Transition Mastery: Create Explainer Videos and Multi-Scene Projects in Adobe After Effects

1. Intro: So you want to learn how to create explainer videos. That's awesome. It means you are serious about your career. Maybe you also want to master product demo videos, documentaries for YouTube, or even animated music videos. Do you know what all of these projects have in common? Transitions. Let me explain. All these types of complex projects consist of multiple stints. For example, explainer videos can include anywhere 5-20 stents, sometimes even more. When I was a beginner motion designer, after receiving the script for my clients and designing the stints, I still felt super afraid to take on these projects. The reason I didn't understand how to smoothly connect all the stints in the animation phase. I didn't know how to transition from one scene to another. A few years later, after mastering explainer videos and becoming an after effects instructor, to my surprise, the number one question I kept getting from my students was the same. How do we transition from one scene to another? Most of them had the same fear I once had, and it was holding them back from taking on big projects. At that moment, I realized I wanted to solve this problem once and for all. More importantly, I wanted to teach it in a fun and easy to understand way. And that's how transition mastery was born. The course kicks off with the first two lessons where I'll take you through the basics and break down the different types of transitions from scratch. Then I'll walk you through some key things you need to know in the preparation phase before we dive into animation. In these two lessons, you won't need to do anything. Just sit back, watch and listen. Once you've got the basics down and a solid understanding of transition types, we dive right into the practical side of things, and that's when you take action. During the course, you will gain a deep understanding of the most commonly used transitions in complex projects. This skill will not only help you animate smoothly, but also help you plan your projects better, structure them for easy changes, and even estimate project costs more accurately because you will finally understand what it takes to work on complex projects. You will also discover how to achieve the highest quality for your projects and spot potential problems that may come up during the process along with practical solutions to fix them. At the end of the course, you'll be filled with tons of ideas for a variety of transitions, and more importantly, you will know how to create them in after effects. You'll get the hang of the right workflow for handling complex animations like when to use camera and when to skip it, when and why you should precompose your layers, and how to mix three D and to the stings smoothly to take your animations to the next level. Don't worry if you feel that it's not a course you can handle because I'll guide you with helpful cues, so you always know when to just listen and when to jump and follow along. You will also get a mid class questions to help you memorize key techniques and remember all the important stuff. And don't worry, I'll remind you to take breaks at just the right times so you stay fresh and don't burn out. Plus, all the lessons come with a professional voiceover that's super easy to understand, perfect for non native English speakers. Moreover, throughout the course, we'll dive into some fun stuff you want to practice every day, like making three D objects and text animations. We'll also design awesome backgrounds and even try out some basic character animation. You'll get to play around with bounce animation, eye catching shape animations, and so much more. And to wrap things up, I've got a fun home task for you. I've designed three different small projects ready for animation. For every project, you will find a video showcasing the transition I want you to create. The screen designs are simple, so you can focus entirely on perfecting your transitions. You can start animating right away, but if you're not feeling confident enough, you can check out how I created the transition in the after effects project file provided for each task. So if you're ready to level up your motion design skills and finally take on big projects with confidence, don't waste any time. Let me guide you with my years of experience so you can short out your learning curve and start mastering transition today. Take the leap, conquer your fears, and let your creativity shine with transition mastery. 2. Transitions you can make in After Effects: Hi, and welcome to the first lesson. In this lesson, you don't need to do anything, just watch and listen. We will start with basic transitions that most of you are probably already familiar with. You might feel like you don't need to watch this, but I insist that you do because I'm sure you'll discover a lot of things you didn't know. Most importantly, this lesson will warm up your brain before we dive into animation. Let's start with the basics. In my case, I'm demonstrating the examples using videos of animals, but this could be a pre comp or any other layers in your project. Using these basic transitions with videos because they work better for real life footage like this rather than for motion graphics. Of course, you can use these transitions in your motion design projects if you want, but they tend to work better with real life videos. We'll explore transitions specifically for motion design projects right after these ones, and we'll practice them later in the course. For now, it's very important to me that you become familiar with the basics. I'll demonstrate how to create all the transitions using the precomps I've already prepared for this lesson. This way, we can learn how to approach each transition from scratch, not just see how they look. We'll begin with the simplest one, the cut transition. A cut transition happens when we end one sequence at a specific point in time and immediately start the next one right after it. First, I'll find the moment in my video where I want it to end where the Panther rotates its head. Now I'll press Alt in the right bracket to crop this layer from the right side. That is from the end of this layer. Next, I'll find the moment in the second video where I want it to start. Let's say somewhere around here. I'll press salt in the left bracket. To crop it from the left side, that is the beginning of this layer. Now, all I need to do is place the second layer right after the first one. After checking that, it looks good, I can move on. When making cut transitions, it's important to ensure the layers are placed immediately after one another. Sometimes we might accidentally leave a gap of one or two frames, which can cause unnecessary empty frames between the layers, like you can see now. So make sure to zoom in and check that there is no gap between the layers. All right let's move on to the next one and create a dissolved transition. A dissolved transition is when the first sequence fades out and reveals the next one. It's very simple to create. First, we need to find the point in time where we want the first sequence to end. Then press T to open the opacity property of the layer to create the dissolving animation. Now I'll create the first keyframe with a value of 100%. Let's say I want the dissolve to last 1 second, at that point in time, I'll bring the opacity to 0%. Now I can crop this layer at the end using Alt and the right bracket. Then I'll easy ease the key frames to create a smoother disappearing animation. Here's the shortcut for the easy ease function. To finish things up, I need to find the moment in the second sequence where I want it to start. Let's say right before the lion rotates its head. I'll move the layer to the left. Let's see. A bit more. Now I can crop this layer from the moment when the dissolve animation starts. Let's see how that looks altogether. I think it looks great. Now we can move on to the next one. This time, we'll create a white dissolve, which involves using a layer to cover the entire frame as a way to transition between sequences. The layer doesn't have to be white. You can use any other color, but most of the time, it's better to use white or black. For this transition, first, we need to crop the first sequence at the point in time where we want the transition to happen. Then find the moment for the second sequence to start and place the two layers one after the other similar to how we did with the cut transition. In my case, after checking the video, I see that the best point in time to start the second video is from the beginning. I'll place the layer here. After that, we'll create a white solid layer or a white shaped layer that covers the entire frame. This time, I will use a shape layer. For this, make sure no layer is selected to avoid creating an unnecessary mask. Then double click on the rectangle tool. This will create a rectangle exactly the same size as your composition dimensions. Next, make sure to choose the right color and turn off the stroke for this shape. Now, press enter on the layer, to rename it to white dissolve and place it above the two sequences. Next, crop this layer. For example, let's say it starts at 13 seconds and 20 frames and ends at 14 seconds and 20 frames, which is exactly 1 second later and crop it from the end. Now, go to the beginning of this layer and press T to use the opacity property again. This time, I'll create the first keyframe with a value of zero. Then I'll go to the center of this layer and change the opacity value to 100%. Finally, I'll go to the end of the layer and bring the opacity back to zero. Now I can easy ease the key frames. After that, I'll place the layer so that when the opacity is at 100%, it aligns exactly with the point in time when there's a cut between the two sequences. This way, the cut is hidden because the white shape covers it, creating a smooth, white dissolved transition. Just make sure that if you change the timing of the transition between the sequences, you also move the dissolved layer accordingly. This ensures that the moment when the dissolved layer reaches 100% opacity aligns perfectly with the cut. Let's see how that looks. Awesome. Moving on to the next one. This time, we'll create a flicker transition that adds an energetic vibe to the scene. It's super simple to create and is very similar to the dissolve animation, as we'll use the opacity property again. First, we need to find the transition point between the two sequences. I will speed up this process. Then I'll duplicate the white dissolve layer using Control or Command D. Now I'll bring this layer above the two sequences and place it here for now. Then I'll press