The Power of Shape Layers: A Complete Guide to Mastering AE's Most Underestimated Animation Tool

1. 01.01 Course Intro: Welcome to the Power of Shape Layers. My name is Jeff Knight and I'll be guiding you through this exciting course as I show you all the cool things you can do in after effects with shape layers. I'm a motion graphic designer with over a decade of experience. I've worked for ad agencies, film agencies. I've done work for studios and independent artists. I've also worked as an independent contractor for clients in virtually every field, including advertising, tech, banking, fashion, music, and film. I've also taught courses at the college level, and I produce a Youtube channel called Seven Minute AE tutorials. If you have little to no experience with shape layers, you'll be amazed at what's possible with this powerful At Refix tool. If you're an advanced shape layer user, you may find some useful information that you didn't even know existed. So regardless of your skill level and exposure to shape layers, I highly recommend you go through this entire course to take the most advantage of the information we'll be covering. I'm going to take you through every aspect of shape layers, including a broad overview, what they're used for, what they are, and how to make simple shapes. We'll also move on to more advanced topics, such as using groups, working with vertices and applying animation tools like the repeater, trim paths, zigzag and much more. Whether you need to create simple icons or complex hut elements, shape layers are the key to making you a better, more well rounded and more marketable motion graphic designer. The last section of this course includes a series of tutorials where you'll take everything you've learned and apply it to actual projects. You'll create intricate and complex designs, hut elements, icons, backgrounds, and more. It's really important to see what other designers are creating. Take a look around online at some sites for inspiration. A few great sites include Information Is Beautiful.net and Video Hive.net These sites include some very talented and experienced designers. Get familiar with the work of other people in your industry and see if you can learn from their designs. I'll provide project files where appropriate for you to download and practice. Feel free to use these project files in any way that helps you. You can create templates or you can just hang on to them for reference. As you learn more about shape layers over time, feel free to go through this course at your own pace. I've designed it so that each lesson builds on the previous one. So make sure you understand the principles, the commands, and the techniques of the lesson you're on before moving forward, I'm very excited to go on this journey with you. Okay, there's a lot to get through, so let's dive right in. 2. 01.02 Creating Basic Shapes: Let's jump right in and create a shape using some of the tools you have at your fingertips. We're going to make a star, an animated stroke, using a tool called trim paths, which we will go over in much more detail later in this course. We will also add a fill and then fade that in after the trim paths animation. At this point, don't worry about where the settings are located or how to add anything. We're going to cover each step in great detail throughout this course. The purpose of this is to introduce you to shape layers and show you how powerful they are and how quickly you can create animations using shape layers. Let's do it. Okay, so let's create a composition. You can either click this icon right here, which is for create a new composition, or you can go to Composition, New Composition and choose that. Or if you're on a PC, you can choose Control, and on a Mac as command. Now I'll be putting up shortcut keystrokes throughout this course so that way you can learn some of these and save some time. Solicius, choose new composition. All of our lessons are going to be 1920 by 108,029.97 frames. Let's just make this example 10 seconds long. And then we're going to also be naming all of these. Let's name this trim paths Polystar. And we're going to choose okay. There are also a number of ways you can create shape layers. The quickest way is to right click in this area here, this to the left of your timeline and choose New. And then go to the Pop out menu and choose Shape Layer. Now After Effects creates a Shape layer for you automatically. But if you open this, you'll see that there's nothing in here. Everything within your shape layers will be within this contents area. Everything that you'll need to add will be done by this ad button. So if you click this arrow here to the right of the word ad, you'll see you have a bunch of options starting with group, then you have your shapes, then you have your fills and strokes, and then you have your animation tools. We'll be covering every one of these in great detail throughout this course. If we click on our Ad button, we can access it through our shape layer or up top through our shape layer control. So with this arrow selected, let's go down to Polystar. And as you can see, Afroffx adds in the polystar for you right here. But we can't see it if we click away. And the reason why is because it doesn't have a fill or a stroke. All shape layers must have a fill or a stroke both. The way that we add that is we go back to our Ad button, which is here, or appear. And let's just choose Stroke. Now whenever you add a stroke, it automatically defaults to a two pixel wide stroke and it defaults to the color white. If we click on this white box here, we can see that we can change the stroke color to anything you want. Let me go out of the waist. That way you can kind of see if you want it to be red. You can make it blue. Make it any color that you want. So let's just kind of choose something like this. It's like grayish green And choose okay. And Al's increase our stroke width. Now I'm just holding down my left mouse button and I'm scrolling to the right. So your value starts at zero and goes all the way up as far as you want it to go. One thing to keep in mind is that stroke widths are key frameable, which means you can start off with a stroke that's very small or even zero, and you can key frame it up to any size you want and back down. Let's make this stroke, we'll say about 15 pixels wide. Then let's go back to our Add button and we're going to add a Phil. Now Phil is always default to the color red. If you click on this red box next to Phil, we can see like with our stroke, we can change this color to anything we want. It doesn't really matter what color you choose. The purpose of this is just to illustrate a few of the things that you can do very quickly. Let's choose Okay. And then the final thing we're going to need is a Trim Paths. So let's click our ad arrow once again and choose Trim Paths. If we open that up, we'll see we have several settings to choose from. We're going to focus on the setting that says End. And as you'll note, Trempass defaults to an end percentage of 100. Let's turn this all way back to zero. And you can already see as I'm scrubbing through this, the effect that it's having. One of the things to keep in mind is that Trempass is a stroke animation. And you can see why, see how it's affecting our fill. As we scrub through this, you'll want to apply the trim pass primarily to strokes unless you're going for this kind of an effect, which normally you wouldn't. Let's turn this all way back to zero and let's put a keyframe at our zero time for end. And then let's go forward to 1 second. And we're going to turn this up to 100 in order to get around this issue with our fill. Let's open up our fill settings on the second key frame, which is where our animation for the trim pass ends. Let's put a keyframe for opacity and turn this down to zero. An opacity of zero is invisible and opacity of 100 is fully visible. And you can choose any value in between. We want zero. Let's go forward another ten frames. And a quick shortcut for doing that is to hold down the shift button and page down. So we go forward ten frames and then we're going to make our opacity 100% Now if we loop this in, a way to do that is to go maybe to about the two second mark hit in. And that will bring your right bracket all the way over to where your playhead is. And this is true for anywhere that your playhead may be. So if I'm at 3 seconds with my playhead and hit in, it moves with it. Let's go to the two second mark, hit to loop this area. What that means is as a play, it's going to go back to the beginning. Once it reaches this endpoint, we can hit zero on our number keypad to play. We'll see how it animates on, and then the film comes on after it. That's just a really quick introduction to shape layers. This is a quick way to animate a polystar with trim paths. You can adjust your stroke and your fill. You can adjust the color, you can the width of your stroke, as well as the opacity of your fill. Now this is not even barely scratching the surface of what shape layers is capable of. You can create characters with this. You can create entire scenes and animations, entire videos using nothing but shape layers. But I just wanted to show you this really quick animation using a polystar stroke, a fill, and a trim paths. We'll take this one step at a time so that way you can truly see what shape layers are capable of doing. 3. 02.01 Section 02 - Shape Layer Basics: Welcome to the power of shape Layers, section two, shape layer basics. This is where it all begins. In this section, we're going to cover some of the foundational aspects of shape layers. We'll be going over the importance of understanding hierarchy and shape layers. Shape layer, transform properties and the different types of shapes and paths. We'll create some basic shapes and learn how to apply fills and strokes in a few different ways. We'll dive deep into stroke attributes, including how to apply, change, and manipulate color, opacity, stroke width, line, cap, line, join, and dashes. If some of these topics sound foreign to you, don't worry. We're going to go at a reasonable pace and cover everything you need to know to fully understand each topic. Let's get started by taking a look at shape layer hierarchy. 4. 02.02 Shape Layer Hierarchy: In this lesson, I want to go over shape layer hierarchy. Shape layer hierarchy is extremely important. First, let's go ahead and create a new shape layer. And I'll show you what I mean. We're going to write, click Choose New Shape Layer. And let's open it up. There's nothing in our contents. Now if we go to our Ad button and we click it, you'll notice a specific layout to the shape layer options you have. At the very top, we have group below that, we have our shapes rectangle, ellipse, polystar or path. Below that we have our fills. And our strokes fill. And stroke by itself is a solid. And then we have gradient fill and stroke. Finally, below that, we have all of our animation tools. This layout is for a very specific reason. At the very top of our hierarchy, our groups within the groups, we have our shapes. Within the shapes, we have our fills and strokes. Then all of that is affected by our animation tools. Let's go ahead and add a group and I'll show you specifically what I'm talking about. Now if you open this up, we see that the only thing inside are the transform properties, but there's no content inside. Let's go back to our Ad button and you'll notice the next group contains our shapes. Now if we were to skip this group and just add a fill, for example, nothing happens because the fill has nothing to effect. Delete that. Go back to our group and we're going to add a rectangle. Let's go back to our Ad button, and below our shapes we have fills and strokes. So let's add a fill. As we can see, this fill is affecting this rectangle path. Now say we want to add an ellipse, but we put it below our fill. Well, now this fill is not affecting this ellipse path. Let me open this up and pull these apart so you can see what I'm talking about. We move our rectangle over here just to make this larger so we can see. What we're doing may make this 300 pixels by 300 pixels. And the same with our ellipse. We can see the outline of our ellipse, but it doesn't have a fill. The reason why is because shape layers are affected from the bottom to the top. Meaning this fill affects only what is above it. This fill affects this rectangle inside of this group. Now if we were to add a stroke and say, let's move the stroke now to underneath our ellipse path. Let's increase the width of this. Now we see that the stroke is affecting the ellipse as well as the rectangle. However, the field is still only affecting the rectangle. As you can see, the way shape layers are affected are from the bottom to the top. This also is true with animation tools. Let's go back to our Add button and let's add a repeater. And we're going to go over this in greater detail later on, but this is mainly to just show you what I'm talking about. Let's add a repeater. And it automatically goes to the bottom of our pile here, because after effect believes you want to add the effect to everything above it. As you can see, this repeater is affecting now our ellipse and our rectangle. However, if we move this repeater above our ellipse path, it's now only affecting our rectangle path. And I can spread this out a little bit more so you can actually see the repeater working. Maybe we move our rectangle path so they're separated better. It's very important for you to remember the shape. Layers are affected by the attributes. We added them from the bottom to the top. Okay, with contents highlighted, let's add a group. Say if we want to add a rectangle to this group, you have to make sure that group is highlighted. So let's add a rectangle. And as we see, it goes inside of this group, our rectangle. However, if you have contents highlighted and you add a rectangle, it goes underneath the group. It's important to know what you need to highlight and when. If we have group highlighted and add a fill, now the fill goes inside of the group but it's above the rectangle path so it's not going to affect the rectangle. One of the things that you'll notice as we go through these is that often I will tell you to highlight contents and then add whatever attribute you want to add. Whether it's a group, a, shape fill, or stroke, or your animation tools. And the reason for that is to make sure that these attributes are being added in the correct hierarchy. Now with group highlighted, let's add a rectangle, and let's add a fill. Then let's open up our transform properties for group one. And let's just move this over. Maybe we'll increase the scale of this group with group one highlighted, control D to duplicate. Now let's take group two, open up our transform properties and move it to the other side. Say I wanted to make this rectangle path and ellipse. Well, with group two highlighted, let's go to add ellipse. And you'll see that ellipse gets added underneath rectangle path. And you can see if you zoom in here, that we actually can see the outline of the ellipse and the rectangle path. So let's just delete rectangle path so that way we our ellipse and then say we also want to make this ellipse have only a stroke. Let's add a stroke and then get rid of our fill. Now our ellipse path has a stroke and our rectangle path has a fill. Say we wanted to animate this ellipse on with the trim paths. Well, if you highlight contents and you choose a trim paths and then say we start to animate this trim paths. Well, since it's below both group one and group two, it's trying to animate trim paths on both of them. One of the things that will go over in the section for trim paths is that trimpass is really just a stroke animation tool. It's not intended to be used for fills. There are two ways we can solve this problem. We can either move trim paths between group one and group two. That way it's only affecting our ellipse with the stroke. Or my preferred way is to actually put the Trempass inside of the group. That way all of your effects are organized and there's no confusion. Always make sure that you have your strokes and fills and your animation tools underneath your shapes. Say if we pull this Trempass back to 50% so you can see the animation. If we move this Trempass nel above ellipse again, we see that it no longer works because the effects and the fills and strokes work from the bottom up. Now there is an exception to this. You could actually place your animation tools above your fills and strokes and it will still work. Just make sure that your shapes first always shapes first. And then either fills and strokes or animation tools. But if you're working with groups, obviously your groups come first and then your shapes. If you stick with the hierarchy of groups, shapes, fills, and strokes, and then animation tools, you won't have any issues. But I did want to point out this fact that you can actually put animation tools above fills and strokes, and it will still work just fine. 5. 02.03 Shape Layer Transform Properties: Okay, so in this lesson we're going to go over what transformed properties are, as well as the different ways to create a shape layer. There are a few ways to create a new composition. One way is this icon here for create new composition. The second way is to go up to composition and choose new composition. The third way is to use the shortcut that after effects actually gives you. Now I'm on a PC, so the shortcut should be seeing on my screen or PC related. However, I will be putting up shortcut keystrokes on screen for both PC and Mac. And the last way is to just click this large icon that you see right here in the middle of your comp. Now the thing to keep in mind about using this icon is that it is only visible and only an option if you haven't created a comp yet. So whenever you open up a new project, if you haven't started working yet, you haven't created a comp, you can click this new comp icon. But just remember, if you're working through a project and you want to start a new comp and you've already created a comp, you need to use one of the other three options, the new comp, icon composition, new composition, or simply control in. Let's go ahead and just choose New composition. And this is our default here, 1920 by 108-02-9907 And let's leave it at 10 seconds. And let's just call this shape Layers. So we click okay. Now if you look right here at this 100% this is our magnification ratio pop up. If we click on this dropdown, there are different magnifications that you can choose. Let's choose the one that says fit that way, it will put our entire composition into our viewer like that. Okay, so now I mentioned there are several ways to create shape layers. One way is to right click in this area here, to the left of your timeline. Right click, Choose New. And then from the pop out menu, you can choose Shape Layer. Another way to add a shape layer is to go up to layer new shape layer. Then a third way is to actually create a shape using a shaped tool. If you see right here, this is our rectangle tool. Now if you click on this little arrow to the right of it and hold down your left mouse button, you can see your other options. Here you have rectangle tool, rounded rectangle tool, ellipse tool, polygon tool, and star tool. Let's just grab a rectangle tool. Now I'm just holding down the left mouse button and dragging up and down and left and right until I get the shape that I want. As you can see, it comes in automatically with a stroke and a fill. Now if you release your left mouse button, you'll see now that you have your shape. And if you noticed your anchor point, which is this right here in the middle, snapped to the middle of your shape layer, where your anchor point is located is very important for shape layers. Especially as you start to animate these, you always want to know where your anchor point is. Now if you want to get this to the center of our composition, let's go to our Align panel over here. Just drag this down and these are the Align options. So we want to align our layer to the composition. If you choose this second one here, that's Align Horizontally, if you click that, you see it moves it left and right, centered. If you choose your fifth option that aligns it vertically. And the way you can tell that it's definitely centered is if you hit your quotation marks key. We zoom in here, we can see that this is in fact centered perfectly in the center of our composition. Now let's get rid of this shape layer, and then we're going to create one in a different way. We've already right clicked and created one in this way, choosing new. And then from the pop out, choosing shape layer. Let's go up to layer new shape layer. Now this creates it the same way as right clicking in this area creates it where you get an actual shape layer. But it's an empty shape. So we have to add in our shapes as well as our fields and strokes and animation tools. Let's go to our Add button. Everything that you'll be needing to add will come from this Ad button here. This arrow to the right of the word ad. If you look up top next to our Fill in our stroke, you'll see the ad button here as well. You can add everything you need from either location. So let's just click this ad button here, and let's add a rectangle. And then we can add a stroke, and then also add a fill. Your stroke will always default to white, two pixels wide, and your fill will always default to red. So let's just change these colors, make them a little more interesting. It doesn't really matter what the color is, because this is more for experimentation. And let's maybe make our stroke ten pixels wide. Whenever you create a shape, either from this layer drop down, or by right clicking in this empty area next to your timeline, it will automatically center your shape in the middle of your composition with the anchor point in the center. First, let's make this rectangle path a little larger. If you open up your rectangle path, you can actually increase this. We'll go over some of these settings later in a later lesson, but for now I'll really want to go over what transform properties are because this is the foundation of all shape layers and something that is very important for you to understand. Transform properties for any layer are anchor point, position, scale, rotation, and opacity. Now this goes for shape layers, it goes for videos, it goes for images, for text layers, every layer is going to have these transform properties. What's special about shape layers is that you may encounter more than one set of transform properties. It's very important to understand how those interact with one another and what they mean. For example, let's highlight our contents right here in our shape layer and go to add. And then let's add a group. Let's grab everything other than the group. Our rectangle, feel and stroke, and drag it into that group. Okay, now everything is in sight of this group. Well now you'll notice inside the group, you have transformed group one. If you open up that, you also see you have anchor point position scale and you also have the skew and skew axis rotation and opacity. You may be wondering why there's two sets of transform properties. Well, the thing you need to keep in mind is that the transform properties for the layer control the entire layer. So as you move your position around, it moves everything on this shape layer. To make this clear, let's highlight group one and duplicate it, Control D. Now we have two groups. Now they're on top of each other, so you can't really tell them apart. But this is how I can illustrate this old up our transform properties for group two and grab our position for that. And let's move this to the left. See this group transform properties affects only group two. These transform properties under group one only affect group one. These can move in their own way independently and if you affect the transform properties of the entire layer, this controls everything that's within the layer. Group one and group two are inside of the same shape layer. The transform properties for the entire layer will affect the entire layer. So it's really important to differentiate between all of these. One of the things that you'll also notice with shapes such as rectangles and also with ellipses, and we'll go over this as we come across it, but if you open that up, you also have this position in size for the specific rectangle path. So see you can even affect the position within the rectangle path as well as the size. So it's really important to understand how these interact with one another and when to use the transform properties for the group versus the transform property for the layer. There's actually one more shape layer attribute that has its own transform properties, and that's the repeater. I'm going to leave this up and then I'm going to go to add, and we're going to add a repeater. And we'll be going over the repeater quite a bit later on. Just for illustration purposes. Let me show you what I mean. I'm decreasing the scale of the entire layer. So I use this transform property for scale for the layer. Then we're going to move this over. Now for the repeater, it's going to default to three copies. The position defaults to 100 pixels on the X axis. As we scroll this forward, you wouldn't see how they start to move apart. Now see they're overlapping, so I can actually move group two to the left, maybe even up, so that way we can see what's going on. More in group one, we can move transform properties down. See now our repeater has its own set of transform properties. We have anchor point, position, scale rotation, and instead of just one opacity, we have start and end opacity. And the repeater transform properties are even more specific than the transform properties for the group and the layer. For example, if we start to manipulate the scale, we can see how this is affecting only some of the boxes don't get overwhelmed because we have a whole section on the repeater where I will go over this in detail. The whole purpose of me showing you this is at the very foundation of shape layers which you need to understand is that there are multiple sets of transform properties. Meaning anchor point, position, scale, rotation, and opacity. We have the shape layer transform properties, transformed properties. And we also have repeater transform properties. And all of these affect your shapes in different ways. And there are certain times you need to affect only the transform properties of a particular group or the entire layer. As I said, don't get overwhelmed because this is a lot to take in. But you need to pay attention to your transform properties and be aware that they're there and that they will interact with one another. 6. 02.04 Types of Shapes and Paths: Okay, let's go ahead and create our composition by choosing our icon. And we're going to call this composition Types of Shapes and Paths. In this section, I want to go over the types of shapes and paths that you have available, depending on how you create your shape layer. First, let's start with the method of right clicking in this area down here, and choosing New, Going to the pop up menu and choosing Shape Layer. If we open up our Shape layer here next to our contents, we have a next to the ad, we have our ad button. We also have this ad button up top as we can see. And the same exact options are available from both ad buttons. Let's look at this layout. The first order is Group. Group allows you to group different types of shapes together. So say for example, if we add a group here, we can add a rectangle. And then say maybe we want to add another group. Maybe we want to add an ellipse, and we want to be able to control these independently of one another. We have transformed properties for each one of these groups. I want to go over the types of shapes and paths you have available to you with the methods of creating shapes. If we choose Ad here, this second section here we have rectangle, ellipse, polystar, and path. These are the types of shapes, rectangle, ellipse, and polystar that we can create. And then we also have a path. The reason why there are only three options here is because you can add roundness to a rectangle and you can also make a polystar a polygon. The reason why that's important is remember rectangle, ellipse, polystar, just these three options. If we go up to our shape layer tool, if we go into our dropdown, we see we actually have five options. We have rectangle, rounded rectangle, ellipse, polygon, and star tool. We have five options here. We have three options here. Yet we have the same amount of control. Add a rectangle and let's give it a fill, Okay? Now if we want to make this rectangle have rounded edges, there's an option under rectangle path for roundness and all we have to do is increase or decrease this. If we go up too far it becomes a circle. But see how we can actually change the roundness of this rectangle. Now let's move this one out of the way, and let's use our shape layer tool. And we'll choose rounded rectangle. Now if we left click and drag, we can see it actually comes with the rounded edges. And remember our last stroke was actually pretty large, 45. Let's make this smaller. Let's go down to maybe five. Now if we open up this path, open up our rectangle path, we can see that this has a roundness of 20. We can actually affect the roundness of this. Now, I didn't hold down the shift button, that's why this is a rectangle and not a perfect square if I were to do that. Let's see, At one time I'll grab our rounded rectangle, hold down shift, and drag it so that way it's perfectly square. Then go back into our settings for this rectangle. We'll see that the rectangle path roundness defaults to 20 pixels for roundness. You can adjust this just as you could if you created the rectangle path by right clicking, choosing new shape layer, and then adding a rectangle and adding a pill, We can adjust the roundness of that rectangle the same way. I'll do it again. We'll grab a rounded rectangle tool, hold down shift, and drag it out. And as we see, it defaults to a roundness of 20 pixels, which is adjustable. And there's how when I created the rounded rectangle, it gave us a stroke automatically. And again, afterefx gives you the last chosen stroke value, both color and stroke width, as well as the last chosen fill. Then what happens if we just choose this rectangle tool? Well, this hold down shift and click and drag. It doesn't give us the rounded edges. But remember all rectangle paths come with the roundness option. Regardless of whether you create a rectangle using the ad button or you use the shape layer tool, you have the same exact options, which is why the ad button doesn't give you the option for a rounded rectangle, it would just be redundant. However, with the shape layer tool, if you know you want a rounded rectangle tool, it gives you that additional option to save time. So let's get rid of that right click. Let's choose new shape layer. Ellipse is just atripx word for circle. Okay, now let's add a fill to that. And the same way if we grab our shape layer tool, we grab your ellipse tool, fill the shift button. As you left click and drag it will make it perfect circle. You have the same exact options. If you open up ellipse one and ellipse path one. You can adjust the size of your ellipse path and you can move your position. These are identical in what you're able to do with them. The main difference being when you create a shape layer using the shape layer tool, it brings in your stroke and fill. Whereas if you create it from scratch, you have to physically add in the ellipse and the stroke. Let's create a new shape layer. We're going to add polystar. Now notice here there's no option for polygon, so let's just squid and choose a Polystar. And we'll add a fill and also go up to our shape layer tool. And notice we have polygon and Star tool, we have these two options. If you know you want a polygon, you just choose polygon. Or if you know you want to star, you can choose star. That's one of the differences. If you create it using the shape layer tool, let's scribe the polygon tool and holding on shift, let's left drag. Is that why it doesn't rotate and put these next to each other. So these are actually the same kind of shape layer as you can see underneath our shape layer here we have polystar one is the polygon and recreated. And the polystar path is the one that recreated using right click New shape layer. This is wine. Let's open up both of these polystar paths. You'll notice these underneath the polystar path name. They have type. Now under the polygon that we created, obviously it is set to polygon, under star, it's set to star. These both have the option of either a star or polygon. So now we're on the star over here. Watch what happens whenever we choose polygon. It looks identical to the polygon that we chose using our polygon tool. Same thing if we set them both to star, they are both the same, identical shape. It's the same idea. With creating a rectangle, you only have one option for rectangle, although you know you have the option for roundness. Same thing, you have only one option for Polystar. Although you do have the option to change this to a polygon and all that Effx is allowing you to do by using the Shape layer tool is just to bypass that. One extra step, if you know you want a rounded rectangle or if you know you want a polygon, then you can choose that from the shape layer creation tool and not have to go in here and convert it. Just to quickly recap, go to new shape layer, go to our contents, and add. We have three options for rectangle, ellipse and polystar. However, with our shape layer tool, we have the option for rectangle tool, rounded rectangle tool, ellipse tool, polygon tool, and star tool. You have the same exact amount of control with each option. One of the other things that you can see in your shape layer is you also have this option for path which is in this group with rectangle, ellipse, and polystar. Well, right next to our shape layer tool is the Pin tool. The Pin tool does the same thing that the path does. Say if we go to our shape layer here and choose add path, we can see that our Pin tool defaults and automatically wants us to create a path. Again, if you create it by hand, you have to go in here and add a stroke and then give specifics for the stroke width and for the color. Whereas if you just grab the pin tool here and start to draw, it creates a shape for you and gives you the stroke in the stroke width. Bring up your rulers by choosing control all on a PC. Put on a ruler here, and then you can snap these to the guide. So let's open up our shape, have path highlighted. And just bring these points up to the line. And now we have a perfectly straight line. So those are the different types of shapes and the different types of paths and the different ways that you can arrive at them by either creating a shape layer by right clicking new shape layer or layer, new shape layer. As opposed to going directly to our shape layer creation tool. Again, there are a few ways of creating the same thing. But you have the same controls regardless of how you create a shape or a path. And that's the most important thing to take away from this lesson. 7. 02.05 Creating Shape Layers: Okay, so let's go ahead and create a new composition. We'll just use our icon this time. Click that, and then we're going to rename this Creating Shape Layers. Choose. Okay, now I'm going to go over this one more time. There are three ways to create shape layers. Two of them are by what I'm going to call command. Meaning you can write, click in this area down here and choose New Shape layer. Or you can go up to Shape Layer that's creating a shape by command. And then another way is to create it using the Shape Layer tool. If you go up here to your tool bar, next to your pen tool, you'll see a rectangle tool. You can grab that and choose any one of these shapes. We'll choose an ellipse. And if you hold down the left mouse button and you drag, you can start to create an ellipse. If you hold down the shift button, as you drag, it'll make a perfect circle or a perfect square. Release it and see our anchor point goes right to the middle. Now let's choose a rectangle tool, holding on the left mouse button. We're going to click and drag. And now we see how the width and the height are different. But if you hold on the Shift button, it automatically goes to a perfect square. Notice what happens to your anchor point. Once you add a second shape to a shape, the layer's anchor point remains centered on the first shape you created. It does not readjust itself to the center of your shape layer. This is significant when you start to animate these shape layers, and we'll get into that in a later lesson. For now, just note that if you create a shape using the shaped tool, your layer's anchor point will be centered on the first shape that you created. Choose the rounded rectangle path holding down shift does the same thing for the rounded rectangle tool. You can see it's just like the rectangle tool, but it's got rounded edges shot down the shift button and how it makes a perfect square. Okay, now let's delete that shape layer. If you choose the polygon tool and you left click and drag as I'm scrolling left and right, it's rotating this polygon. And also if you go up and down, it's rotating it. Now if you hold down the shift button, it just keeps it where it won't rotate. You can make it larger and smaller, but it won't rotate. So now I'm releasing the Shift button, and again, we can rotate it. And this is true also for the Star Tools. Let's choose that left click and drag, and as you can see, left and right, up and down, it's rotating. If you hold on the shift, it no longer allows to rotate but only scales up and down. I'm going left and right and then also up and down. So something to keep in mind whenever you're creating these shapes using the shape tool. If you hold down shift for circles or rectangles, it will make the shape a perfect square or circle. And for polygons and for stars, it just disables the ability to rotate. So now, which method is better? Well, it depends on what you're trying to do and really what your preferred method is. I prefer to create shapes by right clicking in this area, choosing new shape layer. And the reason why is because I don't like to have my shapes to be pre loaded. I like to choose everything from scratch. Now that's just a personal preference. It's not something that's better than anything else. However, there are some benefits and drawbacks to doing it. In either way, the benefits and drawbacks of creating a shape layer, either by right clicking and choosing new shape layer, or by going to layer new shape layer, are the same. But there are some differences between that and creating a shape layer using the shape tool. So first I want to create a shape layer by right clicking and choosing new shape layer. And then I'm going to open up our shape layer and go to our Ad button, which is next to the word Ad. And I'm going to just create an ellipse and then I'm going to give it a fill and a stroke. And the reason why I like to create it like this is because now I have complete control over where this is located. I like my shapes to always be in the center of my composition. And again, if you hit the Quotation Marks button, it brings up your safe margin guides. You can see that put your shape layer in the center of your composition by default. However, by using this method, you do have to add in the shape you want and a fill and a stroke when you create shape layers in this method, your stroke will automatically be white and your fill will automatically be red. So let's get rid of that shape layer. If we create a shape using our shape tool, we get our ellipse tool and we left click and drag and hold down our shift button to get a perfect circle. We get a fill. And a stroke automatically pre loaded within it, which is great. However, it's not necessarily centered into our composition. To get it centered, you need to go to your Align panel and center it horizontally. And then align center vertically. Shapes created using the shape layer creation tool are pre loaded with the last fill and stroke color, as well as the last stroke width you used, so you don't have to add in a fill or a stroke. This could be useful if you're creating a series of shapes that require the same colors every time you create a new shape using the shape layer creation tool, your shape will have the same fill and stroke attributes as whatever you chose last. You'll also notice that when you use the Shape layer creation tool, after effect automatically puts the shape along with its fill and stroke inside of a group. And it names the group whatever the shape is. In this case, the group after effects created is ellipse one. It side of this group are the ellipse as well as the fill and the stroke. Delete that shape layer, grab this poly tool, left click and drag, and get whatever size we want it to be. Unless we released our anchor point, pops through the middle. We're going to center this now see if we open up our polystar settings, we can see that it came with the stroke and the fill automatically. It gave us the stroke and the value that we last. Let's change this value to like a green and we'll make this stroke maybe like a yellow. Okay, now if I get rid of that, I'll watch if I create another shape. Say we'll do this star tool now it's going to be a yellow stroke. With a green fill, your stroke will automatically be white and your fill will automatically be red only whenever you create it by command. Meaning right click, shape layer or layer, Shape layer. You will get these values for your stroke and your fill, and even the stroke size based on the values that you chose. Last, if you use the shape tool, each method takes a few extra steps, just depends on which method you prefer. Just to recap very quickly, if you right click and choose new shape layer, in order to add content to your shape layer, you have to use the add button. So you want to add any shape, say rectangle, and add a fill and a stroke. This will always default to white for the stroke, at two pixels wide and red for the fill. And then you have to resize it to whatever size that you'd like. But it is in the center of your composition. Or if you use a shape layer tool, you get the left click and drag holding down your Shift button. And although your anchor point will be centered in the middle of your shape layer, as we see, you still have to align it to the center of your composition. If that's where you want it to be. You will get these values for your stroke in your fill, and even the stroke size based on the values that you chose. Last, if you use the shape tool, either method is fine, it just depends on which way you prefer. 