The Knit Sweater Look In Adobe After Effects

1. Class Trailer: Hey, I'm Jake Bartlett and this is the Knit Sweater Look in After Effects. In this class, I'm going to show you a super simple technique for creating this really awesome looking effect. It's completely procedural, which means whatever you put into the effect will come out looking like a knit sweater, even animation. This technique is extremely simple. So even if you don't have much knowledge of After Effects at all, you'll still be able two follow along. For the class project, you'll be applying this effect to anything you'd like. It could be an animated holiday greeting that you turn into a gift, or even just as still graphic. This class is for anyone, whether you're an animator who's very familiar with After Effects, or you're a designer who's just interested in this effect. I'll walk you through every step of the process to turning your designs and animations into a knit sweater. So grab a cup of hot cocoa, cozy up by the fire, and let's get knitting. I'll seen you in class. 2. Building the Knit: So here's the artwork for my title graphic before the effect has bean applied. I've maid this completely inside of After Effects, but you don't have to make it an After Effects. You could bring in graphics from Illustrator or Photoshop, I'm just pretty comfortable building things inside of After Effects and it made adjustments really easy to make. Now, as you can see, this has a little bit of animation on it. I have the snowfall, but nothing complex. If you wanted to, you could use this effect purely for still graphics. I think this effect is so easy to build and use that even if you're not using it for animation, it's still a really great weigh to achieve this effect. Once you have your artwork and after effects, you need to make a new comp. Now, I made my comp 1920 buy 1,080 at 30 frames per second. But really, you can set the resolution and frame rate to whatever you'd like. The first thing we need to do is add an adjustment layer. So I'm going to come up to Layer, New, Adjustment Layer. Make sure that that's at the very top of your layer stack. I'm going to rename this by pressing "Enter," and call it knit texture. Then I'll start adding some effects two it. So come over to my Effects and Presets and type in ball. Under simulation, we see CC ball action. If I apply this to the Adjustment Layer, instantly you see that we get this pixellated look. Let me zoom in 100 percent so you can see exactly what's going on. If I come over to the effects controls and turn the ball size down, you can see that this effect is splitting up our graphic into a bunch of different circles. If I increase the grid spacing, the circles get bigger. For now I'm going to leave this at, say six. Then I'll turn the ball size up until there's just a tiny little bit of gap between each circle. I'll zoom this, come back out to fit by pressing Shift question mark. One thing I want to point out quickly is that I'm viewing my comp at full resolution. I suggest that you work in fool resolution for this because watch what happens if I turn this down to half. You see that everything changed just slightly. When I drop it down to quarter, it changes even more. The only way you're going to know exactly how this is going to render in the end is if you leave this at full quality Next, we need to add another effect, so we'll come over to my Effects and Presets and type in wave warp. I'll apply that below the ball action. You can see that this effect is warping my image. Let me just turn off ball action so you can clearly see what's going on. I turned it off and back on, especially up here at the top, you can see that it's warping it in this oscillating motion. I want to change the wave type from sign, which is what's giving this the curved warp, and change it to triangle. Now this is much more jagged. You see that there's no curving with this warp. Then if I move my play head in the comp, you see that this effect is actually animated. The wave is actually moving as the time goes on. I want to turn that wave speed off. So if you come down to wave speed and change one to zero, it no longer animates. I'll turn ball action back on, and let me zoom in here so we can see how these two effects are going to work together. Right now you can see that the wave warp is going up and down about every three or four circles. What we want is for that up and down to happen every two circles to create this effect. So if I come to the wave width and turn that down, see that our waves get narrower and narrower. I'm going to turn this down a little bit more till we get right where we need to be. Right there at 14, I think that's just write. You can see that we've got these V shapes now every two circles. So one goes down, one goes up. If I adjust my wave height down a little bit, we can get something that looks a little bit more like this knit texture. So very simply, with those two effects, we can achieve this knit-looking pattern. The problem is, if I want to change the size of the knitting, I need to adjust the grid spacing. So