website. Scroll down a bit until you see the plug in download. I will download the version for Windows. The installation process for Mac users is exactly the same. All right, Now choose a folder on your computer to save the plug in. I will save it in the folder where I download all the after effects plug ins. Now let's extract this file. Once done, you can delete this file. Now let's go into this folder and open its installation. Let's press I agree. If you are using previous versions of after effects, then choose Custom and select your version. All right, let's click Install and finish. Great. And now we are ready to move on to the next part. When we learn how to animate the Viking Zicon using this plug in, it's going to be awesome. So see you in the next part. But before you dive into the next lesson, I highly recommend that you take a ten minute break, get up from your chair, do some light stretching, and drink a glass of water. This will help you to recharge your brain for the next lesson. 32. How to use the Saber effect: Welcome back. After we've all installed the plug in, let's get back to our project, head over to the AE folder and open the project. Now to use the plug in on our layer, we first need to trace its path. To do this, first we need to select the layer, go to layer, and select Autotrace. Autotrace works by analyzing the image and creating a bunch of paths based on the edges and color contrasts in the image. Okay, so let's click on it now. Make sure that all the settings match mine. Make sure to uncheck, invert, and hit. Okay, now we have our shape, which is made up of many masks. We can delete this layer. Now let's turn off the transparent background. Now let's select the layer and press him to see all the masks on it. We can expand this panel. As you can see, after effects created a keyframe for each mask. We don't need them. Let's select all of them And delete them by pressing backspace or delete. Scroll down to make sure you selected all the key frames. Now let's select one mask press control to select all of them and close them all at once. Once done, you can close the layer now to have better control over the effect we'll create. Soon, we need to copy all of these masks and paste them onto a solid. Let's create a new solid. We'll call it Viking. Make sure it's the same size as the composition. Color the solid in black. And hit. Okay. Now let's select this layer and press to reveal all the masks. Select the first mask. Press control, select them all. Now press control C to copy them. Next, let's close this layer. Select the solid. And press control V to paste the masks onto this solid. You can delete this layer now. Now we can add the Saber Effect. Let's go to the effects panel and look for the new effect we installed called Saber Drag the effect onto the new solid. Let's adjust some parameters. First, open customized core and make sure the effect references the masks on this layer. Second, go to alpha mode and change it to mask glow. For now, let's turn off the glow because I want to show you a handy shortcut. Let's zoom in a bit and let's talk about the shortcut. As you can see, we have a lot of mask paths on this layer. Sometimes it can interfere with our work when creating detailed path animations. Luckily for us, there is a cool shortcut to hide these paths. Press controls shift H. This short cut is used to toggle the visibility of layer controls, such as masks, effect controls, and transform properties in the composition panel. This way we can see what we're doing better. Okay? And now we can bring back the glow. And let's start changing the parameters of the effect. Set the core size to 0.50 Next, set the globe bias to one. For the glow spread, you can set it to 0.8 Finally, let's change the color to bright orange. Now to animate the path, we need to set key frames for the end offset. Let's go to the beginning of the timeline and create a keyframe at a value of zero. Now press you to see the key frame we've created. Move to the fourth second. Now change the value to 100. Now we have some cool reveal effect animation. Now let's select the key frames and press F nine to ease them. Let's make it more interesting by animating mask evolution. But instead of rotating this parameter with key frames, we can do it more smartly. Question, what should we do to rotate this parameter without creating key frames? Let's do it with an expression first. To create a new expression for this parameter, we need to hold the Alt key and click once on the parameter, Stop watch. Now let's write time asterisk five and see how it looks. But as you can see, we are not seeing the rotation animation we just created. It's because the shape has reached its maximum reveal. Let's fix the issue by changing the last keyframe for the end offset parameter, which is responsible for creating the reveal effect. Let's stand on this key frame and change it to 20. Now the shapes reveal doesn't reach its full extent, therefore we can see the rotation motion on this path. All right, now let's open the flicker. Change the intensity to 100 and the speed to ten. That means we now have a small flicker animation on this path. With that, we're done with this effect. We can close the effect. Now let's turn on all the layers and move this layer down. Now let's create a background for our scene. For this, let's press control Y and create a new solid. Change the name to BG, make sure it's the same size as the composition. Leave the color black and hit okay. Next, let's add the gradient effect to this solid. To know which colors to use, let's go to the project panel and drag the background layer to our scene as