8. 02.06 Path Size vs. Layer Scale: Now let's go over some of the differences between these shapes and some of their attributes. So I'm going to write click New Shape Layer. I'm going to open this up. Let's add a rectangle. Add an ellipse also. Then let's give this a fill and a stroke. Now since these are stacked, as you can see inside of our composition, it's added the rectangle and the ellipse on top of one another, they have the same exact position. All rectangles and all ellipses default to the size of 100 pixels by 100 pixels. So this size here is not in percentages. Remember from our transform properties, we have anchor point, position and scale. The scale is in percentages. This scale is 100% And you can see right next to the scale value, this percent sign. Now for a rectangle path and ellipse path, there is no percent sign. And the reason why is because these are 100 pixels by 100 pixels wide. So we can actually increase the size of these independently. Also, one of the things that you can do is you can unlink the size. Say if we uncheck this and you can see the constraints, the proportions. Now if we scroll our x value for the rectangle path, we see that it's wider than it is taller. And we can also adjust the height of it. We can adjust this independently. Same is true for the ellipse path. If we uncheck this, we can make it wider independently of its height, or taller independently of its width. If she wants to be a perfect circle, just simply make these values the same. I'll make it width of these 330 and I'll re link them to make this 330 and make this value 330. And we will link that again. And now we have our perfect rectangle and our perfect ellipse. Once again, something to keep in mind is that with all rectangles and all ellipses, the shape will default to a pixel size of 100 by 100 always. 9. 02.07 Shapes vs. Paths: What's the difference between a shape and a path? Well, shapes are made up of paths and I'll show you what I mean. This right click, new shape layer will add a rectangle and we'll add a stroke. Let's just increase this. If you right click on this rectangle path word right here and choose Convert to Bezier path. This will show you what paths actually make up this rectangle. We click. If we click on our path one, we can actually see the segments that make up this rectangle path. Now that we've converted this to a path, we can actually manipulate the path. We can play with corners and create any kind of shape we want. We can also add more points. If you choose your pen tool, you can add a point to any one of these paths over here. And now we can make an even more interesting shape. Again, the way I did that, let's get rid of our contents. I'm going to add a rectangle and then I want to add a stroke. Make this stroke a little bit bigger. And then I right click onto the Rectangle path and choose Convert to Bezie Path. Now you can also create paths by themselves. And the way you do that with contents highlighted, click Add Path. And this brings up your pen tool, so you can just make two points for example, and then add a stroke, and now you have a line. Then you're going to actually add more points on that as you'd like. A shape is a set of enclosed paths, whereas the path is not enclosed. You can also create this path in another way. See, the way I did it was I have the shape layer already added. Then I added a path. And it brings up your Pin tool. We'll say, what if I didn't want to do it that way? Well, you can just choose your Pin tool and then start to draw. As with your Shape tool, it automatically brings in your stroke and your fill. See if you open your contents. We now have a shape and it's a path just to emphasize that right click and choose new shape layer. And then we add a path. It will default to your Pin tool, so that way you can make whatever path you'd like to make. You have to physically go in and add a stroke. And it defaults to white two pixels wide. However, if you want to create it in the same way that you would create a shape using your shape tool, just choose your pen tool and start to draw a path. It will include the stroke color and width, as well as the fill of the last stroke and fill that you chose. If you open this up, you'll see underneath your shape group here. This is indeed a path. The main thing to take away from this is that shapes are made up of an enclosed set of paths. Delete that shape layer, draw some shape. And what I mean by enclosed is you want your last point to be your first point. So let's click on this right here, and we see how it's enclosed. We have this fill and this stroke. And I'm not sure if you notice what just happened, but let's get rid of this real quick. If we start to draw, once we kind of start to get somewhat of a shape here, it actually does put in a fill, but the problem is that it's not enclosed with a border. So technically it does give you a fill whenever you create path like this. But it's not going to be enclosed by a stroke. So see that's kind of an odd looking shape there. So if you want to make a shape that's enclosed on all sides, just make sure that your first point is the same as your last point. And in that way it will be totally enclosed. 10. 02.08 Fills & Strokes - Add Button: Okay, so now in this lesson we're going to go over what I call Shape Layer Attributes. So let's dive right into that. Let's create a new composition this time. Let's do control in for PC, we're going to call this Shape Layer Attributes. Click Okay. The way that you can add your attributes and the way you can control them varies depending on how you create your shape layer. Which is why I wanted to show you earlier on the different ways of creating shape layers. Right, click into this area here and create a new shape layer. If we click on our Ad button, we can access it through our shape layer or up top through our shape layer control. What I mean by attributes is everything that comes below the actual shapes and paths. So fill stroke, gradient, fill, gradient stroke. And then all of these animation tools. And we'll be covering all of these in great detail and other lessons. For now, I want to focus on the fill, the stroke, the gradient fill, and the gradient stroke. If we create a shape layer in this method where we write, click and we choose a new shape layer as we know. We have to actually say let's add an ellipse and we have to add fill a stroke, a gradient fill or a gradient stroke. We've already done fills and strokes. And then we can increase the size of this ellipse path, as we know inside of our ellipse path controls. And we can even control the size of our stroke. That's easy enough, but now there are other options that we have. Let's get rid of this stroke in this fill, and we have our ellipse path. Let's add a gradient fill. The gradient fill defaults to a linear gradient. What I mean by that is if we open up this gradient fill, here, we can see the type is linear. We have two options, linear or radial. Radial simply means that the gradient is a radial gradient that begins inside of our circle and grows outwards. I haven't messed with any of these controls. So what you see right here is how Afrofx defaults. We'll take a gradient fill linear. We see our start point is 00, endpoint is 1000. Now these are pixels located within our shape layer. So as we start to move these around, we can see the effect that is having on our gradient. If we want it to be a horizontal gradient, for example, we need to alter these settings. We want to make our X on a start point and exxon endpoint both zero and now we can start to flip these. We can make them more of a gradient or less of a gradient. The way that you can manipulate the linear gradient, whether you want it horizontal or vertical, is adjust the X value of your start and end point. So just take some adjustment of these settings to get the look that you want. These colors default to black and white. Pure black to pure white. And in between, the gradient is gray. If you click on this edit gradient, you can now choose the colors that you want. So see our far left option is set to white. So let's maybe make this like a red and then the black color that's defaulted to, we can make that something else. So as you can see, your possibilities are already growing. You can change the colors and you can even change the direction of your linear gradient. You can do all kinds of cool stuff with this. You can mess with the opacity of it. So if you want to be a little bit lighter, you want to be very bright. So those are some of the settings for the linear gradient. Set this all back to what it was by default, which is all set to zero with the endpoint x value at 100. And change this to radial. So now we have this small circle inside of a larger circle. And again, we just start to mess with some of these settings. This y value spreads out the gradient for the endpoint, and the x value alters where it starts. As you adjust these settings, you can see how it's going to affect your gradient. Now, inside of a radio gradient, you also have high light length. It defaults to 0% You can increase that and see how it moves around inside of your gradient. Here you also have highlight angle. So as you adjust that, it moves around within the circle of the radial gradient. You can adjust your opacity, edit gradient. You can adjust your colors. So maybe you want to make it something a little different. You can even add more points in here. So say you want a third or fourth part of your gradient. Just kind of experiment and see all the possibilities that you can come up with. These are all key frameable. There are stopwatches in front of all of these settings. So you can set key frames and you can move them around and do all kinds of cool stuff with them. You can change colors, the possibilities really are endless. So now if you watch it back, you can see some of the things you can do with it. And this is just a really quick rough playing around with some of these settings. That's your gradient fill. Again, you have radial and you have linear. You have all of these settings. We also have gradient stroke and it works in the same way. Let's increase the size of this. We have linear and radial. You have your start and end points. You have your highlight length, your highlight angle. You can change your colors. There are a lot of options that you actually have with these gradients. You can add gradient fills and gradient strokes to all shapes, whether it's an ellipse, a rectangular, or a polystar. 11. 02.09 Fills & Strokes - Shape Layer Creation Tool: In the previous lesson, we learned how to add strokes and fills when creating a shape by command. In this lesson, we're going to go over how to add strokes and fills when creating a shape layer using the shape layer creation tool. Let's just grab this rounded rectangle tool holding down the left mouse button. We're going to click and drag when you create your shape using the shape layer tool, you can actually go up into your stroke and fill and holding down. If you click through, you'll see you can make some choices here. Hold on the Alt button and click that makes it a linear gradient stroke. If we hold on Alt and click again, that's going to make it a radial gradient stroke. If we do it one more time, it removes our stroke. And if you Alt click one more time, it makes it a solid stroke. Okay, and the same thing with fill. Let's hold on the Alt button and click Fill, and we'll see that's a linear gradient fill. A click again, it's a radial gradient fill. All click again and then it removes the fill. And do it one more time and it adds solid fill. You have all of these shortcuts only if you create your shape using the shape tool. And I'll show you if you go New Shape layer, If we add rectangle and let's make it a little bit larger. Now if I start to click through here, click on Stroke. We can see that it's telling it to change it to different kinds of gradients and to remove the stroke or go to a solid. Same with fill. If we click through it's like, oh, that's a linear gradient. That's a radial gradient. But it's not adding it to our shape layer. We have to physically add it to the shape layer if we create a shape layer from scratch, as opposed to using our shape layer tool once you add a stroke. Now see if we click through it, it will change it to a gradient stroke. The same thing if you add a fill. Now we can click the fill and that will give us a gradient fill. And you click it again and it makes it a radial gradient fill. Click it again and it removes it. We see the eyeball disappeared over here. Alt, click again. You see the eyeball comes back on and makes it a solid. That's just one of the things to keep in mind is if you create a shape layer from scratch, you have to actually physically add at least a stroke or a fill in order to toggle through the Alt click options as opposed to if you create a shape layer using the Shape Layer tool. And it makes sense if you think about it the way that when we first approached the ways to create shape layers, when you create a shape layer using the shape layer tool, it automatically gives you a stroke and a fill. So it makes sense that from the beginning you would have the options of adding all of these That covers the shape layer attributes of fill stroke, gradient fill, ingradient stroke. 12. 02.10 Stroke Color, Opacity, Width: In this lesson, we're going to go over Stroke Attributes, focusing on color, opacity, and stroke width. So let's go ahead and create a comp. We're going to click Create New Composition icon here. And we're just going to call this stroke Attributes. It really doesn't matter how you create your shape layer here, since we'll be focusing primarily on strokes, I'm going to just create one the way I like to write. Click New Shape Layer, and it can be any shape. I'm going to create a rectangle and I'm going to add a stroke. And I'm going to increase that stroke width to 15 pixels. And then I'm going to open up the rectangle path and increase the size of this so we can get a better look at it. Let's make this stroke a little bit bigger. Let's say 50 pixels. Okay, So now if we open up our stroke one here underneath our shape layer, we can see there are actually a lot of controls that we have for our stroke. The first thing you'll notice is that our color has a stopwatch, which means it's key frameable. Let's set a key frame at the beginning of this layer. Go forward a little bit, change it to red, go forward a little bit more, Change it to yellow, and you go forward a little bit more, Change it to blue. If you end to loop this area, hit zero on your keyboard to play it. Now we can see how our color can be key frames, so it moves from one color to the next. In between these keyframes, it's changing its value, it's changing colors between the key frames. This keyframe here is a solid red. This one is white, but in between is a mixture of those. Same between the second and third one. This is a red and it goes to a yellow. In the middle, we see it's more like an orange and from yellow to blue in the middle, a green. If you wanted these to change dramatically, where it just goes from white to red, yellow, blue, one thing you can do is if you highlight all of those keyframes, right click and choose toggle Hold key frame. It doesn't make the change in value until your playhead gets to the next key frame. If you watch it, it just changes abruptly to the actual colors that we've chosen control. Click back on the, change them back to linear key frames. If you hit nine, it makes them bezier. Remove these keyframes. We'll just keep this white for this next section. Let's go to opacity. Make your stroke zero. Opacity is transparent. 100 capacity is the brightest it can be. Again, this is keyframable, you'd want it to make it flash For example, go 0-100 off and on like this. Highlight those, toggle hold keyframe and play it. And we see how we can create a flash if you don't toggle hold those and you play, you see it fades in and out between one another. We'll leave that at 100 stroke width, we said it at 50. This is key frameable, you can change the width. It's the same principle as with our color and our opacity. You can slowly change the stroke width. Or if you highlight all of these right click toggle hold keyframe, it'll jump to the different sizes. Depends on what you're going for in your animation. 13. 02.11 Line Cap & Line Join: If you notice we have line cap, and if you click the drop down, there are three options but cap, round cap, and projecting cap. These differences are more noticeable on paths. So let's go ahead and create a path real quick. We'll create just two points here. I'm going to zoom in on this. Let's focus on this path with butt cap, which is what it defaults to. The stroke ends at the end of the path, meaning these two vertices are the length of the path. Choosing butt cap just means that it's going to be squared off at each end of the path. If we choose round cap, it extends beyond it, but with a rounded semicircle projecting It just extends slightly beyond it. With a squared off cap line join will affect shapes and paths with more than two vertices. Right now we have what's called mitor join, and that's just a pointed connection. Round cap and round join, they have the same effect on what they are affecting. Whereas the path, a rounded end, round join, makes the corners of our rectangle have a rounded corner. Then the other option is bevel join, and that gives us a beveled edge. It's like a squared off connection. It's somewhere in between a pointed connection and a round connection. If we choose bevel join, we see how it squares off disconnection. Remember, line cap is going to affect your paths which are in line segments. So we can add more points in here and you can see the effect it has on this. So if we do like a zig zag, we can see how it only affects the ends of them. But now if we choose the round join, it's going to round off these segments that are in between the ends of the path. Line cap only affects the ends of your path, and it makes sense. That's not really going to affect a shape. Because if line cap affects the ends of a path, well, a shape does really have an end of a path because it's all connected. A good way to remember this is that line cap will affect paths, only line join will affect shapes. And paths with more than two vertices. Depending on how extreme your vertices are, it's going to be more noticeable like if these are closer together, it may not be quite as noticeable like if we do like a round join and a round cap. See, these are actually rounded. Although you can't really tell until you start to come out a little bit more extreme to notice the difference. 14. 02.12 Stroke Dashes: Welcome back to our lessons on stroke attributes. So far, we've covered color, opacity, stroke width, line, cap, and line join. In this lesson, we're going to focus on dashes, which is located underneath line join. So let's just click on Added Dasher Group. Immediately, we already see the effect that this has. If you don't remove it, just simply hit the minus button and it takes it away. Now the reason why this is affecting both the rectangle and the path is because within my shape layer, I've added the shape which is this path I've drawn and this rectangle path. So I'm going to ahead and just get rid of this shape with the path so that way we can focus only on our rectangle for right now. Okay, let's go ahead and add our dashes back in. The first thing to take note of is this number next to our. If you increase, the number of dashes decreases. And if you decrease this number, the number of dashes increase. They become closer together and they increase in size. As the number gets larger, more spaces between them and fewer are visible. See, we can go all the way up really high. At 854, there's only two dashes. This is really where you want to work in conjunction with your stroke width. Okay, so let's make the stroke with a little thinner to see how it affects the dash line. And then let's give it a round join and a round cap offset is located here. As you adjust the settings of the offset, you can see how it moves the dashes around the stroke path. These are both key frameable. Set a key frame for offset at zero and go forward and maybe move it just to some random number. And if you watch it, that's how you can get your dashes to move around the square. By altering this offset here, keyframe dashes. Let's maybe make this 35 and see what happens. An interesting animation. The whole point is, is that you have a lot of options with dashes and with the offset. If you highlight dash and you hit plus again, you get an option called gap. The gap defaults to ten. The larger the gap you make, the more distance is going to be between each. This is key frameable, so you can animate this in any number of ways. You can add up to three. And gap controls, Highlight, dash, plus, again we get two plus, again we get gap two plus, again we get three plus, again we get gap three. Notice we no longer have the option of adding any more dashes or gaps. As you kind of start to play with some of these settings, you can do some very interesting things with your stroke. Now you can have three different controls for your dashes and your gaps and how they interact with one another. Player on this offset really get some interesting looks. These gaps are affected by the previous dashes and gaps. What I mean by that is this. Let me set all this back to ten. This two is affected by one. This is interacting with one as is this gap here. Gap three now is interacting with all of the above. This here is being affected by 2.1 Same thing with our gap. As we increase that and decrease it, it's affecting gap one and gap two. If you want to get rid of any of these dashes or gaps, simply hit the subtract button and it's going to remove them from the bottom most position. It doesn't matter which one. You have highlighted notices with a value of 27. If you hit subtract, it's still there. The attribute that was in the bottom position was gap three. So that's the one that got removed as you hit subtract. They are removed in the same order that they were added. You can always add them back in, but they will fall back to their original, which is ten. And if you want to get rid of your dashes completely, just hit the minus button here and your stroke will go back to a solid line. Attributes are keyframable color opacity stroke with your line cap. However, your line join is not but your color opacity stroke with, if you add dashes, the dash in the offset and the gap, if you add a gap are all keyframable If you want to have something that's flashing or if you want colors to come off and on, you want to highlight all of these right click and toggle hold keyframe to make them come off and on. Otherwise, they will blend into one another and will include values in between the key frames, That is stroke attributes. 15. 02.13 Section 02 Review: This section was packed full of very detailed and dense information, but it provides you with a very strong foundation for understanding how to work with shape layers and also what the technical aspects are of shape layers. If there's something you're not sure of or you don't feel like you fully grasp a concept, I highly recommend you go back and watch it again, that way you fully understand it. Before proceeding further, in the next section, we'll be going over vertices and groups. Understanding the types of vertices on a path and how to manipulate them will give you more control over your designs. Grouping, shape layers keeps your design streamlined, but it also gives you more control over all the shapes within your design. In some cases, grouping is necessary. In other cases, grouping won't provide the desired effect, and in other cases, grouping is optional. Don't worry, we'll cover all of these situations throughout the course. I look forward to seeing you back in the next section. 16. 03.01 Section 03 - Shape Layer Properties: Welcome back to the Power of Shape Layers, section three, Shape Layer properties. I'm glad to see that you're progressing through this course Now that you've learned all about shape layer hierarchy. The different kinds of transform properties, the differences between paths and shapes. And how to add bills and strokes and all the components that make up strokes. Let's talk about vertices and grouping. The plural of vertex is vertices. So whenever I'm talking about vertices, I simply mean more than one vertex. Think about it like a stopping point for a path. A straight line has two vertices and a rectangle has four. There are different types of vertices and different ways that you can manipulate them to get the most out of your designs. We're also going to go over grouping. Grouping refers to organizing a shape into its own compartment where it has its own fills strokes and animation tools that are specific to itself. Only you can either completely group a shape in all of its attributes, or you can group a shape in some of its attributes. Such as whenever you have a fill, a stroke, and an animation tool beneath more than one group. We'll cover all of this in the upcoming lessons. There's a lot to get through. Let's dive right in. 17. 03.02 Vertices Basic Training: In this section we're going to go over vertices. Vertices is the plural of vertex. Every shape has vertices and every path has at least two. Let's dive deeper into this. First, let's create a composition. We'll just click on our composition icon here and we'll name this comp vertices choose. Okay. Then let's make our magnification fit into the size of our comp. Now the way that you can control vertices differs depending on what you want to do with them and how you create them. First of all, let's just create a new shape layer. And we're going to add in a rectangle. And we'll give this a stroke, make this rectangle a little bit larger, we'll make the stroke a little bit thicker. Now looking at this rectangle, we can see that it has all of these points. It may seem that these are vertices, but really they're not. You can't manipulate these points. It just makes your rectangle larger or smaller if you want to convert these points into vertices. The way you do that is right click on the rectangle path and see we have this option for convert to Bezier path. Once we do that, now we have a path that you can really manipulate. I'm going to undo that, so I can really drive this point home. Look at where it says path one. When I undo it, see it says rectangle path. If you see rectangle path or ellipse path or polystar path, you don't have vertices that you can really manipulate. This has to be a bezie path, not a rectangle path or an elliptical path, or anything like that. It has to be a Bezie path. Let's click on Path, and now we can see each corner has these vertices. Now, this has been converted to a Bezier path. We can move these vertices any way that we want to. These are all keyframeable too. Let's put a keyframe on our path here. We move forward a little bit. We can move this here, and go forward a little bit further. We can move that there. And then if we watch it play back, we can see how we can move this path. If this is just a planol rectangle, there's no way to do that. Again, I'll add back in our rectangle. Go to a new rectangle. It's a field this time, so we can see it easier. And we'll just increase the size of it again. See we can't manipulate these points. It only makes the rectangle thinner or fatter, or taller or shorter. In order to manipulate vertices, this rectangle path has to be converted to a bezier path. I'll do the same thing for other shapes. Let's add an ellipse. We'll give that a fill. Now see clearly we have these four points. If we bring them together, they just changes the width and the height of our shape. However, if we right click and convert the ellipse path to a bezier path, now all of these points become movable. And you can do all kinds of cool things with this. And again, these are all key frameable meaning you can come up with all kinds of designs and make them do all kinds of cool things. The most important thing to remember with this is that if you want to manipulate the vertices of a shape, it has to be converted to a bezier path. Okay? And this holds true for even if you create a shape using your shape layer tool. So let's use a polygon tool and we'll create a polygon here, polygon and polystar. It's even more noticeable because we don't see the corner points here, but we can't do anything with it again. It just makes it shorter, taller, wider. However, we right click on our polystar path right here, convert to Bezier path. Now we're going to have our five points that we can manipulate and do some cool things with. 18. 03.03 Bezier vs. Linear Vertices: Now let's go over the differences between linear em, Bezier vertices. I'm going to grab my pen tool and I'm just going to draw a random shape. All of these vertices default to what's called a linear vertex, meaning there are no handles to pull this, we can't round the corners out. That's what our default is set to. There are two types of vertices. We have linear E bezier. Bezier simply means that you can round the corners out, give you handles, you can do more creative things with your vertex. A linear vertex doesn't allow you to make those kind, so all of these vertices are linear. So let's get rid of this. I want to show you the difference between that and a Bezier vertex path. With our pencil, we're going to left click and drag, Left click and drag, left click and drag. So we have these handles, okay? Our last text be our first vertex. If we click around, all these have handles as we can see. If you write, click on any one of these and then click on roto bezier. We lose our handles, See we have no more handles. Whatever roundness we had on there before is the roundness that we're stuck with. However, we can go back if we write click and uncheck roto bezier. Now all of our handles are back. Now this does not work in reverse. What I mean by that is let's get rid of that shape layer. And I'm going to just create a shape using linear vertices. See I'm not dragging, I'm just making points. Now if I write, click say on this vertex and I choose roto bezier, nothing happens. It doesn't matter which ones I click on, I never get those handles. This really only works if you begin with a bezier vertex path. There are times that you're going to want these handles to be on here. It depends on what you're creating, whether it's just a shape or maybe a character. Sometimes you will want these and then there are times that you want to be a linear vertex. But be aware that there are some differences in what you're able to do with whether or not it's a linear vertex or a bezier vertex. Now let's go in here and create a new shape layer. And then let's add an ellipse. We'll do a stroke here. Let's right click onto our ellipse path and convert to bezier path with all ellipses. These are automatically going to be bezier vertices for obvious reasons because it's a circle. Now, if we add a rectangle, and then we convert that to a Bezier path, these are linear because it's a hard corner, it's a 90 degree corner. Whenever you convert a rectangle to a bezier path, it's going to have linear vertices. For ellipses, it's going to have bezier vertices. The same is going to be true for some of our other shapes. Let's get our shape tool and let's create a rounded rectangle. Okay, So if we create that, obviously there is some roundness going on here. If we write, click onto our rectangle path, convert to Bezier path, and now we can see that these are bezier vertices because it has to create some roundness for it. Any shape that's rounded, once you convert it to a bezier path, we'll have bezier vertices. Any shape that has hard corners like a square or a polygon, or a polystar, those will always default to linear vertices. However, if you create them by hand, grab the pen tool and you draw some shape. Unless you click and drag, they're going to be linear vertices. So like for example, this is a linear, this is linear. This one I click and drag, so that's a bezier. 19. 03.04 Converting Shapes to Bezier Paths: Let's create a rectangle and then let's give it a stroke. Rectangles and ellipses are special in that they have these separate settings for position and size. For rectangles, you have this roundness too. Once you convert this rectangle path to a Bezier path, you lose those functions. Now you no longer have the size and position and the roundness function that you had before. That's something that's actually very important. Like if you want to make this wider now and you may not stay on a perfectly straight path, you may go off like that. One of the benefits of working with shapes as opposed to paths is that you will have these extra controls like with size, You can very easily change the size of them or the position of them, the roundness of them, and you lose all of that functionality whenever you convert to a bezier path. And see, I'll show you the same way with an ellipse. Whenever you had an ellipse, just give it a stroke. The ellipse path has this size and has this position options here. You can uncheck that. Well, once you convert that to a bezier path, you no longer have that. Now it's just a path so you don't have those controls for position and for size. So something to keep in mind as you start to get into more complex shapes and animations. There are times that you actually want to have a rectangle path or an ellipse path as opposed to just a plan bezier path. 20. 03.05 Setting a First Vertex: There's one other thing I wanted to touch on when it comes to vertices, and that's setting a first vertex. So let's just create a shape. Let's add a rectangle and give it a stroke, and maybe increase that a little bit. Now let's right click on a rectangle path and then convert to bezier path. Whenever you have a bezier path, there's always going to be one vertex. It's thicker than the others in this case is this upper right one here. Now the reason why this is important is, and we'll get into this more detail later. If you add something like a Trempass, this end percentage is going to control the animation for how it begins and ends. As you can see as we scrub through this, it's beginning and ending with that first vertex. What if your animation requires it to begin over on this vertex over here? You can always offset it with this offset percentage here, but it's a little cumbersome and it's not exact times. You may get like a half of a degree that you need to begin your animation at. This may be a little confusing, but we will get into Tripas later and it'll make much more sense. The point I'm trying to make is if you want to control where your animation begins and ends, whenever you add a trim pass, you need to be able to set your first vertex. And the way you do that is say we want it to start from this corner here, well just click on that vertex, right click mask shape and path, and choose set first vertex. When you click that, your animation will begin and end from there. One of the things to keep in mind is that when you have a path, you can always add more points. Choose your pen tool. Let's just add a few more points in here now. Say we want our animation to begin and end from this vertex. Right click, mass shape and path set first vertex and there we go. 21. 03.06 Groups Basic Training: Okay, in this lesson, we're going to go over groups. First, let's create our composition. We'll just hit this icon here for create new composition, and we'll call this Groups. Click. Okay, let's go ahead and create a Shape Layer. We'll right click in this area here, this to the left of our Timeline, New. And from the pop out menu, we're going to choose Shape layer as we've seen before. We get a shape layer from after effects, but nothing in our content. So we have to go in and add our contents. So the first thing I'm going to do is go to add. Let's add a group. Groups are important because there are a way to control each shape within your shape layer. You'll want to use groups when you need to control the transform properties of some or all of your shapes independently. Let's walk through an example. Okay, so within this first group, let's add an ellipse. And we'll give that ellipse a fill and a stroke. And as we can see from our shape layer panel up here, we get our default white stroke that's two pixels wide and our default red pill. So I'm just going to change this to maybe a blue Make the stroke, we'll say orange. And let's increase our stroke to maybe 20. Now let's open up our ellipse path, which is inside of our group. And just increase this so we can see it a little bit better here. One of the things that you can do with groups is that you can rename them. You can also rename your ellipse paths and call them whatever you'd like. Even your strokes and your fills. And the way you do that is just highlight whatever it is you want to change the name of and hit Return or Enter on our group one. Let's hit Enter, called this circle. And then with contents highlighted again, we want to add another group and we'll name this one rectangle. Then inside of this rectangle group, let's go ahead and add a rectangle as well as a stroke and a fil. Let's make this ellipse path and rectangle path the same size in pixels. So see our ellipse path. Let's change, say, to 550. And we'll make our rectangle path as well, 550. Our stroke for ellipse path is set to 20, so let's make our rectangle stroke also 20. We can just leave the default settings for the field and the stroke for the rectangle path. Okay, now here are two groups, circle and rectangle, and as we mentioned before, we have transform properties for the entire shape layer. As we start to move our transform properties for the shape layer itself, we can see how these move together. Well, what if we want these shapes to interact separately in our circle group? We have transform properties for it. So we can take our position and say we want to move it over here. For the rectangle group, we can open up our transform properties and move that to the other side. In the most basic way, you can see how groups are important if you want to control your shapes independently of one another. But it's not just position and scale that you can control with these settings, you can also control the rotation. You can add some scripts. This is a common script if you Alt click on rotation and just type in time times 20. And we will go over some more expressions and scripts as we go through these lessons. We won't get too deep into that because that's a whole other course. But this is a very basic script that's used quite often. And let's just go ahead and loop this at 2 seconds. So put our playhead at 2 seconds. Hit in to loop that area and press zero on your number pad. And so see we can move that rectangle independently of our circle. So adding groups is a very simple way to control multiple shapes within one shape layer. Now, there may be times you want only one shape per shape layer, but there are definitely times that you're going to want more than one shape within a shape layer. I'll give you an example brought in this project file for a character that I created a while back. And let's just take a look at him. I named him Bob. So let's open up our Bob comp. And here's Bob waving to us. Now if we go into our Bob pre comp here, you can see that these are all shape layers for all the body parts. This is something that I'm going to show in another course. But just so you know, you can create entire characters using only shape layers. Now one of the ways that I create my characters is that I will put a character's head in one shape layer. I'm going to solo this layer here for head. And let's zoom in here real quick. So this is one of those instances where you want more than one shape within a shape layer. So if we open this up, as you can see this has multiple shapes within this one shape layer. And these are all just circles, ellipses, polygons, things like that. So see like within our hair group here, if we take that away, you can see this is his hair. Even within our hair group, I have five other groups that make up his hair. So the whole point of showing you this is to let you know that there are definitely times that you're going to want more than one shape within a shape layer and that's where groups come in. So groups are a way that you can control multiple shapes within one shape layer. 