let's say I drop this down to maybe 16. Now my wave warp isn't lining up with that grid and I'd have to adjust this width down again. As you can see, it's not very easy to do by eyes. What I want to do is link the wave width to the grid spacing size of the ball action effect. We'll do this very simply using expressions. If you don't known what expressions are, its After Effects coding language that's based on JavaScript. I know that for most motion designers, coding is just not a language that we speak. So don't get freaked out. It's actually very simple and we're going to do it really quickly and easily. What I'll do is click on my Adjustment Layer and press E on the keyboard to bring up the effects. Then I'll twirl down the wave warp and the ball action, and I'm going to give myself a little bit more space here by dragging the timeline up. Now, what we need to do is figure out the ratio between the wave width and the grid spacing. Fortunately, I've already figured out this ratio, so you don't have to do any complicated work. What the ratio is, is the wave width needs to be the grid spacing times two plus two. So whatever this number is, double it and add two to it. For a grid spacing of four, it should be 4 times 2, which is 8, plus 2, which is 10. Just like that, you can see that now my texture is lined up. If I increase this to five, then I would change the wave width to 5 times 2, which is 10 plus 2. There you go, it's lining up. How do we get After Effects to automatically do that math? Well, we need to add an expression to the wave width. To do that, just hold down Option or Alt on a PC and click on the stopwatch for the wave width property. That will open up the expressions dialog box and automatically fill in the code that references that effect. We don't need that, so I'm just going to press "Delete." Then I'm going to come over here to this little pick whip, and this behaves a lot like the parenting pick whip. You can just click and drag it and then select something, but because it's the expression pick whip, instead of parenting, it's going to grab the expression code for whatever I select. If I come up to the grid spacing property for the ball action effect and let go, after effects automatically fills in the expression code that it needs to reference that. Even though I didn't know exactly how to code this, I'm able to generate it very easily by using that expression pick whip. You don't even need to know exactly what this is saying, you just need to know that that's the code that references that property. So After Effects is translating this as grid spacing, then we need to add times two double that value, and then we need to add two to add two to that value. Then you just click off of that dialog box to apply the expression, and you see that this number is now red, and that means that it is a value being generated by an expression. If I try and change this value, the number changes, but as soon as eye let go, it snaps back to what it was. So we can't change this value anyway other than adjusting the grid spacing. Let's see what happens if I turn the grid spacing down. That number changed from 12-10. If I go down won more, now it's eight. That's perfect. That's exactly what we needed. But as you can see, when I change the grid spacing down pretty low, the wave height is now a little bit off. I did some playing around and I found that the wave height really should be half of what the wave width is. If the wave width is eight, then the height should be four, and then that looks a lot more realistic. Again, I don't want to have to change this number by hand every time that I change the grid spacing. Now we're going to link the wave height to the wave width. Again, hold down Option or Alt on a PC, click on the stopwatch, grab the expression pickup whip for the wave height, and this time reference the wave width. After Effects fills in that code, and then we'll divide that by two. Then I'll click "Off." Now, this number is always going to bee half of this number, and this number is always going to be double this number plus two. All of that math is done for us, and now I can turn my grid spacing up or down, and this knit texture will always look correct. Just like that, we wrote a couple of very simple expressions that make working with this affect a hole lot easier. I'm going to give myself sum more room to view this comp, and then we'll come back to the ball action effect. If I zoom in here, it's very subtle and pretty hard to notice, but maybe if I turn my grid spacing down a little bit, you can see that these two shapes don't line up exactly right, but we can easily correct this. If we come to the wave warp effect, and then adjust this phase number, if I just slide it, you can seen that it is shifting where that wave warp is centered. If I dial this back to maybe about right there, so around negative 11, those two shapes line up now. That's just a tiny detail, but it makes for a little bit more symmetrical effect. Next we have the ball size in the ball action effect. If I turn this down, you see those circles