a reference. Now select the solid and go back to effects controls to see the effect on it. First, let's sample the right colors. Now we can see that the gradient here is circular. Let's change it for our solid as well. We can delete this layer. Let's position the gradient colors, but as you can see, we can't see them. That's because we previously hid the layer visibility using the short cut controls, Shift H. Let's press that shortcut again to bring back the layer controls. Now we can move the colors either from here or directly from the point itself. Let's create something like this. Now let's place the background beneath all the layers. As you can see, we can't see it at all. That's because above it we have our solid with the icon. To see the background in the icon, we need to change the blending mode of the icon layer. I'll show you what I mean. Let's click here to see the options for different blending modes of the layers. Now let's open the blending modes for the solid and choose a blending mode called that. There you have it. In my opinion, the background should be a bit darker. Let's go back to the gradient effect and darken its color a bit. Now let's make the text animation a bit more interesting by creating a small camera movement. To do this, let's enter this composition. Now let's select the camera and press to see its position. Let's move to the point in time where the text completes its animation and create the first key frame with the current value, because at this point we want the camera to be in this position. Let's go to the beginning of the timeline to see what we are doing with the camera. Click here and choose two views. In this panel, we can see our entire scene from a different perspective. See it from the top. It's much more convenient for us to move the camera forward like this. Now, as the text enters, the camera moves away from it. Let's lower the quality for a moment to check the camera movement we've just created. All right, now let's go back to the main composition and create a scale animation for the icon. Select it and press S to open the scale for this layer. Now let's stand at the beginning of the timeline, change the size to 150, and create the first key frame. Now let's move to the second number five, to the point in time where the camera finishes its animation and increase the size of this layer to 180. Let's lower the quality here as well and see how it looks. I think it looks awesome. Now let's press control to save the project. Before we move on, one last thing, let's go back to the gradient in the background and change the ramp, scatter to 100. As we learned in the previous lesson, this should improve the appearance of the gradient. Now let's move on to the next part where we will improve the look of the scene and render the final animation. See you there. 33. Useful tips and rendering: Welcome back. Let's start with improving the look of the scene. But before that, let's bring the quality back to full turn off the grid. Isolate this layer so we only see it. Now let's get a bit closer and enlarge this panel. Now, right click on the text layer, go to Layer Styles, and select inner Shadow, just like we did in the previous lesson. Let's change the color to white, set the opacity to 100, and the blending mode to screen. There you go, we've created a cool highlight. Now let's choose a more proper color for the design. Choose some orange color so it will blend with the icon and the fire stroke we have in the back. Next, let's activate the global light, change the distance to three and the size to two. This creates a cool back light effect from behind the text. I'll zoom in a bit so you can see what I'm talking about. As you can see, it adds a nice touch to the design. All right, now let's isolate the background as well to see how it looks with the background colors. Now let's add another effect to improve the look even more. Go to the effects panel type sweep and drag the effect called CC light sweep onto the text layer. Now let's animate this effect to create more exciting animation when the text enters the scene. Let's find the point in time when we want the sweep to start. Let's say from the four second mark. Now let's create the first keyframe for the parameter responsible for the position of the sweep. Press you to see the key frame we created. Now move to the seven second mark. And move the sweep here. Let's see how it looks. It looks great. Let's stand at the time point where we see the sweep on the text and fine tune it a bit. First, let's change the color to yellow. Now let's adjust the other parameters. When you want to learn about a new effect, play with it and change the various parameter values while looking at your scene. This way, you'll understand what each parameter controls and more importantly, how it affects the appearance of your scene. Okay, now I want to make an important note. As you can see, the initial position of the sweep is here. If we go a few seconds back in time, it seems that the text collides with the sweep at this point. This means that until second three, the position of the sweep should be outside the scene. We won't see it. When the text is in this position, the sweep will start entering the scene only from second three. Then it will perform the animation we set up earlier. All right, now let's select the effect and duplicate it using control D, we can close the first effect. Now we'll use the second effect only to add an additional highlight to the text. Let's click here and remove all the key frames we created. Now let's place the sweep in the center and rotate it by 90 degrees. Let's also change the color a bit