22. 03.07 Group Anchor Point & Positions Settings for Ellipses and Rectangles: Now one of the unique things about ellipses and rectangles is they both have their own separate size and position controls. See, you can control the size of this circle using a scale, a percentage scale within the group transform properties. Or you can control it using the pixel size. See this size here for ellipse path, this is in pixels, not in percentages, and that's an important differentiation. There are times that you're going to want a specific pixel number for the size of your ellipses or your rectangles. You can control the position as well. Click on Ellipse Path and then you press Y to bring up your pan around tool. This will show you where your anchor point is. As long as your position on your elipse path is at zero, your anchor point will be dead center in the middle of that ellipse. Now watch what happens if you start to move your position within the circle. So your anchor point is now no longer centered. And this is significant at times say like if you wanted to scale this using your transform properties for circle. You can see now that it's scaling from wherever the anchor point is. However, if you adjust your size, it will still scale from the center. This can get confusing. My suggestion is to leave your position for ellipses and rectangles alone. Always set those at 00 unless there's a very specific reason. See if you move your position here. Your anchor point still stays in the center of this shape. 23. 03.08 Why Use Groups?: In this lesson, we're going to go over when it's useful to use groups at the very basic level, you'll want to use groups in shape layers that have multiple shapes. Because you want to have the ability to control each aspect of each shape independently of one another within a single shape layer groups allow you to do this. Let me give you an example. Add a polystar and we'll get this polystar fill and a stroke. What if we want to have a rectangle in this shape layer as well? We want these two to interact. Well, if we add a rectangle, even though we can move our rectangle, if we open up our polystar path, we can actually move our polystar over. The problem is both of these have the same fill and stroke. There are some things you can do with the hierarchy of your layers here. If you move your rectangle underneath stroke, now the fill will apply to the rectangle and the polystar, but the stroke will not apply to the rectangle. What if we want the polystar to have a blue fill? Well, you can apply a fill only to the polystar by playing with the hierarchy of these layers. Just add a new fill. Now this fill will apply only to this polystar. If you change this fill at this level just with fill to highlight, you'd say we make this blue. It will actually make both of your fills blue as you can see. And say if we changed any color it's actually affecting both fills. What you have to do is go inside of this fill two and change the color within this layer here. If we change this to blue, now we can have a blue polystar. And we could actually add a stroke to our rectangle by simply adding stroke and then pulling it underneath our rectangle path. But this can get very cumbersome and it can get very confusing. The easiest way to deal with multiple shapes in a shape layer is just simply add a group. Now see if we can pull our polystar fill and stroke within group one and then contents. Let's add a second group and we'll pull our rectangle stroke and fill inside of group two. Now we have transformed properties for each group. Let me just put this anchor point back in. The center rotation controls, we have opacity controls, we have things like that. Whereas before, if you notice, if you open up our polystar path, although we do have rotation, we don't really have a size control now. We can increase the inner radius and match that with the outer radius to make it bigger. But this can get very confusing very, very quickly. One thing that we don't have is opacity controls within the polystar. Same thing goes if we open up our rectangle path. We have size and position, but we don't have a rotation control within rectangle path. By placing these shapes within a group, you have more controls over each individual shape. See our rectangle path, we have full control over the position, over the scale. We can skew it, put this anchor point back in the center. We can rotate it, we can control the elpacity. While there are ways to stack your shape layer attributes and still get a similar effect, groups allow you to have complete control over each shape. One of the other things that groups allow you to do, as I touched on earlier, is to make your shape layer cleaner. So like we can call this star, we can call this box. So it's much easier to navigate through the shape layers. If your groups are named, we'll go back to Bob, let's go back to our head. And so as you can see, if these were not actually in groups, but these were actually just laid out, it could get very confusing very, very quickly. If I want to make a change to his beard, I know that this group right here contains my beard. And within that I have several lips paths. I have emerged paths which we will go over in a later lesson. So it's much easier to pinpoint which shapes are in which group and which controls affect which shape. So I highly recommend in your own projects, whenever you're creating shape layers, if you want to have multiple shapes within a single shape layer that you use groups and always rename them so they're much easier to find and to navigate through these shape layers. This is a good time to point this out as well. You'll hear me using terminology like shapes, shape layers paths throughout this entire lesson. When I refer to a shape layer, I'm referring to the actual layer. As you can see right here. Even whenever you create a new shape layer, it comes in with the name shape layer. Shapes are the shapes that are within the shape layer. See this polystar is a shape within the shape layer. Just keep that in mind as we go through these lessons. But in general, shape layer is a layer itself which is controlled by the transform properties of the layer. And shapes are individual shapes that have their own controls, either within groups or within the shapes themselves. 24. 03.09 Group Transform Properties vs. Layer Transform Properties: Something that's really important to remember whenever you're working with groups and the transformed properties of those groups is to remember that the group transform properties are relative to the layer transform properties. And what I mean by that is this, this composition is 1920 by 1080. So if we go down to our layer transform properties, we see that our position is 960 by 540. And the reason why is because this shaped layer is in the center of this comp. 1920/2 gives us 960. Likewise, 1080/2 gives us 540. So this shape layer is in the center of this composition, and the center point position of that is 960 by 540. So now if we open up our group, we go down on transform properties. We'll see that our position is 00. What that means is that this group is zero pixels from our layer transform properties. If we were to make our layer position zero, and we can move our group position over to 960 and get the same result. But I recommend that you position your layer using your layer transform properties. And you only adjust your group transform properties such as position, scale, and rotation relative to that layer. So if you have multiple groups or shapes within the shape layer, that would be a good time to adjust your group position to offset them. So again, the layer transform properties controls the position of the layer itself. And the group transform properties are relative to the transform properties of your layer. This goes for other transform properties as well such as scale. So see, our scale is set to 100% that's 100% of the layers 100% So say if we made our scale 50 for the shape layer, our group is still 100% of 50. So now if we decrease this down to 50% so on this group is 50% of our layer, so we can move this back up to 100. And we can see if we put our group back up to 100, it's the original size. But this scale is going to be relative to our layer. Just as our position, our anchor point, our rotation, is all relative to the transform properties of the layer itself. In other words, the values of your position for this group does not mean that that's where this layer is located in the composition that's controlled by the layer transform properties. This group is zero pixels from the position of the layer itself. So say if we wanted to go 500 pixels to the left, negative 500. This group is now negative 500 pixels from the position of the layer. But its position in the composition is not negative 500, it's actually 460. And the way we know that is 960 -500 is 460. And I'm just going to bring up a ruler to show you what I mean. If we bring up a ruler here and we go to the edges of this ellipse right there. And we change our group position back to zero and we move our layer position to 460. We can see it's in the same exact location. That's something that's very important to remember, is that your group transform properties are relative to your layer transform properties. 25. 03.10 Masking Shapes: One of things we need to cover going over shape layers is masking shape layers. And there are some rules and some things you need to understand when trying to mask shapes. And we're going to go over those right now. Let's go ahead and create a new composition using our new icon. And we're going to call this Masking Shapes. I leave our settings where they are and just hit, okay, let's right click in this area, this left of the time line shape layer. Let's go ahead and add an ellipse. And we'll give it a fill. Let's just change that fill to a blue. We're going to increase the size of this ellipse in the same shape layer. Let's go ahead and add a rectangle. Let's make these past the same size. Let's make our ellipse path 500 pixels by 500. And the rectangle also 500 by 500. Now we're just going to move these so we can see them independently. Let's move our ellipse path negative 500 pixels. And our rectangle path will move 500 pixels. That way they're equal distant on our comp. Okay? If you wanted to mask this safe, for example, if you only wanted to see half of this ellipse here. There's a way to do that using shape layer tools. One of those ways is merge paths, which we're going to go over in a later lesson. But for now I want to show you what would happen if you try to do that with a mask. We just grabe this rectangle tool. The first thing to know whenever you're trying to mask a shape is there are two options for applying this rectangle tool. And they're right here, This star and this transparency box here. If you notice if you hover over the star, it says tool creates shape that is enabled by default. And the reason why is because after effects believes if you're grabbing a shape layer tool that you want to create a shape. It doesn't think that you want to mask a shape. Although you can mask a shape, the default setting is always to create a shape. If you click this mask button or if you grab your Pin tool, you'll see that this star is on by default. You can toggle these off and on. Now if I try to mask this shape with the Tool Create Shape Tool, it's just going to create another shape. That's not what we want. What you can do is choose this box here. Tool creates mask. Now this will create a mask, but watch what happens. If I wanted to say only use half of this ellipse here, I'm going to change it back to our rectangle tool because these both do the same thing, they both create masks. I'm going to draw a box and see, now it's adding this mask. But now the rectangle over here disappeared. And we can change our mask setting from Ad to subtract. And we have the other half of our ellipse. But now our rectangle is in here as well. Well, you could create another mask and just mask that out if you didn't want that change this mask to subtract. This is a lot of unnecessary steps. The best way to do this is with merge paths. But I do want you to be aware that you can mask shapes. It can just be a little cumbersome and you don't really have a whole lot of control. Now if you only have one shape in your shape layer, this can be more effective. Like, for example, let's take out this rectangle path and say we only had our ellipse path, we're going to move back over to the center. Notice if you move your lips path with your position settings within your path, the mask does not go with it. And the reason why is because the mask is applied to the shape layer, the layer itself, not to the individual shape paths within your shape layer. Something that's very important to understand. Whenever you apply a mask to a shape layer, it's applying it to the layer. You cannot mask these shapes individually. In order to have that effect, you need to use merge paths. Let's move this mask over and see, we can't actually get half of an ellipse. There may be times when it is useful to do this, but I would highly recommend learning merge paths because you have a lot more control. And this can become either cumbersome or nearly impossible if you have a lot of shapes or like a lot of groups within one shape layer, you just simply won't be able to mask out individual shapes. Let's get rid of this shape layer here and start over from scratch and do a new shape layer. I'm going to create groups. Let's create a group and we'll make an ellipse. You have that ellipse feel. Change that up a little bit and let's increase the size of our ellipse path. Let's duplicate group. Once we have group two, we're going to add a rectangle and remove this ellipse. Let's change this rectangle path to a different color so we can differentiate the two. I'm going to just increase my rectangle path so that way we can see both of these. Let me change this so we can keep better track of our group. We'll say circle and name group two square. Now what happens if I want to only have a semicircle? If I take my rectangle tool and then I enable tool creates mask and say I want to mask out the left side of the ellipse. Watch what happens. It also masks out our square again, the reason why is because the mask is being applied to the shape layer itself, not to the individual groups or the individual shapes within the groups. You are extremely limited. If you try to mask a shape that has more than one shape, always remember that it's going to default to Tool creates shape. If you grab a pen tool or a shape tool and you have to physically change it to tool creates mask. In order to mask out of shape, the most important thing to remember in this lesson is if you want to alter your shapes by masking certain areas out, or only including certain parts of the shape, you need to use merge pads, which we're going to go over in a later lesson. I highly recommend that you stick around for that and you check it out. 26. 03.11 Create Shapes From Text: Okay, so for this lesson, in the next lesson, we're going to go over converting non shape assets into shape layers. In this lesson, we're going to cover converting text into shapes. And in the next lesson, we're going to cover converting vector images into shapes. To convert text into shapes, the first thing you need is some text control T to bring up your text tool. And then let's just type shape layers are cool. I'm going to go up to my layer tab and then go to Transform Enlist center anchor point and layer content or control. All tome, that puts our anchor point right in the middle of our text. Then let's go to our line panel and just align this to the center of our composition. Now one of the things to remember about converting shapes from text is that the shape layers will pull over your fills and your stroke. Notice in our text here, we only have a fill. We don't have a stroke. Now I'm going to add a stroke. If you click this square, this right behind your fill square, let's just add a stroke. So I'm going to make it red. Now this will default to the last stroke with that you used. I used 11 pixels. Let's make it seven then. Notice you have the option for fill over stroke and stroke over fill. Whichever one of these you choose will be represented in your shape layer. I'm going to choose fill over stroke. Whenever I convert this to the shape layer, my fill will come before my stroke. Okay, Then with the text layer highlighted simply, right click and then choose Create. One of the things to take note of here is that if you're using an older version of after effects like before 2018, this option will look different. Instead of this create option with the dropdown, you'll see create shapes from text and create mass from text and a few of these other options. In this primary window right here in versions after 2018, you have this option for create. You can either create shapes from text or create mass from text. Since this is a course on shape layers, we're going to focus on creating shapes from text. Choose that. Now notice two things happen. First of all, our text layer has been hidden. Notice that the is no longer there and this text layer is not hidden from our view. The reason why this happens is because after effects assumes we converted text to shapes for a reason. And we want to use the shape layer, not the text layer. However, it leaves the layer there for reference or in case you need to make any alterations. Okay, now let's open up our shape layer. If you open up contents, you'll notice that we have a group for every letter. As we click through here, shape layers are cool, each letter has its own group. Let's open up the group for S. We chose fill over stroke as we can see over here. And sure enough, our fill comes before our stroke. And the reason why is because the shape layer is duplicating our text layer exactly. If we had chosen stroke over fill, the stroke would have come first. One of the things to realize here is that each one of these letters now has its own transform properties. If you open up transform, notice how we can move each letter anyway that we want. We can scale each letter. We can rotate each letter. Each letter has its own control. Now notice that whenever we scale and rotate, it's rotating from the middle. And the reason why is because our shape layer defaults our anchor point to the center of our layer. Here is our group. If you choose Y, we can now look for our anchor point and notice how it's right here at the bottom of the R. If you want this to be centered, we have to actually drag this anchor point over to the center of our. If we highlight H, notice that our anchor point is in the same spot. We've got to drag it over. Let's skip down a little bit further. Let's go to this A. See, our anchor point is still in the same exact place that all the other letters are. That's one of the things you have to keep in mind is that if you want to adjust scale and rotation with each one of these groups, you need to make sure that you go through each group and center your anchor point. Or put it at the bottom of your layer, depending on how you want to animate it. Example, if I put this anchor point in the center of my P. Let's open up our P here. I can scale this. And now it will scale from the middle of the P. However, say maybe if I wanted to animate it from the bottom, If you're bringing us down to the very bottom, we can unlink our scale. We can make our letter pop in or do something like that. If we wanted to rotate it, it will now rotate from the bottom. All of the transformed properties operate the same way that they would for a regular group or layer. But remember, whenever you convert text into shape layers, you do have to move that anchor point over to each one of your letters. It can be a little time consuming, but this does give you complete control over each one of your letters. So you can see that there are some benefits to creating shape layers from text. You have complete control over the fills and strokes of all of your letters. And each letter is given its own group with its own transform properties that you can completely control. When the drawback says, if you want to animate the scale or rotation of your letter, you have to actually pull over your anchor point and move it to the proper location, because your anchor point will not default to the center of your group. However, you have complete control and I highly recommend using this method whenever you want to do specialized animation for text. 27. 03.12 Create Shapes From Vectors: Okay, in this lesson, we're going to cover converting shapes from vector images. And the last lesson, we talked about converting shapes from text layers. I have a few icons I've already brought in. These are vector images. As you notice, this is an AI file, this is an EPS. These are vector images, meaning you can make these images as large as you want without losing any quality. They can be rasterized and they can be made the size of a billboard and they will have as much clarity as they have inside of your project file. Just to note, shape layers also are automatically rasterized, meaning they can be any size and not lose any clarity. I'm going to bring in this Facebook logo, hit S to bring up our scale. Let's just make this a little bit bigger. Notice how the quality isn't great while whenever you have a vector image, you have to choose this rasterized layer option is this star right here. Now watch the image. Whenever I click that, I'll see it's clear and now it's not. So make sure if you're using vector images and you scale them up, that you do rasterize them in order to keep that clarity. Okay, let me bring this back into our viewer here. You convert shape layers, the same way you convert text by right clicking and go to this create menu. And again, remember in older versions of after effects you will not have this create option, but rather create shapes from vector layer will be in this main pop up window you see here. So let's go ahead and choose create shapes from vector layer. And you'll notice it's the only option that we have. These other ones are grayed out, like text layers. Whenever you convert vector images into shapes, it's going to hide your original layer here. You still have access to it, but it is hidden because after Effects believes you want to use the shape layer instead of your original image. Now let's open up this vector image here. This is a little bit more complex than text layers. Text layers are very straightforward. Every character gets its own group. These groupings are based on how this image was created in either Illustrator or some other software. The groups that you get here are directly related to how they were originally created. But if you start to click through these, see that have a path in a fill or a stroke depending on how it was created. Say if this group here, if it had a stroke in Illustrator, then it would have a stroke here. Whoever made this vector only made it with a fill and a simple path. You can talk with these off and on. One of the benefits of having your vector images now in the shape layers is that you have complete control over things like color. Say this group five is his background. Well, if we click on our Phil, we can change this to any color that we want. If we wanted to make Facebook, suddenly an orange logo, our to be green, maybe blue. You have complete control over this. And you can also animate these in again, like text layers, these all have their own transform properties. You could fade this background in, you can scale it in, you can do anything that you could normally do to an independent layer, because each one of these groups now have their own transform properties. 28. 03.13 Converting Vector Gradients to Shape Layers: So there are instances where you may run into some issues converting vector images into shapes. Notice with the Instagram icon we have this gradient. One of the things after effects doesn't do well is it doesn't interpret gradients from illustrator files into after effects shape layers. If we write click on Instagram and go to Create and create shapes from vector layer, we'll see that that color now becomes gray again. It's because affects cannot interpret gradients from a vector image properly. For a shape layer, color is actually this group four here. If we open up group four, see that it has a fill and it's gray. If we're going to create this on our own, we would have a gradient fill and try to match that. Let's do that real quick. We hide this fill here, highlight group four, and add a gradient fill. Now we turn our Instagram icon back on. We can move it over just by looking at it, we can tell it's a linear gradient. I'm going to make a few adjustments here to our gradient fill. We're going to move our start point over our endpoint match. You see these handles here? You can actually grab these handles and match the way that this looks. Okay, now let's edit our gradient. And this white color here is going to be this more yellow. If we click on this bucket here, we can grab that yellow. We can click on this bucket with the black color and grab this color over on the extreme right. It may take some playing around with it, but you can definitely see how we can get pretty close to the original. Now, this will take a little bit more work to get it exact, but the main idea that I want to communicate with this is that if you have a gradient in your vector image, once you convert that vector image to a shape layer, you're going to get this gray color instead. The reason why, again, is because after Fx cannot interpret gradients from vector images to shape layers, those are just two ways to create shapes from non shape layers. Keep this in mind as you go forward. You can do some really cool things with texts by converting them to shape layers. And you can also have a lot more control over vector images by converting them to shapes. 29. 03.14 Section 03 Review: Now that you've learned all about the basics of shape layers, furtices, grouping, fills, and strokes, and transform properties, you're ready to tackle some animation tools. This is where all the fun happens. Now, while you can do quite a bit with shape layers on their own, there are built in animation tools and after effects that are designed specifically for shape layers. Animation tools make your design possibilities virtually endless. In the next section, you'll learn about basic and advanced animation tools. And by the end of this course, you'll be able to use these animation tools with confidence and ease. I look forward to seeing you back in the next section. 30. 04.01 Section 04 - Basic Animation Tools: Welcome back to the Power of Shape Layers, section four, Basic Animation Tools. Now I've broken animation tools down into two groups, Basic and Advanced. Basic Animation tools are those that only have a few settings and add some alteration to your shape, such as twisting a line, rounding a corner, or affecting the integrity of a shape. While these are basic animation tools, they can yield some pretty impressive results. Advanced animation tools are those that have more complex and intricate settings, such as trim paths, the repeater, and merge paths. The possibilities are virtually endless. With these animation tools, you can use animation tools to create motion graphic designs such as hut elements, animated boxes, bursts, moving icons, and so much more. In this and the next section, you'll learn how to bring your motion graphic design to the next level. The key to getting used to working with animation tools is experimentation. I'm going to show you how to use these animation tools and we will go over them in some tutorials at the end of this course. But I highly recommend that you experiment with them in order to truly master them. Don't get overwhelmed. We'll cover each and every animation tool thoroughly and completely. There's a lot to get through, so let's dive right in. 31. 04.02 Round Corners - Shapes: Okay, the first shape layer animation tool we're going to cover is called round corners. First, let's create a composition using our new composition icon. And we're going to just call this round corners. Let's right click in this area to the left of our timeline for new shape layer. We're going to start off with just adding a rectangle and we're going to give it a fill. And we're going to do a few things in this lesson to show you what round corners can do is fit our comp into our window. Let's increase the rectangle path size a little bit so we can see what we're doing better with contents highlighted. Let's add a round corners. As you open this up, you see there's only one option and that's for radius. Now one of the things to keep in mind is that rectangle path has this roundness option. Round corners isn't really necessary. If you're using a rectangle by itself, you can increase the roundness of this rectangle path all the way until you get an ellipse. If you use round corners, you can do the same thing, just increase it until you get an ellipse. If you're using a rectangle path by itself, round corners isn't very useful. It's also not very useful if you're using an ellipse path because an ellipse path is already round. Let's go ahead and increase this so we can see some of the roundness, okay? So hierarchy is very important when using shaped tools. The way that shape tools interact with one another is directly impacted by their hierarchy. And let me show you what I mean by hierarchy mattering. Watch what happens whenever you add other shaped tools. For example, if we add a pucker and bloat, this hierarchy is fine. Round corners comes before pucker and bloat, and round corners is affecting this shape layer. And the way you can tell is if you hide this round corners, you can see the effect as having. However, if you put round corners below pucker and bloat, it no longer has any effect whatsoever. That's one of the things that's important about round corners is that if you're using it in conjunction with other shaped tools, you need to make sure that round corners comes first. As you can tell, there's a limit to how much round corners will have an impact. Let's put the radius for round corners back down to zero. Now as we start to slowly increase it, we see the effect that it's having. However, at some point, it no longer affects our shape. In this case, a radius of somewhere around 330 or so no longer has any impact on our shape layer. Let's get rid of this pucker and bloat and then also add a twist and start to increase some of these settings for twist. And as you can see, round corners does affect our shape layer. And you can tell if you switch this off, see the difference. However, once again, if you pull round corners underneath twist, it no longer has any impact whatsoever on our shape layer. Again, make sure if you're using round corners in conjunction with other shape tools like zigzag, twist and pucker, and bloat, make sure that round corners comes first. There is one interesting exception though, let's girt of twist and now let's add an offset pass again. We're going to go over this in more detail in an upcoming lesson. But let's just increase the offset paths amount. We can see that round corners is affecting our shape layer if we turn it off and on. Now watch what happens when we move round corners underneath offset paths. It still affects it, but just in a different way. If you're using round corners with offset paths, you can put it underneath offset paths, but it's going to have a much less extreme effect. However, if you put round corners below twist pucker and bloat in zigzag, round corners has no effect whatsoever on your rectangle path. Again, round corners has only one control and that's for radius. Let's add in a polystar. For now, we'll just hide the rectangle path. So here's our polystar. Let's change this to a polygon and increase the radius so we can get a better idea of the impact that round corners is having. We can clearly see that this is affecting this polygon. Now if we turn our rectangle path back on, we can move it over to the side and see how it's affecting both of these shapes. In one case, round corners would come in useful if you want both of these shapes to have the same amount of roundness. For example, if we turn round corners off, we see now that they all have these sharp edges. If we increase our rectangle path roundness it only affects our rectangle path. But if we want the polystar and the rectangle path to add the same roundness, just turn round corners back on and play with these settings. Also notice how the amount of radius affects shape layers differently. You can see that the rectangle on the right is affected differently than the polygon on the left. If you increase round corners to its maximum effectiveness, this polystar almost becomes an ellipse. But you can see around the edges it's not quite a circle. Round corners can be useful in certain cases when you want to just round the corners off of a polygon, a polystar, or a rectangle. It's a fairly simple tool with only one control. Also notice that there is a stopwatch next to radius, which means that it's keyframable. That means that you can animate the radius. So you can start off with the lower radius and increase it. Or you can start off for the higher radius and decrease it. The main thing to take away from this lesson though, is that if you're going to use round corners with other shaped tools, make sure that it comes first. 32. 04.03 Round Corners - Paths: Okay, now let's see what effect round corners would have on a path. We've seen how it affects shapes. Let's add a new shape layer. Then we're going to add a path which will automatically engage our Pintol. Just make two vertices here to make a line. Let's add a stroke, so we can see the effect it's going to have on it. Increase that. We'll pull our ruler back up now with contents highlighted. Let's add round corners. As you can see, there's no change whenever you add round corners initially. In fact, no matter what value you add to round corners, it will not affect a straight line path. Let's see what would happen. However, if we make a path, this is not just a straight line, but something a little more creative. If you hit G on your keyboard, it brings up your Pin tool, Let's just add a few vertices to form this line A to get something a little bit more interesting. Now let's increase our round corners. As you can see, round corners does have an effect on a path that's got more than two vertices. But if it's just a straight line, it's not really going to do much of anything. This is key frameable, so let's put a key frame at 0 seconds. We will make the radius 25 and bring it down to zero on the radius at 1 second. And just loop that and see what effect it has, as you can see, doesn't really do a whole lot. As a matter of fact, you get to go pretty extreme to really see the difference. As you can see, round corners has very little effect on a path. And in fact, if that path is only two vertices, it has zero effect. 33. 04.04 Offset Paths - Shapes: Okay, the next tool we're going to go over is called Offset Paths. Let's right click and create a new shape layer. In that shape layer, let's create that a rectangle. And let's give this a stroke and increase it. And then open up our rectangle path. And increase our rectangle path. If we add an offset paths and then open that tool up, we'll see that there are two main controls, amount and line join. We had line join whenever we talked about strokes and how it affected paths, the concept is the same here and I'll show you what I mean by that. First, let's look at amount offset paths defaults to an amount of ten. As you can see, this control simply increases or decreases the size of your path. There's another option here for line join. Let's change this to round join. We can see how curves the corners of this rectangle. There's also bevel join, and we can see how bevels the edges of this rectangle. Again, this is very similar to the way that line join affects strokes. To see how this interacts with other shape tools, let's add a twist underneath it. We can see that twist is affecting our shape as well as offset paths. We move it underneath. It still affects it, but just in a different way. Once again, hierarchy is very important whenever you're applying these tools to your shapes. Some don't work at all and others work in a different way, like round join, Offset paths is a very simple tool, but you may find it useful in some of your animations. 34. 04.05 Offset Paths - Paths: Now let's see the effect that offset paths has on a path. Let's right click in this area and we're going to add a new shape layer. Let's add a path which will automatically enable our Pin tool. First wedl just two vertices to make a straight line. Add a stroke, so we can see what effect this is going to have and we're going to increase that stroke. Now with contents highlighted, let's add in offset paths. You can see that there's already some effect. If you talk with this effect off and on, you can see that something is happening. Let's open up offset paths and see what happens whenever we increase our amount. As you see, it has a very interesting effect. And this has both positive and negative values, so you can go in either direction. Basically, it makes a straight line into a rectangle. It's offsetting the paths both up and down. It happens if you rotate this path around so that it's a vertical line, it expands horizontally. Now what happens if we add in more vertices? Hit G. To bring up your pen tool, just going to add in a few more vertices, there may be some bezier as well. Just pull these out. You can see that you get something much more interesting. You can add in a fill. It actually fills in the area around your offset paths for you to decrease our amount of the offset path down to zero. It's just a straight path line that we initially came up with. But as you start to expand it, you can really start to see the possibilities. Watch this. Let's put a key frame with the amount of zero at our zero frame. Go forward 1 second. Let's increase this, maybe 50 pixels, and then go to our two second mark. Let's go the other direction, negative 50. Then at 3 seconds, we'll come back to zero. Let's slope that, you get Something that's pretty interesting here as you can see the effect that offset paths has on a path a lot different than the effect it has on a shape. Just experiment with this tool, you can increase the size of your stroke. If you open up your stroke properties, you can do things like change your line joint to a round joint to get a rounded edge on this you can change it to bevel joint to, can get something a little different. You can even add in dashes to get something that looks even more different. It's play around with our stroke width here, dash, amount. You can see the effect that offset paths is having here. It's a very simple shape layer animation tool, but has a lot of potential depending on how you use it and what you're using it for. 35. 