get smaller, so that knit gets much more spread out. I found that a value around 60 works pretty well, but that is a value that you can play around with depending on what effect you're going for. I'm going to set mine to 60, but that's basically where you can change the size of your yarn. 3. Adding Some Imperfection: Now I want to add one more effect to this adjustment layer, because right now this is a very perfect looking pattern. It's very digital and doesn't look all that realistic. So if I come over to my Effects and Presets and type in turbulent displace, and apply that to my adjustment layer. I'll zoom to fit the comp so you can see what's happening. It's warping the image in a very random way. You can play around with the size and the amount to get different looks. I want the size to be very small, so I'm going to type in something like 10. You can see that this distortion is a whole lot smaller now and the amount is way too high, so I'm going to drop that down two 10 as well. Now that it's much smaller, I'm going to fine-tune this by dragging this number down, and maybe turning the amount up a little bit. Basically, what I'm trying to do is just make this grid not so perfect. You can see that these shapes are not so symmetrical anymore. I think I'm going to turn the size down even further, because I really want this to be tiny little details. I don't want to go too crazy with the amount. You see that this is now starting to look a little too distorted. So maybe we'll go somewhere around 35, and that still looks like a knit sweater but if I turn it off and on, you can see that it just adds this little level of detail, tiny bit of imperfection that looks really nice. I'll zoom to fit again by pressing Shift question mark, and already we have a very convincing looking effect. Again, if you adjust the grid spacing, you're essentially adjusting the resolution of your knit, which is funny to think of it that way, but that's exactly what you're doing. If you turn it up higher, you can see this text down here is pretty much unreadable, and the same thing for right here. If you keep the grid spacing down to around three or four, I think that's a sweet spot where you can tell that this is a knit sweater pattern, but you can still read things pretty well. You can always turn the grid spacing down to two, but at one you can see that that pattern is pretty much gone. So I wouldn't go any further down than two. I'm going to bump this back up to three and I'll leave it there for now. Then I'm going to select all of my layers by pressing Command A or Control A on a PC, and I want to pre-compose them. I'm going to come up to Layer and then all the way at the bottom Pre-compose. This is just going to group all of the layers I have selected into a new composition and replace these layers with that composition. I'll name this comp KnitSweater Title Source, and then press OK. Now if I zoom in here again, and turn on my transparency grid rate here, you'll notice that between these knits, there actually is nothing, that black is transparency. So we need to add a layer behind this one to fill in those gaps. I'm going to make a new shape layer by deselecting my layer, and then double-clicking on this rectangle tool up here that automatically makes a rectangle that's the size of my comp, and I need to come up here and turn the fill on. I'll press OK and then I want to turn my stroke off. Hit OK. I'll rename this layer BG for background, and then I'll send it to the back by dragging it down like this. Now if I zoom in here again, you can see that between these gaps we now have this dark and blue color because that's the color of the fill for that layer. But I want it to be a slightly darker version of this red. So if I grab an eyedropper and then click on that red, I'll just drag it down until it's a little bit darker to add a little bit of contrast, but it keeps the same color of what the sweater is supposed to be. Let me zoom to fit again, and with that off, it actually makes a pretty big difference going from nothing to having that red background. That's an important detail. 4. The Cozy Texture: This effect looks pretty good as it is, but if I zoom in here again, you see that this pattern doesn't have a much texture to it. It actually doesn't have any texture at all. They are very solid shapes. I want to add a thread texture to this so that it actually looks like yarn. I'm going to add a new solid by going up to Layer, New Solid and I'll start with a black solid. Press "Okay". Then I'll duplicate this by pressing "Command" or "Control D" and then I'll come up to Layer, Solid settings and I want to change this color to white. Now, I have a black and a white solid. Then I'll come over to my Effects and Presets and type Venetian for Venetian blinds, and I'll apply this to the white solid, and I'll change the transition completeness to 50. I want to change the direction to 90 degrees and the width down to 10. Now I've just got these horizontal white stripes. Next I want to add wave warp again, write underneath a Venetian blinds, and here you