and increase the edge thickness. We can zoom in a bit to see what we're doing. We'll set this to three. Now let's increase the sweep intensity to 400 and reduce the sweep intensity to 60. Then with 60 as well. Now we have additional highlights on the text. This is how it looks without the duplicated effect. This is how it looks with it. In my opinion, it looks better this way. As you can see, we got some nice highlights in the middle of the title. Okay, let's bring back all the layers. Now I want to create a drop shadow for our text layer. This will make it look better since there isn't enough contrast between the text and the shape behind it to make a drop shadow effect on the layer. We need to search for it in the effects panel and drag it onto the layer. But if we have a light sweep effect on the same layer, it can make the drop shadow look weird. As you can see, it looks more like some glow. It's going to look like that even if I move the drop shadow effect above the light sweep. Let's remove it now. I will show you how to create a proper drop shadow effect along with the light sweep. To do this, right click on the text layer composition. Go to Layer Styles and select Drop Shadow. Now let's open the effect and adjust the parameters. Okay, I think this looks good enough. Now let's make a minor color correction to the entire scene. To do this, let's create a new adjustment layer and apply an effect called curves to it. Let's bring this part of the handle down a bit, and this part up a bit, that way we created more contrast in the scene. Next, let's copy the effect name and paste it onto the adjustment layer. But now I notice that the sweep looks too small to change it. We can go back to the first light sweep effect and change its shape. I'll leave this one as linear. Now I want to show you a cool trick to make the scene look more interesting. Since we have fire strike in the background, we can animate the inner shadow effect we added earlier to create a feeling like our text is affected by the fire strike behind it. Let me show you what I mean. First, let's select this layer and press the Ukey twice, so that we can see all the parameters and effects on it. Let's close all the effects here until we get to inner shadow. Now let's create an expression in the opacity. For this, let's hold the Alt key, and click once on the Opacity Stopwatch. Now let's write the following expression here. Once done, let's click here to finish the action. Let's isolate this layer to see how it looks. Notice that the inner shadow is now flickering, giving us the feeling that the light is coming from the fire sparks behind it. All right, now let's create the outro animation for the whole scene. Let's start with the title animation. First, let's go into the text composition. We can go back to view one now. Stand at the nine second mark when the text finishes its animation. And trim the work area to that point using the N key. Now, right click the work area and select trim comp to work area. Once done, let's go back to the main composition and duplicate this pre comp, select it and press control D. Then right click on the new pre comp, go to time and select time reverse layer. Now this pre comp will function as our text out animation. We can delete the first sweep we have here because we don't need it to go over the text again. Let me explain why. Let's move this pre comp to the end of the first pre comp. Make sure both pre comps are aligned perfectly side by side. Since this pre comp is essentially the reverse of the original pre comp, we see the sweep going backward. I don't like that. I suggested we delete the first sweep. Okay, now let's get to the end of this pre comp and press in to trim the work area to here, because we don't need to render everything after this. Next, let's create an outro animation for the sparkles. Let's select the layer and press to reveal the key frames on it. Now let's copy these keyframes and paste them at the end of the animation. Now, right click on one of them. Go to key frames Assistant and select reverse keyframes to reverse the animation. Finally, let's move these keyframes here. Once done, let's select the icon layer, press and create a fade out animation at the second number seven. Create the first keyframe at this point in time with the current value. Now move to the second number nine and change the opacity to zero. Finally, let's ease these key frames. Now let's lower the quality and see how it looks. I think it's great. Now let's set the quality to full and prepare to render the scene just before rendering. Let's clean up the software to avoid unexpected issues during rendering. To do that, go to Edit, Purge, and select all memory and disk cache. Then hit Okay and wait a few seconds. Now let's organize the project panel, Create a folder called Assets, and drag the folders with the logo layers and the solid folder into it, and the Viking icon file. Next, create a new folder called precomps. And drag all the precomps we created during the project into it, except for the main composition, which we can tag with a different color. Next, let's close these pre comps. Press control S to save the project. Now press control M to access the render panel in output mode. Choose H 0.264 40 MBPS. And render the animation to our renders folder, check the name, press save and then render. And now wait for a moment. Great. And now let's see what we got. It looks excellent. You should be proud of yourselves, as you have learned a lot today. And now let's go back to our project and close it. This time we don't need to organize the project because we already did it before rendering. So just close the program and save the project. Remember to close Illustrator as well. I hope you enjoyed the session, and I look forward to seeing you in the final lesson of this course. We'll create a super cool logo animation for a made up animal sanctuary by diving deep into working with a camera in a three D space. It's going to be awesome. So see you there. 