you and delete its key frames. Now, I'll bring the opacity to zero and now I will position this layer at the point in time where I want the flicker to start. Let's start this layer from here and rename it to flicker. Great. Now I'll press T to open the opacity property and create the first keyframe with a value of zero. Then I'll move one frame forward and set the opacity to 100%. Let's zoom into the timeline for better visibility and here is a shortcut to move one frame at a time. Hold control or command and press the right arrow key to move forward one more frame. Now, I'll set the value to zero again. Move another frame forward and set the opacity to 100%. Instead of repeating this action manually, I can copy the keyframes I've already created. Move one frame forward, and paste them. I'll repeat this process a couple more times. To finish, make sure the last keyframe has a value of zero. Now I don't want this flicker to last too long. I'll go to the last keyframe and crop the layer at the right side to end it there. Finally, I'll position the flicker layer so that at the cut moment between the two sequences, the opacity is at 100%. This ensures the flicker fully covers the cut, giving us a cool flicker transition. Let's see how that looks one more time. Awesome. Now we can move on to our last basic transition, which is the overlay transition. This involves using another piece of footage to cover the cut moment between the two sequences for a very short period of time. Let's see how to do it. First, as always, we need to find the moment where the first sequence should end and crop the layer to this point. Let's say I want it to end here. Then find the starting point for the second sequence and crop the unnecessary part. I can now zoom in on the timeline to check that my two sequences are placed correctly and I don't have any gaps between them. After setting up the transition point, we can use some interesting footage as an overlay for the transition. In my case, I found this cool video of old TV visuals. I'll place it above the two sequences, and now I'll find a nice moment in this footage to use for the transition. For example, this moment with the circle and the title. Next, I'll crop this layer from the left, so it starts being visible at this point. Then I'll find an endpoint for this section and crop the layer from the right. Now I have a very short piece of footage that I can use as an overlay transition for my sequences. I'll place it right at the moment when the cut happens. And there it is a nice transition. I can tag it in blue to identify it as a transition layer in my timeline. So with this, we've finished exploring the basic transitions we can use with videos. Now let's move on to some more advanced transition techniques. For example, MAT transitions. I'll be demonstrating them with real life videos for easier understanding, but you can also use these transitions and motion design projects. MAT based transitions involve using specific types of footage to create a unique way to reveal or hide our sequences. We can even animate the footage to achieve specific results, like I did in this example, by animating the scale of this ink footage to create a reveal animation. Essentially, we're using another piece of footage as a mask for our sequences through the Track MT options and after effects. If you're not familiar with the track MAT function, don't worry. I'll explain this topic briefly in a moment. However, to understand it in more detail, I highly recommend checking out my free course, the beginner's guide to after effects, where I cover this topic in depth. You can find the link to the course and the description of this video. In the meantime, I'll open the non animated pre comp ie prepared for this lesson and let's see how to make this happen. To create this type of transition, you'll typically work with black and white ink footage like this one or brush animations like this one. Let me bring these two pieces of footage into my scene. Before moving on, let me do a quick recap of what Track Matt is in after effects. There are two main types of track Matt functions, Alpha mat and luma mat. Let's start by understanding what alpha Mt is. As you can see, I have a sphere with a black to white gradient and a video layer. This video could also be a precomp or any other layer in after effects. Here are the Track Matt functions. The Track Matt function is essentially another way to describe masking options and after effects, similar to a clipping mask in Photoshop or Illustrator. Means we can use one layer as a mask for another layer. If I want the video to use the sphere as a mask, I just need to drag the pick whip of the track Matt function from the video layer to the sphere layer. Now the sphere automatically turns off and my video is visible only within the boundaries of the sphere. This means the form of the sphere is being used as a mask for the video. The video will only appear within the spheres area. We can also click here to invert the Alpha mat, which does the opposite. Now in the area of the sphere, the video will not be visible. To cancel the mat, all I need to do is open the Track Matt menu and select none. To bring it back, I'll drag the PI whip from the video layer to the sphere layer again. Let's move on and learn what a luma mat is. Here, we have the exact same setup with the gradient sphere and the video. By the way, if you don't see the track Mat functions, just click Toggle Switches down here. Now, let's use the luma mat. First, I'll drag the PI whip from the video layer to the sphere layer. Then I'll change the alpha mat to luma mat by clicking here. Now we're using the luma matte function. Unlike Alpha mat, which uses only the shape and dimensions of the sphere layer to create a mask, the luma mat also uses the brightness, the white colors, and darkness, the black colors. In our case, the gradient sphere. This creates a more complex masking effect for our video. With luma matte, aftereffects not only uses the sphere's shape, but also the brightness and darkness of the sphere to determine which parts of the video are visible or hidden. In this case, the bright areas of the sphere make the video visible while the darker areas hide it. If we invert the luma nat, the bright areas will hide the video and the dark areas will make the video visible. Now that we understand the two track mat options, I'll close the precomps and we'll see how to apply this technique to create beautiful transitions. The first transition we'll create is a brush reveal animation, as shown in this example, we have the video of the lion and then it disappears in a brush style revealing the video behind it. Let's see how to create this effect. Here's my brush strokes footage. I'll leave it here and move the rest of the layers to the side for now. Next, I'll bring in the video I want to interact with it. In this case, the snow leopard. I'll place it below the brush footage. Before applying the tract mat, I can tag this layer with a different color to keep my timeline organized. As you might remember, the track mat functions will use the shape of this layer to interact with the video below it. Keep in mind that this footage has a rectangular form, which is important for what we're about to do. For now, let's crop this footage at the point in time where the screen goes completely black because we don't want to use the rest of the footage for the reveal effect. I'll stand at this point, press salt and the right bracket to crop it. Next, I'll drag the pick whip of the track mat function from the video layer to the brush footage. In the newest versions of after effects, the track mat will automatically switch to Luma inverted mat to create the correct interaction between the two layers. However, most of the time when we drag the pick whip, the first mat applied is the alpha mat. Let me reset it to the default alpha mat option. Now, we don't see anything happening. That's because, as you might remember, Alpha mat only considers the shape of the matte layer and ignores its color information. In this case, as I showed earlier, the footage has a rectangular shape. This means we've essentially created a rectangular mask for the video below, which is not what we need. To make after effects recognize the color information in this footage, we need to click here and switch it to Luma Matte. Now, we can see some interaction between the two layers. The dark areas of the brush footage will hide the video below it, while the bright areas will make it visible. But let's say I want this interaction to happen later in the timeline. Let's say starting from the first second. Right now, I don't see anything happening because the footage layer is not interacting with the layer below it in this time range. The interaction starts only at the first second where the brush stroke footage begins. As you can see, the white areas of the footage make the layer below it visible. This means we need to extend the white frame so that it starts where the video of the snow leopard begins. For this, I have a cool trick to show you. In this situation, I can right click on the footage, go to time, and enable time remapping. This creates key frames for the start and end points of the video. Now I can extend the footage from the left side because we've converted the time of this layer into keyframes, everything before the first keyframe will freeze. This allows us to stretch the footage to include more of the bright areas which will interact with the layer below it. I can even start the footage later in the timeline and expand it back to the point where the video below it begins. That's how we create the disappearing transition for the video. Now, let's use this footage to reveal the video. To do this, all we need to do is invert the luma mat. This makes the bright areas of the footage hide the video while the dark areas make it visible and that's the transition I was aiming for. I wanted to reveal this video in that way. Next, I'll crop the unnecessary parts of the footage. Now, I'll decide where in the video I want the reveal to happen. Let's say somewhere around here. I'll bring the footage to this point and crop it to start from here. We don't need to extend the footage in this case, because with an inverted luma mat, the dark areas of the footage act like empty space that doesn't interact with the video below it. I know that in the beginning it may feel super confusing, but trust me, after playing around with track mat functions a few times, you'll get the hang of it very quickly. Don't worry if you don't remember which type of luma mat to use for a specific effect. Just toggle between the regular and inverted luma options a few times and see which works best