can really see how this effect is warping, and we're going to change the wave type from sign to noise. This gives us a very interesting texture. I'm going to change the wave height up to something around 30 and the wave width down to around 30 as well. Then if I pan up hear by holding down spacebar and clicking and dragging. You can see at the edges, we're getting this darker area. We can eliminate some of this by coming down to painting and changing it to all edges. I known that looks a little bit strange, but the way that we're going to use it, it will be just fine. Now, I'm going to select both of these layers and pre-compose them by coming up to Layer, Pre-compose, and I'll name this yarn texture and then press "OK." Then I'm going to set this layers blending mode to overlay. If I zoom in here, you can see that that texture is now overlaid on top of our art work, but it's a little too strong. I'm going to press "T" to bring up the opacity and then turn the opacity down to something around say, 35. Now, we have a pretty convincing looking thread texture on top of our artwork. Now that this is pre-composed, if I zoom in here and scrub through my timeline, you can see that that effect is updating, because inside of that comp, the wave warp speed is set to one. Now, we could set this to zero, but after effects is still going to have to process those two effects for every frame of the animation, and it's going to slow down your render. Instead of bothering with that, I'm going to freeze this comp so that only one frame is ever rendered, the first frame. I will right-click on this, come down to time and then say, "freeze frame" and that just enables time remapping and adds a hold key-frame on the first frame. Now that effect will not process throughout this timeline. You can seen as I scrub through, nothing is changing. That it's a very convincing looking knitted texture and pattern that we just created 100 percent within After Effects. 5. Polishing It Off: To finish it off, I'm just going to add a little bit of effects so that this entire image doesn't look so flat. Again, we're going to add a new adjustment layer by going to Layer, New Adjustment Layer and I'll rename this Effects. Then I'm going to type in unsharp mask in my effects in presets and apply that to the Adjustment Layer and I want to turn the radius way up, probably around 400. Then I'm going to turn the amount down, so probably around 20. You can see what that's doing to the design. Then I want to add a glow, so I'll come to my effects and type in glow, grab glow under stylize. Probably turn the threshold up just a little bit, turn the radius up to probably 100 and then the intensity way down so probably put it around 0.3 and that's just adding a very subtle glow that gives the entire image a little bit of a color grade. If I turn this whole Adjustment Layer on and off, you can see that it's just very subtly adjusting the entire image. Let me zoom to fit again. Try to give us a little bit more space. Finally I want to add a vignette but I want to do it with an effect that produces some pretty unique looking shapes. I'm going to come on to effects and type in spotlight and drag that out underneath the glow. You can see that this gives us this spotlight looking effect. If I grab this little controller here, I can adjust what direction that spotlight is coming from and you see that it affects the shape. I'm going to zoom out by pressing the Comma key on the keyboard a couple times and then I'm going to drag this up two the left. You can't see it very well but right here in the center, I have another control that if I click and drag, this is where the light is shining. We have these two points to control where the light is hitting and where it's coming from. Next thing I want to do is turn the edge softness way up probably to a 100 percent and then change the cone angle to be much wider. Something around 25 looks pretty good. Then we can adjust the height to change the shape of that shadow. If I bring this in a little bit so we can see it better. You see the height at zero gives us basically a directional light straight down. If I bring it up to 100, it's like it's hitting it straight on like you're pointing a flashlight at it. I want to put the height around 30 and then bring this back out and then position this so that most of the image is lit up. I'm going to adjust the cone angle a little bit more, maybe adjust the height up a little bit and then I'm going to turn the intensity down so that the darkness isn't quite so dark. Again, I'm going for very subtle adjustments here. I don't want to overdo any of these effects. I'll zoom to fit again, and if I turn this Adjustment Layer on and off again, you can see that it's just adding a very subtle vignette and then adding a little bit of a color grade over the entire image. Nothing complex and that completes the effect. 