34. Logo #4 Home task: Hi there. I hope you found the lessons helpful and learned some new and interesting things. To better remember everything we covered, I highly recommend practicing by completing this homework assignment. Your task is to recreate this cool animation. You have the freedom to change the colors and add any additional graphics you like whenever you face any issues or have some questions. Feel free to check the AE project file to see the steps I took. Additionally, you can always reach out to me for help. Good luck. 35. Logo #5 - Animating a logo for an animal shelter: Hello there. In this lesson, we will create an awesome logo animation for an imaginary wild animal shelter. This type of animation is super popular. There will always be a company asking you to create an animation where all of its employees come together with the company's logo. In this lesson, we will delve deeply into the world of three D space and after effects and three D camera movement. We will also learn how to build the project smartly so that you can easily change to a different or add a new image without affecting the animation. This animation consists of three main animated parts. We will create each part separately and then connect and time them together. Let's dive straight into it. 36. How to organize a lot of pictures in a 3D space: Hi and welcome to the final lesson for this course. Let's start the lesson by seeing how this logo is made in Illustrator. For this, let's open the main folder we created for the course and enter the AI folder. Now let's open the fifth logo. This design is also split into several layers. There's a background layer, a layer for the orange rectangle, a layer for the main text, which is an outline text layer. That means that this is not a text layer that we can change the text next, and a layer for the slogan. The slogan is a regular text layer written in the Monserrat font. All right, now as always, before diving into after effects, we need to think of an interesting way to animate it. As I always say, it's very important to create a rough storyboard sketch of the idea that can connect to the concept of the logo. Let's open the ideas file and check out what I have planned for this animal shelter logo design. Since the company is all about providing a home for animals, I thought it would be cool to have all the animals come together in the logo. That way we can show that the company is bringing all these animals together and giving them a home. Just so you know, this is the kind of animation that big companies and corporations use all the time. Okay, now let's open After Effects Together, we can close this window so that we can all see the same panel arrangement. Let's click on Default. Now let's move on to creating our first composition. We'll name it Logo Animation five. Next, let's go to three D render. Since in the previous lesson we use the Cinema four D renderer. Let's make sure we are currently on classic three D, not Cinema four D, because we don't need to use that renderer in this project. Once done, let's go back to Basic and continue with the composition settings this time as well. We will work in full. Hd format is 1,920 pixels in width and 1080 pixels in height. Then let's set the frame rate at 30 frames per second, and the composition will be 20 seconds long. We'll keep the composition background black. Finally, click Okay. Now let's import our logo design into the project. Double click on the empty area in the project panel, then go into the AI folder and select the fifth logo. Make sure not to check this function and press Import here. We already know that we need to select composition, because we want this file in separate layers. Here, we'll select layer size, because we want the layer boundaries to match the objects size, not the documents size. Now let's import the animal pictures to our project. You can find them in the Assets folder. I downloaded these pictures from the Vado website. You should now see another folder here called New Ignore it For now, we will get to it at the end of the lesson. In the meantime, let's select all the pictures here and click Import. Now let's click here to see the pictures in a more organized form. Before we begin working on the first scene, let's save the project and give it a name. This time we'll do it using the shortcut control. Now let's find the folder we created for the lesson. Enter the AE folder and give the after effects project we're working on a name. You can select this project to sample the name and change it to five, underscore trust. Once done, click on Save. Now let's learn how to deal with projects with many pictures where we may need to change the pictures at any time in the project. Because the client can always ask us to change or add a new picture along the way to create the project in a way that allows us to quickly change the pictures without affecting the animation. We need to create a pre comp for each picture. Let's create the first pre comp with the first picture to create a new pre comp press control. Let's name this pre comp photo one and decide that it will be in a format of 1080 by 1080 pixels. You can leave the other settings as they are Now click Okay, great. We have automatically jumped to the new pre comp. You can find