for the animation you're going for. Now I'll place the lion video here and find a good point in time to start it. Here looks good, just before the lion turns its head. After the lion turns its head, I'll start the reveal animation of the snow leopard. It's very important to ensure the first video lasts until the reveal animation is complete. Otherwise, we'll have an empty area in the timeline. Now let's move to the next one. I'll tag this footage in blue and let me demonstrate this process again. To use the ink footage to interact with the Black Panther video, I'll first drag the Track Matt pick whip of the video layer onto the ink footage. Once again, the Track Matt automatically sets to inverted Luma, which creates a revealing animation. If I turn off the invert function, we'll get a disappearing animation. In this case, we want to reveal the video. Now I need to place these layers above all the others. Let's say I want the Black Panther video to start at this point in time. Now, the dark areas of the ink footage make the video visible, while the bright areas make it invisible. As soon as the dark areas start to spread, more of the video becomes visible. However, this time the dark areas don't cover the entire frame, which means we won't see the full video beneath it. Situations like this, we can simply create a scaling animation. First, I'll move the anchor point of the ink footage to the upper left corner because that's the direction I want it to grow. This way, I'll get more of the dark areas covering the frame. Then I'll use the scale property to create a scaling animation for the ink footage. Now we have the black color covering the entire frame. But because we scaled the footage, it lost some of its quality. In these cases, I love to activate the quality and sampling function here. This can improve the look a little bit. Now I can see the Black Panther video entirely. Let's check how it all looks together. Awesome. With this, we've finished covering the basic transitions that are most commonly used when editing videos. Now let's move on and learn about basic transitions specifically for motion design projects. The first transition we'll discuss is the super handy matchcut transition. A match cut transition is a cool trick used in motion design and video editing. It connects two shots in a smooth way by matching visual elements or movements between them. This makes the transition feel seamless and pretty satisfying. We can create a match cut transition using different properties like position, scale or rotation. Now I'll go over each one and create them from scratch so you can see how simple it is. Let's start by creating a match cut using the position movement of two elements in the scene. For this example, we'll create a transition between two text layers. First, I need to place them both at the same position. Do that, I can use the align tool. After that, I'll select both layers, press P to open the position property, and create a simple position animation for each layer, moving them from top to bottom. As you can see, the movement of these layers is currently linear, meaning they move at a constant speed throughout the animation. To create the match cut effect, we need them to move very fast at a specific point during the animation. We can achieve this by easing the keyframes and then adjusting them in the graph editor. Make sure you're using the speed graph. The speed graph, we can see the speed of the animation. At the beginning, the speed is zero pixels per second, but in the middle of the animation, it peaks at over 50 pixels per second. The speed changes because we converted the keyframes from linear to Easy Ease keyframes. Now, we need to exaggerate this change and speed even more. We can do this by dragging the handle of the first keyframes to the right and the handle of the end keyframes to the left. Now the speed in the middle of the animation is over 2000, we're just one step away from creating the match cut. Before we do that, I want to remind you that you don't have to manually adjust the speed of the keyframes and the speed graph. You can do this using the keyframe velocity panel. To use the keyframe velocity panel, first, make sure you've selected the keyframes. Then hold down Alt or Option on Mac and double click on one of the keyframes. This will open the velocity settings. Here, I can change the influence percentage, which corresponds to what we adjusted earlier in the speed graph to 85% for both incoming and outgoing velocities. In the graph editor, this will look as if we manually adjusted the keyframes to achieve the same effect. It's important to note that you cannot adjust the keyframe velocity for different property types at once. For example, if you select scale and position property keyframes at the same time, the velocity adjustment will only apply to the property of the keyframe you clicked on. To avoid this, finish adjusting one properties keyframes before moving on to another. Now to create a better match cut effect, let's increase the velocity influence even more to create even greater speed at the middle of the animation. Setting the velocity influence to 95% will make the motion slow at the beginning a bit more, but it will then skyrocket the speed in the middle of the motion and slow down to the starting speed. This will make the layers move super fast in the middle of the animation. Right. Now to actually create the match cut effect, all we need to do is split the layers at the point where their speed is at its peak. To do this, I'll select the first text layer and go to the point in time where the speed is at its maximum. In our case, as we saw in the graph editor, it's in the middle of the animation. Then I'll press Alt and the right bracket to crop it from the end. I'll do the same for the second text layer, cropping it from the beginning to the same point in time. Since both layers have the exact same speed and movement, this creates a super fast transition between them during the position animation. You can see, it looks very smooth and dynamic and it's super easy to create. Now, let me show you how to achieve this effect using a scale animation. This is pretty much the same process, but this time I'm using a scale animation instead of position. First, I will select both layers and align them to the center of the comp using the shortcut control shift home. Then I'll go to the beginning of the animation press and create the first keyframe for both with a value of 20. Next, I'll move 1 second forward and scale them up. It's too much. Let's try 120, maybe 110. Now I'll adjust the velocity. And after that, I will stand in the middle of the animation and the first word at this point in time and crop the second word to start from this exact point in time. There it is. We have a nice scaling match cut transition. The cut between the layers matches the animation of the two layers. To help you remember this technique better, let me show you how to create the effect using a rotation animation. First, I'll place the layers in the same position. Then I'll create a similar rotation animation for both layers. Next, I'll adjust the speed of the motion. Finally, I'll find the point in time where the speed is at its peak and crop the layers accordingly. Now that we've learned how to create a match cut between layers, let's level up and see how we can use this principle to create a match cut transition between two scenes. As you can see, I have two scenes in my composition. These could be scenes in your project with multiple layers and various elements. In the first scene, I have a rotation text layer. While in the second precomp, I have a different design with different layers. There's also an object with a rotation animation. When we play the animation, you'll notice that even though the rotating layer in the first scene is completely different from the rotating object in the second scene, and even though the colors and designs are entirely different, we still achieve a smooth and visually pleasing transition. This is the magic of the match cut technique and it's how you can use it to transition between scenes and your projects. Let's see how this is done. To begin, I'll enter the first scene and prepare it for the transition. But before that, I'll close all the open precomps I have here. Now let's say this is a scene in my project, and I want to create a transition to the next one using the match cut effect with rotation. I'll start by determining the point in time when the first scene starts to end. From there, I'll create a rotation animation for the text layer as we did earlier. I'll set the duration to exactly 1 second and make the layer complete a full rotation. Finally, I'll adjust the velocity. That is the speed of the animation to make it super fast in the middle of the motion. Let's see how that looks. Next, I'll go to the second scene and create the same rotation animation for the shape layer, starting from the exact point in time when the animation begins in the first scene. This simplifies the demonstration and ensures a seamless transition. Here is the point in time where the speed of my shape is at its peak. I'll go back to the main comp and crop this precomp from the beginning to this point. Then I'll crop the first scene to end at this sa point. Now, I've created continuous motion for the layers inside both scenes, resulting in a super cool transition between the scenes. Let's see how that looks together. Great. Now let's move on to the next example. Sometimes we can use precomps as layers to create a match cut transition, like I did here using a scale animation, exactly like we did with the text layers in the earlier examples. The difference here is that we're animating the precomps themselves. Let me show how I did it real quick. First, I selected both of the precomps and created the same scale animation for both. Then I adjusted the velocity and moved the keyframes to the point in time where I wanted the transition to start. After checking the animation a few times, I placed the time indicator in the middle of the motion and cropped both comps accordingly. That's how we create a cool scaling match cut transition. With this, we've finished the match cut examples. Now let's move on to the next transition technique that you'll use frequently in your motion design projects, the panning transition. A panning transition is a super straightforward technique that involves creating a panning movement to transition from one scene to another. There are many different approaches to this transition. Let's start with the basics and see how to create a simple panning transition from the first scene to the second. Let's say you're working on a project and your timeline already has