04.06 Wiggle Tools - Shapes: Okay, so the next shape layer animation tool, we're going to take a look at our wiggle tools and there are two of them. First, let's right click in this area next to our timeline. Choose new shape layer. Let's add a rectangle. Let's give that rectangle a fill and a stroke. Let's increase this rectangle path. Let's fit our comp into our viewer. Maybe make this a little bit larger. Say 500 pixels tall and wide, with contents highlighted. If you click the ad button, you'll see that there's wiggle paths in wiggle transform. Now these can work either alone or with each other, or with other shape tools. We're going to take a look at each one by itself first. And then after that, see how they can work together. First, let's choose wiggle paths. We open up wiggle paths. We'll see that we have quite a few options here. We have size, detail points, and the options are corner and smooth wiggles per second. Correlation, temporal phase, which is time, and spatial phase, which is space. We also have a random seed. You can see already around the edges that this wiggle paths with this default settings already affects our shape layer. Let's just increase the size of our wiggle path, increase the detail. And you can see already how this is really affecting our shape layer. Now notice also that these have stopwatches next to them, which means that they are key framable, which simply means you can animate them. For points, we have the two options, corner and smooth corner, we have these spikes. If we set this to smooth, you'll see that they're more rounded out. As you affect the detail, you can see the difference. Wiggles per second, defaults to two. Let's increase that to five. Correlation can be set anywhere 0-100% If you turn it all the way up to 100% you'll see that the points are no longer visible. Temporal phase and spatial phase are more for fine tuning. Let's loop this area at about 1 second. You'll notice that we have no key frames, but because of the way the wiggle paths interacts with our shape layer, we get some animation based on our settings. This comes from the wiggles per second. We set the wiggles per second to zero. As you can see, there's no animation whatsoever. The wiggles per second really is the thing that gives this the animation. You can go very slow or you can go very fast. Again, this is all keyframable, so you can affect this over time. You can make it grow and then go back down. This really is one of those tools you need to experiment with to realize its full potential. Okay, the other wiggle tool is wiggle transform. Let's add a wiggle transform to the shape layer. Open up our settings. And the key to wiggle transform is in the word transform. The transform properties of wiggle transform are going to dictate how the settings are applied to the shape layer. Right now, see, there is no animation. Our anchor point and position default to zero. On the x and y axis, our scale defaults to zero and our rotation to zero degrees. But now watch what happens if I increase the x value of our position and we move it over to the right. Notice that the bounding box for the original shape layer stays in the position of our rectangle path. The effect of the wiggle transform moves if we move our rectangle path. Let's just set this back to zero. Notice that wiggle transform has a wiggles per second control, just like our wiggle path did. Now let's loop this at 2 seconds and watch it. As you can see, this is a wiggle expression. If you've used a wiggle expression before, you'll know that it applies temporal and spatial values in a random way. Let's increase the size of this and you can see how this affects our shape layer. What wiggle transform is doing is taking the information from our transform properties within the wiggle transform and it's applying them to the transform properties of our shape layer. These transform properties are affecting these transform properties based on the wiggles per second, the correlation, and the temporal and spatial phase, we can make adjustments here. We can increase our random seed again, it's the wiggles per second that really makes this animation happen. If we take the wiggles per second down to zero, there's no animation. However, since our position has been moved, 215 pixels on the X axis, and our scale has been increased by 150% those settings remain, take this back down to 00, and we have our original rectangle path and we can even rotate this, but again with no wiggles per second, we see no animation. If we increase the wiggles per second, we now see an animation. Wiggle transform is another one of those shape layer tools that you really should play around with to see what you can get out of it. Let's see what happens if we apply both wiggle tools. We have wiggle transform already applied. Let's add a wiggle path. Now if we increase the size of our wiggle path, we can see it starts to deform our rectangle, increase the detail, change our points to smooth. Let's increase this wiggles per second setting to five wiggle paths is affecting the edges of our shape, while the wiggle transform is affecting the entire shape itself. These two tools can be stacked in any order and they will still have the same effect on our shape layer. Just remember, for both wiggle paths and wiggle transform, the key to the animation is in this wiggles per second. In wiggle transform, the key is the word transform. You need to adjust the settings of your transform properties within wiggle transform in order to really see what this shape layer tool does. As you can see, I affected only a few controls and we have this animation. I highly recommend that you play around with it in order to take full advantage of this shape feature. 36. 04.07 Wiggle Tools - Paths: Okay, so we've seen how wiggle tools affects a shape. Let's see how wiggle tools affects a path. Right click in this area. Next time line, new shape layer. Open up our shape layer here and we're going to add a path. It brings up our Pin tool. We're going to do what we've done in the previous lessons and just draw first a straight line with two vertices. And we're going to add a stroke to that and increase our strokes. We see what's going on. The first thing I'm going to do is add a wiggle paths to this straight line. If you toggle this effect off and on, you can see that there is something going on here. Nothing major yet. And let's open up wiggle paths. If increase the size, it has a similar effect it had on our shape as well as detail. More detail you add, the more points we have. We also can change from corner to smooth to make them round or sharp edges. Let's make this stroke with a little bit thinner. Maybe if we loop this area and just watch it, you can see that even this alone has a cool effect. This is being animated using this wiggles per second. And we saw this whenever we applied this to our shape. Now let's see what happens whenever we add more vertices. To bring up your pen tool, I'm going to click and drag just to get a Bezier vertex here and add a few of these. You can see as I'm adding vertices, it's already altering the shape and house interacting with this effect. I'm going to spread this out a little bit, maybe bringing down our detail to about five. Then if we watch it back, you can see the effect this has. All of this is key frameable, including our path split a key frame for a path here, go for to second. Maybe move some of these vertices a little bit to get something a little bit more interesting. Then we can key frame our size of this wiggle path. We have it at 362, let's go down to maybe 200. Let's go down to 2 seconds. If we copy our first keyframe on our path and then paste it, it'll go back to that initial shape. Let's change maybe down to 101 Of the things keep in mind with wiggle paths is if there are no negative values. So once you get down to zero, you can't do anything else with it. This is something that's pretty cool. It's a random effect because it's a wiggle effect. It's supplying the values that we've given it and applying it in a random way, just like a wiggle effect does on position and scale and rotation. It changes the smooth, and you see it's a little bit different. Wiggle paths does work on paths which makes sense because it's wiggle paths. Let's hide this for now. And let's add a new shape layer. We're going to add a path for this and start off once again just with two vertices. We're going to add a stroke and increase that stroke contents highlighted. Let's add a wiggle transform. If you talk with this effect off and on, we see no effect. We have to do something to this in order to get some a result. Let's start to move around some of our transform properties. Remember, whenever we applied wiggle transform to a shape transform is the key in the effect for wiggle transform, let's just offset this position slightly. Say maybe 150 on the x axis. Increase our scale, maybe to 110 rotation, let's make that maybe negative ten. If we watch this, we get an effect just with these few settings. And the reason why is because it's being animated by this wiggles per second. If we increase wiggles per second, it goes faster. If we lower it maybe to 0.5 it gets something really, really slow, sets back to two in our correlation, we can increase to 100, put our correlation down to zero. It affects it slightly differently. Now what happens if we add more vertices to our path? Click to bring up your pen tool again, I'm going to click and drag to bring up some Bezier vertices here. Then we'll just offset these a little bit to get something like a squiggly line. And then let's watch this play back wiggle transform. And wiggle paths both work for shapes as well as paths. The way that it interacts with your shape or your path is going to vary depending on the settings under your wiggle transform and also what effect you make to the transform properties of the wiggle transform. The same thing goes for wiggle paths. The effect that you're going to get is going to depend on these settings under your wiggle paths options. Here again, a lot of experimentation. Try some key framing. Play with some settings on your stroke. Try to use round join instead of minor join. Maybe bevel join. Increase the size of your stroke. The possibilities really are endless with these effects. It's just all a matter of what you want to create and how large your imagination is. I highly recommend that you play around with these settings and see what you can come up with. 37. 04.08 Pucker & Bloat - Shapes: Our next shape layer animation tool is called Pucker and Bloat. Let's apply it to a shape layer. Right click in this area next to our time line. Choose new shape layer. Open up our shape layer and let's just add an ellipse. We'll give that ellipse a fill and a stroke. Increase the stroke. Maybe change the color of this fill. Now let's increase the size of our ellipse path with contents highlighted. Click our Ad button and we'll see pucker and bloat. You can already see immediately. As soon as you add this effect, that is starting to affect our shape. The reason why is because poker and blow defaults to an amount of ten. Now this is the only control that pucker and blown has. However, if you start to scroll through the amounts, you can see it actually has a very cool effect on any shape layer. You can use positive or negative values, and these values are keyframable. You can animate them. Let's do something like this. Pull out a key frame, 135, another key frame for negative 135, and the final key frame for 135. If you watch it, you can see it has like a kaleidoscope feel to it. One of the things that's really cool about these effects is that you can stack them. Say, if we wanted to add a repeater and play with some of these settings, we can really do some very cool things. I'm just playing around with the settings randomly, not even really sure exactly what I'm going to do. As you can see, just these random settings have a very cool effect on this shape layer. You can either make static or kinetic designs with pucker and bloat. Again, it's got just one control and that's for amount. But what it can do is quite impressive. As with the other shape layer animation tools, I highly recommend you play around with this both by itself and in conjunction with other shaped tools to see what you can get out of it. For example, if we had a twist, you can see how it really affects this shape layer, pucker and bloat. While it is a very simple shape layer feature, it can yield some pretty impressive results. Let's change our shaped path to a polystar and get rid of our ellipse path. Let's make our type A polygon and increase the size of it. As you can see, this has a totally different effect that our ellipse did. If we add a rectangle, we can see the effect that the rectangle will have. The way that pucker and bloat affects rectangle is slightly different in the way it affects a polystar and an ellipse. But you have a lot of very cool options. You can even add multiple shapes. We have a rectangle path, now let's add an ellipse. And you can play with the sizes individually. You can move them in any direction that you'd like. As you can see, the way they interact with one another is very interesting. Let's add a polystar to this mix. Change our type to polygon, Increase our points and increase our outer radius. If you want to have even more control, you can put each one of these shapes in its own group and give it its own fill. Let's create group one and grab rectangle one and fill one and put it in there. Let's create group two and we'll put polystar in there. Then let's add a fill to our polystar. It'll be read. Then let's add another group and put our ellipse path in there. Then we will add a fill for our ellipse and maybe change that to more of an orange. Since pucker and bloat is below, all three groups is going to affect all three groups. This is one of the things that's very important to remember about shape tools. They affect only what is above them. For example, if we move Parker and blow between group one and group two, we can see that it's only affecting group one. If we move it below group two, it's affecting only group one and group two. When we go below all three of them, it affects all three of them. Pucker and bloat is one of those shape layer tools. It's very under utilized and very underestimated. I highly recommend that you play around with it and see what you can create using this powerful shape layer tool. 38. 04.09 Pucker and Bloat - Paths: Okay, so we've seen the effect that pucker and bloat has on a shape. Let's see how it affects a path. Right click in this area next to our time line, new shape layer. And we're going to add a path like we did in our other lessons and just draw two vertices. And then we're going to add a stroke and increase that stroke so we can see what's going on here and we're going to straighten out this path a little bit. Okay, now with contents highlighted, let's add in pucker and bloat. And we see that it has an effect as soon as you add it, it basically just rounds out the corners. However, the thing with pucker and bloat to keep in mind is that no matter what you do to it, you're not really going to have much of an effect. You get this randomization here and that you can key frame. But there are probably much easier ways to get this effect. Aside from using pucker and bloat. It's very limiting what you can do to a straight path with pucker and bloat. Let's add in more vertices and see what the effect is to bring up your pen tool and we're going to add in some Bezier vertices. And we can see already that something interesting is already happening. Maybe add in one more over here. Let's move these around and open it up a little bit to see what's going on here. Let's your to these keyframes for pucker and bloat and play with the settings here. As you can see, you do get an effect. You get something that's interesting with pucker and bloat. And this is something that you have to play around with to really see what the possibilities are for this. If you open up your stroke here, you can change your line join to a round join to get rounded edges. Or maybe a bevel join to get more beveled edges. I'm going to leave this at round join and maybe decrease my stroke width. Here sets some key frames, so we can animate this. The first one said at 02:58 Bring it all way down to ten at 1 second. Then maybe back up to 150, 2 seconds. Going to loop that by hitting in on your keyboard and just watch it. Pucker and Bloat has some pretty cool effects on paths that have more than two vertices. So just keep that in mind that pucker and Bloat doesn't really affect a straight line. It has some effect but it doesn't compare to the effects that it has on a path with more than two vertices. Again, I recommend that you play around with this and see what you can come up with. Pucker and Bloat only has one control and that's for amount and it is keyframable. Don't forget that your path also is keyframable. You can move these vertices around over time to get some pretty cool looking results. Experiment around with it a little bit and see what you can come up with. 39. 04.10 Twist - Shapes: Okay, so the next shape layer animation tool we're going to cover is called Twist. Let's right click in this area next to your timeline. Choose new shape layer, and let's open that up. Let's add a rectangle and give that rectangle a fill and a stroke. I'm just going to change the color of our fill as well as our stroke and make our stroke a little bit thicker. Then let's open up our rectangle path for the shape layer and increase the size of it with contents highlighted. Let's go to our Add button and we're going to add Twist. You can see immediately, as soon as you add this effect, that it's already starting to affect our shape. Toggle this effect off and on, you can see how it's slightly moving. The reason why is because Twist has a default setting. As you'll notice, most of these defaults to a value of ten. For example, if you add a pucker and bloat like we did in our last section, you'll see that the amount is ten, also with round corners. If you open that up, you'll see that it defaults to ten twist. We have two controls here, we have angle and we have center. Let's look at angle first. As I mentioned, in defaults to a value of ten. As you increase it, you can see the effect that this has on your shape. The higher you go, the more of a twist is applied. When you get to zero, there is no effect. One of the things interesting about angle is that it has positive and negative values which are key frameable as we can see by the presence of a stopwatch. Notice how our edges here have this boxed off edge. And the reason for that is in our stroke strokes have line cap and line join. The default setting for line cap is butt cap. In the default setting for line joint is minor join. If we alter our line join and say choose a round join, you can see the effect that this is going to have on the edge of this twist here. With this effect where it is at the moment. If we add a bevel join, it looks pretty much the same as a minor join. As we tweak the value for our angle, we can see how this affects our shape pops right there. You do want to be mindful of that. If you set it to round join, you don't get really that weird deforming when you get to a certain threshold. Now we change it to bevel join. It looks similar to butt cap, but we don't get that deforming as well. If you're going to use twist, I would recommend you set your line join if you're using a stroke to either round join or bevel join. If you're going to use minor join, see how it clicks right there. You want to adjust your minor limit. If you decrease your minor limit, then you don't get that popping and you avoid that sharp pointy edge. If you increase your minor limit, you do get that we're deforming when it meets a certain threshold. In this case, it's right around negative 180. If we go to a positive value, we see around 210. This pops off and on. You have to play with these settings to get the right look that you want. I'm want to set this back to round join. That way we avoid it completely. You can also decrease the size of your stroke in order to avoid extreme deforming. That's angle. Our next control is center. Notice that center defaults to zero on the x and y axis, which puts the effect directly on the center of your shape layer. Watch what happens when I move the center value to the right, to a positive value, to a negative value on the y axis, to a positive value into a negative value. You get all of these very interesting shapes and designs that you can create, all by using key frames. Let's try something out real quick. We'll do a two second animation. We'll start with our angle at zero, maybe go up to 50. Start our center point at 00, and by the end of the animation, go 50 positive on X and negative 50 on Y. Then we can watch that playback. You can see how you can animate these shapes in either a very extreme way or something very subtle. If you want to get something that looks like an optical illusion, just leave your center point at 00 and then just play with the values of your angle. Twist is a fairly straightforward and very simple shape layer feature, but it's something that may come in very handy if you have certain designs or animations that call for shape layer to have this an effect. Right now this is being applied to a rectangle path. We'll get rid of that. Also add a polystar. We're going to move that above twist because remember all of our effects depend on hierarchy twist, like the other shape layer tools are going to affect whatever is above it. As we start to scrub through here, we see the effect already this is going to have on our star. There are a few things to keep in mind when you use twists. The first thing is, what shape do you want to use? I recommend either a rectangle or a polystar. If you add an ellipse, the ellipse is already circular. As you can see, it's affecting this ellipse at all. Even if we increase the size of this ellipse, twist is not going to affect it. It will affect either a polygon, polystar, or a rectangle path if we remove this fill, let's add back in a rectangle, increase the size of this rectangle. We can see it better. See this is the effect without the fill. This is the effect with the fill and the stroke. Then this is the effect without the stroke, but the fill only. Not only do you need to take into consideration what shape you're going to use, also think about if you want to use a fill and a stroke, possibly a gradient fill or a gradient stroke, a gradient fill here instead. This was covered in a previous lesson. I'm just going to make some changes really quick to our, this could be like really cool for like an animation logo or something like that or a certain design or pattern that you need for a client. Keep in mind as well that the value for your center point should stay at zero on the x and y axes. You can alter these for certain effects, maybe you want something like that. And I'm just scrubbing through these values on the x value, let's put this back at zero. This is what it looks like on the y value. I want to change this back to our original stroke and fill, get rid of this gradient. Phil, set our center point back to 00. That is twist. It's a very simple shape layer animation tools, something that you should play around with and get familiar with and see what its full potential truly is. 40. 04.11 Twist - Paths: Okay, so we've seen how twist can affect a shape. Let's see how twist affects a path. Let's go to Layer, New Shape Layer. And we're going to open up our shape layer here and add a path which will bring up our Pin tool. And we're going to draw two vertices like we have in our previous lessons for a straight line. We're going to add a stroke and increase that stroke with contents highlighted. Let's add a twist. And you can see already that there is going to be some effect. Now let's play around with our angle. As you can see, it has a very similar effect paths that it has on shapes, you can get some pretty cool effects. This is all key. Frameable. I'm going to decrease my stroke down maybe 40 pixels. Let's start our angle at zero, go forward 1 second, go up to 750. At 2 seconds, let's come back down to zero slope that you can see the effect you can get here. Actually, let's go in the opposite direction, negative 750. With twist, it has both positive and negative values. You can see there's some really cool things that you can do with this. What happens if we add more vertices to bring up your pen tool and I'm just going to add some linear vertices. I'm not going to click and drag, so let's get some linear vertices in here. I'm going to drag these around a little bit to see what happens whenever we apply twist to this interesting. I think that without the other vertices, twist is probably more effective to get the circular optical illusion field that you saw whenever we applied it to just a straight line. But you can certainly play around with this and get some really cool ideas for designs, for patterns and for animations. Twist does work with paths as well as shapes as you've seen. Play around with this shape layer tool and see what you can come up with. 41. 04.12 ZigZag - Shapes: Okay, the final shape layer animation tool we're going to cover is zig zag. Go up to layer new shape layer. And we're going to add an ellipse. And we're going to give that ellipse a pill. Let's just change this fill color, something like that. Now let's increase the size of our ellipse path. Zigzag is one of my favorite shape layer animation tools because it interacts extremely well with both shapes. And, and there's some specific things you can do with paths that we'll get to in just a few minutes. But first I want to show you the effect that it has whenever you add zigzag to an ellipse path with content highlighted. Let's go to, we're going to a zigzag. And you can see there's already a little bit of stuff going on here. If we open up zigzag, we see that there are three controls. We have size and that adjusts the size of the zigzag. We also have ridges per segment. This is just how many ridges there are on the path. And then we have this option for points, we have either corner or smooth. This is very similar to other effects that we've seen where you have corner and smooth, It allows either for spiky edges or for more rounded edges. You can see right here, we zoom in a little bit the difference between corner and smooth. Now zigzag works really cool in shape layers if you go with more extreme settings. First of all, let's crank up our size settings. You can get this really cool effect on ellipses, increase our ridges per segment, and you can see how you can get some really cool design ideas and some patterns you can create. These are all key frameable. We can go from a zero size and zero ridges per segment up to that really extreme look that let's add in a stroke to this. See what that effect would have as well as you can see, just get like a different look here. Maybe you can change that down to stroke of 0.5 make it really, really small. What zigzag is doing is it's taking the size of the zig zag in these ridges per segment, and it's manipulating and changing this ellipse path. The fact that it can be keyframed just opens up a world of possibilities here. Get rid of this stroke real quick and let's see what happens whenever we add a rectangle to this. I'm just going to hide this ellipse path. For now, let's add a rectangle and we're going to make the rectangle the same size as our ellipse path 413. Then watch what happens whenever we apply our zigzag. We have a different look. Totally. I'm going to back up our elipse path and I'm going to move over so we can see them better. But you can see the effect that zigzag has on an ellipse as opposed to a rectangle. The more extreme you go, sometimes, the better. You don't go too crazy. Maybe it brings down maybe to 250 and you can see this effect that it has with the smaller ridges per segment. We can bring that down to 50. There's just some really cool designs. It's just a couple of settings on zigzag. Again, you can key frame this so you can animate these in. Let's add one more shape. Let's try a polystar. I'm going to hide our ellipse and our rectangle path. You can see immediately how this affects our polystar. We can increase the size, we can play with the ridges per segment. Some design ideas. You can either make these static or animated graphics changes to a polygon. And you can see, even though they both have five points, just changing from a Stargo polygon gives you even more results. Let's go down to maybe three. This is a triangle. Here we go to four, that's more of a square. Try 15 points. You can see that all of these settings have a direct impact on the look of your design. Some really cool stuff here with zigzag, I highly recommend that you explore zigzag more and see what the possibilities are with this, because you get some pretty cool design ideas using zigzag. 42. 04.13 ZigZag - Paths: Let's right click in this area next to your time line. Choose new shape layer. I'm going to add a path. Let's just make two vertices, then let's add a stroke and increase that stroke. The effect that zigzag has on paths is a lot different than it has on shapes. Let's add a zigzag to this path. Now. See there's already an effect, you can toggle this off. And on the other shape tools, you'll see that zigzag defaults to certain settings, defaults to a size of five and ridges ten for points. It goes to corner automatically. As you increase the size of these, you can get these really cool zigzag lines. You can increase your ridges per segment or decrease them, change your corner to smooth. These are all keyframable. You can do some cool stuff with this key frame. All of these just to get like an idea of some things you can do, you can change the size of your stroke. Remember two with stroke width that is also key frameable, you can do some pretty cool things with this shape layer tool. Again, it's one of those things that you have to just play around a little bit and experiment with. Zigzag works fantastic, both with paths and with shapes. We're going to go through a few tutorials where I apply these shape layer tools. You can see these tools in action. The purpose of these lessons up to this point is to familiarize you with these shape layer features and get you comfortable working with them and getting a basic understanding of what the controls do and how you can apply them to both shapes and with paths. Again, experiment with this, have some fun, and see what you can come up with. Your imagination really is your only limit. Now one of the things keep in mind you'll see under points here for smooth. When I try to add a key frame, we get this box here. What this box is, is a toggle hold keyframe. See if you write, click on any of these keyframes. Get this option for toggle hold keyframe. We touched on this in an earlier lesson. There's no animation between toggle hold key frames. You have animation between linear key frames and bezier. But if it's a toggle hold keyframe, the animation doesn't begin until you get to that keyframe, and the value you have for that setting will remain until you get to another toggle hold keyframe. The point is with zigzag you can't key frame these points. You have to either choose corner or smooth like right now it's set to smooth. If we go to this 1 second mark and I change this to corner, we get another toggle hold keyframe. The points remain smooth until we get to this keyframe where we tell it to become a corner point. And it will stay at that corner point until we get to another key frame. If we copy this smooth keyframe and paste it at the end of our animation, you'll see that it does go back to a smooth point, but only once we reach that keyframe. There are some settings after effects that don't allow animation between certain settings. With zigzag, it makes sense because the points can either be smooth or corner. There's really no in between a corner and a smooth point. Keep that in mind as you're animating using zigzag. You'll want to choose either a smooth or corner or like in this case, if you want to snap into place, that's cool as well. 43. 04.14 Section 04 Review: Now you should be able to create some pretty impressive designs with what you've learned so far. But the next section is going to make you a motion graphics wizard. Advanced animation tools include the repeater, trim paths and merge paths. There are so many possibilities with the repeater merge paths and trim paths that I've given these three animation tools, an entire section, all to themselves. I look forward to seeing you back in the next section and teaching you all about these advanced animation tools. 44. 05.01 Section 05 - Advanced Animation Tools: Welcome back to the Power of Shape Layers, section five, advanced animation tools. You're almost through this course, so stay strong. Advanced animation tools include tools with more intricate and complex settings, and it includes the repeater trim paths and merge paths. The possibilities are virtually endless with these animation tools. And you'll be creating some pretty amazing graphics once you learn how to use these tools in your projects. I'll say it again, Keith of getting used to working with animation tools is experimentation. The repeater will open a world of creativity with what you can do with a single shape. From backgrounds to circular designs to endlessly repeating designs and so much more. It's all possible with the repeater trim. Paths is a path animator that will bring your designs to light, animate designs on off, or have them animate in countless other ways. Prim Pass really is one of the more powerful animation tools in after effects. And finally, merge paths will make icon creation not only possible, but much easier. As well as making creating difficult and complex designs a breeze. Again, I highly recommend that you experiment with these animation tools in order to truly master them. But this section will give you a stronghold on how to harness the power of these animation tools. Don't get overwhelmed. We will cover each one of these animation tools completely and thoroughly. There's a lot to get through, so let's dive right in. 45. 05.02 The Repeater Basic Training: The repeater is a very important and powerful shape layer animation tool. You can quickly create patterns and designs using the repeater and it's definitely a must know shape layer feature. The repeater creates duplicate copies of a shape layer, all of which can be manipulated and altered in a consistent pattern. The repeater can be confusing at first, but don't worry, we're going to cover it in detail. Okay, let's go ahead and create a composition by clicking our new composition icon. We're going to keep it at 19:20 by 1080. And we'll leave our duration at 10 seconds. Let's just call this comp the repeater Now. Let's go ahead and right click in this blank area next to our timeline, and click New Shape Layer. We're going to resize this a little bit so we can move around a little bit better. Let's open up our shape layer and click our Add button. And we're going to add an ellipse. And then let's give that ellipse a pill. We can go and change that color to any color, doesn't really matter what it is. And then let's just increase this ellipse. Let's just fit our comp into this window here. Once we have our ellipse path, Then let's go back to Add and we're going to add repeater. And one of the things to know about the repeater is that it repeats everything above it. Meaning whatever shape you have or whatever group you have. Just to illustrate that, let's go ahead and let's add a group. Let's pull this ellipse path in the fill inside of that group. Now let's duplicate that group by choosing control D, fill it up, group two, we can actually make some adjustments here. Let's change this fill to a different color, maybe a purple. Now, as you can see the repeater repeating both of these groups, as I toggle this group two with the purple color off, you can see group one is underneath it. Let me just move this out of the way so we can see a little bit better what's going on here. As we can see, the repeater is repeating both of these groups. Now if you move the repeater above group one, you'll see that it's only repeating group two. It repeats whatever shapes, paths, or groups are above it. Okay, let's get rid of this group two here, and we're going to focus only on group one. Let's move the repeater back underneath group one and open up the repeater properties. And there are some defaults here that you should keep in mind. First of all, the repeater always defaults to three copies. So as you can see right here, there are three copies of our lips. Offset is always set to zero. If we open up our transform properties for the repeater, we can see that it has an anchor point. Position, scale, rotation, start and endopacity. Now some of these transform properties are similar to our layer transform properties, but some of them are a lot different as well. We can add more copies, so see if we add five, you can see that it increases the number of copies to five. The way that you can add distance between these shapes is by simply manipulating your position under your repeater transform properties. As we increase our X value for position, the circles move further apart. And then if you adjust your Y position, they move up and down. As you can see, the repeater is interacting with this group. Up here, the group is above it. See if we decrease the size of our ellipse path, all of the shapes will decrease in size. Same thing if you manipulate your transform properties of the group. Instead of decreasing the ellipse path size, which is in pixels. If we go to the transform properties of the group and manipulate our scale, which is in percentage, it has the same effect if you move your position on your ellipse path, all of the circles move with it. If you manipulate your transform properties of the group, it's very important to understand that the transform properties of the repeater are interacting with the group transform properties as well as your layer transform properties. 46. 05.03 Create a Circle of Shapes with The Repeater: Okay, now I'm going to create a circle of circles. So we'll go new shape layer. And then in our shape layer we want to add an ellipse. And then let's add a fill, and we'll change that fill to something else you like a blue with contents highlighted. Go back to Add, and we're going to add a repeater. It defaults to three copies, offset is zero. Now, if I wanted to make a circle of circles, there are a few settings that you have to remember. First of all, you want your position and your anchor point to equal zero on the x and y axes. See if take this position from 100 down to zero. We can no longer see the other copies no matter how many we add, because they're all in the same exact position. Now let's add 16 copies. Now if I want to make a circle of circles, what we need to do is open up our ellipse path. And we need to move our position for the ellipse path up. We move it up like this. Then for our rotation under repeater, we want to take 360 and reduce some math in after effects divided by the number of copies, 360/16 and then we have a perfect circle. Now the thing that's really cool about this is you can change the number of copies and still maintain this perfect circle. But get to, remember, change the math on your rotation of your repeater. See we want 12 copies. As you can see it throws it off before we do the math. Here you see how it's not a perfect circle. Back down to our rotation and type in 360/12 We now have a perfect circle. Once again, as you move this position of the ellipse path up and down, you can see already some of the different designs you can get. You can decrease the size of your ellipse. You can maybe increase the number of copies, say 20. We'll go 360/20 to get that perfect circle Again, you can do some really cool things with this. As you move your position left and right, you can see how that's going to interact. What's happening here. This is our original shape right here. See, we can hide this repeater by clicking on this eyeball here. And you can see this is our original circle. If you turn it back on, you can see that that's the one that's highlighted. That's where you know where your original shape is. Well, as I'm moving my position to the right, you can see that our original shape is moving and the copies are moving around with it. You can do some pretty cool things with this because this is all keyframable too. Let's put our position at zero. Here, actually, let's put our position at zero for both in our ellipse path for X and Y at zero. We can only see one copy, although we know that all the other copies are behind it. Put a key frame for position at our zero mark. Go for maybe about 15 frames. And now let's lift it up and hit to loop that area. Hit zero in your number pad to watch it. And you can see we have somewhat of a burst here, so you can even move it back down. You have something like this. 47. 