it in the project panel as well. Now let's drag the first picture into this pre comp. As you can see, it's quite large. Let's press S and resize it to fit the dimensions of this precomp. I think 30 is excellent. Now let's move the photo here so we can see this teddy bear. Now let's make the corners of the image rounded. And we will do it using the track matte function. Let me show you what I mean. We need to ensure that we're not selecting the layer. Now make sure we're using the rectangle tool with a white fill color and no stroke. Next, double click here. This way we will create a rectangle that is exactly the size of this comp. Let's open the rectangle. Let's also open its path here. We will change the property called roundness. In my opinion, 100 is excellent. Let's close the layer. Now we can use this shape as a mask for the photo using a track mat function. If you don't see it, you can click here. Now let's drag the track mat. Pick whip of the image towards the square. There you have it. We've created rounded corners for the image. Basically, this image will only be visible within the borders of the square. Okay, I'll place the photo here. Now let's learn how to prepare the second picture, but without repeating all the actions we've done so far. For this, we need to duplicate the pre comp of the first image through the project panel. Let's select the composition and press control D automatically. After effects, we'll call the new composition photo two. That's great for us. Now let's enter this composition to replace the image and keep the same track. Mad at settings. We'll select the image layer here. Now let's drive the second image onto it while holding the Alt key. Finally, let's adjust the size and position of the image by holding out while dragging the new photo onto the previous one we basically replace between them while keeping the settings from the first photo. Now let's move on to creating the composition for the next image. Let's select this composition and duplicate it with control D. Let's go inside it. Select the image we want to replace and the onto it while holding the Alt key. Now let's reposition the new photo. Awesome, now let's repeat this action until we finish all the images. It's good that we're doing the same action many times because that way you'll remember it better. Okay, so after we've created all the pre comps for each in, we can close them from the layers panel. But instead of doing it manually, let's use a handy shortcut. Hold down the control key and press the key several times until we close all the pre comps for the images. If you accidentally close the main composition as well, just double click it in the project panel. All right, now to keep things organized in the project panel, let's create a new folder called animals Picks. Next, let's select all the images and drag them into this folder. Now let's create another folder called precomps and drag all the precomps for the images into it. Awesome. Before we move on, let's press control to save everything we've done so far. Now let's open the precomps folder and drag all the precomps for the images into the main composition. You can close this folder now. Now we'll learn how to spread these layers in three D space. For this, first we need to create a new camera. Right Click here, go to New and select Camera. We'll work with the one node camera with a 35 millimeter lens. Click Okay. Now for the camera to interact with these precomps, we need to convert all these layers into three D layers. Let's click here to access the three D layers function. Now let's select all the layers and convert them into three D layers to make it more convenient for us to spread the layers in the three D space. Let's switch our preview to custom view one, We can turn off the transparent background to see what we are doing better. We can also set the preview screen to fit. Now let's understand what is going on here. Here we can see our entire scene from the side. This is where the camera is located. Here are all the layers currently stacked on top of each other. Now we can select the second image and move it along the z axis handle. We could also move this layer through the layer itself. For this, let's press the key to see the position property. Now we can change the value of the z axis manually. Let's select the first image and press P to see its position as well as you can see the value of the z axis, it's currently set to zero. Let's change the zaxis value for the second image to 500. Now let's select the third image and press P to see its position also. And change the zaxis value to 1,000 Why 1,000 Because it's 500 pixels after the second image. This way we maintain a consistent distance between the layers in three dimensional space. Let's move on to the next layer and place it after the third picture. Instead of selecting it and moving it manually. Like this, we can simply change the z axis value to 1,500 Okay, you got the idea. Now let's enlarge this panel. Select all the layers and press to see their position. Then let's change the z axis for each one of them, adding 500 pixels to the value of the layer in front of it each time. All right, now let's click here to make sure no layer is selected. And press once then, once again to close the position for all the layers at once. Next, let's go back to Active Camera to see how our scene looks through the camera we created. Now let's move on to the next part of the project. And keep organizing the images across the three D space and mix up their position to keep things interesting. It's going to be a fun ride. See you in the next part. But before you dive into the next lesson, I highly recommend that you take a ten minute break, get up from your chair, do some light stretching, and drink a glass of water. This will help you to recharge your brain for the next lesson. 