a lot of layers. Some layers belong to the first scene while others belong to the second scene. In this situation, you'll need to precompose the layers for each scene. For example, let's precompose the layers that make up the first scene. Select all the relevant layers, then right click, choose precompose, and name it. Scene one. I make sure both functions here are selected and then click Okay. Next, do the same for the layers of the second scene. I'll call this one scene two. Now you'll have two precomps, which you can see in the project Pamel. Before moving on, I recommend organizing your project by placing the precomps into a separate folder. This helps keep things clean and manageable. Now, let's say all the action in the first scene ends at a specific point in time. First, I'll select the scene one precomp and press P to open the position property and create the first keyframe at this point in time. Next, I'll move 1 second forward on the timeline. Now I can decide what kind of panning I want. Don't have to move it only to the sides. I can animate this pre comp up and down as well. In this case, I'll move the first scene to the left. All right. Now I'll easy ease the key frames and adjust the velocity to create smoother motion. That's how we create a basic panning transition where the first scene moves out of the frame, revealing the second one. Now, let's make it a bit more interesting. Let's have the second scene enter from the right side just as the first scene starts moving to the left. For this, we don't need to create a position animation for the second scene. Instead, all we need to do is move it to the right side out of the frame. I'll place it exactly beside the first scene. Next, move the time indicator to a point just before the animation of the first scene starts and parent the second scene to the first one. This way, we achieve the panning movement we're aiming for. This is an example of creating a panning transition by animating the precomps. Now let's explore another approach to creating a nice panning transition. Unlike the previous example, this method involves animating the layers inside the precomps instead of the precomps themselves. This approach might take a bit more time to set up, but it looks better because you can create a cool delay between the layers motion. All right. Let's see how to create this transition. First, I'll duplicate the scenes I created earlier from the Project panel so I can make changes to the new ones without affecting the original versions. Now let's start working on the transition. First, I will enter my first scene. Before continuing, let me switch the precomps names and the Project panel real quick because this precomp needs to be called pre comp five since it's the first scene in this sequence, and this pre comp will be scene six. All right, back to the transition. Now I'm inside the precomp called scene five, the first scene.'s imagine I'm working on a project and I decide that this scene will end at second two. I'll select all the layers, press P to reveal the position property, and bring the time indicator to second two since that's where I want the scene to end. Next, I'll create a keyframe for all the selected layers. Then I'll move 2 seconds forward to second four, as I want the outtro animation to last 2 seconds. I'll drag all the selected layers out of the frame to the left side. To improve the motion, I'll easy ease the key frames and adjust the velocity for a smoother result. After checking the motion, I'll start creating a delay for the layers. I want the layers closest to the left side to start moving first. For better organization of the timeline, I'll bring this layer up here. Then I'll bring the black sphere closest to the left side below it and move its key frames. Let's say three frames forward, maybe four frames. After checking the motion, I will place the next closest layers to the left side, which is my text layer in the third place and move its keyframes four frames after the last layers keyframes. Finally, I'll repeat this process for the last three layers, which are already in the correct order in my layers panel. Let's see how that looks together. If the intro animation feels too slow, I'll adjust the timing. For example, if the animation starts at second two and ends at second four, I'll select the last keyframes and drag them back to second three, ensuring the entire animation now lasts 1 second. Let's see that once again. Now I think the delay is too long. To shorten the delay between layers, I'll select all the keyframes, excluding those of the first layer and drag them backward by about three frames. A useful shortcut for this is to hold At or option on Mac and use the arrow keys to move the selected keyframes one frame at a time. Let's see what we've got. All right. Once I'm done animating my first scene, now, I need to shorten the work area of this precomp because I don't need it to last for 9 seconds, my animation ends around second four. To do this, I'll place the time indicator at this point. Press in to set the end of the work area to this point and then right click on the timeline and choose Trim Comp to work area. Great. Now I've trimmed the precomp to match the outtro animation of the first scene. Next, I'll create an intro animation for the second scene. Create an intro animation when the final design of the scene is already in place. Like in our case, we need to work backwards. Let me explain what I mean. Since I know that the end of the intro animation needs to look exactly like the current design, I'll first create a position keyframe for all the layers and drag it to second one because I know this is the position they all need to be in after entering the scene. Then I'll go backward to the start of the animation, the beginning of the timeline, and drag the layers out of the frame to the right side. Next, I'll adjust the animation and start adding delays between the layers. I want the background layer to enter the scene first. Then the layer closest to the left side of the frame should enter next. To do this, I'll select all the keyframes except the background layer and move them two frames forward. I'll repeat this process for the remaining layers, staggering their keyframes slightly. After checking the motion, I'll return to the main comp to time the two scenes. First, I'll check where the outtro animation of the first scene starts. Then bring the second scene to start at this point in the timeline. Now, I'll check the transition. If I notice that the motion of the outtro animation of the first scene doesn't perfectly align with the intro animation of the second scene, I'll tweak the timing by moving the second scene backward or forward in the timeline until the transition feels seamless. Awesome. That's another way to create a simple panning transition. Now let's move on to a more complex type of panning transition like this one, where we have three D layers involved in the scene and an element such as a stroke that starts in one scene and ends in the other. This is one of the trickiest transitions for many beginner motion designers, especially when creating transitions between scenes that involve three D layers positioned in three D space. Be honest, this is one of the most used transition techniques in my projects. Now, I'll explain the basics of this transition and then dive into a more complex version involving three D layers. First, let me close all irrelevant precomps and open the non animated comp I prepared for this lesson. All right, so here we are working on a project, and I've decided to create a seamless panning transition between two scenes. For this type of transition, the key is to start with a wider composition that can fit the layers of both scenes. Then we'll animate the two scenes as a single precomp in our main composition. This approach is different from our previous panning example where we split the layers into two separate precomps. Let me show you what I mean. I'll enter this precomp to copy the layers and show you how it's done from scratch in our new example. These layers belong to the first scene, and now I'll bring in the layers that make up the second scene. Now let's begin creating this transition. Before we start animating the scenes and layers, I'll select all the layers and precompose them into one precomp. I'll name it scene one and two. Now I'll enter this pre comp and start preparing the scene for animation. Since 3. Pros and cons of the preparation process: Welcome back. In this short lesson, I want to show you the important steps in my process of creating designs in Illustrator before importing them into after effects. Just like in the previous lesson, I'd like you to sit back, watch and listen without doing anything. The design process for preparing scenes is incredibly important, and I'm sure you'll discover a few handy tricks in Illustrator that you might have missed. Tricks that can really help improve your workflow when creating complex motion design projects. Let's start with the first tip, which is all about setting up your document. The first thing I love to do is choose the film and video format. This setup provides built in guides specifically for animation, which you'll see in just a minute. When I design scenes, I like to work on the entire project at once so I can see all the scenes side by side. For this example, I'll name the project TM All scenes where TM stands for transition Mastery. After naming the file, I'll create 16 boards to represent my scenes. I choose 16 because most explainer videos consist of five to 20 scenes. Later, I can add or delete our boards if needed. For now, I don't need to change anything else, so I'll hit Create. Before I start working, I usually set my workspace layout to essentials classic. This arrangement displays all the necessary panels for my workflow. Now, I want to show you how to adjust the preview of your workspace in case you don't like the default look of the film and video document setup. To do this, I'll go to file and click on Document Setup. Here, I can make various adjustments to the workspace. We can also reach this panel by clicking on the document setup in the quick Actions tab found here. This panel, you can customize grid colors. For example, I can click on Custom and choose a color for the first grid. Let's say I pick a dark gray for the first grid color. After selecting it, a pop up will appear for the second grid color, where I'll choose the same dark gray. Now the grid has a subtle uniform look. For this example, I'll reset the grid back to the default colors and move on to adjusting the artboard spacing. Right now, all the artboards are too close together, which I don't like because I prefer more space to