6. Swapping Out Art & Basic Animation: Now that you have this built, you can go into your source comp, and whatever you put into this will automatically have the knit texture applied to it. So for example, if I turn off all of this artwork, I can bring in a new layer, say this star wars artwork that I just happened to have, and then come back to my title, and it automatically updates to fit this new artwork. If I zoom in here, you'll see that the color between the thread is still red. So just be aware of that. You could break up each won of these colors into there own sweater texture, or maybe just make it a very dark, desaturated color so that it adds a little bit of contrast to fill in that transparency. Like you saw with the title, this effect even works with animation. So if I just very quickly turn the knit texture adjustment layer off so I can seen more clearly, and I'll select all my artwork layers. Then I'll go forward in time, maybe 15 frames. There we go at frame 15, and I'll hold Option or Alt on a PC and press R to add a rotation key frame as well as S to add a scale keyframe. Then I'll back up to the first frame, select all of these quay frames, and then just slide the rotation back a little bit and turn the scale down to zero. Then I'll select the second set of key frames for all of the properties, press F9 on the keyboard to add an easy ease, and then open up the graph editor, zoom in here, select the second set of key frames here just by dragging a box around all of those properties, and then increase the influence to that handle. That's just going to increase the amount of ease of that motion. If you don't known what the graph editor is, I have an entire class dedicated to it. It's called animating with ease in after effects, and you can checked that out in the notes of this class. Let's ram preview this by setting our work area. I'll press N to snap the out point to my playhead, and then I'll ram preview by pressing zero on the number pad. Now all of those heads are animated. Then I'll come out of the graph editor and press U to collapse all of those layers. Finally, I just want to offset each one and these and by a couple frames. The quickest way to do this is to back up say, two frames. So if this is frame one, then I'll press Page Down to go one frame forward. Then I'll hold Option or Alt on a PC and press the write bracket to trim all of those layers, so they're all two frames each. Then I will select the layer that I want to start, which is this top left one, hold Shift and select the rest of them. It's important that you do it in the order that you want these to be layered. Then I will right-click, scroll down to keyframe assistant and say sequence layers. I'll press, Okay. You can see that After Effects is automatically staggered, each one of these layers front-to-back. Then I'll press End to go to the end of my comp and hold Option, and press the right bracket again to expand all of those layers to the last frame of the comp. I'll press Home to get back to the front, and then ram preview again. Now you see that all of those heads are animated, staggered by two frames each. Great. Now I can turn my knit texture back on. We'll go back out to our mane comp. I'll fit this comp in that window, go forward a few frames until all the heads are on, and then ran preview. As you can see, it does take a little bit of time to render, and that's just because there are a bunch of effects working together. But the end result is well worth it. There you have it, a fully animated knit sweater texture. If you take a look at BB aids head, his antenna is not showing up. This is something you can run into just because of the way that the effect works. To fix it, I'm going to go back into my source comp, and I'm going to grab that layer, and zoom in, and you can see again that antenna is just gone. But if I tap the right or left arrow keys just once or twice, you see there it pops in. Sometimes with fine lines, depending on your grid size, they could disappear. So you might have to do a little bit of nudging hear and there to get things to look the way that you want them to. Then I can come back, and there you go, his antenna is back, and that's all there is to it. 7. Animating The Snow: I probably should have known, but many of you already have asked me how I animated this snowfall. I known I probably should have just shown you, it's actually way simpler than you might think. Let's just take a look and I'll walk you through how I did it. First of all, if I turn off the effect, you'll see that it's just blocks that are falling from the top down to the bottom, and that's it. If you look at my timeline, it's just looping nine frames. The way that it worked out, I was able to just get it to loop seamlessly in those nine frames and that was very nice when exporting a gift because I only needed those nine frames. I made the file size very small. Let's jump in to my comp and let's take a look at this first precomp that I have called snowfall row 1. If we take a look at this comp, you see that it's just a single row. Again, this comp is made up of a bunch of precomps itself. They're actually 60 layers of the same animation. If I open up one of these and you see I have a single rectangle, I'll press u to open up the key frames