37. 3D Camera: Welcome back. Let's learn how to randomize the images across the three D space. First, we can start by moving the image to the sides to do that and continue to see how the scene looks through the camera. We can work with two views. When working with this method, it's important to pay attention to the blue frame here. It means that we are currently selecting this panel. Meaning that all the settings here will apply to this panel only if I tweak the preview background, we will see it on the right panel only. Now when we click here, we will select this panel. Now all these settings will apply to it. Only in this panel we will see the scene from a top perspective that is from above. Now, I don't want you to do this with me. Just listen. I want to explain what's happening here. We can also work here with custom D one. Now if I move the camera forward along its Z axis in the right panel, we will see the images getting larger. It's important to understand that we are not increasing the layer size of the object, but rather zooming in with the camera, making it appear larger. In other words, in this panel we see the scene through the camera's lens. Okay, So I will select this panel and set it back to the top view. Now you can do it with me. Let's move to this area using the middle mouse click. If you don't have the middle click on your mouse, you can hold down the space bar and drag the screen with the mouse. All right, now, before we position the images and move them to the sides, let's move our camera a bit backward. Now let's select the first image, hold the control key, and select every second layer. Now let's get closer and move these layers to the side using the x axis like this. Once done, let's click on the small square here and tag these layers with a different color. This will make it much easier to select the rest of the layers. Now click on the square of this layer and choose Select Layer Group. Now let's move these layers to the side, This. Next let's select the camera and move it forward and backward to check how the motion looks with the current arrangement of the pictures. As you can see, everything is too tight. In my opinion, we need to shrink the pictures a bit. To do this, let's select all these layers, process, and change the scale of all of them to 30. Now when we move the camera, we'll have some space between the pictures. Let's see how it looks. That's much better. All right, now let's animate our camera. Let's go to the beginning of the timeline. And move the camera to the point from which we want it to start moving, somewhere around here, before the last picture. Now let's press P and create the first key frame with the current value. Then let's move to the ten second and move the camera backward like this. Let's see how it looks. It looks great. It's a good time to press control as to save everything we've done so far. Now that we have the camera motion, we can navigate the timeline and arrange the pictures in a more interesting way. For example, we can stop at this point in time. We can lift the wolf up here, which is easy to do from this panel. Now, let's move forward in time and move the fox here. Next, let's move forward in time. We can place the leopard down here. Let's continue doing that until we finish arranging all the animals pictures across the three D space. Our goal is to scatter the pictures in such a way that when the camera reaches its last point, all the pictures will be approximately in the center of the scene. We'll understand why we're doing this very soon. For now, just moving forward in the timeline and continuing to arrange the pictures for now, this looks good. Let's see how it looks at the beginning of the camera's movement. But before that, let's select this panel and set the preview to fit so we can see the entire frame. All right, now let's see if there is a picture we need to adjust. We can move the leopard here. At this point, the camera is passing right through the picture and I don't like that. I'll stand at the problematic frame and move the picture to a slightly different position. There is another picture here that needs to be moved. We can move it a bit more to the right. Everything looks good so far. Now let's learn how to create a cool depth of field camera effect in our scene. This means that some parts of the images will be blurry and some will be in focus. To do this, let's close the camera and open it again. Now let's open the camera options. By the way, instead of doing it manually, we can simply press the key twice. All right, now let's activate the depth of field. Note that a new line has appeared in our camera. If we change the focus distance, this line will move. This line defines where the focus part will be. To understand what we're doing, let's raise the aperture to 100. Now we can see the depth of field. Better currently, the focus is next to the zebra layer. This layer is in focus and the rest of the layers are not. We can move the focus to the position of the dog layer to see where to move the focus point. We can select the dog layer from this panel. That way we can see its position in the top view. Now we can move the focus distance to that point. All right, I'm sure you got the point. Now let's place the focus distance somewhere in the middle of the camera lens. Since the camera is moving, it will look like the focus changes as the camera moves from one image to another. Let's check out how it looks. It