design my scenes. To spread out the artboards, I'll go back to document setup and click on Edit artboards. Then in the quick access panel, I'll click on the rearrange all button. Here, I can adjust the number of columns and the spacing between artboards. Let's set the spacing to 500 pixels. Now all the R boards are 500 pixels apart. If I want to change the spacing, I can simply re enter the rearrange all menu and adjust it again. For example, I might set it to 300 pixels or even 200 pixels, whichever feels right for my workflow. Once I'm happy with the setup, it's time to save the file. At this point, I'll create a new folder on my computer called AI to store all the Adobe Illustrator files for this project. After naming the file and ensuring it's being saved as at AI file, I'll click Save and then hit Okay. That's it for this step. Now let's jump into the second tip, which is all about the design process. In the early stages of my design process, I usually work with only two layers, one for the background and another for the graphics. Keeping it simple at this stage helps me stay organized. Later in the lessons, I'll explain when and how we can split layers in a super efficient way. Another important tip for the design process is handling continuous scenes that you want to see side by side. For example, in this case, I want to create another scene that continues from the first one. To do this, I use the RbardTol and select all the R boards in the arboards panel to move them to the left. Next, I'll click on one R board to deselect all the R boards and then select only the ones I want to move. While holding Shift, I'll select the three R boards I need, then hold down Alt or Option on Mac to duplicate them and move the copies to the new position. Sometimes when moving R boards, you might accidentally select unnecessary layers. Don't worry. Just switch to the selection tool, select the layers you don't need in the new scene and delete them. Now I can continue designing the next scene that belongs to this animation sequence. Visually, this approach is very organized and it helps me imagine the transitions I can create within the sequence. Now, let me show you some common mistakes you might encounter during this process. For instance, after selecting the artboards you want to move, it's easy to forget that you're using the artboard tool and accidentally create new artboards. To avoid this, double check your selections and delete any unnecessary artboards from the list. Then you can move on to create your scene. If you need to adjust the position of your R boards, select them all again and move them to align perfectly with the previous scenes. This ensures everything stays neat and visually consistent. All right. Moving on. Now let me show you what to do after finishing your scene designs. As you remember, we've been working with only two layers so far, but now is a good time to split the layers for each scene. This allows you to have the relevant layers for each individual scene. Here's how I do it. First, to make things easier to work with, I'll grab this panel from the gray area and move it into this section of the interface. Now I want to separate each piece of graphic content into its own layer. You can do this manually, but let me show you a useful trick. Before splitting the layers, ensure that none of them are grouped. After ensuring everything is ungrouped, I can select the layer containing all my graphics. Then I'll click on the Hamburger menu to open the panel options and select release to layers sequence. Now Illustrator separates the contents of this layer into individual layers. Next, I'll select all these new layers and drag them out of the original layer. This will leave an empty layer behind, which I can recognize because it no longer has the small arrow Ica next to it. Once confirmed, I'll delete this empty layer. Awesome. Now I'll repeat the same process for the background layers, select the layer, release the layers, move the new layers out, and delete the empty layer. Now I can group the layers that belong to each scene. This grouping will be very useful in the next step where we'll import each board into after effects. Soon, you'll see why this step is important. For example, I now have one group that includes all the layers creating the first scene. I'll repeat this process for the rest of the scenes. By the way, the shortcut for grouping layers is Control or Command on Mac plus G. You might not fully understand why we're organizing the file this way, but bear with me. It'll all make sense in a moment. I'll speed up this process for now. Once I've grouped the layers for each scene, I'll get rid of any empty layers created during the grouping process. As mentioned earlier, you can identify an empty layer because it lacks the small arrow icon beside it. Let me speed up this process as well. Great. Now I have 21 layers that represent each scene. Next, I'll open the artboard panel and place it close to the layers panel for easier access. I need to ensure the artboards are in the correct order. Right now, for example, if I click on the fifth scene, it appears as the 16th artboard in the panel. This will create issues later during the saving process, it's important to fix this now. To reorder the arboards, I'll select the desired scene in the Layers panel and Illustrator will highlight its corresponding artboard in the artboard panel. Then I'll drag the artboard to its correct position. This point, I'm selecting the designs while watching the Artboard panel to see if the selected artboard fits the order of the scene in my project. When I see that the artboards don't fit the order of my design, I move them in the correct order on the Artboard panel. Once the Rboards are in the proper order, I'll rename them for better organization. All I'm doing now is selecting the arboard, double click on it, and renaming it to the correct name following the chronological order of my scenes. At this point, we can click on each scene and check the arboard panel to double check that the scenes are in the correct order. Everything is organized, I'll save the artboards as separate Illustrator files. For now, the layer names don't matter, since we can address that in the next step. To save the document as separate Illustrator files, I'll go to file and click on Save As. I'll choose to save it on my computer, select the folder where I want to store the separated files, R boards, and proceed from there. Next, I'll choose a different name for the document I'm working on now. Then I'll make sure to save it as an Illustrator file. After clicking Save, I'll choose the option to save each arboard as a separate file. I'll select all the R boards and hit Okay. Now, I'll wait for the saving process to complete. Now when I open the folder, I'll see all the separated artboards saved as individual Illustrator files. The first file will always be a copy of the original document, the one that includes all the scenes we've just been working on. However, in this case, I don't like the names of the Illustrator files. I want the names to represent the scenes. To fix this, I'll reopen the original file and close the newly created files. Then I'll delete all the Illustrator files I just saved and go back to change the names of the R boards. It's important for me to show you these steps because I want you to work in a very organized way. I also want you to be aware of potential mistakes you might make and how to fix them before it's too late, like finding out during the animation phase, which could lead to a total mess in the project, especially after you've already animated a few scenes. After renaming the Rbards, I'll press Control or Command on Mac pluss to save the changes to the document. Then I'll save each Rboard as a separate file again, just like I did earlier. Now, I have all the files saved in a very organized way. One of the files will still be the same as my original document, so I can delete it if I want. Before doing that, I'll close Illustrator to avoid confusion and then delete the duplicate file since I don't need two copies of it. Before starting the import process in after effects, I like to create a new folder specifically for the artboard files that represent the scenes. This helps me stay organized because the main AI folder might also contain other Illustrator files for the project. Keeping the scene file separate ensures everything is easy to find. Now that I've prepared all the design files for animation, we're ready to move on to the animation phase. This is where you can finally grab your mouse and join me in creating an entire explainer video from scratch, focusing on learning different approaches to create seamless transitions. It's going to be awesome, see you there. 4. Complex zoom-in transition in a 3D space: Hi there. Now we're diving into after effects to start animating our scenes. This is the lesson where you'll begin working alongside me. It's important to mention that we'll start by creating the most complex transitions for the first scenes in the project and then move on to easier ones. I've structured it this way to take advantage of your initial focus levels at the beginning of the course. That said, let's make sure we're all on the same page regarding software settings. First, click on the default workspace to see the same panel arrangement as mine. Next, go to edit preferences and click on General. Ensure all the settings match mine. Once done, please set the language of your computer to English so all the shortcuts we'll use will work properly. All right. Now let's create our first composition. We can call it Master Comp. We'll work in full HD resolution 1920 by 1080 with a frame rate of 30 frames per second. Since we don't know the duration of the final video, let's set it to 3 minutes from now. You can leave the preview background color as black and then click Okay. Now, before importing the designs, I recommend saving the project to activate the autosave function in case the project crashes. Let's go to file and click Save. Now, let's create a new folder called AE and then enter it to save the project here. Let's name this project TM Project. Once done, hit the Save button. When working on complex projects, I like to open the main design file to see all my scenes in one place. Sometimes this helps me come up with new ideas for transitions between scenes. To start, let's work on these two animated sequences that make up the first scene of our project. For now, I'll import only these two designs, not all the designs I have. Now, before importing the two files into after effects, I'll open the files and adjust the layers. Note that you don't need to do that because you already have the finalized design