and I've just animated the position from the top of the comp to this position here and that's just where the title cuts it off at the base of the trees. That's why it only goes that far down. Now, I resized my comp to be just 20 pixels wide because the rectangle is 20 pixels, and that maid lining everything up later on easier. But let's just start here. We have the single snowflake moving down the screen. Now, I knew that this rectangle is going to produce the shape that I needed because I started with this layer, I'll copy this in my sauce comp so I could see what the effect was doing to that single rectangle. Let me just turn off the snowfall for now, and I will paste that layer that I copied right there. There it is write here. This is what told me that a 20 pixel rectangle was enough to fill up one section of this knit, so the two halves of the one knit, and I made it ten pixels tall, so it only filled up one row. If I were to change the height of this rectangle to 20, then it's going to take up more of those knits and I didn't want that. I just sized it down. It looks like it was actually 18 and eight. If I expanded this to 20, it still works, but anyway, 18 worked just fine, so that's what I used. Then I animated it. You see that my position has these red numbers. Again, that means that there's an expression applied. If I twirl this down, I'll disable the expression and show you what it looks like without it. I'll just run preview this much of the animation. You see that as it comes down every now and then, there's like this halfway in-between state. I guess it's only happening up at the top. Let's back up to that point and you seen like right there, right there, there's a halfway point where it's going semi-transparent and is taking up two of these sections at once. To understand what's going on, let me go up to my knit texture and I'll disable the turbulent displace and the wave warp, so we can see just the bawl action. What's happening is that this snowflake layer is showing up right in-between this grid section right hear. The effect is blending some of it into this row and some of it down into this row. If I turn the effect off and hide my outlines by pressing Command Shift H, you see that even After Effects is blending these edges. This is called anti-aliasing and it's a way to make graphics look smoother when you're dealing with in between pixel values. What the expression does is rounds the pixel values of the position to whole numbers. Right now the y position is 24.3 pixels, but if I enable my expression, it rounds it to the nearest hole number. You see that those soft edges are now gone. That's true for the entire animation now. No matter how I animate this, the values will always be rounded off to the nearest whole pixel. That can solve a lot of problems if you're running into that in-between anti-aliasing, that can sometimes happen with this effect. That's why I'm pointing it out. Now it's a little bit more complex to understand, but let me just walk you through it. I'll take it off. We need to start by understanding that a position value by default, is not a single number. It has two values on the same property or if it's a 3D layer, it will have three. When writing an expression for it, we can't just come up with a single value. We have two have a value for each one of these properties. I'm going to add my expression by holding Option or Alt on a PC and clicking on the stopwatch. The way that you written an array is by typing in open bracket, a value, comma, the second value, and then a closing bracket. This is called an array. What's in this first value is what will be plugged into the first value of the position property. Then the second will be applied in a second. This is the x and this is the y. If I said 100, 200, and clicked off, now my position value is 100 on the x and 200 on the y. Instead of doing that, we need to type in an expression that will round whatever value the position currently is at. Let's edit this expression again. Instead of 100, we're going to type capital Math.round, open parenthesis, and then I'm going to grab the pick whip and select the x value of the position, and that will automatically fill in the code for that, and then put a closing parentheses. The expression is saying round the value of the position x value, which is represented by a zero here. X is zero, y is one. Now let's do the same thing for the y. Instead of 200, we'll say Math.round, open parentheses, then click the pick whip and select the y value, and then closing parentheses. Then I can click off. There you go. Now my expression is written and the values are rounded. Once I have that working, I could turn my effect back on. I precomped this layer, which is what brought me to this comp. So I had this single snowflake falling. Then I duplicated that single snowflake 60 times so that it filled the entire width of the comp. Then I offset each one of these layers by a little bit in time. It was pretty much completely random. I just duplicated the layer 60 times and then shifted all of these around until the snowfall