05.04 Using Groups with The Repeater: If you use a repeater like this where it's just underneath an ellipse path, or this could be a rectangle path or a polystar path. There are some controls you don't have. If you open up your elipse path, there is no rotation, there's no opacity, nothing like that. See, let's add a group and we'll put our lips in our fill inside of that group. Now our group has all of these other transform properties. We have anchor point, position scale, skew, axis rotation, and opacity. Get rid of these keyframes here. Instead of using our elipse path options, let's use our group transform options. We'll do something similar, but add a little bit extra flare to it. Let's put a key frame for scale. Let's just make that scale 0% go forward 15 frames. Make that 100% go forward another 15 frames, and we'll make that 0% Again, we have the same look we just had where it increases and decreases. But now watch what happens if we add a rotation. Say we put a keyframe for rotation at zero degrees and then go forward maybe 15 frames. And let's go up to like 180. I'm not sure if you just saw that, but watch. If we change our rotation degree. Remember the shape that's selected. We'll have this box around it. So if we put it back to zero, notice that this goes back up to here. The reason why is because that is our original shape. When I typed in 180, it looked like it just jumped. See if I scrub through and start off at zero and then slowly go forward to 180. We can see that it's actually moving. Remember that the shape that's bounded by this box is going to be your original shape. Let's put it back to 180, go back down to zero here. And the. Let's watch what happens when we do this. Now we have this rotation of this pattern. You can also do other things with transform properties. You can key frame the opacity. Maybe you want this it 50% and knows how all the shapes share the same value for opacity. And this is going to be true for all of these transform properties within your group. All the shapes are going to share the same value for any one of these. Maybe increase the skew a little bit and you see what it's doing to our circle. Here is skewing our circle. You can already start to see all of the potential designs and patterns and cool little things you can do with the repeater. I always recommend to put your shape inside of a group, That way you have more control and more options. 48. 05.05 Advanced Animation Principles with The Repeater: New shape layer. And then in our shape layer we want to add group A a rectangle. And then let's add a fill to that rectangle. We'll just keep that red for right now. Now, with contents highlighted, let's add a repeater. The reason why I want contents highlighted is this. Just real quick, if I have group highlighted and add a Re repeater will go inside of the group. There's a difference. Now see if I had three different groups and I wanted to add a repeater to all of it. You have to have contents highlighted and add the repeater and it goes underneath all these groups if I want to, just inside of one of these groups. Well, if you highlight one of the groups, click a repeater. The repeater will be nested with inside of one of those groups. Okay, let's get rid of these other groups and contents highlighted. Add a repeater. Let's open up our repeater settings and also our group transform property settings. Now remember for our repeater, we want to make sure that our anchor point and position are all set to zero in the x and y axes. That way we only see one copy. And then we want to look at our group transform properties. And we move our position up. Then just figure out how many copies of the rectangle that you'd like. So say maybe 16. And then remember to go under our transform properties for repeater, under the rotation for transform properties of repeater. And we do the math, 360/16 and there we have a perfect circle. You may want to tweak some of these settings depending on what look you're going for. Now that we're using a rectangle, there are some differences that you can see as opposed to just using an ellipse. Our transform properties under group one, if we play with our rotation, we see how these rectangles are all rotating. Again, whatever you do to your initial shape, which is this one bounded by this box, the repeater applies those values to all instances of that shape to see if we want to skew that one, they all skew. You can just imagine some of the really cool things that you can do with this. Now see this is just a rectangle and I cranked up the skew on this and now I'm playing with the rotation. Remember these are all key frameable. This is a cool shape. So say it's 190 degree rotation. Let's move that key frame forward and then bring this back to zero. And now watch this, we can get this an animation. Now if you like the shape here and say maybe you want this shape to rotate, that's when you would use the shape transform properties itself. What I mean by that is let's close up our shape layer here. Remember your layer itself, the shape layer has its own transform properties. Now see we can rotate this and we can get that kind of a design. You have a lot of transform properties going on here. You have your group transform properties which controls whatever is inside of this group, In this case, it's our rectangle. You have the transform properties within the repeater which is interacting with your group transform properties. And then you have your layer transform properties itself which controls the entire layer. Another reason why I suggest that you put all of your shapes within groups is watch what happens whenever you move the repeater inside of the group. Okay, see now we lost that entire design. And the reason why is because the repeater is interacting now with the rectangle path properties instead of the group transform properties. We have all these settings down here. We have our position that was altered, we have our rotation. Well, the repeater can't interact with that now because it can only interact with what's above it. You can't move the repeater underneath the transform properties. Because the transform properties of a group affect everything inside of the group itself. It's really important to make sure if you do designs like this, to have the repeater outside of the group. The repeater only has this information to interact with, which is size, position, roundness. It can't interact with the rotation because rectangle pass and ellipses don't have a rotation option. To do this design, Again, make sure you have your repeater outside of the group. Now you can always add another group and put this group one and repeater inside of that. Now this group and repeater are inside of this one group. Let's call this red design. Now watch is we can duplicate this red design. May call this blue design. Go up to our fill and change that one to blue. Now we have a few more options. Now remember the repeater affects everything above it. The repeater is affecting the group above it and all of the transform properties within that group. Well, now that we've grouped, that this group has its own transform properties, we can move this design anywhere that we want to. Now, these two can be controlled independently. Let me get rid of this again, we'll focus on our blue design here. Put this back at 00. We started off with the group and the repeater. And the repeater is affecting this group in these transform properties. All I did was with contents highlighted, add another group, and we'll call this design. Now we can move this group and this repeater inside of this design group. And now we have even more options. We can manipulate this group with this rotation while also manipulating the rotation of the group itself. These all have different effects. One of the things that's important with the repeater is that you experiment and play around with it. But there are some basic principles that you need to know. 49. 05.06 Repeating The Repeater pt. 1: Okay, in this lesson we're going to dive a little bit deeper into the repeater. Let's go ahead and create another composition. We'll call this repeating the repeater. This is something that's really cool, that really opens up a whole world of possibilities. Let's fit our comp to the window size. Right click in this area. Choose new shape Layer up, our shape layer here. And let's go ahead and add an ellipse. And then let's add A. Now remember from our last lesson, we want to make sure we group our shape. Add a group and we'll pull our ellipse and fill into that group. Then go back to contents. And then we're going to add a repeater touched on last time, Is going to default to three copies. Open up our transform properties. We have this default 00 on the X and y axis for anchor point for position 100 pixels on the X axis and zero on the y. Let's quit and put this position back to zero, so that way we can only see one shape even though we have three. We want to go back up to our group using our group transform properties. Let's move our ellipse up. Going back down to the repeater, let's add 16 copies using the transform properties of the repeater. Let's go to rotation and 360/16 and we get our circle of shapes here. Now one of the things that's really cool is that you can repeat the repeater. The way you do that, highlight contents add. And we're going to add another repeater underneath the initial repeater. And you've already started to see some of the effect that this is having. But let's tweak these settings and get a really cool effect here. So let's open up our transform properties of repeater two. And remember the repeater defaults to three copies, and it does this offset of position 100 pixels. This is going to happen. No matter how many times you add the repeater, it will always default to these settings. Now let's change this position zero and watch what happens whenever we decrease the scale of the transformed properties of repeater two. Now we have three copies of this initial repeater, and you can increase the number of copies. Say maybe ten and it goes way back. See, now we can really start to play with this watch. What happens whenever you increase the scale beyond 100? It goes in the opposite direction. This is key frameable, Let's put the scale to zero, Put a key frame there, go forward about 15 frames and then maybe make this 150. Then let's slope that area. You can see the effect that it has. You can do some really cool things with repeating the repeater. Now using the repeater two transform properties, watch what happens whenever you adjust the rotation. So you start to get this an effect. You can do some really cool optical illusions. This repeater two is repeating the information it's getting from repeater one, which is repeating the information from group one. See if we decrease our ellipse path, all of the circles will get smaller because it's all hierarchical. We make our ellipse path size really small. Go to repeater one, maybe increase this to 30, and we have to do our math here on the repeater one, rotation 360/30 Now we have repeater two. We can start to play with these settings. You can get some really cool effects here. Now watch what happens if we go back up to group one. Let's add tangle instead, and get rid of our ellipse. Now all these are going to be rectangle paths. Let's decrease that a little bit. You can see the difference that tangle has from an ellipse. Let's rotate this. Put our transform properties for our layer. Just bring this up so it's full screen. So as you can see, the rotation of your repeater two has a different effect than the rotation of your repeater one. The repeater one rotation properties are very specific. In order to make a circle, you have to divide the number of copies by 360 in your rotation. That's not the case with repeater two, because repeater two is repeating what's already been done. See if we take away repeater one. We have something that we did not want to create here. The way the interacts with the shape layer now is not at all what we initially had. Just remember, as you start to stack these repeaters, you're going to get a lot of different effects. This is all key frameable, so you can do all kinds of really, really cool designs. I highly recommend that you do some experimentation. 50. 05.07 Repeating the Repeater pt. 2: In the previous lesson, we repeated the repeater in order to create some really cool design variations based off of a circle of ellipses and rectangles. In this lesson, we're going to expand our knowledge and create a background of small ellipses. Once again, repeating the repeater. This shows you how many things are possible with the repeater. And this is just the tip of the iceberg. Right click in this area. Choose new shape layer. Now let's add a group. In that group, we want to add an ellipse. Let's add a fill with contents highlighted. Let's add a repeater. Okay, now remember everything is going to repeat relative to the initial shape. Say we want to make a background full of little small dots. Well, let's just grab this shape and put it in the top left corner. And now let's make our ellipse path say maybe 20 pixels. So make it really small. Let's increase the number of copies, say, to 20. Remember as you adjust this position, the X value adjusts the space between the shapes horizontally, and the Y axis adjusts the direction of the line vertically. Let's put this back to zero. Bring these in closer, and maybe add more copies. Say 30, a little bit more. Say maybe 40, and bring us in even a little bit closer. Now see we can adjust this ellipse past size, maybe down to ten. Make the 60 dots and pull these in really tight, we have this really thin line of dots. Let's add another repeater. Now remember this is going to repeat everything above it, including repeater one. Open up our repeater two properties. Let's put our position back to zero. Now watch what happens whenever you adjust the Y axis. It moves it down. See, now we have this. Let's make maybe 50 copies of this. Now we have this whole screen full of these little dots. Repeater one, you see how our position is set to 31. Let's make this 35. Go to repeater two, make our y axis 35. There's exactly 35 pixels, both vertically and horizontally between these dots. Again, let me point this out. Repeater one, our position on the X axis is 35. Repeater two, our position on the Y axis is 35. This is controlling the space between the dots horizontally, and repeater two is controlling it vertically. You can do some really cool things. Start to play with the rotation of repeater two. You can just get some really cool designs. Again, this is all keyframable. You can animate these in, you can do some really, really cool things. One things we haven't really talked about is start endopacity. Startopacity. If we bring this down, you can see the effect, it's 0% opacity, which means it's nonexistent. Our endopacity is 100 going from left to right, we get this gradation. We can do the same thing with repeater two. We can put our startopacity down to zero. And now we can see how it's just this bottom right corner, because we're going from left to right, top to bottom. Just play around with some of these settings. Put the star opacity back up to 100. Put our endopacity on repeater two down to zero. And now you get the top right corner that has the brighter shading. Or we can do our endopacity zero and our starpacity 100 and it goes from left to right. I highly recommend that you play around with these repeater settings. The repeater and repeating the repeater can yield some really cool and interesting designs. Your only limitation is your imagination. 51. 05.08 The Repeater & Expressions: Okay, so I want to show you how to create some very cool animations and designs. And you can do it super quick using some very simple expressions. Even though this course isn't really about expressions, there are a few that motion graphic designers use very regularly, and they're very simple to remember and to use. Okay, so already created a composition. Let's just right click in this area. Here go new shape layer. Let's open that up and we're going to add a group. Then let's add a rectangle and give that rectangle a fill. Let's just change this color to something else, like an orange. Okay, And then with contents highlighted, let's add a repeater. And then we're going to open our repeater settings. First thing we need to do is go into our group one. And we're going to use our transform properties for group one and move that rectangle up. Now we need to choose how many copies of that shape we want. Let's say 25. Let's go down to our transform properties. For the repeater, our anchor point and position x and y values need to be set all to zero. That way we only see one copy of this shape go down to our rotation. And let's do the math, 360 divided by our number of copies, which is 25, and we have our circle. Let's go back up to our rectangle path and maybe adjust the size of this so we can see it a little bit better. Then go back to content. Let's add another repeater. And we're going to open up the transform properties of that repeater. And make our anchor point in position x and y values zero. Now let's decrease the scale of the second repeater and maybe increase the number of copies to ten. Now we have this which we got in the previous lesson using the transform properties of the shape layer itself. Let's increase this so it fills up our area here. Now there are a few expressions you can do to get some really cool effects. Go to our group one and open up our transform properties. On a PC, you want to a click onto rotation and just type time times negative 15. That's going to rotate each one of these boxes to the left. The speed of 15 is pretty slow. That's okay because that's the effect that we want. Using group one transform properties, we have each individual box slowly rotating to the left. Let's go to our repeater two and Alt, click on rotation and type time times 50. That's going to make all of these inside turn, maybe let's slow that down a little bit. Let's say times 25. While these boxes are all rotating to the left, the boxes inside are rotating to the right. We can do one more with our shape layer highlighted click R for the entire shape layer rotation. A click under rotation in type time times negative 15. Now we get this effect. Our shape layer is rotating while each individual shape is rotating while repeater two is rotating. See, this is just a quick example of how you can create something that's very interesting and cool very, very quickly. Just to give it a little bit more style, let's open up our transform properties for repeater two and decrease our endopacity down to 25% We get this fading actually. We can go all the way down to zero. We get this fading away in the back. You can change these colors instantaneously just by clicking on your fill. You can make this a different color. Add a stroke if you'd like, Increase the size of that stroke. You can do all kinds of cool things and everything updates automatically. Because it's in a hierarchical layout, whatever you do to the initial shape, the repeaters are going to affect that. Repeater two is going to affect repeater one, which affects the initial shape. Add a little bit of a skew to this. Now we have a really cool design here, something that looks very interesting. Obstacle illusion like, again, that was super quick. Just one shape layer, one group that has a rectangle and a couple of expressions. I highly recommend that you do some experimentation and just really see what the repeater can do and see how your creativity can come to life using this powerful feature. 52. 05.09 Trim Paths End Percentage: Okay, so let's go ahead and create a new composition. We'll just click our new composition icon here, which brings up our composition settings. And we're going to name this trim Paths. And leave all the settings as we've had them so far. And just choose Okay. So now just to recap, we have gone over the three ways to create a shape layer. You can either right click in this area, this left of the time line, choose New Shape Layer. Or we can go up to our drop down menu and choose New Shape layer. Or you can grab a shape layer creation tool, pick whatever shape you want and then draw it on. We also learned that if you use this method, say let's choose a polygon tool and you hold down the left mouse button, click and drag. And if you go on shift, it will make your polygon have no rotation on it. It will bring in the stroke color and stroke width, as well as the field that you chose last. Also, remember that if you create a shape in this way, you need to go over to your alignment panel and just align it to the center of your composition. Conversely, if you create a shape by choosing new shape layer, or going up to our drop down and choosing layer, new shape layer. It brings in a shape layer, but there's no content. So you have to physically add in everything that you want to add in. I'm going to go ahead and start from this point, and we're going to add a rectangle. And we're going to give this rectangle a fill. And let's just increase the size of our rectangle path by opening up our rectangle path option here and increasing it. Now one of the things to know about trim paths is that it is a stroke animation tool. It is not a fill animation tool. You can apply it to a fill, but the results you get aren't going to be what you want most likely. There may be some rare instance that applying a trim path to a fill works for your needs. But 99% of the time that's just not going to be the case. Trim paths is designed to animate strokes and I'll show you why. Contents highlighted. Let's add a Trim Paths. Okay, if we open up our trim paths right here, we see we have these options, Start, end offset, and trim multiple shapes simultaneously. If you click the drop down menu, you also have the option of individually. We'll go over what each one of these means. But first I want to show you what happens if you apply a trimpass to a fill focus on our end animation, which is set by default to 100% and start at 0% and we'll explain why in just a second. But for now, watch what happens as I start to scrub through our end percentage here. As you can see, this is a very odd way to bring on a fill. It just doesn't look right. And if you adjust your offset, you can kind of move it around a little bit. And like I said, there may be some rare instance that this is the look you're going for, but most of the time you're not. So just keep in mind that trim path is designed as a stroke animation tool. And it makes sense that this is the case because remember, a path really only has a stroke. Once a path is enclosed, it becomes a shape that can contain a fill as well as a stroke Trim paths actually trim only paths, or at least that's what it's designed to do. So let's get rid of our trim paths here and let's get rid of our fill. And now let's add a stroke to this rectangle path. And it defaults to white at two pixels wide. So let's go ahead and increase our stroke width. We'll make it 50 pixels. And maybe I want to make this rectangle path a little bit larger with contents highlighted. Let's go to Add, and we're going to add a trim paths. If we open up trim paths, we see that we have several options. We have start, end, offset, trim, multiple shapes. What do these mean? In order to animate this, you need to add key frames. By default, trim path, start percentage is set to zero and end percentage is set to 100. Let's put a key frame at the beginning of this layer and move this 100% down to zero. Go forward maybe a second. Bring it back up to 100 to loop that. And if we watch it, we can see how trim paths animates on this rectangle. Okay, let's talk for a minute about what this 0% to 100% on the end percentage actually means. Forget about start percentage for now, we will cover that in a later lesson. Think about the end percentage like this. When your animation is complete, it should be 100% complete. When there is no stroke visible, meaning it has no trim whatsoever, it will be at 0% Since your end percentage defaults to 100% Ax is automatically applying trim paths on your stroke as a completed animation. 0% on the end percentage of a trim paths is a incomplete animation and 100% is a fully complete animation. And then of course, you have percentages in between. You are only trimming a stroke path on. That is if you are animating a stroke from fully incomplete to either partially or fully complete, then it's best to use your end percentage. Again, we're going to cover start percentage in another lesson. The main thing to take from this lesson is to remember to use your end percentage if you are trimming a stroke path on. 53. 05.10 Trim Start Point & Direction: Now there are a few ways to adjust where you want this animation to begin. One of those options we've already gone over is if you change this rectangle path by right clicking to convert to Bezier path and then you highlight the path, You can select whichever corner you want, Right click and then choose mask and shape and set the first vertex to that vertex. Now it will animate from that vertex, if we want it to animate from the lower left, we simply right click on the lower left vertex mask and shape path and set first vertex, and we see that it animates. From there, I'm going to control Z. To get back to our rectangle path, there are going to be times where you want to retain the ability to adjust your roundness, ability to move the position, or you may want to adjust your size. Either link size, which if you have this link checked here, then your x and Y size stays identical. Or if you uncheck it, you can adjust the size both vertically and horizontally without getting distortion for the size not being linked. And what I mean by that is say for example, let's think this perfect square 500 by 500. And now see if you go down to your transform properties. And if you unlink your scale. And remember scale is percentages, where size is in pixels. And that's a very important distinction. Say if we unlink our scale and say we just want to make our horizontal scale larger, you start to get this weird deforming so that your stroke isn't consistent all the way around. Again, this is adjusting the scale of the shape layer, which is in percentages. You want this to be at 100, 100 and to avoid that distortion, unlink your rectangle path size as you make this wider, there's no distortion of your shape. And your stroke say is consistent. And the reason why is because of that distinction that I mentioned. Your size is in pixels. So this doesn't affect the actual scaling and percentages of the shape layer. It only adjusts the pixel width and height of your particular shape. So that's something very important to remember. If you're going to adjust any shape, you want to adjust the size, not the scale of the transform properties. Okay, back to trim path. Let's make this 500 by 500. In cases where you want to retain the control over the size and the position and the roundness, you don't want to convert this to a bezier path because as we just saw, once you do that, you lose that ability. So now it's just a path and you don't have the control over the size, or position, or roundness instances where you want to control where this animation begins. You can manipulate this offset. Now, offset defaults to zero degrees and this is basically a rotation that controls where your animation will start. As you start to scrub through this, you can see that you can set it maybe to the top left corner. You can come down here and set it to the bottom left corner. That's how you can control where your animation begins for a trim paths. Now if we watch this, we see how the animation is going clockwise. Well, what if you want to go counterclockwise? This is going to be true for every stroke trim path that you create. If you look under rectangle path, we have these two options here. We have reverse path direction on and reverse path direction off. If you simply click on the one that's not highlighted, it will change the direction of the animation. See now we're going counterclockwise. Click the first option which is reverse path direction off and it goes clockwise. That's how you can control where your animation begins by using offset, the direction of your trim pass. Animation is controlled using reverse path direction. Off and on toggles. 54. 05.11 Trim Paths Start Percentage: Picking back up where we just left off, let's go to this last keyframe here for our animation. And let's put a keyframe for start and is set at zero and go forward another second. And then let's increase start to 100% And you can see the effect of this has it animates on and then it animates off. Let's remove both of these. What happens if you animate only the start position? Well, say that zero, go forward to second, move up to 100% If you have end, 0% trimas animates on this rectangle. If you're using end to animate this on 0-100% your start percentage must be at zero. If you increase your start up to 100, then it just simply animates off. There's no animation on. Likewise, if you have end set to 100% which is the default, go from start 0% up to 100% Again, it just animates off. Some of these are a little bit tricky, but use the defaults that after effect sets for you. After effect sets, trim paths start at zero and end at 100% The easiest way to remember it is use your end percentage to animate strokes on and then use your start to animate them off. This is the effect that you would get with end percentage used first and then start percentage used second. 55. 05.12 Trimming Multiple Paths: Now we've going to over start an offset. What about this trim multiple paths simultaneous and individual? This option is used when you have multiple shapes. I'm going to show you a few different scenarios and how this trim multiple shapes works. Let's go ahead and add an ellipse. And we're going to increase the ellipse about the same size as our rectangle. And then let's just move it over. These are next to each other without a group. Both the rectangle and the ellipse path are using the same attributes. Meaning the same stroke and the same trim paths. Whatever we do to alter our stroke is going to apply to both of them. Whenever you have shapes or outside of groups, whatever comes underneath them will apply to them both. Say we want them to have the same stroke color and stroke width. Let's open up our trim paths and we'll set a key frame for trim paths at zero, go forward 1 second and set it to 100. And then let's just watch that. We see that they animate on the exact same time. And in the exact same way, you do have a few controls that you can use to make these somewhat unique. So if we want to reverse the direction of the animation for our rectangle path, you just simply click reverse path direction on. And now when we watch it, we see they go in opposite directions. We can also make them both go counterclockwise, or we can have the ellipse path go counterclockwise and the rectangle go clockwise. But what if we want the rectangle to animate on first and then the circle? Well, that's where this trim multiple shapes comes in. Trempass defaults to simultaneously, meaning the Trempass is going to be applied at the same time, no matter how many shapes you have in here. However, if we change simultaneously to individually, whichever shape is higher in our hierarchy, we'll animate on first. If we watch that, we see now that our rectangle comes on first and then our ellipse. If you notice, the animation is quicker. And the reason why is because it's animating each path on, so it actually has less time to animate them on individually. This is a 1 second animation. If we have to set to individually, then it's giving half a second for each shape to animate on. Whereas, if we have to set two simultaneously, it's not a full second to animate them on at the same time. See, that's a lot slower than if we change this individually. Now let's take a look at what happens if you ad groups. In order to have a little bit more control over this, let's up our lips path in our rectangle path and let's just set our position to zero to get the sprite back in the center, that way they're on top of each other. Then let's get rid of this trend path for now. We're going to go to contents, we're going to add a group. Now let's pull our rectangle path into group one. Add another group and we're going to pull our lips path into group two. Group one is rectangle and group two is, we'll say circle. Now we can use our transform properties to control the position, scale, rotation. Everything of each individual shape we get under our transform properties. For rectangle, we can just move our position over to the left. And the same for circle. Open that up, get our transform properties for that group and move it over. As you notice, we have a stroke that's outside of these two groups. Again, this stroke will apply to both the circle and the rectangle. If we move the stroke up above circle, we see now that it doesn't apply to circle, it only applies to the rectangle. It's best practice to actually put your stroke inside of the group for rectangle, now we have that inside of a rectangle. Group up, circle, highlight, circle. We can go to add and we can add its own stroke. And now, so these two strokes are independent of one another as we see this stroke here. If we go up to our shape layer control panel, we see that it's red and 64 pixels wide. If we highlight this stroke, we see that it's white and only two pixels wide. Let's increase this up to 64 so they're the same size. And we can change this color to anything we want and it will not affect the stroke that's within the group for rectangle. Okay, Now let's go back to contents. And if we add a trim pass, it will automatically add the trimpass to the bottom of this hierarchy. Okay? Now if we have this trim pass here, and we're going to open that up and let's use our end animation. Put a key frame, move it down to zero, go forward 1 second and increase it to 100. This has the same exact effect as what we saw whenever these two shapes were outside of the groups. And the reason why is because this trim pass is affecting everything above it. It doesn't matter if this is a group or just shapes. We want more control over this. Maybe we want some time to pass in between the animation of these two shapes coming on. Control D, which is going to make a copy of our trim paths have trimpass one in trim pass two. Let's move trimpass one inside of rectangle and trimpass two inside of circle. We can just open these up. We'll open up our trim pass. Open up our trim paths here for our circle. Say we can grab these keyframes and maybe move them past our last keyframe and maybe even a little bit further. So there's some space in here, I'm going to loop that. And as we can see, the rectangle animates on and then the ellipse, That's just one way of having more control, is to create these groups where you put your shapes inside of the groups and also add all of the attributes meaning strokes fills, anything like that. As well as your animation tools, Meaning trim paths. Since this trim paths is only affecting this rectangle in this stroke within this group, there's no reason to change simultaneously to individually, because now it's only going to affect this one shape. 56. 05.13 Trims Paths Summary: Just to sum this up, trim pass is a stroke animation tool. It's not intended to animate fills, but only strokes. And you have a number of controls at your disposal. You can animate the end percentage. You can animate the start percentage. You can use the offset to control where the animation begins. And if you have multiple shapes, either within a group or within the shape layer, you can choose to individually trim multiple shapes. And it will trim them one at a time. Whereas if you have them set to the default setting up simultaneously, they will animate at the same time and at the same speed. 57. 05.14 Merge Paths Basic Training: In this lesson, we're going to cover merge paths. Merged path is a shape layer feature whose functionality allows you to form complex shapes by combining different shapes while adding and subtracting overlapping segments of shapes. As well as including and excluding intersections of those shapes. It can be a little tricky, but if you follow along and you pay attention to the hierarchy of how shapes and their fills and strokes in the merge paths are placed, You'll find that it can be a very, very useful tool. And we'll go over a few instances where using merge paths is extremely useful, such as creating icons. Okay, so let's go ahead and create a new composition. We'll do our usual new composition icon here, and we're going to call this merge paths. Everything looks good. And click okay. Now let's create a new shape layer. Let's have that shape layer in here. Let's use the Add button. And actually let's use the Add button from our Shape layer panel up here just to use something a little bit different and to get you used to using different methods of creating these shape layers. Using the Add button, we're going to hit Add, and we're going to add an ellipse. And then let's add a fill. Let's go ahead and make this ellipse a little bit larger, and maybe change the color of it. Something like that and maybe a little bit bigger. Okay, Then with contents highlighted, let's add a different shape, Something else. We'll add a rectangle. See how the rectangle has been placed in here, you can see the outline of it. And if we hide our ellipse path by clicking this eyeball right here to shy it away, we can see that our rectangle is right there, make them both 500 pixels. Remember that the size for ellipse and rectangle paths are in pixels, not in percentages. This is actually 500 pixels by 500 pixels. Okay, now I'm going to offset this slightly. So you can see the effect of using merge paths. We can even add a stroke actually. So you can see the full effect. The stroke in this fill are affecting both of these shapes completely. The rectangle has this fill and stroke, and the ellipse has this fill and stroke. When we combine them, you can see the stroke goes around both shapes, highlight contents. And we're going to add a merge paths. And now notice where the merge paths places itself. It puts itself between the shapes and the attributes of stroke and fill. And that's very important that the merge paths is in this location. If you click away now the stroke has disappeared from around the inner part of the circle and the rectangle. And the reason why is because of this merged pass. Now watch if we move the merge pass underneath the stroke and fill it completely does away with both shapes. So it is very important where you place the merge paths. Put the merge pass between your shape and your attribute of stroke and or fill, then you should be good. Okay, now let's open a merge pass and we'll see that we have some options here. Under mode, it's set to add. That's what it defaults to. Notice though, that's our second option. If we click Merge, if you watch the stroke now it just merges these two shapes. This is the same effect as if we did nothing. When you merge emerged paths, the result is basically not even adding emerged paths. Let's turn that back on. This is what it looks like on ad mode. It combines these two shapes into one. Subtract, it's going to subtract the area where they intersect and the rest of the shape that's in the lowermost position. What I mean by that is this. Let's go back to merge. These are our two shapes. These two shapes intersect right here on the right half of the ellipse and the left half of the rectangle, if we choose, subtract the area where they intersect, as well as the rest of the rectangle path which is in the lowermost position, disappears. And if we click away, because right now I have this shape layer highlighted so we can see all of the boundaries around both shapes. If I click away, now we have a semicircle. Okay, Now watch what happens if I move the ellipse underneath the rectangle path. Now what's missing is the area where it intersects. And the rest of the ellipse hierarchy is very important with merged paths. Let's go over some more of the modes. This is subtract again. Whatever is on the bottom will be subtracted as well as the intersecting area. Underneath subtract, we have intersect. This includes the area where the two shapes intersect. And then the last option is exclude intersections. This is going to do the opposite of what intersect does. Now we have this empty space here where the two shapes intersect. You can really see the effect of this when you start to move some of these shapes around. I'm going to pet back to subtract and then watch as I move this rectangle path around. I'm going to select control shift H on a PC. It's going to make all of these bounding boxes disappear. This is a useful option sometimes in cases where you need to see your screen, but you don't want like masks showing up or bounding boxes such as in this case control shift H. Now we can't see any of the bounding boxes and I'm just going to move this rectangle path around. You can see the effect that it's having. I'm going to move the ellipse path underneath the rectangle path and I'm going to move the ellipse path around now. And you can see the effect that it has. This is key framable, you can actually move this ellipse from left to right for an effect like that. This is clear underneath. Let me just click on this tagle transparency grid. You can see it actually subtracts the area it's transparent underneath and turn that back on for now. Now let's take a look at Intersect. As we move these around, you can see that the area that's showing up are the areas where these shapes are intersecting. Going to turn that back on, swings are bounding boxes as we're moving around. The only area included are where the two shapes are intersecting, exclude intersections. Is going to include everything except where the two shapes are intersecting really quick. Just to recap, in order to use merge paths, you have an ellipse and fill and you have a rectangle. Make both of these about the same size. We'll say 500 pixels each. If you have shapes and a fill or a stroke, merge paths will automatically place itself between the shapes and the fill or the strokes offset these a little bit. Do we need to add a stroke? It's going to default to add. If you do emerges as if you never even added emerged paths, you can see the effect is exactly the same, whether or not you have merged paths turned on. Add adds these two shapes together to form one shape. Subtract, subtracts the intersected area, as well as the rest of the shape that's on the bottom. Intersect includes only the intersecting areas of the two shapes. Exclude intersections. Includes all the areas other than the intersected areas. 