files. At this point, just listen and watch how I prepare these files for animation. Soon we will import them to after effects together. This is the point where I can work individually and adjust the layers in each design rather than managing all the layers across all the designs in one document. In my opinion, this is a very efficient way to work. It keeps your focus on each scene and makes it much easier to handle a document with fewer layers rather than navigating a cluttered file. For example, in this design, I'll separate the sphere layers from the line layers because I'll need them on separate layers to create the transition I've planned for this scene. However, when I try to separate the layers as we did earlier, it won't work because the graphics are still grouped. To fix this, I'll ungroup all the graphics in the layer first. Only then I can use the function to separate the graphics into individual layers. Now, I'll move all the layers out from the main layer. Once that's done, I can delete the empty layers that are no longer needed. At this point, you can name the layers to keep them organized. In my case, I won't do this because we're going to recreate this scene from scratch and after effects. Sometimes if a scene consists of simple geometric shapes, I prefer to create it directly in after effects. This is a great habit to develop because it can save you a lot of time in future projects. Of course, we can also animate the layers from the Illustrator files if needed. But in this lesson, I want to encourage you to get comfortable building scenes from scratch and after effects. It's an invaluable skill for streamlining your workflow. Showing you this process right now because there are scenes that we cannot create from scratch and after effects. I use this simple scene to explain the preparation process for an individual scene so you can understand it better. Let me go through the process one more time for the first scene as well. After ungrouping the design, I can separate the layers and then get them out of the main one and delete it. It's very important that you hit Controls to save the files after adjusting them before importing them into after effects. For these specific two scenes, it's not as crucial because we'll create them from scratch and after effects, but it's good to build the habit for the other scenes. All right after saving the designs, let's import the files into after effects. Now it's your turn to grab the mouse and do this with me. The first thing you need to know is that you cannot import more than one file at a time. If you do, after effects will import them as a flat layer without the separate layers we just prepared. If you accidentally do this, press Control Z or Command Z on Mac to undo and import each file one by one. When you drag the file into after effects, you'll see a pop up asking how you want to import the Illustrator file. We don't want it as a flattened layer, so we won't choose footage. Instead, we'll select composition. This option imports all the layers and automatically creates a pre comp for the file with all the layers inside. Next, you'll be asked whether you want to import the file with layer size or document size. Here's the difference. Document size, the layer boundaries will match the original document dimensions. This can make animation more challenging. In layer size, the layer boundaries will fit the specific content of each layer, making it much easier to animate. Make sure to choose layer size for this project. Great. Now let's bring in the second scene as well. To keep the project panel organized, I like to click here to sort the assets by order. Then I tag my master composition with a separate color to differentiate it from the other comps I'll create in the future. Now is a good time to press Controls or Command S to save your progress. Make it a habit to save every few minutes. Now let's enter the first scene and take a look at what we've got. You'll notice it might look a bit different from mine. If I move the layers around, you'll see that in my project, the layers are cropped, while in yours, they're not. That's because you're working with the fixed version. Let me show you how I fixed it. In cases like this, all you need to do is go back to your Illustrator design and move all the layers that are outside the scene into the seeing boundaries. Once you've done that, save the project. When you return to after effects, you'll find the layers uncropped and ready for animation. All right. Now let's start animating this scene. As I mentioned earlier, you can use the Illustrator files and the pre made scene to animate it, and we'll do this for the next scenes in this project. But since I want to teach you how to get the most out of after effects, I'd like you to learn how to create simple scenes from scratch. This skill will save you a lot of time in future projects. Let's practice this approach together. We can select the pre comp here and use it as a small reference window to see how the scene should look. To begin, let's create a gray sphere without a stroke. Now, change its size to 300. If you don't see these properties, it's likely because you're using an older version of after effects. In that case, you can find all these settings by opening the layer properties. Here's the size of the shape. Great. Next, select the layer and press Enter to rename it to sphere one. Now duplicate the layer four times to create five spheres because there are five different colored spheres in the design. Let's move the new sphere here and continue this process four more times. All right. Now let's color each sphere. You can change the color from this panel or by using the Eyedropper tool to sample the colors directly from the design. Repeat this process for the rest of the spheres. Great. Now, move the spheres up here and create a new white solid layer to serve as a background layer. So right click here, go to New and select solid. Name it BG one. Sample the color from the design and ensure the size matches the composition. Awesome. Next, let's create the title for this scene. Select the text tool and type. Welcome. Change it to the correct font, which in our case is Poppins bold, which can be found in the pre installed fonts and after effects. But in case you can't find it, you can activate it from the Adobe Fonts or download it for free from Google Fonts. All right, back to the project. Now, to find the correct size, you can jump into the design, double click on the text, and now here I can see the correct size. Back to after effects. Let's change the font size to 50. Go to the paragraph panel and align the text to the center. Then ensure the text direction is set to left to right. If you don't see these panels, you can find them under the window menu. Now align the text to the center of the comp using the align tool and center the anchor point. To do this quickly, hold Control or Command on Mac and double click the AnchorPoint tool. Awesome. Now we're ready to prepare the scene for animation. But first, press V to go back to the selection tool. All right. Now we'll animate the scene in three D space. First, let's create a new camera. Now, use a one node camera with a 35 millimeters lens and hit Okay. After Effects will prompt you saying there are no three delayers in the scene, click Okay and convert the existing layers to three delayers. If you don't see the three defunction icon, click here to enable it. Convert all layers except for the background layer, which we can lock for now. Save the project before moving on. Now, let's spread out the layers to create the desired look. To do this, we'll work with two views. Ensure you're using the classic three D renderer. If you don't see this, press Control K to open the composition settings. Then go to three D renderer and change the setting from there. Now let's select the left view and set it to the top view. This is one of the most convenient angles for arranging your camera and layers in the scene. Use this view to start spreading the layers in three D space while referencing the design. Keep an eye on your reference window at the top of the screen as you move the spheres to match the layout. If your preview doesn't look like mine, select the view and set it to fit. And now continue adjusting the spheres using the two views. Top view is great for moving layers along the Z axis closer or farther from the camera. Active camera view is better for moving layers up down or to the sides. Let's duplicate this one. I'll duplicate this one as well. Sometimes we can use the position property values from the layer to move the layers around. Let's duplicate this one. This is a good example where it is much more convenient to change the values from the layer to find the right position for the sphere. Now, let's duplicate the dark one as well. I'll duplicate this one as well. Let's duplicate the blue one, too. I see that we have a bright blue sphere that needs to be far away from the camera. Let's duplicate this one and place the new one in the back. Now I see that we have another sphere that needs to be placed far away in the back. It's a dark one. Let's go back to after effects and duplicate this one. Now let's place it far away in the back. If I zoom out in the top view, I can see the layers positions from above and how far they are from each other. All right. And now let's close the layers and save the project before moving on to start animating the scene. Great. Now when we have our scene ready for animation, we can go back to work with one view and finally start animating the scene. To animate the intro of this scene, we'll use the reverse animation technique. Since we know that all the layers should look exactly as they do right now, I'll move to, let's say the two second mark and create a keyframe for the position of the spheres. Let's select them all, press P, and create a keyframe. Then I'll go back to the beginning of the timeline and move all the spheres to the center of the comp. Using the align tool won't work since we're dealing with three D layers, but I have a nice trick. We can set the Z axis value to zero for all the layers and then align them manually to the center using the title safe grid. Let's turn the safe action grid on and use it to find the center of the frame. We can turn off the text layer for now and keep adjusting the position for all the spheres. We have a smooth position animation. Next, let's animate the scale of the spheres using the same reverse animation technique. At the two second mark, I'll create a keyframe for the current scale value because I know that at this point, the spheres need to look as they do now. Then I'll move backward in time and set the scale value to zero. If your computer isn't