looks awesome. Now we can close the camera and continue. Now let's press Control Why to create a solid that will function as our background in this scene. Change the name to B, G. Make sure the solid is the same size as the composition and change its color to white. Now let's move this layer down and we won't make it three D, So that it won't be affected by our camera's movement in the scene. That way, the background layer will stay in place when the camera moves. All right, once we finish composing the scene in the three D space, we can go back to working with view one. Now let's select all these layers and press control shift C to precompose them all. Let's call it Pick Comp. Make sure both options are selected and hit okay. Now we are ready for the next step where we will learn how to combine the logo of the company with the scene of the images. First, let's find the logo text and drag it into our composition. In the next step, we need to make the precompose of the images visible only within the text boundaries. To do this, let's click here and use the Track Mat function. Again, we want the pre comp of the pictures. We'll use the text layer as a mask. Therefore, we will drag the track Matt pick whip of the Pix pre comp towards the text layer. Now the text layer functions as a mat for the image pre comp. All right, now let's process and scale up this layer. As you can see, it's very pixelated right now. What function should we apply to the Illustrator layer to maximize its quality? To solve this problem, let's click here and apply the collapse function to this layer. Now the text is crisp and looks great. Once done, let's return the size to 100. Now let's go to the point in time when the camera motion ends in the image pre comp, let's say at the ten second mark. Now let's create the first key frame for the scale of this layer to tell after effects that at this point in time, we want this layer to be this size. Now let's go back to the beginning of the time line and scale up the layer until it covers the entire screen. We can grab the layer from this point and scale it while holding shift. Let's write 3,000 here, That's what we've got now. But we don't want to see the text shape at all at this moment. We need to adjust the position for it as well. For this, let's press Shift, and now let's go to the ten second mark. We'll set a key frame with the current value because we know that this layer needs to be where it currently stands at this point in time. Now let's go back to the beginning of the timeline and move the layer slightly to the right now We need to scale it up and continue synchronizing both parameters until we don't see the text parts. Okay, let's write 6,800 for scale and make sure we don't see the corners of the text. All right, now let's find a good point in time to start the shrinking of the text layer we just created. I think we can start this animation from the second number seven. Since this is the point where all the pictures are seen in the frame. Let's select these two key frames and move them to the second number seven. This is so that the text starts the animation from the second rather than the beginning. Let's see how it looks. As you can see, the text moves very quickly towards the end. This happens because there is a huge change in the value parameter of the scale within a very short time. To fix this, let's select all the key frames and press F nine to ease them. Now, move these two key frames to frame number six to make the animation a bit longer. Let's see it now. It looks better. Now let's go to second number ten and create the part where the text turns white. To do this, we can enter the composition of the images. Now to make this happen, duplicate the white background and place it above all layers. Now press the left bracket to move this layer to the position of the time indicator. Now press to display the opacity of this layer. Let's create a key frame with an opacity of zero here. Move to the second 12 and change the opacity to 100. Finally, let's select these key frames and press F nine to ease them. Let's see how it looks. It looks good. Now press center on this layer and change the name to white Fade. Now when we return to the main composition, we can see that we have created the effect where the text turns white. Okay, now it's a good time to press control S to save everything we've done so far. Now let's import the rectangle of the logo by dragging it into our composition. Now for the best animation results, we need to convert this illustrator layer into a shaped layer with paths that we can adjust and scale. To do this, right click on the layer. Go to Create and select Create Shapes from vector layer. You can delete this layer now. Now open this shape layer until you see its path. Then go to the point in time where the text finishes its animation, which is the second number ten. Create the first key frame for the path in its current shape. Now go to second number eight to see what we are doing. We can isolate the layer and now select the top points of the path and drag them upwards outside of the scene while holding the shift key. Now select this part and drag it down. Next, let's zoom out a bit, select the side points and move them to the sides. As you can see, a new key frame was automatically created on this path. This means that the shape of this path will look like that, all the way up until the second number seven. This shape won't change until it gets to the first key frame, only after that it will start shrinking. All right, now let's select these key frames and press F nine to convert them to AsE's. Next, let's hold the Alt key and