58. 05.15 Issues Using Groups with Merge Paths: Let's create a shape layer. Now let's use some groups. So we're going to group ellipse fill, and we'll make this ellipse a little bit larger. Let's control D to duplicate that group. Let's add a rectangle and get rid of our ellipse path, our size. We'll make these 415 each. We'll make our rectangle path blue. Now we don't have a fill that's underneath these shapes. Normally if you just add in shapes, you will have your fill underneath your shapes. Well, in this case we have two groups but no fill underneath. I watch what happens. If you go to contents and you go to merge paths. It automatically adds in a stroke and fill for you. The reason for that is because for merge paths to work, it has to have a stroke and fill underneath it. Now let's get rid of these two here, and as you can see, they disappear. One of the drawbacks with using groups is that you can't actually use the fills of your groups because it's using the fill and stroke that comes in with the merge paths. Let's change this fill to maybe like an orange. Now see this fill is red as we can see up here. This fill is red for our circle. But now we can't see the red fill because this fill underneath merge paths overrides whatever fill you may have in this group one or group two. Because it's all hierarchical. You have to use the stroke and the fill of the merge paths for these shape layers here. See if we get rid of this fill here. Now see only the stroke is being recognized. Add a stroke to our group one. But it won't matter because this stroke down here is overriding the stroke inside of group one. Just keep in mind the limitations you'll have if you incorporate groups whenever you're using merged paths. Since merged paths is intended to be used to create a single shape, it's best to have the shapes fields and merge paths all within the same group together as a single unit. In order to use merged paths, you have to have at least two shapes. But those shapes will be used with merge paths in order to create a single shape. This can be a little confusing since we normally want to group different shapes within their own group. But if you remember that merge paths purpose is to create a single shape from the merging of multiple shapes. It should help merge Pass is used to create one shape out of at least two shapes. Therefore grouping those multiple shapes should not be used. They should all either be in the same group or in the same shape layer by themselves. A single shape per group is the best way to go. 59. 05.16 Merge Paths with Multiple Shapes: Now let's create a new shape layer. Let's add an ellipse. Phil, we'll just increase this ellipse path. Now say what if you want to make like a pie. For example, you want a slice of this pie to be cut out. Well, one way to do that is you can add a polystar. Open that up, let's change our type from star to polygon. Let's give this polygon just three points. And see here's our polygon right here in the middle. And we can actually increase our outer radius to make it larger. Then let's rotate it around 30 degrees. Move the position over. It's going to intersect right in the center of the circle. You can see we want the tip be right in the center. This is our anchor point right here. This is what we're wanting to exclude here to take out that slice. Let's go to contents and let's add emerge paths. And it's going into default to add, choose, subtract. And as you can see now we have this slice cut out. It looks like a pat man. If you choose intersect, it includes only that slice exclude intersection. Includes everything except for the intersection. See something really quick that you could do. Say if you did subtract and L's duplicate this shape layer control D. Now we have shape layer two. Using shape layer one, let's change this merge paths to intersect. Now this is including only the intersecting part. If you press for position on shape layer one and just move it out to the side a little bit, click away. This is already starting to form something that you could use, possibly in an info graphic to show a pie chart or like a slice of a pie. So maybe something that needs to be highlighted. You can change the color of this, something like that. Merge paths is something that is very simple to use. It can be confusing if you get your hierarchy mixed up. But the main thing you need to remember is to put merge paths in between your shapes and your field. 60. 05.17 Create Shape Layer Animation Presets: In this lesson, I'm going to show you how to save your shape layers. As presets, you can save any shape layer along with this animation as a preset so you can use it later. This is a huge time saver, especially if there are shape layers and animations that you use on a regular basis. Or maybe there's a shape layer icon or some other image that you've created that you're really proud of and it took a long time to create. Well, you can save that shape layer as animation and instantaneously have access to it at a later time. If you go to the contents of your shape layer and make sure that it's highlighted, go up to Animation and save Animation preset. This will bring you to your documents, Adobe, the after effects version you're using, and user presets. As you can see, I have a lot of folders because I've been doing this for a very long time, but you may only have a few folders in here. The first time that you do this, let's create a folder for Tomy specifically. So simply go to new folder, name it to me, and then we'll go inside of that folder name your preset, something that you'll remember. For example, this is rotating stars and click Save. And just wait for after effects to save your animation preset. So now you have this preset saved. And the way that you can find out for sure that it saved correctly is if you delete your shape layer. Now let's create a new one. Right click, new shape layer. Go over to your effects and presets panel. If you open up animation presets, all of the presets that you make will be under user presets. So if we open this up, scroll down until you find the new folder that you created, which is Tomy right here. If we open up utomy, we see we have rotating stars. So it did in fact save it. We included animation in this preset. A really important thing to remember is it will drop your keyframes wherever your playhead happens to be located. So say if my playhead is at 3 seconds with this layer highlighted, simply double click on rotating stars and there's our preset. Now if you hit you to bring up your key frames, you can see that all the keyframes in fact, did come over. But I want it to be at the beginning of the layer. So let's control Z to get out of that. Go back to the very beginning of your layer. And now it's double click rotating stars. And we see that our key frames came in at the exact place where our playhead is located. And if we watch it, we can see that it's the same animation that we had saved before. Let me give you an example of some of the ones I've made. I'm going to delete the shape layer, right click, new shape layer, and see I have all of these folders. So I've created a lot of shape layers and animations over time. So say for example, I want to look at an avatar I had built. At some point I'm going back to the beginning of my layer and I just double click on any one of these. And it immediately comes in. If I open up the shape layer, you can see in my contents, I have Avatar Man and all of the groups that go along with how it was created. Now these groups weren't named, but I do highly recommend if you get the chance to name all of your groups. That way you can easily change the settings of very specific groups. As you can see, this particular avatar has 17 groups. Let's delete the contents. Just highlight contents and hit delete. I'm going to go to Graphs and Charts bring or playd back to the beginning of the layer. And let's just double click any one of these. And we have a data graph as you can see, it brought in key frames, because this animates in. I'm just going to loop this and then we can watch it. So you can save literally as many of these presets as you'd like. And I highly recommend as you create shape layer animations that you save them as presets. You never know when you're going to need them in the future. And some of these shape layers may contain a lot of groups. For example, this business bar chart presentation. As you can see, all the key frames came back in with it. If we watch it, we can see that there's a lot going on here. I renamed all of my groups, bar 123 chart and screen. If we open up these groups, we can even see what makes up those groups. These are all paths. I use the merge paths here for the chart, and then the screen is a rectangle path with the fill. So remember, if you want to save your shape layers and their animations as presets, highlight contents, go to animation, save animation preset. Make sure you're in your documents, Adobe the version you're using, user presets. And either create a folder or put it into a folder that makes sense. 61. 05.18 Section 05 Review: You should be super proud of yourself right now. You have gone through each and every aspect of shape layers. From the basics of creating a simple rectangle, to adding fills and strokes, to learning about vertices and different types of transform properties. To using powerful animation tools that even some advanced motion graphic designers don't know how to use thoroughly. Starting now, you truly are a motion graphic rock star. There's one more section that I created just for those of you who have dared to become a shape layer master. The next section is full of tutorials where you will take what you've learned and create actual designs. You can watch these tutorials as many times as you want, and in some cases, you may want to revisit the ones that are packed dense information. Once you've learned these tricks, try them out on your clients or at your job. Impress the people that you're creating designs for and proudly let the world know that you are a shape layer wizard. I look forward to seeing you in the next section and showing you how to make some really cool and impressive motion graphic designs. 62. 06.01 Section 06 - Shape Layer Tutorials: Welcome back to the Power of Shape Layers section six tutorials. This is where you've put what we've learned to the test. In this section, you'll follow along with me to create hut elements, icons, shape layers from text animation, and just make some really cool motion graphics. I'm assuming that you've learned the basics. So while I want me going too fast, if you don't have a strong hold of the basics, you might find yourself running a little bit behind. Don't worry, I'm here for you. You can watch these tutorials as many times as you want. You can also contact me anytime with questions or comments. Now let's get down to it and start making some really cool motion graphic designs. 63. 06.02 Create an Animated Arrow: Okay, so we're going to go over a few quick tutorials that should help strengthen your understanding of trimpass. I'll introduce a variety of ways that you can use them for your own shape layer animations. So let's go ahead and create a new composition. We'll click or create a new composition icon and just call this trim path animation. For our first animation, I want to create an arrow using a polystar and a line. Let's right click in this area right here. Click go to Shape Layer. Whenever we create a shape layer like this, there are no content, so we have to add everything in one at a time. First, let's add a group. And then in side of that group, we're going to add a polystar. And we're going to give that polystar a fill. And let's go ahead and change that fill to white. Okay, now let's open up our polystar path options. Here we can change this polystar now to a polygon. We can see now that it's become a pentagon instead of a star. One of the options you have for these polystar settings are points, position, rotation, outer radius, and outer roundness. Let's focus on the points. If we change our points from five down to three, we now get a triangle. And we can increase the size of using the outer radius option here. That looks good, just like that. Go back to contents and we want to add another group. In this group, we're going to add a path. But before we do that, I know I'm going to be creating a straight line. And one of the things I like to do whenever I create straight lines is to use my ruler. Let's run a PC. Hit control R to bring up your rulers. And let's just pull this out. Hit our quotation marks to get our guides up. And put your ruler right on the middle of the vertical center point. Now within this second group, let's choose Add Path. It brings up our pen tool. Let's just draw a straight line. So with two vertices, one there and say one here. We also need to add a stroke, so it's going to default to white. And let's just increase this so it's a little bit larger. One of the things I'd like to do once you highlight path is make sure this actually snapped to your ruler to make sure that you have this capability. Go up to view and make sure you have snap to Guides enabled. If Snap to Guides is not enabled and you try to make it snap it or just go right past it, we need to line this up better so that this arrowhead is on top of our line here. Go back to group one and then open up your transform properties for group one. And now we can move our position of group one up. So as you can see, group one transform properties only affect group one. Once we have this set, maybe we want to change the look of this polystar. Let's adjust our outer radius to make it a little bit smaller so it fits better. And then that's our arrow with shape layer highlighted. Now if you right click, go to transform. And let's just choose Center Anchor Point and Layer Content. And I always like to do this, so that way I know that my anchor point is centered on the layer. If you just click that, now you see our anchor point centers right in the middle of this entire shape layer. Let's adjust our position. If you hit P for the shape layer, now you see this is the position for this entire shape layer. So wherever we move this or scale it, it will affect everything within this contents, okay? So let's see that back to 100, okay? And so before we animate this, I want to make some more changes to our stroke here. So let's see if we hide our group two. We see that that's actually our line. So let's rename group two to line. And group one, we'll name Arrowhead, so that way we know which ones we're working with and they're easier to access. Let's open up our line. We want to add a trim paths to this line group. We'll open that up and let's put a key frame for end and set the percentage to zero. Move forward 1 second and make it 100. That way we see it animates in. I want to change the look of this line, see how we have this hard edge on it. I want to make it rounded, and as we learned in a previous lesson, that's controlled using our stroke. Let's open up our stroke and let's change our line cap. See it defaults to butt cap, to round cap. And let me zoom in here a little bit. You can see how that's changed this before we had butt cap, now we have round cap. And one of the things that I'm noticing is that this path actually extends well into our arrowhead. We really want the end of this path head at the bottom of our arrowhead. So let's take our arrowhead group, open that up, go to our transform properties for arrowhead. And just move this up to where it meets almost the top of this path here. Okay, so now we're going to want this to scale up from the bottom of this arrowhead. See right now, if we animate this, we say out animates from the middle. We want this to animate from the bottom. And this is one of those times that your anchor point is important. Choose y. It brings up your pan around tool, which looks like this. And just move anchor point to the very bottom of this arrowhead. So now as we adjust the scale of this group, we can see it's going to animate from the bottom. Come back out and we see our key frame for our line is controlled using our trim pass. Let's go to this last keyframe, this second key frame for our line, and then we're going to set a key frame for our scale. This is going to be for our arrowhead group. Again, these are the transform properties for the arrowhead only. So this will only affect our arrowhead go forward 1 second. And we're going to set a key frame at 100% this first key frame we want to set to zero. And that's going to animate this in from bottom to top. Go to about 3 seconds and hit in. So that way we can loop it, choose our magnification to fit. Hit the quotation marks to get rid of our guides and hit zero on your number pad to watch it, the arrowhead comes in a little bit slow, so maybe we'll make that animation a little bit quicker. So our first key frame is at 1 second. If you hold on shift and page down, just page down twice to go 1020 frames, we can pull our key frame back over to where our playhead is. And then if you right click, you can go to Keyframe Assistant and choose Ease in. So this is going to ease in whenever it animates in. So let's take a look at this. And it's still a little bit slow, so I want to add a little bit more speed. I want to come in fast and then ease into its final resting spot. And the way we do that is with this second keyframe highlighted. Click this right here. This is our graph editor. And we'll be using this quite a bit in all of our tutorials, so just click that on. This is the visual representation of this ease in. If we take this handle right here, this is for the second keyframe. And pull all the way to the left. And so this is going to make the speed of this keyframe come in fast and then ease into its final resting spot. So let's click this Graph Editor button again to go back to our timeline view. And let's watch it now. So see it comes in fast, and then it eases in. And with shape layer one highlighted select, this brings up only our key frames. So now we can see just the key frames without all the other information in front of us. And I still want this to be quicker. So the way you make animations faster is to move keyframes closer together. So let's go to our first key frame for our path and shift page down 12. And let's grab all these keyframes and bring them back over and see how this looks. Now we can even go even a little bit quicker. So go back to the beginning of our layer shift page down once to go forward ten frames from this point. We'll shift page down one time to go forward another ten frames. That way our entire animation occurs over 20 frames. And then let's go to 1 second hit, end a loop it. And now let's watch it. So that's our arrow, It comes in pretty quick. And then the arrowhead comes to a resting spot. And a more interesting ease in. Now, whenever you look at this animation, think about it as one animation. So from the beginning to the end, it's just one movement. So you don't want your key frames for your path to ease in or out. These are called linear key frames. This keyframe is called a Bezier keyframe. There are a few different types of key frames. The main ones you'll be working with are linear and bezier. We also have toggled hold keyframes, but we'll go over that in a different lesson for now. Just so you know, whenever your key frames are this diamond shape, that means that they're linear. If you have an ease out or this is an ease in or an easy ease, these are all considered bezier key frames. So we want these first three key frames to all be linear and this last one to be a bezier ease in. And we've manipulated the speed using the graph editor with this animation. As you see, let's open it back up. We have two groups that we've renamed, the arrowhead and line. Now our line is a path that we use the trend paths on manipulating our percentage 0-100 And then at the end of that animation, we created a new animation with our arrowhead manipulating the scale of the arrowhead group going from zero up to 100. And we eased this in and then manipulated the speed with our graph editor. So that's just one really quick shape layer animation you can use that includes trim paths and also incorporates groups and helps you to learn and get an idea of how these transform properties of each group affects only that group. 64. 06.03 Create an Abstract Animation: Let's do another quick animation here. I'm going to do something a little bit more abstract, the contents highlighted. Let's add a group. Let's call this group circle one. Then we're going to add an ellipse and give that ellipse a fill. Then let's change the fill color from red to like a light blue. Then I want to have two of these circles. Let's control D to duplicate circle one and it'll make circle two. Okay? Now I want these two circles to be on either side of this comp. So with circle one highlighted, let's go into our transform properties and move this to the left. We'll go negative 500 pixels. Then circle two, Open up our transform properties for this group and make this position 500 pixels. If we bring up our guides, we can see that these are the same distance from the edges of our comp. Let's also move it down to our midpoint in the middle here. Remember we right click on our Shape layer. Go to Transform Center, Anchor Point and Layer Content. That puts our anchor point right in the middle of this shape layer. Press P to bring up our position for the shape layer. And let me open this up. This is our position within the transform properties of the shape layer. Remember, our midpoint is 960 by 540, because this composition is 1920 by 108960. By 540 is the center point in a composition that size. I want to create a jagged line that goes in between these two dots and animates off and on. And I also want to scale up these dots off and on. So this is how we do that. Go back to contents and let's add another group. Anytime you add anything to a shape layer, it's going to move it to the bottom of the hierarchy. So see our group one now is below circle one and circle two. Highlight group one and add a path and it will bring up our pinole. I'm going to draw like a jagged line in between these two dots here. And then let's go to add a stroke. And now I want this stroke to be the same color as our dots. The way you do that, let's click on Stroke and grab this eye dropper. And then let's just click one of these circles. It'll make the stroke of this path the same exact color as our circles. Click Okay. And then let's increase the stroke width of this line. I still want to play around with how this line looks. Highlight group one. And just rename this jagged line. Open up our stroke properties. And I want this to have a rounded edge and rounded corners here. As we learned earlier, that's under our line cap and line join line cap is going to adjust the way the ends of this path look. So not these points in between but just the ends of it. So let's change that to round cap. And as you can see, I'll toggle this off and on, that's the effect that a round cap has. But I also want these points in between to be rounded as well. So let's go to line join. It defaults to minor join, which are these angular edges. And let's just change that to round join. See, now this is all rounded. Now, only change the way this line looks, the way you do that. Let's go up to our jagged line and highlight path. Now this gives us the ability to move these individual points and you can tell when you're able to because see they're clear inside of each point here. Also, if you just click on jagged line, even though they're filled in, you can grab a point and you're able to move them around. However, say if you have circle highlighted and you go in here and you try to manipulate the points on your jagged line, it won't work. Make sure you have jagged line or path highlighted. And then that way you can manipulate some of these points. Drag these out a little bit, make them different heights like that. Maybe it will decrease the stroke width. Let's make it 15 change, maybe the height of this, we have something like that, something very abstract. But we're doing this mainly for illustration purposes. And to show you how to use trim paths and how to use group transform properties. Whenever I have an animation like this, I like to make the hierarchy of my shape layer in order of how things are going to animate. I want this circle to come in first, then the jagonline, then this circle. And then I want them all to animate off circle one comes first. Let's move circle one to the top of circle two, have jagon line, move in between circle one and circle two. Then circle two will be at the end of our animation. First, let's animate circle one. Let's open up circle one. This is our circle one group. And these are transform properties for this group. Let's put a key frame for scale. And just zoom in here a little bit. Holding down shift page down one time to go forward ten frames. Let's put another key frame and then shift page down for ten frames, because I want this circle to bounce in, it's going to bounce in and then come to its final resting spot. In order to do that, we are at 100% to make it larger, we just need to increase this. Say to maybe 110. So it's a little bit larger than it gets smaller. We want our first keyframe to be set at zero, so that way it animates. In we highlight all these keyframes. I'm just holding down on my left mouse button and highlighting all these key frames. Right click on any one of them. Keyframe assistant easy S or as you can see, nine does the same thing. Then we can watch that animation. So that comes in, see how it does a little bounce. Maybe want the bounce to be a little bit more extreme. So let's make this 120. Instead, we want our line to start to animate, right? As this circle comes in, say this midpoint. Let's go down to jagged line. And we want to add a trim paths. Now see it's kind of cumbersome to scroll back up and scroll down. So this one of those times you may want to use your panel up here. It's that way you don't have to scroll through all of these groups down here. So we'll jag it a line highlighted. Go up to our shape layer control panel. Click Add. We're going to add a trim paths. We're going to put a keyframe for end and move it down to zero. Go forward shift 12 and increase our end percentage to 100. We want to make sure that we leave these linear because this is one solid animation. The reason why we have these beziers because this ellipse is going to bounce in. We want our line though to go straight and fast. We don't want to ease in because we want it to appear as if this is one solid animation. Let's go to the end of this animation which is the second key frame for our S highlight these keyframes for scale in our group. One circle one, control C to copy them. And make sure only scale is highlighted so that way you don't copy position or anything else. Go down to circle two and control V and see it paste the key frames that we created for circle one. Now if we hit you, we can see all of our key frames. These are the key frames that make up the animation. Let's just watch this real quick. Something very abstract, but you get the idea of some of the things you can do with shape layers and with groups and with trend paths. Now I want to animate these off. The way I would animate these off is highlight these keyframes for our scale, for circle one, copy and paste. Now if you write Click, make sure all of these are highlighted. You'll see something under Keyframe assistant called time reverse keyframes. It takes the key frames you have selected and it reverses the order of them. Instead of going 0-115 to 100, it will now go 101150. We want that and I'll show you why. Let's click Time Reverse Keyframes. You want these two keyframes to have the same value because you want to remain that size during this period of time. The scale percentage is 100 here. And also here, it's going to animate off like that. So now we need this line to animate off. Let's go to the second key frame, the way we did the first time. And we need to open up all of our contents here. That way we can see what we're doing. And we're going to put a keyframe for start at 0% and go forward 12, end that animation at 100 on start percentage. So that way it will come in and then it will go right back out. So go to the last keyframe and hit you to bring up our key frames again. And we want to copy these keyframes from circle one, this is the animation of copy. And then highlight scale for circle two and control V to paste and then we can watch your animation. We have a circle that comes in, the number, the line, and then we have a second circle and they animate off, and they animate on. This is a very abstract animation. The reason why I wanted to show you this is because it uses several techniques. We are using trim paths only on one group, this jagged line group. By having trim paths inside of this group is only applying to this group as opposed to the entire animation within circle group one. We're only affecting the transform properties of that circle. This scale animation only affects circle one. Likewise with circle two affecting the scale within the transform properties of circle two affecting the scale of this circle two. Notice we didn't affect the position or the size of this ellipse path. Technically, we could have, but I find it much easier to use your transformed properties of your groups before you manipulate the size or position of your ellipse path. The only time I would really adjust this ellipse path size is to say once I had this animation done, I'm like, well, you know what, I really want these circles to be larger. And the quick way to do that is just to increase the size of your ellipse path here. Say maybe make it 180 and then go up to circle one, we can make that the same size, 180. You still retain that scale animation without having to make adjustments to multiple key frames. Whenever you're doing animations with shape layers and you're using groups, try to use the transform properties of your groups before you change the size or position of your actual shapes. 65. 06.04 Create Stars and Animated Lines: Let's right click in the area to the left of the time line. Click New and create a Shape layer. And then let's open up our shape layer, highlight contents. And we're going to add a polystar. And then let's give that polystar a fill. And we'll change the default red to something, maybe like a light green contents highlighted Again, let's add a group, then we want to pull our polystar and our fill inside of this group. Okay, now with group one highlighted, let's add a repeater. And one of the things to know whenever you add a repeater is that it has default settings. Like everything else, it always defaults to three copies. And your transform properties will always look like this. Your anchor point and rotation is set to zero. Your position is always set to 100 pixels on the X axis, zero on the Y. What we want to do is increase the number of copies. Say let's make eight. Then to spread these out, move our position over to the right. See as you change this initial value of 100, the greater the value, the more spacer is going to be between your copies. And the more you decrease the value, the closer they are until you get to zero and they're on top of each other. And then if you keep going left, getting smaller, going into negatives, it goes the opposite direction. We want to go, something about like that. Now notice that our stars go off of our composition. We need to move that over. The way we're going to move it over is using the transform properties of this group one. Let's open up the transform properties of group one and just move our position over to the left. See they still don't quite fit. So let's go back to our repeater and make some more adjustments. Make this a little bit smaller. If we want to make the stars smaller, you can go into the transform properties of your repeater, you would think, and just decrease the scale. But see that doesn't work, these stars smaller, This isn't where you need to do it, so you want to make that back to 100. What you want to do is go into your group transform properties and decrease the size there. Likewise, you want to move your stars over using the transform properties of group one. I'm going to get this centered about right there. Let's go ahead and change the name of this group one to stars. Okay, now let's pull down our ruler and go right above our stars. And we're going to add another group, and we're going to add a path. We're going to put two vertices, one above the first star and then one above the last star. Within this group, we want to add a stroke. And let's click on the color of the stroke. Grab the eye dropper, and we'll choose the same green click. Okay. Now let's increase the size of the stroke. As you can see, the end cap is a butt cap and it has that harsh edge, so I want to adjust that. Let's open up our stroke settings and change butt cap to round cap. And I'm going to press my quotation marks to get rid of my safe zones. Right now I'm going to get rid of this ruler. Just push it off screen. Call this top line then with top line highlighted, control D to duplicate that. Rename top line two to bottom line. Now if we open up our bottom line group, go to our transform properties for bottom line group. And let's adjust our position so it goes just below our stars like that, okay? And as you can see, our anchor point is not in the center of this group. If you wanted that to be in the center, press Id. To bring up your pan around tool, you can move our anchor point right to the middle. Let's do the same thing for our top line. Let's move it right there. Let's just check our stars group and see our anchor point is in the center of the original star, which this is the one that makes all the copies. Let's just move that to the center of all of our stars. Now everything is centered and lined up. Okay, I want this top line to animate off and on from left to right. And then I want the bottom line to animate off and on from right to left. At the same time, I want all of these stars to rotate using a script called time. Let's take this one step at a time. So our top line is going to be our first animation. Let's move it to the very top stars comes next, and bottom line comes next. Actually, our top line and bottom line will be animating at the same time, but this just kind of gives us some more organization. Open up top line with top line highlighted. Let's add a trim paths, open up trim pass and we want to put a keyframe for our percentage. Move that down to zero. Go forward holding down shift in page down 12. And let's increase this to 100% If we have trim pass highlighted, we can control C to copy it. And one of the things to keep in mind is that it will paste your keyframes wherever your playhead is. I'm going to leave my playhead right here on the second keyframes, when it control V is going to paste the first key frame at the same location of this keyframe for bottom line control V. And as we can see, the keyframes came in. So it's like this. Okay, but now I want this second line to animate in the opposite direction. If we open up our bottom line group, we can click on reverse path direction on this will reverse the path direction, now it's going in the opposite direction like that. Okay, let's go to this last key frame on bottom line. That way we can see our key frames for trend paths. Let's go back up to top line and put a key frame for start at 0% shift page down 12, and increase start percentage to 100. That way this animates off and on. Then we want to highlight these two key frames on our start from trim pass and control C. Go down to our trim pass for our bottom line, highlight Start control V, and then it will paste the same exact values. We end up with something like this. These animate on and then off. Also mention I wanted all these stars to be rotating as this is happening. Let's go into our stars group here. Let's go to the transform properties of this group for stars. Now, this rotation, if you manipulate this, you'll see that it rotates this entire layer. That's not what we want. Let's put this back to zero. Let's open up our repeater, because remember it has its own transform properties. So if we go to the repeater transform properties and we start to rotate the stars there, we see that's not exactly what we want either. If you want to rotate all of these stars, you don't do it at the repeater transform property level or at the group transform property level. So how do we make these rotate? Well, if we go back to our polystar, we'll see we have an option for rotation. This is just our first star. As we can see when we have polystar highlighted, this is the only one that we're really controlling. These other instances of the star are copies. So whatever we do to the first polystar, the other stars will follow suit. Say if, for example, if we move over our position, see they all move with it. Likewise, if we change our rotation, they all do the same thing that the first one does. If you want to Mac Alt, click on rotation and type in the word time, type times, or an asterisk and the number 50. This is going to rotate at a speed of 50. Let's see how this looks. By manipulating the rotation of the polystar path, we can rotate all of the stars that are within this shape layer. Because the way the repeater works is it makes copies of the first instance of your shape. Now see if we wanted this to go quicker, we would just change the value, say, to 250. And you can see how this now will rotate faster. If you wanted to go in the opposite direction, you simply make it a negative. We'll say negative 150. With this example, we covered a few things. If you create a path and then you change your stroke settings from on your line cap to round cap. It will round out the edges of your line. When you add a trimpass to a group, that trimpass only affects that group. This group is now autonomous to these other groups. We just duplicated the top line to create the bottom line. And then moved the bottom line using the transform properties of that bottom line position down 101 pixels. We wanted the trim path to go in the opposite direction of the top line. We changed the direction path we reversed path direction on. That reverses the direction of the animation for the trim path. Then for the stars, we use the repeater, The rotation for the group and the rotation for the repeater do not have the effect desired. If you want to rotate the stars, you need to go to the polystar path and use the rotation for the polystar path. 66. 