very powerful, you can lower the preview quality to improve performance. Try to set it to quarter if that's not enough. I'll bring it back to full and now deselect all the layers and press you twice to collapse the keyframe display for all layers. Let's preview what we've created. I think it looks fine and we can move on. Since we've spread these spheres across the three D space, with each sphere positioned differently along the Z axis, moving the camera creates a cool parallax effect, just as I mentioned earlier. All right. Let's press Control or Command ZA few times to bring everything back to normal and now start creating the transition for the next scene where we see the little graph and the text below it. For this, we'll use a Zoom in animation with the camera and animate a few of the spheres to connect them to the next scene. To start, let's bring the text layer back and switch to two views to better position the layers. And now since there's another title in the next scene, I'll duplicate the current text layer and move it slightly backward along the Z axis, placing it somewhere in the back. This will be the point where we create the second scene. Why this specific position? Honestly, I'm just guessing, there's no right or wrong choice here. This is what animation is all about, experimenting, making adjustments, and refining as needed. Mistakes are part of the process, so don't worry about them. They're how we learn and improve. Okay. Now let's look at our reference and move some layers to the positions needed for the next scene. In this case, we need to move four spheres. Let's start with this one, hold control or command on Mac, and continue selecting another three spheres. Make sure you are selecting the right colored spheres. That's where the small reference panel above the project panel comes in handy. Once selected, let's place them up here to have an organized timeline. We can also tag them in different colors to indicate they're going to be used in the next scene. All right. Now let's turn off the first text layer and change the text for the second title. Copy the text from the design and make sure the details are correct. In our case, all the details are correct, since it's a duplicate of the first title that needs to look exactly like this one. Next, let's add the line we see in the scene. To find it, I'll search for it in the second scene layers. I think it's this one. To confirm, we can double click on the layer to preview it. Let's turn on the transparency background in the preview, and as you can see, this is the layer we need. Now, let's drag it into the composition. To animate it, we can convert it to a shape layer. After doing that, delete the Illustrator file and rename it stroke. Let's also tag it in purple to indicate that it belongs to the second scene. Now let's convert this shape into a three D layer and move it to the same Zeaxis position as the title of the second scene. To do this precisely, check the Xaxis value of the title layer and set the same value for the stroke layer. To make it easier, we can change it to some rounded number that we will remember and then set this number for the stroke layer. Awesome. Next, let's adjust the position. Bring the title layer downwards slightly and move the stroke layer upward. Nice. We've just finished preparing the second scene. Now we can start working on the transition. But before that, let's create a nice intro animation for the first title using the scale property. So first, let's turn off the layers of the second scene and turn on the first title. Now, to start the animation of this text layer, let's go to the beginning of the timeline. Isolate the layer, turn on the transparent background, and switch back to work with one view to focus on the animation. And now let's create a cool pop up intro animation. Create the first keyframe with the scales set to zero. Then go to the 1 second mark and set the value to 100. After that, at frame 15, the middle of this animation, scale it up to 150 or maybe even 200. All right. Now let's easy ease the keyframes. Now, instead of adjusting the velocity manually in the graph editor, we can use a quicker method. Select the keyframes, hold Alt or Option on Mac, and double click one of them to open the velocity panel. Set the incoming and outgoing velocity to 85%. Let's see how that looks. Okay, I think this looks nice. Now, let's adjust the spheres animation as well. Our goal is to time the animation of the spheres to the pop up animation of the text. So first, solo all of them to focus on their animation and then press P to open the position property and see all the key frames we have here. Let's easy ease all the position keyframes and this time, use the graph editor to make the animation start quickly and then slow down as it ends. Let's see what we've got. Great. Now let's adjust the scale animation for the spheres. Select all the scale keyframes and create the same animation as we did for the position. Let's watch it one more time. I think this looks good. Now, let's time the animation in the scene. I want the spheres to enter the scene after the title animation. To do this, first, let's view the keyframes we created for all the layers. Make sure no layer is selected and press you. Viewing all the keyframes for all the layers will help us time the text and the spheres animation. All right. Let's select all the sphere layers and find the right moment in the timeline for their entrance into the scene. We can solo the first text layer as well. Next, we need to watch the text layer animation and adjust the spheres timing accordingly. Let's move the spheres here and review the animation a few times to see if it feels right. I think we can move the spheres animation to start from frame number 20. Now it feels like the text is activating the spheres, which is exactly the effect I'm aiming for. All right. Let's bring everything back to normal and start working on the transition to the next scene. To start, we'll animate the spheres that need to appear in the second scene. Let's decide that the transition starts at the 1 second mark. Let's select the four spheres and press P to see their position key frames. A quick tip. When you have layers transitioning from one scene to the next, always create a small pause between their first animation and their next movement. Our case, I won't start moving the spheres to their new positions immediately after they finish their first animation. Instead, I'll give a few frames of pause by creating a keyframe with the same value as the last one. Only after that I will go, let's say 2 seconds forward and start moving the spheres to their new positions. Let's set the Xaxis value for the spheres to 3,333, as this matches the value of the second title and the stroke layer. Now that the Zeaxis is set for the spheres, we can move them up down, left or right to roughly position them where they need to be. While doing this, I always keep an eye on the reference to ensure each sphere is placed correctly. Let's start moving the spheres and try to place them in the right position using the reference. Soon we will deal with their sizes as well. That's how I like to work when I'm dealing with a bunch of layers. I first create an initial animation for one property and after that, I'm creating an animation for another property if needed. Only after that, I'll improve the animation by adjusting the velocity and the timing of the animation I created. Once the position animation is complete, let's move on to the scale animation for the spheres. As with the position, I'll start by creating a short pause by setting the same scale value at this point in time. Then I'll go 2 seconds forward and adjust the scale to fit the design. I think a value of 20 works well for now. After that, press you to reveal all the keyframes and fine tune the last position keyframes to achieve the desired look. All right. I think it looks great. Now we can move on to creating the camera animation for the transition from the first scene to the second. Let's start the camera animation at the point where the four spheres begin moving toward the stroke in the second scene. Then move 2 seconds forward and bring the camera closer to the layers in the second scene by adjusting it's the axis position. O for now, let's place the camera somewhere around here. If needed, you can also adjust the wide position for better alignment. Next, let's remove the sphere that shouldn't be visible when we're already seeing the second scene. To do this, go to the point where the camera starts moving because this is the point where our four spheres start to move, and this is the point in time where the transition begins. This will be the timing to animate the unwanted sphere we have in the second scene. In our case, it is at the three second mark. Create a keyframe for the position of this sphere, then move 2 seconds forward and move the sphere out of view by adjusting its the axis value. Great. Now we can save the project and move on. And now we'll start finalizing the second scene. For instance, let's adjust the animation of the four spheres in this scene. I want to fix the final position of one sphere because it's not aligned with the stroke layer. To do this, we can lower the opacity of all the spheres and adjust their final position keyframes. This way, I can easily see whether the spheres are aligned with the stroke. Once done, bring the opacity back to 100. Now press S to adjust the scale of the spheres. In my opinion, they're too big right now. A value of 15 looks much better. All right. Now let's talk about the fact that even if we place the stroke layer below all the layers in the timeline, it will still appear on top of them in the scene. This happens because we're working with three D layers and in three D layers, the layer order in the timeline has no effect on the scene. What determines the appearance in the scene is the Z position value. To fix this, we need to move the stroke layer one pixel backward along the Z axis. This adjustment ensures its place behind the spheres. Let's go back to one view to see how it looks. As you can see, there's a point in time where the light blue sphere collides with the stroke for a few frames. This happens because at that moment, there's the axis positions are the same. This isn't a problem at all because we can adjust the position path of the sphere. Let me show you how. First, we need to find the point in time where the collision happens. It looks like it's around here. This sphere moves from behind the stroke and before reaching its final position, it passes through the stroke. To fix this, let's go a few frames backward and move this sphere upward so it goes over the stroke instead of through