double click on one of the key frames to change the velocity, Set it to 85 for both axises, and hit. Okay, let's check it now. Okay, now let's disable the isolation, close the layer, and see how it looks in relation to what's happening in the scene. I think the rectangle animation starts too early to fix this, press you to see the key frames on this layer. Now let's find a better time for this animation to start. I think it should start from the second nine, select them and move them to second number nine. Let's check it now. Okay, let's leave it like this for now and move on to the next part of the animation, which is to create a background for the main comp we are currently in. As you can see, if I turn on the preview transparency background, we don't have any background right now. Let's create one for this. Let's select the background layer from the original logo design. Let's create a solid in the color of that background. Finally, move the solid down. Now we have a nice background in the scene. Great, we can now move on to animating the logo slogan. Let's bring the slogan layer into our scene. Now let's place it in the scene. We can go forward in time to see where to move it. Now, hold down the shift key and move it down using the arrow keys on the keyboard. Now, to avoid it interfering with the animation, let's position this layer below the rectangle so that the rectangle will hide it this way. We only see it when the rectangle shrinks. Great. Now let's create a cool sweep that will pass over the slogan to capture the viewer's attention. For this, let's click here to ensure we are not selecting any layer. And select the rectangle tool, set the field to white and make sure the stroke is off. Now zoom in a bit and create a rectangle that looks like this. Now let's select this layer and press, let's rotate the layer by 30 degrees. Now let's go to the second number 11. Go back to the selection tool. Move this layer here while holding the shift key. Now press to see the position property for this layer and then create the first key frame. Next, go to second 13 and move the layer here while holding the shift key. Then select these key frames and press F nine to make them easy. Ease. Awesome. Now let's press center on this layer and change the name to slogan Mat, or you can call it Slogan Sweep. All right, now let's position this layer above the slogan layer. Click here to see the track matt function. Now drag the track pick whip of the white rectangle towards the slogan layer. This will ensure that the rectangle is only visible within the slogan shape. Finally, let's turn back on the slogan layer. Then click here and apply the collapse for this layer. Now let's see how it looks. Looks nice. Let's press control S to save the project. Now let's move on to the next part and create an outro animation for the entire scene we've created. 38. How to easily replace pictures: Welcome back. Let's create nutroanimation for this scene. But before that, let's organize our project a bit. First, let's select these two layers and tag them in orange. That is because these two layers create the slogan part animation. Next we'll tag this layer in brown. These two layers will also tag in brown because these three layers relate to the same part of the animation, the animation of the main logo. Great, now to make this animation end with a white background, let's duplicate this orange rectangle layer, tag it in a brighter color. Now press you to see its key frames. Go to the second number 13 and move them somewhere around here. For now. Then right click on one of the key frames and reverse their animation. Then move the key frames to the second number 13. Now let's change the color of this layer to white and position it beneath the orange rectangle. That is how we created the white background that needs to be seen at the end of this animation. Now let's create an outro animation for the rest of the layers in the scene. First, select the text layer hold control, and select the orange rectangle layer. Press S and go to the second number 13. Create a new key frame for the orange rectangle and another for the text layer. Now let's move to the second number 15. Scale down the layers to zero. Next, let's select these keyframes and press nine to ease them. Now hold out and double click on one of the key frames to change the velocity. Let's see how it looks. Looks great. Now let's stand at the second number 15. You can close these layers. Now press N to trim the work area to this point in time. Now let's watch the entire animation from start to finish. It looks great. Now let's learn how to add new images to our animation, because this can be a very possible scenario when creating animation with lots of pictures. First, let's click twice on the project panel and enter the folder name. We will select the three new images and click Import. To keep our project organized, let's open the image folder. Select all the images and tag them in green so we know they've been used. Now let's place the new images in this folder to see the order of the images more conveniently, we can click here to arrange them by their color. Okay, now let's enter the composition of the images. Let's say we were asked to add new images to a scene. To do it in the fastest way possible, first we need to duplicate the composition we already have in the scene through the project panel. Select composition number 12, and press control D. Let's enter the composition, then select the image we want to replace. Now we'll drag the new image in its place while holding the Alt key. Once done, position the image and tag it in green so we know it has been used