06.05 Create an Animated Icon: Okay, so we're going to create an icon using shapes. And I'm going to use Merge Paths as a device. Show you some really cool things that you can do with icon creation in after effects to give it a little bit more life or to make it a little bit more stylized. Let's right click in this area to the left of our timeline, new shape layer. And I'm going to be creating some groups and naming them, just follow along with me here and do what I do. We're going to add a group, then that group, we're going to add an ellipse. Let's give that a fill and a stroke. And we're going to be creating a camera, by the way, let me just go ahead and name this camera. Lean this group one lens. Let's increase the size of this ellipse path. Let's make the fill like a lighter blue, the stroke. If you grab the eye dropper and just click on your fill, it's the same color blue but then darken a little bit. I do that quite a bit like I want to say in the same color family. And I want just either a brighter or lighter shade of a color. That's one way of doing that. Just grab the eye dropper, click the color you already have, and then darken it, or lighten it depending on what you need. Highlight contents here. And then let's add a second group and this is going to be our body under body. We're going to add a rectangle and we're going that rectangle of Phil and Stroke. Uncheck this rectangle path size, this link here. So that way we can manipulate our size horizontally and vertically. We want to be more of a wider rectangle. We don't be. Let's change this body. It can be any color really. I'm going to do maybe like an orange stroke. I'll do the same thing. I'll choose the body color and then darken it a little bit. Maybe make this stroke ten pixels wide so it shows up better. Let's go back to contents and let's add another group and we'll call this flash within there. We're going to add a rectangle and fill and a stroke. So let's move up position about where your little clicker would be. I'm going to make it this orange color but maybe give it a little bit darker. Fill that way it stands out more. And again, I'm going to choose that orange and darken it, make this ten pixels wide as well. This is what we have so far. Okay, now for this flash body, I want to add a little bit of a topper to this right here with rectangle path highlighted. I'm going to control D to duplicate that. I'm going to unlink the top rectangle path size so I can go wider. And skinnier, something like that. Okay, this is a time when merge paths would come in useful. See how I have these two shapes and the stroke goes around both shapes. I only want the stroke to go around the entire piece here with flash highlighted, let's just add a merge paths and see immediately it pops right out and that mode is set to add. See, that's without it, and that's with it. This is one of those times that merge paths comes in very useful to resize this a little bit to get more like what I'm wanting. I'm just adjusting the scale of this in the position. Now. See I can move this flash actually down with flash highlighted. See I have transformed properties for this group. I can animate that, where it clicks down now too, this is our basic body. It's not a great scheme. Let me actually play with the lens color here, so that way it's a little bit more pleasing to look at, stay in the orange family here. Let's increase this lens size so it's a bit larger. I want to add like a little reflection in here on our lens. One way of doing that, let's add another group. Now keep in mind groups are always added to the bottom of your list hierarchically. See how this group came underneath Flash. Sometimes you may need to move your groups around. In this case I do. I want to add a reflection. Move group one above lens and type reflection. Then for reflection, we're going to add an ellipse and a fill. We want that fill to be white, highlight, ellipse path and control D. To duplicate it with reflection highlighted, let's add a merge paths and it goes right in between our shapes and our fill here. I want to have a curve shape here for this reflection. And the way I'm going to do that is selecting mode under merged paths. We're going to choose subtract Now see they both disappeared. And the reason why is because neither one of these ellipse paths have moved yet. They're right on top of each other. As I start to move this over, we start to see what I'm going for here. If I click away, we can see how it's like a half moon. Now let's highlight reflection and open up the transform properties for reflection. And we can put this anywhere we want. We can even adjust the scale of it. If we go into our field under our merge paths, let's decrease the opacity down to about 50% It's very light. It's just like a little bit of a reflection there. Actually, maybe we can move it over to the other side. May look better over there. Now if we control shift H to get rid of all of our lines, that way we see better what we're doing. I'm going to be moving around the position of this ellipse path two to see how I want this to look exactly. I'm just messing with the position of ellipse path two now. I want to make some buttons over here, and I want them to be two toned. I'll show you what I mean by that. Let's go ahead and add another group. We're going to move this group to the top, and we'll call this button. And we're going to add an ellipse and give that ellipse a fill again. Let's change the color. Eyedropper will choose the orange, but we want this to be a lot darker transform properties. For button, let's move it over to this side of the camera with button highlighted. Let's add a rectangle. Now you want the rectangle ellipse to be the same size, or they both default 100 pixels. That's fine with button highlighted. Let's add in emerged paths and we want to set this to subtract. Okay, now let's move our rectangle path over. We get a half circle here. Control shift H again to get our lines back, we can make more precise measurements. Here we have half of a button. I want the button to be two toned, and I'm sure you've seen this in some icons, and this is one way of doing it. We'll call this button left with button left, highlighted, control D to duplicate it. We'll rename this button right. Open up, button right. We're going to change the fill of this to something a lot lighter. To make this two tone, all I have to do is move this rectangle path the same number of pixels in the opposite direction. See we're at 49.4 Let's make it 50. Button left for our position. Let's make that 50. And then let's make our position for button right, negative 50. See now we have a two tone button again. The way I did that was I added a merge paths with the rectangle on the bottom. And I moved the rectangle path 50 pixels to the right. I duplicated that, changed the color of it to something lighter. And then move the rectangle path negative 50 pixels that weighs the same exact measurement away from the center point highlight contents. And let's add in another group and move it above our buttons. Let's just rename this button. But now we can bring button left and button right inside of that group. One things to keep in mind is, as you create these shape layers, your anchor point is always going to default to the middle of the shape layer itself. If you hit Y, we'll see that our anchor point is still in the center of our shape layer, despite the fact that we moved our shape layer over in this area. Select Y for the pain around tool with button highlighted, just grab this anchor point and pull it over. Put it right here in the middle. Decrease the size of that button and it will move uniformly. This coloring needs to be a little bit better. Let me make some adjustments. Here it is slightly darker, a lot of icons. We're going to have this look where it's two toned split down the middle. One side is shaded. We can do the same thing with the body. Okay, with the rectangle path for body highlighted. Let's control to duplicate it. Highlight Body. And then we're going to add a merged paths that we'll put it between our shapes and our attributes of stroke and fill. Let's choose the mode for subtract. As we see our growth rectangles disappear because they are on top of one another. Now let's move rectangle path two over to about the middle point. Then if we duplicate the body again, open up our second rectangle path and move it negative 500 pixels. And now we can change this color to something slightly different. Now our camera has that two tone, we darker on one side and lighter on the other side. This is something that's not completely necessary, but if you want that two tone color, this is an easy way to do it. Let's our flash. Just want to show you something that cool real quick. Open up our transform properties for flash. Let's put a key frame for position. If you shift page down one time it goes ten frames. We can move that down there. Control shift page down. Copy this keyframe, control C and then control V to put it back, highlight all these key frames. Right click and choose easy E's. Maybe move this over about a second or so. If you watch it, that's helping. Click it. You can set some keyframes to click that and see this group controls the flash body. Okay, let's do something interesting with this button over here. Whenever our camera clicks down. Let's open up both button right and button left. And we want to focus on our fills here. You want to make sure this is lined up with the keyframes for the animation of your flash. Put a keyframe for color on both of these. Move forward to where this keyframe is lined up, change colors. Let's make this bright orange and maybe a white. And then we come back to the end of the animation. And we just want to copy these initial key frames. So that way the first and last key frame are the same as you see as we go through. It has a flash. Watch it. As it clicks, it flashes. You may want this to go a little bit quicker. If you hide the layer and choose you, you can see your key frames and pull these a little bit closer together. I would make all of these easy clicks or nine, if you watch it, have a camera that clicks, Flashes, there you go. This is a very simple icon of a camera. This is one way to animate it really quickly. You can see how using merged pads came in. Very useful to create the reflection and to create this two tone button over here, and even to create our flash button. As with every other feature of shape layers, I highly recommend that you experiment a lot with merge pads, look up other tutorials, go a little crazy with it and see what you can come up with. The more time you spin with it, the more used to it you'll be. You'll be more confident in using it in your shape layer animations. 67. 06.06 Create an Animated Circular Holiday Design: Okay, so in this tutorial we're going to create a patriotic badge using some shapes in the repeater. Create a new composition using our new composition icon right here. And we want to keep all of our settings the same as we've had them. 192-010-8029 0.97 10 seconds. And let's just call this patriotic badge. Hit Okay. Right click in this area down here next to our timeline. And choose New Shape Layer. And I'm going to name these groups as we go along so that way we can keep everything nice and organized. First, let's rename our shape layer Patriotic Badge. And now let's add our first group, and we're going to call this stars With stars highlighted, let's go ahead and add a poly star. And we're going to add a fill. Now we want to make this fill white. Create that white. Now with contents highlighted, we're going to add a repeater. Using the knowledge we've gained over the last few lessons. We know that we need to make some adjustments to this repeater and its settings for our copies. We're, we'll say 16 copies of that. Now remember, our anchor point in position need to be all set at zero on the x and y axis so that we only have one shape visible, which is right here. Let's go to our stars group and open up our transform properties. And we need to move this up towards the top, going back down to our repeater transform properties, we need to go to our rotation and divide 360 by the number of copies we have, which is 16, to get that perfect circle of stars. And let's just make some adjustments to the size of these stars. We'll use the transform properties of the group stars. Let's just bring this down maybe to something about like that. We're at 30% now. We need to have a ring and we also need to have background going to contents. We're going to add a group and I'll make sure this group goes underneath the repeater. Okay? Because if it goes above it, the repeater is going to repeat that. And I'll show you what I mean, we touched on this earlier, but I just want to emphasize this so that way, you know it. Group one, let's add in an ellipse, and then let's add in a stroke. Okay? And we need to make this stroke. We'll make it red. Okay, let's increase the size of this ellipse path. It's about the same as our stars here. And then we're going to increase the stroke width. Remember it defaults to two pixels wide. We want to go beyond our stars. We zoom in, we see it goes just beyond our stars. Something like that. Now let's rename this group to red stripe. And now see, watch what happens if we move the red stripe above the repeater. The repeater is going to try to repeat that red stripe. The reason why I'm going to see one copy of it is because it has the settings that are similar to our stars. If you move the position around, you can actually get some pretty cool effects here. And yet, just another example of experimentation and what you can get out of the repeater. This isn't exactly what we want, but it's kind of a cool effect, okay? So that's if the red stripe is above the repeater, so let's move it below. So now we need a background, so we can actually go back into red stripe here. And we can actually add a fill into this. Let's change this red stripe just to background. Now our fill is going to default to red. Let's change that to some blue. Make sure you pull your fill below your stroke. The stroke is actually on top of the fill. That way it goes beyond our stars. One of the things that's very important with shape layers is the way things are laid out in a hierarchical manner. Just like with Photoshop or Illustrator, it's just layering. In a situation like this, when the fill is above the stroke, we see the stroke is actually behind the fill. There's more of the stroke there, we just can't see it. We want to put the fill underneath the stroke. Let's make some adjustments to our stars. Here we have under our polystar path, we have this inner and outer radius tweak with those, just make it a little bit sharper. We can play with the roundness of it, something like that. Maybe we can even increase the number of stars we have. We go back into our repeater. Let's actually make this 20 copies and go down to our rotation. And remember we have to go 360 divided by the number of copies, which is 20. And that fills that area out even more. That's our Patriotic Badge right there. Let's give it a little bit of rotation, we can just highlight Patriotic Badge Layer. Let's go into our transform properties of this Patriotic Badge Layer, Alt. Click on Rotation and type time times whatever number you'd like. I'm going to do 25. So we have this rotating patriotic badge. You can put whatever you want in the middle. Maybe something like patriotic badge. I'm just going to make some adjustments to the text here. You can put anything you'd like in here. You can put another image in there. You can put text in there, anything you'd like. There's our patriotic badge. Just a couple of shapes, a repeater and circle of stars. You can add anything you'd like around this. You can add to it. You can add more stars. You can change the colors of. It's very simple to do. Remember, whenever you're working with a repeater, hierarchy is of utmost importance. The repeater affects everything above itself and that includes other repeaters, any groups, any shapes, anything like that. So if you're going to use a repeater and you want to use multiple shapes that you don't want affected by it, make sure you know where your repeater is in relation to your other shapes in your other groups. Have some fun and see what cool stuff you can create using this very powerful tool. 68. 06.07 Create an Animated Background: I'll show you how to use the repeater to make a tiled background transition, like you're seeing right now. The repeater is a powerful tool within shape layers and there are a number of uses for it. As always, you can save this as a preset and use it in future projects easily. Let's create a new shape layer, add a group and we'll call this group one master rectangle, one. And then we want to add another group inside of this. We are going to name this rectangle one inside of this group. Let's add a rectangle, a stroke, and a fill. Now let's change this fill to like an orange. Change the stroke, let's copy the color of the fill, but then make it a little darker for the stroke. And let's increase this to 150. Let's increase our stroke size to 27. For now, we just want to animate the stroke. So let's hide this fill. We won't delete it, let's just hide it. Go into our rectangle path. Let's set a key frame at zero. And we'll make the size zero. Go forward about a second. Make this 150. We also want to animate our stroke width. So we're going to set a keyframe for 27, but we want to move this to about 15 frames. Let's go back to zero and set the stroke width 20. Up at a second, we will make that zero as well. Let's highlight all of these key frames, and click nine to make them bezier. And you have something like that. In our master rectangle, we're going to add a repeater, and this will repeat everything above it. So basically, this rectangle here, you can see the repeater is already doing some work. It adds three copies. By default we want to add 21 copies. We want our row to go from left to right with our anchor point in the center. So it's a good idea to have these copies set at an odd number. The midpoint is ten, let's put negative ten. And we also want to offset these so they're not touching. And now we can go back into our source rectangle. Let's change this rotation to 45. Then we can go back into our repeater one position. And we want to move this over, they're just barely touching. And what we have so far is this, go to our repeater one and let's control D. So we're going to duplicate repeater one. For repeater one, we have our position set at 19040. Let's actually, let's set this at 2000. What we want to do is we want to do the opposite for repeater two. We want our X value to be zero and our Y value to be 200. And there you go, we have this array. The way we got that was repeater one, X is 200, Y zero. Repeater two, X is zero, y is 200, We have that right there to fill in the holes. Let's duplicate this rectangle one, and we want to include our fill with this, we want to make sure these edges are touching, but not necessarily overlapping. For repeater one, let's go back into here and spread this out a little bit more. Let's say 210. And then for repeater two, we want to make sure that this is 010. Now to fill in the entire screen control D, the master rectangle. If we open up this, we're going to go to the transform properties. For master rectangle two, we want to move the layer over. So it fills in all of the white space. Just like that, we don't want to leave any white space. Now you can hold on the control button and adjust your position. It moves a lot more slowly. We have this, we want to mess with these key frames. What we want to do is this is our second master rectangle group. Let's move this over to about ten frames. For this animation of this first rectangle, we want this to be offset. So let's get to about five frames. Grab this group here, move it over. We have that motion. Then the same thing for our second rectangle. Page down 12345. And move these over. What we end up having is that cool. You want your color, your fill. You want that to be the color that you're going to say. For example, if the background is supposed to be like a blue, you want to change to like whatever blue you want. The stroke, I like to choose the same color as my fill, but then just kind of darken it. And you want to do that for both of these rectangles. You just stroke of this, get to rub the eye dropper, choose the stroke from that. For the fill, you want that to be that blue. You can see this as a preset and bring it in instantaneously. And I'll show you how to do that. Save your rectangles, repeaters, and your transform properties. If you don't save your transform properties, the preset will bring up a default transform property setting. Go to Animation, save animation preset. It's going to bring you back to your user presets. And as you can see, I have a lot of folders that I created in here. These are reflected in your atterfix project. So I want to go into transitions, and I'm going to call this repeater diamond background transition. Click safe. We can go in here to our contents and we just delete that. Go into your animation presets. User presets got on the transitions and you can find it here, repeater, diamond, background transition. Or you can go and just do a search like I would type in diamond, and you see it right here. Now, this preset does have keyframes, so it does matter where your playhead is, because wherever your playhead is is where the first key frames will be dropped. So you can either come back to the beginning or if you don't want to, you can go anywhere on the layer and click it brings you back to the beginning. Let's drag this in. And there we go again. You want to make sure whenever you save these, if you adjust the transform properties of one of these groups, you have to highlight transform as well. Otherwise, there's a default setting for transform properties. And that's how you create a tiled background using the repeater. 69. 06.08 Create Shape Layer Transitions: I'm going to show you some very cool tricks. First, we'll make this shape layer transition, then we're going to add a multiply and divide expression that will create alternate versions of the color gradient you're seeing right now. We'll also add controls so that you can alter the anchor point location of this shape layer, essentially allowing you to have four transition possibilities with just this one layer. Then we're going to add checkbox expressions that will allow you to easily toggle between the multiply and divide color schemes. Finally, you'll be able to save this shape layer transition along with all of this added features as a preset so you can bring it into your comps with the click of a button. You'll learn about shape layer anchor points, how they affect your animations, and the importance of math. When working with shape layers, the size of your comp is extremely important because of a lot of math we'll be doing. So I'm going to create a composition that is 1920 by 1080. And let's just call this rectangle transition. Right click, And let's choose new shape Layer. And let's rename this shape layer rectangle transition. And let's open up our shape layer. And we're going to add a group and call that divide. And this will make more sense later on, but for right now, we're going to set the project up so we don't have to make a lot of changes later within our divide group. Let's add another group and call this 01, okay? And then within 01, we're going to add a rectangle and give that rectangle a fill, okay? Now, one of the things that's important to know about rectangle path size, which is what we're about to adjust, is that it's not in percentages like our layer scale is. If we open up our layer scale, we can see this is in percentages x and Y. X being left and right, and Y being top to bottom shape layer path sizes. Your size of the rectangle path is actually in pixels, not in percentages. So our comp is 1920 by 1080 and we need to make our rectangle path size the same. So let's unlock our size dimensions and just make 1920 on X, in 1080 on Y. Okay, so now we need to move our anchor point to the lower left corner of our shape layer. We're not using the anchor point of the layer which is down here. We're going to use the anchor point of our group one. So there's a big difference. Whenever you're doing these kinds of animations. You need to be very cognizant of which transform properties you're using because it does make a difference. So in order to get our anchor point to the lower left corner, we need to adjust our anchor point settings. All shape layers default your anchor point to the center of the shape layer. So since we're 1920 by 1080, you're going to go negative 960 pixels to the left, which is going to move our shape layer over to the center. And then 540 pixels up. If you zoom in and hit Y, I can actually pull this anchor point out. So this is how the anchor point of this group looks. If you just click on the layer here, you can see that's how the anchor point of the entire layer looks. So again, we're just going to be altering the anchor point of the group. So let's click back onto one. And we see it's right here. So now to get this shape layer to fill our entire screen, we need to offset what we've done to our anchor point. And the way you do that is just put in the same values for position, so negative 96540. And now our shape layer is exactly where we need it to be. Okay, so let's go ahead and animate this again using the transform properties of this group one, we're going to put a key frame for rotation and set that to negative 90, so that way it will rotate up into the left as you can see right here. And then let's hold down shift page down to go ten frames. And let's go five more. So page down 12345, Zoom in here a little bit and we'll make our rotation zero. And at this point, let's go ahead and shorten our comp link so that way it's a little bit easier to see. So let's go to maybe 6 seconds. And hit on your keyboard and it brings over your handles, right Click on this top bar and choose trim comp to work path the second key frame highlighted. Change this to an ease in. Go up to our graph editor and let's pull the handle all the way to the left. So what we get is that, so it kind of comes in fast. And then it slowly eases into its position, close up this group here. And we're going to duplicate this four times. So we need five groups, one through five. And it should rename it for you. Just hit control D1234. And so we have our five groups all with the same exact settings. So now if we hit you to open up to see our key frames, we're going to offset each one of these rotations by three frames. Page down, 123, move over group two, because we want this to be staggered from bottom to top. 123, pull over the next set of key frames, 123, the next key frames, and 123, those final keyframes there. So right now you can't really tell what it's doing because they're all the same color. We are going to change that. So now the way we get the color scheme is we need to add an effect. So we're going to effect expression controls, color control, and that defaults to red. With this layer selected. Go into your finder box here. This is something that you may not know even existed. But if you need to find something very specific, you can go into your finer box and type in whatever property you want to find. So let's type in color. And as we can see, all of our colors from this shape layer pop up. So let's parent our fill for group one up to group two. And then we're going to parent group two to group three, group three to group four, group four to group five. We're going to parent this fill color of group five up to our color control. Now we still see that all these colors are exactly the same. So now I'm going to show you how we get that gradient. Let's select our layer again and hit E to bring up our expressions. And as you can see, these are expressions on our colors. At the very end of this after color, let's type divided by 1.5 and this is why we name this group Divide By the way, you can already start to see as you go through here, how the colors in our fills are starting to change. For the bottom four groups, we're going to divide by 1.5 We're not going to put that on this top color because we want our top color to be the color we choose in our color control. Now if we scrub through here a little bit, we can see how we have our gradient. And you can alter this by adjusting your color control. If you make it darker, they all get darker, brighter. They all get brighter. Now to do variations, you can actually parent the color from top to bottom. One would go to 22, to 33, to 44 to five. Then five would go to your color control, and that would just reverse the direction of your gradient. So now we need this to animate off. So let's open up our groups here, and we'll start with group five. And we need to open up our rectangle path. Rectangle path dimensions are different than the transform properties of your layer, no matter where your anchor point is. Whenever you adjust the size of this, it will always default to the middle. And so it doesn't matter if your group, your shape layer or the layer anchor point is set in the middle or not. This rectangle path size, since it's in dimensions, always defaults to the middle no matter what. So this is where our last key frame of everything is. So let's go forward 123 frames and we're going to adjust our rectangle path size. Let's put a key frame right here. Then go forward, shift page down. We'll just do ten frames instead of 15. And now you can either make this first value zero if you want it to animate where it closes from the side. Or you can make the 10800 and it closes from top to bottom, whichever one you prefer. We'll keep it like this where it closes from top to bottom. So let's highlight this first key frame and we're going to make this ease out. And like we did with our other set of key frames, open up the graph editor, and this time we're going to pull the handle to the right. So it's going to kind of start slow and then go fast. And actually, let's make this last keyframe and ease in so that way it doesn't disappear. Let's open it back up the graph editor and maybe make this not so extreme about like that. So it starts off a little slow, but it doesn't just completely disappear so quickly. Now we can highlight those key frames and hit command C to copy. And let's go up to our finder and type in size. And again we see our rectangle path sizes. And we're just going to go forward three frames for each group descending. So 123 page down and go to our rectangle path size. For four, hit command V123, command V123, group two command V123, and for our last one, command V. Now if we watch this transition, so it comes in from the side and then disappears in the middle. This could be a transition that you could save right now, but we're going to include a lot more options. Okay, so as we can see right now, this is animating in from the left corner. Well, what if you wanted to animate in from the right corner on the bottom or the right corner on the top or the top corner on the left. There's a very easy solution for that. Go to your effects and presets panel type in transform and just double click that to add it to the layer Rename transform. Click Enter, you can rename this and we'll name this direction. And all you need to do in order to change the direction of where this animates in is alter your scale. So see this defaults to uniform scale. Let's uncheck that. So now you have scale height and scale width. And all you're going to do is change its value, say the top one, to negative 100. Well now it's going to animate in from the bottom, but it's going to end on the top like that. Now if we change the scale width to negative 100, it's going to swap sides. Now it's animating in from the right and ending on the top. And then if we change our height to 100, it's going to animate in from the right and end on the bottom. You essentially have four options. Either make these values 100, 100, negative 100, negative 100, 100, negative 100, or negative 100 100. Changing that is going to change how this is going to animate in. So let's go back and just make this 100.100 Say you want the gradient to go a different direction, or you just want the color scheme to be a little bit different. Duplicate the group that says divide and now let's name this multiply. And if we highlight, multiply and type in color, we get all of our color options for this group. And let's just change all of these divided by 1.5 to, multiplied by 1.5 And there's one other thing you're going to have to change, I'll show you that in just 1 second. But first, let's just change all of these expressions to multiplied by 1.5 Okay? So now, even though we're in our multiply group, we can see that our expressions still say divide. And the reason why is because we just duplicated the divide group, but all the expressions stayed the same. We actually need to change divide to multiply. So let's do that. So what this expression says is we want our color one to be parented to two, but we're going to multiply that by 1.5 We have our color control up here. Let's rename this to Divide, because we want a different color for our multiply. So duplicate that and name this color multiply. And now in our multiply group, remember on our group five, we parented that to the color parent this. Now to multiply color, let's change the color of multiplied purple. So if you adjust your color, you can see how multiply actually affects your colors differently. Your range is far less. Whenever you use multiply, you need to make the fill color. A lot darker. One of the issues that we have though is we have multiply and divide both on at the same time. What if we want to choose which one we want because you don't want two transitions going on at the same time. We can fix that. Let's select Rectangle. Transition Effect Expression controls, check box control, and we'll name this divide control and duplicate that. And name this one multiply control and change to divide color and multiply color. We're going to use these check boxes to turn these groups off and on. The way we do that, let's select multiply. And we want to close all these groups here. And we're looking for the transform properties of the multiplied group. Let's take our opacity and we're going to pick whip, the multiply control checkbox. And one thing you need to add at the very end of this expression is times 100. And then we're going to do the same thing for divide. Go down to our divide group transform properties. And we're going to take our opacity and pick whip that to the divide control check box. Open that up and we need to add times 100. And so as you can see now neither one of them are showing up, so all you have to do is simply click this checkbox whichever one you want. So if you want the divide color, we have this, turn it off, you can choose multiply control, and now we have the multiply version. What we essentially have here is the ability to change our direction, that these animate in from each one of the four corners. And we can have two different color schemes that we can change and they instantaneously update. So there's a lot going on on this one shape layer. The way to save this as a preset is we want to highlight everything, our contents, effects, and transform properties. Go to animation, save animation preset, and make sure you're in documents. Adobe the version I'm using, 2019 this time, and user presets. Let's add a new folder and you can name this shape layer transitions. And let's select this folder, and let's just name this rectangle transition. Maybe underscore multi control, hit save, and let that save this preset. Okay, and now to make sure we saved it correctly, let's open up our shape layer here and just delete all of your contents. Make sure there are no key frames. If you hit you, we have no other key frames. And go into our effects and presets panel here and just clear that out. Open up our animation presets and we see our folder here. Shape layer transitions has already been created. So that is going to mirror whatever we have in our documents. Adobe User presets. You need to make sure you're at the beginning of your layer at the zero second. And say if you need to get there and your playhead is somewhere else, if you just hit I, it brings you to the beginning. Let's open up our shape layer transitions folder and just double click on the rectangle. Multi control, we already have all of our key frames showing up. We look over here to on our effects. We have the effects that we added. And if we play it, we can see that it plays perfectly. I always enable motion blur just because it looks a lot better. So that is how you create a shape layer transition with multiple controls. So you can use this one shape layer and you have two different color schemes and you have four different directions that it can animate in. If you want this to animate out from the side instead of from the top. All you have to do for this rectangle path size, this animation out. We start off with 1920 by 1080, right here. And see, we chose to go 19200, so just change this to 01080, and these will all animate from the sides. 70. 06.09 Create Long Shadows with The Repeater: I'm going to show you how to make long shadows for text. Long shadows can be accomplished in a number of ways. But I wanted to do this tutorial because it focuses on shape layers, which is something I'm very excited about. There's a lot to get through. So let's dive right in control to bring up your text tool. Seven minute AE is what I'm going to use in order to center this layer transform center anchor point in layer content. And you can see you also have a shortcut here, Control and see that centers our anchor point in the middle of our text layer here. Then open up our Linn panel, and let's just move this to the center of the composition, our magnification and hit Fit. We're going to increase this a little bit, Okay, so whenever you convert text to shape layers, it's going to pull over whatever fill or stroke information you have. Because remember with shape layers in addition to a shape, you also need a fill and or a stroke. And you can also add some animation tools to it. We'll be adding the repeater, so if we click on this square or stroke color square behind our fill square and just click on that, make it red, and say okay. And now, so you have the option of fill over stroke or stroke over fill. I like to do fill over stroke and five pixels is okay for our purposes because I'm not really going to use the stroke in this tutorial. But I do want you to be aware that whatever fills and strokes you use on text, we'll be brought over whenever you convert it. Okay. So depending on what version of after effects you're using. If you write, click on your text layer in 2018 and later you'll see this option for Create. And then within Create, you have to create shapes from text and create masks from text in versions before 2018. These two options create shapes from text and mask from text. We're in this primary dropdown you see here. So if you can't find it in your version of after effects, just be aware what you're going to look for is create shapes from text. Now whenever you create a shape from text, after effects is going to give you a shape layer with a bunch of groups. And within each group is going to be each letter with its own fill stroke and transform properties. If you create mask from text, it's going to give you a solid with masks that draw out each character. So you don't have as much control if you create mask from text. And you definitely don't have the option of using the repeater. So we want to do create shapes from text. And as you can see, a few things happen. The first thing to take note of is that Afrifx hides our text layer. And the reason why is because we no longer really need it, because we're going to be working with our shape layer. But it leaves it in your timeline in case you want to make any alterations. So let's open up this shape layer here. And as you can see, under contents we have all of our letters, each one within its own group. So if we highlight contents, add a group. And I'm going to go ahead and rename this one primary text. Okay, so let's just grab all of these groups. Seven, AE, and bring it into our primary text group. Okay, now let's open up this group here that says seven. And as you can see it brought in our fill from our text character as well as the stroke. And if you go up here to our control panel, you'll see that the stroke is five pixels wide. It's the same width as whenever we created the original text. And now you have control over each letter. You can change the fill if you want to make that a different color. You can change the stroke. You can even change the width of each individual stroke. One of the other things to take note of is you have these options for transform. If you open this up, you'll see that each character has its own transform properties. Meaning anchor position, scale, rotation, and opacity. You also have the option for skew and skew axis. That's something for another tutorial. But just be aware that each character has its own transform properties. So see you can actually move each character independently of one another. For our purposes, we don't really want a stroke on this text. So I'm going to show you a quick way to get rid of this stroke. You can highlight all of these groups. Go up to this search bar right here and type in stroke. And it will bring up every instance of a stroke within the groups. So I'm just going to go through here and I'm going to delete all of these strokes that way we have no stroke on our text. And actually I'm going to do something else. If we highlight all of these, I'm going to and I want to get rid of all of our fills. But before I do that, let me show you why. Okay. Say if I want to change the color of all of my text uniformly and let's go ahead and change it back to white. The way you would normally do it is to go into this primary text group and add a fill. But as you can see, this fill is red, but these fills on these letters remain white. And the reason why is because these fills are superseding the red fill. What I like to do is highlight all of these groups, go into our search bar type fill. And I just want to get rid of all of these fills. Delete. And now this fill down here is controlling the color of our text. And we can make this any color that we want. I want to make it something a little bit lighter. It'll be like a light blue. Okay, so this is our primary text. Let's control D to duplicate that. Rename these properly so we have primary text on top, and then the group underneath is going to be long shadows. Let's go into our long shadows group here. First, let's hide our primary text layer, open up this fill and let's make this black. So whenever we turn our primary text back on, we have blue, long shadows are black. Okay, so now with long shadows highlighted, let's go to Add, and we're going to add a repeater. A repeater automatically, let's open that up, automatically adds three copies and you transform properties for the repeater. Automatically default to 00 anchor point and position 100 pixels, zero pixels. So we want to zero this out, make anchor point position all zeros, and we want to increase the number of copies we have. We'll take a little bit of experimentation, so let's just try it out. We'll say 35 copies. As you can see, nothing's happening yet. And the reason why is because all the copies are directly behind the initial characters. Because our position is 00, now we want to move our position to the left very slightly, type negative 0.1 on the x axis. For the position on the y axis, let's type 0.1 Okay? Now, let's increase the number of copies. As you can see, as we start to increase the number of copies on our repeater, we are getting the look that we were going for. You can just increase this to any amount that you want, depending on how long you want your long shadows. The direction that your shadow is going to fall is going to depend on the position of your repeater. Now these move in very small increments. Now watch what happens. If I type in negative 0.2 the distance that it moved is pretty significant. You really want to move in hundreds of points, so say maybe negative 0.15 If you want to go in the other directions, the shadow falls to the right. Just type 0.15 and see how it goes over to the right. Now this is key frameable too. What I mean by that is let's put a key frame for our copies and move that key frame down, say about 2 seconds. Then at the beginning of our layer, let's just make this number of copies zero. Now if you loop that area, we can see how we can make our long shadows grow. You can go in any direction you'd like. Now, one of the drawbacks with this though is that you can't just change your text using this method. Because these are all shape layers. They're no longer text characters. If you wanted to change your text, you'd have to actually redo this entire process. Just as you can key frame the number of copies you have, you can also keyframe the position for your long shadows. There are a few things that we learned in this tutorial, How to create shapes from text, and how to use the repeater to create long shadows, even though the repeater wasn't designed for that purpose. You can see how you can use animation tools and after effects to get the desired effect of whatever it is you want to create. Be creative and think outside the box and see what you can come up with. 71. 