looked pretty much random. If I ran preview this, you see this is just one row that falls down to the ground. Again, I line that up with the base of these trees. Once I had all of those laid out, I precompted again, and then in my source comp, I duplicated that precomp a bunch of times. If I solo all of my snow layers and ram preview, what I did to get to this point was offset each one of these duplicates by a few frames. If I remember right, it was five frames at a time. But the way that I got it to loop seamlessly was by using time remapping. Let me just duplicate one of these. I'll turn off all the other layers and then I'll open up the time remapping and delete it. We're left with just the single precomp where the snowflake row falls once. Now, I wanted this to loop forever. What I did was right-clicked, went to time, and then enable time remapping. What this does is adds the key frame at the first frame and the last frame of that comp and extends the layer out to bee the entire length of the competence in. That's it. But now I can play around with this timing. If I extend this out, it'll take longer. If I bring it in, it'll be shorter. I didn't want to mess with the speed of the snowfall. Instead, I wanted it to loop once it got to this point. I added another very simple expression by holding Option or Alt and clicking on that stopwatch and typing loop capital OUT for loop out, and then open parenthesis and close parenthesis. Now, once it reaches that second key frame, it automatically jumps back to the first frame and then loops. It will do that forever. Once I had that looping, I duplicated it, offset it by five frames, duplicated again, offset five more frames, and so on until I had enough of these layers to fill up that nine-frame loop. Then once I had enough of the layers, I just backed them all up until the last frame of the first layer was at the beginning of my comp. That way I new the loop would be 100 percent seamless, and that ended up looking just like this. Like I said, it's really not that complex. It's just a lot of layering, offsetting in time, but it's all based on that single snowflake comp. If I were to go into that precomp and adjust the easing so that it starts fast and ends slow, that would affect the entire snowfall animation and you see now my pattern looks completely different. It starting out fast, and then slowing down at the bottom, as opposed to starting out slow, and gradually gaining speed. If I took the easing off completely, then the animation will be a consistent speed. I wanted it to be a little bit more dynamic, so that's why I eased it. Then once you combine that with the effect, because we have that rounding position expression applied, the snowfall is represented by an entire knit for each snowflake with none of those in-between positions. That's how I animated by snow. I hope this was useful to you. Thank you very much for the feedback. I'm always interested in what you're interested in learning. Thank you for speaking up and keep up the great work. 8. Exporting A Still Image: If you want to export your design as a single frame, all you have to do is come up to Composition, save frame as file. That will add whatever frame you're on in your timeline to your render queue. This is how we export things out of After Effects. If you need to export an animation, you would just go to composition, add to render queue. If you need instructions on how to make a gift, check on my other class, compressing gifts like a boss, where I explained my top three ways to compress gifts after animating in After Effects. We have a still frame set up in our render queue, and it's by default going to output as a PNG. I want to change this to a JPEG. So I'm going to click on this blue text. Under my output module settings, I'm going to go to the format and change it from PNG sequence to JPEG sequence. Then I'm going to come to my format options and I'll lower the quality to five. You can play around with this setting to balance quality with file size. Then I'll hit Okay, and I'll press Okay one more time, and then over here, you seen Output 2 and some more blue text. If I click on that, I can tell After Effects where to export the frame. Now, I don't need this time code, so I'm just going to go ahead and get rid of that, and I'll export it to my desktop, and then click Save. Now this is ready to export. So I'll click on Render. After Effects renders that single frame, and here it is on my desktop. That's all you have to do to export your frame. 9. Thanks!: All right, that's it. Thank you so much for taking this class. Now that you know how to build this effect, you can start making sum Christmas sweater designs. I would love to see your work, so be sure to post your class projects, and if you post them on social media, be sure to tag me @JAKEINMOTION. As always, if you have any questions or want any feedback, just let me know in your class project or ask me a question on the community page. I would love it if you let me review for this class. Thanks again for taking this class, and I'll seen you next time.