06.10 Create a Bouncing Sign: I'm going to show you how to create this bouncing shape layer sign using zig zag and the repeater. Okay, let's create a new composition. We got a composition. New composition and let's just type bouncing sign. We'll make this 1920 by 1080. And let's just make it 7 seconds. Okay, let's just right click in this area down here and choose new shape layer. And we're going to call this shape layer bouncing sign. Let's open up this shape layer and we're going to add a group. Let's call this group sign. Okay, within this group, let's add a rectangle. And we'll give that rectangle a fill and a stroke. Let's play around some of the colors. Here. I chose the purple, and if you choose this eye dropper, just click on this purple to get the same color, but then darken it so that way we have an edge increase the size of this rectangle. Let's maybe make this stroke, I will say six. Let's add a background to this layer solid. And we'll just make this something that will allow our sine to stand out a little bit. I want to play with the size of this rectangle. Let's unlock our size settings. It's going to make this a little bit wider. Then if you click it back on now they will move together. Let's do that. Let's go back up to Add, and we're going to add an ellipse. We need to add One more thing, emerged paths. We're going to want this to be set to subtract. And as you can see, it puts a hole in the middle of our rectangle already. Now let's get some exact settings for our rectangle path. We'll say 780 wide, and then we'll do 380 high. Now we want to take this ellipse path, we want to affect its position. Let's go to negative 380. And then to get it exactly on the corner, we're going to take half of 380, which is 190. Now let's duplicate this ellipse path, and then adjust the position to 380. They'll move it to the other side. Let's duplicate this ellipse path. Now we want to go negative 190 to put it in the top right corner. And then duplicate it one more time, and we're going to make the x axis negative 380 to put it in the top left corner. Let's add a new group with contents highlighted and we'll close out. Sign for now. Let's add another group and we're going to call this string. Let's go ahead and move our sign down. We go into the transform properties for sign. Let's just move this down to the bottom about where we want it to land. To toggle your rulers off and on type command R, or you can also go into view and show rulers. Let's just bring one of our guides out with the string group selected. Let's go to Add, and we want to add a new path, it automatically brings up your pinole. We're going to draw a straight line using this guide. We also need to add a stroke. Strokes default to white. That should be fine for our animation. And let's just change the stroke width to ten pixels. Now we can pull this ruler back out. We want to add a zigzag. And you can play around with these settings to get an idea of what it does. And then you can also choose corner or Smooth. We're going to choose smooth. For now, let's just zero these out. Add some text command and I'll just type in seven minute AE Tutorials Shift and increase the size of this. That looks good, like that. I'm just going to play with the settings of our text here. We can block this text out, slick, our text. Click on this purple, then let's just make this lighter. Okay, and let's just center this up on our shape layer. So now we want to parent our text layer to our shape layer. So let's just parent that. Okay, so let's go back into our shape layer and hit P to bring up our position, and we're going to put a key frame here at the beginning. Then let's go forward about seven frames. 1234567. I'm going to put another key frame here. Go forward 12345, put a third key frame, we'll go 12345, put another key frame 123, put another key frame 123, another key frame 123, another key frame 1231, final key frame. This first keyframe is going to be where our animation begins, which is off screen, comes down and it bounces. And we want this first bounce to go up about like that. And we'll actually make this an keyframe assistant, *** or F nine. You see our position on this first balance is 353, or let's say 350. To make it easier, you want these other two keyframes to be a higher value because you want it to be closer to the bottom. We see our final resting places, 548, so let's make this maybe 400. We'll make our final 1500. If you just hit in to bring your handles over, we can check this out real quick. Get an idea of the bounce. No, let's go to this keyframe here that we put an easy ease on and go into the graph editor. And then let's just pull these handles away from the key frame. That way it will bounce and then hang, actually we can add in. Let's go forward 123, put another key frame, and 123 to put another key frame. Maybe make this 520. Let's open up our contents and go to our string layer. And open up zigzag at every point where the sign is at its lowest, meaning it's resting spot. We're going to make the values size and ridges zero, Highlight those two keyframes, command C and then we'll do every other one. The value 00 for size and ridges per segment. Then for these final keyframes for zigzag and our position, let's right click Keyframe Assistant Es for zigzag. Let's make our size overall three pixels. And you can see how it starts to bend here. If you increase a little bit, you can see it goes even more. We do want this to be an easy, let's go to every other one and choose 33.3 Let's highlight all three of these. I'm slowing down the command button and highlighting each of these keyframes. And then you can right click keyframe assistant nine or Y. And then let's go back to our second to last keyframe and we're going to make our ridges per segment. We're going to start with three, Make the next 15, the next 17, and then this first 111. Then again we're going to highlight all of these. Holding down the command button, right click, easy ease. Now we need to affect these two key frames the same way that we affected this position key frame here. Remember how we pulled the handles away from the key frame? We're going to do the same thing for our size and our ridges, that way it's consistent. So just open that up and pull the handles away from the key frame. Okay, so we need another string on the other side of this sign with string selected. Go to add and we're going to add a repeater. We're going to make some adjustments. We just want two copies. So if you move the position of your repeater, you can set this to the other side. If you highlight everything in your contents as well as everything in your transform properties. Go to animation, save animation preset. And you want to make sure you're in documents, Adobe the version you're using, and put it in your user presets folder. We can actually add a folder, so let's do that. We'll call it Shape layer animations. And then within that shape layer animations folder, we want to put this preset, and we're going to call this bouncing sign safe. Then in our effects and presets panel, if you open up animation presets, we see our shape layer animations folder we just created and there's our bouncing sign. Delete these contents and then delete these keyframes for a position. And then just reset our transform properties. Make sure your playhead is at the beginning of your shape layer. Because whenever you bring in these presets, if you have key frames, it will drop your first key frame where your playhead is, if you're over here somewhere, just hit I and it comes back to the very beginning of that layer and just double click on bouncing sign. And as you can see, it brought in all of our key frames here. If you hit you, now I have this preset forever and I never have to create it again. 72. 06.11 Create Animated HUD Elements: I'm going to show you how to make some cool hut elements using shape layers. But just a word of caution, you'll be creating a lot of groups inside your shape layers, so labeling is essential. As with all shape layers, these can be saved as presets for future use. So when you have time, you can create a ton of these and then bank them up for future projects. Okay, so I'm going to create a new composition. You can create any size you want. I'm going to go with our standard 1920 by 1080 and I'm going to call this hut element. And so we're going to create this entire thing using one shape layer and a ton of groups. So right click in this area down here, and let's go New Shape Layer, And we'll just call this layer hut element. And let's go ahead and open up our shape layer. Now right off the bat, I'm going to let you know there's going to be a lot of groups in here, so make sure that you label these in a way that's easy for you to navigate through them. Go ahead and add our first group, and I'm going to start from the outermost and go in, and I'll explain why in just 1 second. So we'll say outer ring. And we're going to add an ellipse and we're going to add a stroke. I'm going to leave the stroke white for now and make it 1.5 width. And I'm going to turn off my guides here. Okay, so let's just increase the size of this ellipse from whenever you command D to duplicate. As you see, these groups duplicate upwards. So now we can just take the second ellipse path and make it a little bit smaller. Let's duplicate that ring, and we'll make this one even smaller, duplicate that. Now, there are no rules on how these are supposed to look, so you can get creative these and just add as many of these elements as you want. Okay, For now actually, I'm going to add in one more then I'm going to go back later and rename these so that way they're easier to keep track of. Here are all of our rings. Let's go down to this last ring. We're going to duplicate that, and let's call this blue. Then we're going to decrease our size, where it comes about midway between the last two rings. And we're going to increase our stroke until it fills it up. You can adjust this until you get it just right. Then we're going to change this to a blue. Let's go ahead and add another group. We're going to call this group blue segments. We're going to move this blue segments folder right above the outer ring and put our blue layer in there. Then let's open this up with blue segments highlighted. We're going to add a trim paths. Let's set our end percentage to 15. Then let's move this trim paths inside of our blue layer there, so that way it's nested at side of here. And then we're going to duplicate this blue group and open up our trim paths and set our offset to 180 so they're on opposite sides. I just duplicated this ring, which is right here. And I'm going to do the same thing I did with our blue rings. Make it smaller and then increase our stroke width. Add a trim pass to that, set our end to 40. Let's go to outer ring five here. If you come down to outer ring five stroke, you see this option for dashes. Just hit the plus signed. I see this looks a little funky there. So you want to adjust how many dashes you have. That way you can get an idea of what looks right. Rename this maybe will make this color red. Increase our stroke to say five. Then let's go to our first ring. Let's just increase our stroke width. Maybe we'll make that like a green. We can add a trim past to this as well and set our end percentage to 45. Maybe decrease our stroke with a little bit. This is going to be our inner ring. Let's go to our second ring here. And we'll increase this stroke width, make this yellow go to contents. And we're going to add another group and we're going to call this lines. Add a rectangle and add a fill. We're going to make that fill white. Let's open up our rectangle path and we're going to adjust our size here. Let's uncheck our size dimensions and then make the first value two and the second value. Just crank it up a little bit, highlight lines. And you want to add a repeater. Open up the repeater, we're going to make four copies and we're going to set our rotation to 90 degrees. You want to make sure your anchor point and your position are both set x and y values to zero. And the way we're going to move that is if you go to your right single path, you want to adjust your position. If you pull this up, we can see the all four move up. Then you can play with how this is going to look. I'm going to increase the size a little bit and then pull this position back down. Duplicate this lines group again and we're going to make some more adjustments here. Let's open up our repeater. And let's add, say, 20 copies. And then open up our transform properties for repeater. Go to our rotation, and if you type in 360, that's how many degrees or in a circle divided by the number of copies, which is 20, it'll give you a perfect circle. See I want to them up a little bit higher, but I want to be a lot shorter because I'll make a ring of lines around this. Add some more in here. Let's maybe make this 30 copies and then go back to our rotation 360/30 We'll put them all in a perfect circle. Then we'll call this ring of lines. Change this color, we'll make this purple. Right now our size is two pixels wide, 50 long. Let's make this maybe four pixels wide to give a little bit more thickness. Go to our lines group at the very bottom. Duplicate that, then if we open up our transform properties for the line group, not for the repeater, but for the line group. We're going to rotate this by 45 degrees, so it's offset. And then we'll make some more adjustments to this rectangle path. Again, we want to be short. We'll say maybe 25 pixels long, but then we need to pull it out, it's out here, and actually that little bit longer, maybe 45 pixels long. Then I'm going to add in one more element, put in a group, and we're going to call this light. And we're going to move this to the very top. This is a light that's going to travel around our T element. And the way we get that is we're going to add an ellipse and a stroke. And it's important that you make this a stroke. That way we can control the thickness of it and how it moves with our trim paths. Let's just increase the size of our ellipse, then we're going to also increase the size of our stroke. Want to really just crank this up because we want to extend out beyond our circle with light highlighted. We're going to add a trim paths and we're going to cut this to the end percentage to about 20% See, you get this kind of weird deforming here. So what we need to do is adjust either our ellipse path or our stroke size. Let's just kind of adjust some of these settings. If we can adjust our ellipse path size, we get about like right there. And then actually decrease this even more, say 13% And we want to change our color stroke, we're going to make this a light blue. Then each one of these groups have their own transform properties, so you have a lot of control over each element. So what I want to do is adjust my opacity of my stroke. We're going to set this down to ten and maybe go a brighter, say 20. That looks good. Now we just need to set some expressions to make this thing move. I'm just going to start from the top and go down. So we want our light, like I said, to travel around. Let's go to the transform properties of light. And we're going to set an expression on our rotation of the entire group. For light light transform rotation option, click on the rotation and just type time times 25. Our next layer is going to be our inner ring. You can either adjust the rotation of the group or you can mess with this offset. You see on your trend paths, they basically will do the same thing for the effect we're trying to do. Option click on to Offset and type wiggle 2200 and close that parentheses. Next layer is just a solid so we don't need to mess with that because no rotation will make a difference on that. Let's go to our dash and then we're going to come down here to the transform properties of option click rotation and just type time times 35. See this next layer here is going to be actually the border. So let's just type border one. And then two down is going to be border two because I remember I put this white element in between those, and we'll call this white light. Okay, so now we want this to move similarly to the way our inner ring moves, but not exactly. Option, click on to offset and type wiggle. I'm going to say 1250. Now let's keep moving down our blue segments. I want these to both move independently of one another. We're actually going to set an expression on each one of these blue groups here. We don't want them to touch and we don't want them to be uniform. With this highlighter, we're going to come down to Trim Paths option, click on offset and go wiggle 190 degrees. Then we can highlight that command C and come down to our blue layer down here. Go to our Trim Paths option, click offset and command V. And now see if you get this where it looks like that they're kind of favoring this side. You can still adjust this. That's why I like to mess with the offset because if you move our rotation around and they're not going to stay completely opposite, but at least they won't be as close as they were before. Let's move this circle of purple lines. Since our orange stroke layer here is moving clockwise, we want to move that counterclockwise ring of lines. And let's go down to our rotation. For this group to transform option, click on rotation. Click Time times. We want this go a little bit slower, so maybe negative 20. If you use negative as your value, then it's going to go counterclockwise. Positive values go clockwise. Lines two, here is the outermost lines and we want to set a wiggle expression on that as well. Come down to transform rotation option. Click on the rotation and we'll go wiggle 0.53 20. Actually I want to add in more lines. Let's, let's make it six. And then we need to adjust our rotation for our repeater, so we go 360/6 to even it out. And maybe even make it a little bit shorter so it doesn't extend beyond. It's going to take a little bit of adjusting here. Just messing with these settings a little bit. Something about like that. Let me add in a few more even. Let's say 10360/10 is actually 36, but I'm going to do the math. Let's set this fill a little bit thinner. Let's make it at one. I'm going to set a rotation on that as well. Come down to our transform properties for lines on rotation and option, click on the rotation and go times 15. This is our hut element so far and maybe just make a few more adjustments. Let's make this inner ring, let's try ten. And then adjust the percentage of the end of the transform. So maybe 65, make it a little bit longer. Duplicate that ring layer. We call this start. I'm going to take off this trim paths. I want it to be a circle, a really small circle right in the middle. I'm going to set this at the same blue as our blue layer. Actually extend these lines here, all the way down to the middle. They actually touch, see, you can really get creative with this. I'm literally doing this on the fly, just coming up with some ideas as I'm doing it. You can alter these and get different results fairly quickly. Let's highlight element go to effect stylize, we're going to add a glow. We're going to put this on top and we're going to make both colors white. Change our glow colors to A and B colors. Just take our threshold down all the way and then just play with our glow settings. I actually like this. I think better without the glow. Okay, now to save this as a preset, let's just highlight our contents, effects, and transform properties. Go to Animation, Save Animation preset. Once you're in Documents, Adobe I'm using 2018, this episode user presets. And let's make a folder called hud elements, then we'll just call this one. Hit Save, and let that save, then let's make sure that it's saved correctly. Let's just get rid of our contents here. Hit you to make sure we have any key frames up and we don't. And get rid of our effect. If come over here to effects and presets, open up your animation presets. Under user presets, we have hut elements, which is a folder we just created. Open that up, and we have U one. Let's make sure our playhead is at the beginning of our layer. As I've mentioned before, presets that have key frames will drop wherever your playhead is and double click on hut one. Did you see our glow element came over? I have it turned off, but you can turn it back on, and if we hit E, you can see all of our time and wiggle expressions came over with it. So that is how you can make a hut element and save it as a preset, and now you have it forever. Hut elements are very common in infographics and futuristic animations. Chances are you're going to come across them at some point or get a request from a client that wants hut elements. There's no rule on how these should look, so let your imagination run wild when creating them. 73. 06.12 Create 3D Text and Shapes: In this lesson, I'm going to show you how to create three D shapes with no third party plug ins. Meaning we will only be using what's natively available in after effects. There's a lot to get through, so let's dive right in layer solid. This blue gray right here is just fine. Then let's make that three D. We'll call this floor. Let's control D that we'll call this wall. Let's layer, add a camera, then layer add a null object. Make that three D. Let's parent our camera to the null object. I'm going to call this null object camera control just to keep things more organized and also like to highlight both of these layers and give them the same color. Highlight floor R to bring up our rotation. And we're going to rotate on the x axis 90 degrees, so that way it's laying flat. And let's just pull this down. If you just right click in this area next to your comp viewer and select new viewer, you'll get a secondary viewer over here. If you see right here on our left, we have active camera chosen. Whenever I'm doing three D, I like to set this one to custom view one. We need to push our wall back a little bit, so highlight wall and let's just push that back in Z space. Now see if you grab your camera orbit tool, you can actually orbit around here to get an idea of how this is going to look. So think of the panel on the right. More is just a viewer. Okay, now let's start to create some three D objects, layer, new shape, layer this, add an ellipse, and then we're going to add a film to change this fill color. I'm going to make this layer three D. If you go up to Comps Composition Settings, go to your Three D renderer and you want to make sure you have Cinema four D selected for your renderer. It usually defaults to classic three D, so you want to set it to Cinema four D. Just click. Okay. Now let's bring up our position and our rotation for the shape layer. And you want to rotate on the x axis 90 degrees, so that way it's flat. If you come down here to your geometry options, you have this option for extrusion depth. And as you begin to increase it, you can see that we're getting exactly what we want. We're getting this three D object. Let's grab our camera orbit tool again and go over to this right viewer and see you can see how this object is actually three D. It's going to extrude from the face backwards. See we rotated this 90 degrees. Let me put this rotation back to zero and then I'm going to orbit around this way. Now watch as I'm adjusting the extrusion depth. It's extruding backwards, so it's going to extrude from the face back. There are no negative values, so you can't go in the opposite direction. Let's put our rotation back to 90 degrees. Let's go up to layer new light and we'll make this a point light. We do want to cast shadows. I've set my shadow darkness to 50% and diffused to ten. And click Okay. Let's play with our light setting a little bit. Camera control, click Ped, and then we'll push in here. Now let's bring our shape layer here, down to the floor. Your three D objects are not going to cast shadows by default. You have to set that. The way to that is go into your shape layer and you open it up. Come down here to Material Options and just click your cast shadows on. Now you can see we have a shadow here. Okay, Now we can set this right view over here. Change it from custom view to front just to make sure we're actually on the floor. See this red line here is our floor. Let's pull this shape layer down so it sits right on top. Let's go back to our geometry options. And let's increase this, say, to 400. And I'm going to put a little bit of a tilt on my camera control for right now, so I get an idea of how this is going to look from the top view hit on our floor. And let's unlink this scale and just really crank this out wide, say to maybe 2000. Same thing with the wall link and make this first value 2000. Okay, let's go to about 2 seconds and we're going to put a key frame for this extrusion depth. Go back to the beginning of our timeline here and make the extrusion depth zero. That's the effect that we want to get right there. Shape layer one, highlighted control D to duplicate. Let's set our position on shape layer one is at 960. For shape layer two, let's make that 1080, So we increase it by 120 pixels to the right you to bring up our key frames. And then let's make this a little bit shorter, so maybe 350. And then let's change the color. Maybe an orange duplicate shape, layer two position. We're going to add 120, so that's going to make that 1,200 Change the color to maybe green hit you to bring up our key frame. And let's make this 250. Then let's duplicate it one more time, and we're going to go forward 120 pixels, 13, 20. And then just make this any other color, let's say something like a blue. You bring up our key frame and we'll make this 150. Just like that. Okay, Now I want to put some text in here and also I want it to be three D control for text. Let's just type the word graph, then I'm going to make this text color white. Let's make this three D. Now let's just go to the end of this animation and see how it's going to look again, This is when that right viewer comes in handy. You can get a much more accurate idea of where everything is. Okay, now let's open up our graph layer. Let's change our material options to cast shadows on. Then we're going to extrude this. Come down to jump three options. You'll see that you have bevel style angular, concave, convex. You also have bevel depth. Let's set this to angular. And as you increase your bevel depth, you can see the effect that that's giving you. Then this is concave. Have a little bit of a different bevel look and see it has those ridges convex looks more like that. Good bevel depth is around three. Just play around with these settings until you see what you like, what works good for your style. Actually, I'm going to change the color of my text. Shall make it more of an orange. Change this orange pillar here, maybe something like a purple. Just set this about where you want it to be. I don't really need this custom view on the right anymore. I always like to start with my end position where I want this animation to end. Maybe something like that. On camera control, I'm going to set my position and my x rotation keyframes, that's my end spot. Then I want it to start like more of a dramatic angle and further away, let me make my floor a little bit longer as well so that way we have more room to play with here. This just all depends on the look that you're going for. Now, we can bring up all these keyframes by selecting, you, highlight them. All right. Click Keyframe assistant, as in. Then let's go to our graph editor. Just pull all of these handles to the left. That way it's going to come in fast and then slow to a stop, something like that. Since this is a text layer, we can add plug ins and scripts to it. Hit your left bracket to bring over the beginning of your layer. As you can see, graph is not going to start here. Go over the effects and presets and type in scale, scale up word. Let's just double click that to apply the script. Hit you to bring up our key frames. Then let's open up this animator and your range selector. And then let's open up this advanced tab. Let's change words based on words to based on characters. That way it will scalp each character one at a time. Going to loop this area to make sure this is the look I'm going for. You can make any shape in any text. Three D super easy. Just remember in your composition settings, you want to make sure that your three D render is set to send them a four D. To get shadows, you need to make sure you had a light, make sure that light is set to cast shadows. And then whenever you set your layers to three D, remember you have to go to your material options and cast shadows on because they will default too off. 74. 06.13 Set Matte: Okay, so set mat, hides and reveals content on your page such as text, images, and video. There are a few parameters you need to be aware of for set Matt, but it's important to know how to use set mat and when to use it. Okay, so let's bring in the solid and I'm going to show you a way to hide it and reveal content using alpha mats. Bring in this solid. Let's change the scale. We can unlink this, make it about that size. Now I'm just going to focus on this Jeff Knight text right here. Okay, So if I want this text only to show up in this area, what I'll do is go over to my track mat and change it from non to alpha mat. And now it shows up within boundary here. And notice how after effects automatically hides your solid layer. If you move the text around, you can see the effect the problem comes in whenever you have multiple layers. Say if I wanted to do the same thing for these other layers of text, I'd have to duplicate this solid and then set these track modes also into alpha. Now they would only show up within this boundary. This could really clog up your project file. Right now we have six layers total for these three lines of text. And for this effect, let's change this all back to no track mat and we'll get rid of these solid layers. The best way to do this is with a shape layer. Let's go to layer new shape layer. And then we want to add a rectangle and give it a fill. The thing that's cool about shape layers is that the size setting within your rectangle path is in pixels, not percentages. And the reason why that's important is so you have a very specific area that you want to act as a Matt. And if you have the exact dimensions, you can put that in here. So if you type 1920, we'll see that it stretches the entire width of our screen and 1080 stretches the height. So we're not going to go quite that high. But say, let's leave this in 1920 and bring it down about where we had our solid highlight, Jeff Knight. Let's go over to our effects and presets and type in set Matt with Jeff Knight highlighted. Just double click on the set Matt and we see that it's in our effect control panel. If we go up here, take Matt from, let's set it to shape layer one. Now if we hide our shape layer and we'll hide these other lines of text, bring up our position, we can see that this is working. One of the options that you have, cool, is invert Matt, which basically works as an alpha invert mat. Now this text will show up in every area other than where our shape layer is located. This take off invert mat, copy this effect and all I have to do is apply it to our other layers of text B. All of these are using that one Matt as an alpha mat. Our seven minute editorials is affected, our power of shape layers is affected, and our Jeff Knight is affected. Whereas before, we had six layers for these three lines of text, now we only have four, it's just one additional layer set. Matt only works on rasterized layers. Shape layers and text layers are automatically rasterized by after effects. Things that are not automatically rasterized are solids, images, and video. Let's see the same effect with the solid, take off that shape layer. And then let's just bring a solid back in, bring up our scale and I'm going to do the same thing I did last time, making about right here on the Jeff night layers. Come back up to our effects of controls and we want to change this to our solid, hide these two layers of text so we can focus on one line of text. Now if we hide this solid, we'll see that Jeff Night is not being affected at all by this set. Matt, if you highlight solid and then you rasterize it by clicking this icon here. Now the solid is rasterized. Now it does work, you can use a solid. Why I like to use shape layers is because shape layers are measured in pixels, not in percentages, and they're just much more precise. Okay, let's go through some of these other settings. Right now we have a set to source to see what this mask setting has. I'm going to actually add back in my shape layer for this part. There are a few things I want to go over that are specific to shape layers in the shape layer to our rectangle at our fill. And then I'm just going to bring this out and bring it up. Then let's set our set Matt back to our shape layer. I'll go ahead and do that for these other two layers. So that way we already have it ready to go. As we can see, it's being affected by this shape layer. What if we didn't want this hard edge? Maybe we wanted it to be a softer edge. Turn back on your shape layer, you can grabe your shape creation tool. This defaults to this setting tool creates shape. If I start to try to mask it, it's just going to make another shape. There's a setting right next to it. Tool creates mask. Let's click that. And now this will work as a mask. Now let's just mask out an area of this shape layer for feather. And we're going to feather the edges. Let's turn the shape layer back off and as you can see right now, we still have that hard edge. Reason why is because set mat is set only to source hit masks. Now it will recognize that feather. There's also one more setting, masks and effects with this shape layer highlighted. Let's look for roughen edge, double click that on. Maybe we'll increase this feather a little bit. Let's turn off our shape layer now under, let's leave it at mask for right now. And as you can see we have that feather still, but we're not really seeing this effect of the roughen edge. If you choose this other option, effects and masks now it will recognize that roughen edge. Let's go ahead and copy this. And I'll just overwrite these other layers. Say we don't want this, recognize the effects, we'll just take that off and change it to masks. Now this layer will only recognize masks, while this one will recognize effects and masks. For the other text layer, we can have this where it only recognizes source. You have all of these options that you can do with this one effect. Again, this is all being controlled on one layer, a shape layer, If you use a solid, make sure that you rasterize it. Let's see how this will work with images. Go ahead and take off this mask and this effect, I'm going to hide these text layers. And then let's bring in disguise image here, set Matt, double click, Take matt from layer, shape layer. And then let's hide our shape layer so that way we can see what the effect is going to be if we start to move around our image right now, watch what happens. It's pulling the shape of the mat with it, but it's not interacting with it. One option is to pre comp it, control shift C. And now you have two options. Leave all attributes or move all attributes. If you leave all attributes, the pre comp will become the source of the layer, Ted. Okay, and now we have this option for rasterize. So let's click the Rasterize button. Now if we move our position, we can see that it's interacting the same way that our text layer did, where it's only revealing the image within that matt area. I'm going to undo this so we don't have a pre comp, comp. Again, control shift C. Now it's time. I'm going to move all attributes. It moves all the properties of this image into another composition. Okay, we can still rasterize this layer now. But now, watch. If we move our position and it's acting the same way it did before. I'm going to undo that. Again, control shift C and leave all attributes. As long as you leave all the attributes, this will be effective for using set mat. 75. 06.14 Course Review: I must say, I am completely impressed with you. Not only have you gone through all of the instructional sections of this course, you've also watched the tutorials which must mean you are a shape layer rock star. You have enough mastery of shape layers that you can start incorporating this into your own designs. I'm very humbled and I'm grateful that you've chosen me to take you on this journey. I hope that I delivered what you were expecting. And even more, I can only continue doing these courses if I'm successful at teaching my students. So please let me know what you like about this course and what you think I could have done better. I'm a shape layer nerd. I love everything about shape layers and I hope after taking this course that you are too. You can check out my tutorial Channel Seven Minute A tutorials where I put up instructional videos like these very often. I also produce quick tips where you can learn something really cool. And under a minute, this is my first Tomy course and I had a blast creating it. I hope you had a good time as well. Thanks for watching everybody and I'll see you next time.