it. Let's see if we fix the problem. It is very hard for me to see it clearly, so let's select the left view and change it to one of the side angles. Let's say the left view and observe what's happening from this angle. Here we can see the camera looking at the stroke and the sphere. Let's pay attention to the left side view and try to see what's happening here. From this perspective, it's clear the stroke needs a bit more adjustment to its position animation path. Let's tag the stroke layer in a different color for convenience. Now, let's stand on the keyframe we created and adjust the spheres path so it doesn't just go over the stroke, but is placed in front of it along the Zeaxis at that moment. This ensures there's no collision between the sphere and the stroke. It already looks much better. We can also tweak the keyframe to make the stroke move slightly to the side. To make the animation look smoother, we can use the convert vertex tool to curve the path of the sphere, creating a smoother motion. I think it looks great. Don't forget to go back to the selection tool when you're done. Now let's move on to adjust the position of the first title. I want the text to be centered in the scene when the camera moves forward. But before that, let's select the left view and bring it back to the top angle. Let's go back to work with one view. All right. Now let's make the camera go through the first text. To achieve this, let's create a keyframe for the position of the text layer at the moment the camera starts moving. Then go a bit forward in time and adjust the position of the text to align it perfectly. Go back and forward to see how that looks. I need to move the text down a little bit. I'll stand at the keyframe and adjust the position. Let's see what we've got. I think it looks great now. Let's place the second keyframe at second five to create a slower movement for the text. It already looks much better. With that done, let's move on and create an intro animation for the second title. We'll use the text animator to create a nice and simple text animation, which I often use in my explainer videos. Open the text, select it, and add a new animator with the position property. There's a lot to learn about using text animators and after effects. So if you feel like you don't know much about them, I highly recommend checking out my course text in motion. This course, I explain everything in depth about using text animators and share other super useful tricks to create eye catching text animations. All right, back to the project. We've chosen the position property because we want the text to animate from the bottom to its original position. Set a value for the position property to define the starting point of the animation. Next, open the range selector and then open the advanced menu. Change the shape animation setting for this animator to ramp up, which makes the text start animating from left to right. Then adjust the setting so the text animates by words instead of characters. Now that the text animator is set up, it's time to create the animation. First, find the point in time where the animation should start. Let's say 4 seconds and 15 frames. Set the offset property to -100, which positions the text according to the value we set for the position property in the range selector menu. Now create a keyframe at this point. Then go to 5 seconds and 15 frames, exactly 1 second later and set the offset to 100. To finish, go to the point in time where the text animation ends. Right click on the text and create a new mask to reveal the text. That gives us a clean revealing text animation in no time. To improve the animation, adjust the easing of the keyframes directly in the text animator. This is similar to how we do it in the keyframe velocity panel, but here you can do it by setting the Es high to 20% and the E's low to 80%. It will make your text animations look smooth and professional. With this, we're almost finished with these two scenes. To keep things organized, we can crop the layers we no longer need. For example, stand at second five and crop the spheres from the first scene, since we no longer see them in the animation. Great. Now, to make things a bit more interesting, let's create a nice intro animation for the stroke layer at second three just before transitioning into the second scene. We can do this using the trim paths effect. Add the trim paths effect to the stroke layer to begin animating it. To better see what we're doing, scale the stroke with slightly and start creating the animation. At second three, let's set the end value to zero and create a keyframe. After that, let's move to second five and set it to 100. Now we can bring the stroke with back to two and see how that looks. To finish things up, let's easy ase the text layer because we didn't do it earlier. Let's do the same for the stroke animation as well. For the stroke, we can set the velocity to 85% for both incoming and outgoing animations to make it look a bit more interesting. For the text, we don't need to adjust the velocity. I love how it moves. However, we can apply this adjustment to the camera movement and see how it looks. A quick reminder, setting the velocity to 85% for both incoming and outgoing animations makes the motion start slow, gain speed, and slow down again right before it ends. Let's check how it looks. I think it's great, but I notice that the animation of the four spheres feels a bit off. So let's select these layers and press you to see the key frames. Now, to focus on their animation, let's solo these spheres. And now I want to explain to you what exactly I didn't like about the animation here. As you can see, their animation starts too fast very early in the timeline. I'd like the spheres to move in sync with our camera motion, starting slow, gaining speed, and slowing down. If I select the keyframes and go to the graph editor, we will see that that is not the case. For now, the spheres are starting to move fast at the beginning of the animation. To make it match our camera animation, first thing, first, let's open the position property for each sphere. Now, select the keyframes and set the velocity to 85%. It's better now, but I don't like the pause and the motion of the bright blue sphere caused by the adjusted velocity. To fix this, hover over the second keyframe, hold control or command on Mac, and click on the problematic keyframe once. Then once again, it will convert the eased keyframe to a continuous keyframe, preventing it from dropping the speed at this moment. The motion looks better now, but I don't like how this sphere collides with the bright one. Let's go to the middle keyframe and adjust the sphere's position to the left at this moment. I think it looks better now. Let's solo the stroke layer as well to see how it looks together. Okay, I think it looks nice. Now let's select the spheres and presses to open the scale property. Then adjust the velocity to 85% to better fit the position animation and our camera movement. Let's watch it again. I noticed that the two blue spheres that are in the middle are colliding now, and I don't like how that looks, let's try to fix it. Let's move the middle keyframes position path to the right. After watching it a few times, now I notice the blue sphere collides with the bright one. Let's move this point down and see if that solves the problem. Awesome. We finally got it right. Let's watch this part once again to be sure. Alright, I think it looks pretty good now. This is a crucial part of creating motion design projects. Always check the animation multiple times before moving on. This ensures that we're as confident as possible before starting the next scene. I think everything looks great, except for the second text. I feel it should enter the scene earlier and that the animation should last a bit longer. Let's adjust that. First, let's start this animation from second four and see the timing. All right, the timing is great. Now let's move the second keyframe to second six and watch it once again. Awesome. Now it looks great. With this, we're ready to move on to the next scene or animated sequence. You can call it whatever you prefer. To transition from the last scene to the next one, we can use a simple match cut transition. Let's have the bright sphere exit the scene from the right side and then start the new scene with the same sphere continuing its movement from the previous scene. Let's decide that this transition will start at second six since we want to give viewers enough time to read the text. Pro tip, when working with text, always keep this in mind. If the viewer doesn't have enough time to read the text, your client won't be satisfied. Your client, it's more important that the audience can read the message than just admire the animation. Ensure text animations are clear and timed appropriately. Before moving the sphere out of the scene, it's a good idea to draw the viewers attention to it. We can do this by creating a pop up animation using the scale property. Let's decide that the spheres scale will be 100 at second six and also at second seven. In between, at 6 seconds and 15 frames, we'll set the scale to 30 or maybe 50. Now let's adjust the velocity to make the animation a bit more dynamic. Let's select the key frames and set the velocity to 85%. Great. Starting at second seven, let's create the outtro animation for the sphere. First, create a keyframe for the position property of the sphere. Then move 2 seconds forward and position the sphere so it moves out of the frame. Now for the match cut transition to work, let's make the sphere leave the frame at high speed toward the end of its animation. We can do it by adjusting the handles of this animation in the graph editor. Let's see how that looks. We can make the outtro animation last 1 second to speed it up. I'll bring the second key frames to the eight second mark. I think we can increase the speed at the end even more. Awesome. Now let's create a line that will extend out from the sphere to fit the design of the next scene. To do this, we can duplicate the stroke layer we have here and then adjust its path. But before adjusting the path, first, let's bring the new stroke layer up and adjust its position so it starts from the upper point of the first stroke layer. All right, now use the Pen tool to select the middle points of the path and delete them. Now we have a straight line that needs to align with the sphere's movement. That means we need to bring this point somewhere around here. To make the line straight, we can use a grid and adjust the point of the path. Our goal is to create the illusion that the sphere and the stroke are connected and make the stroke appear when the sphere starts moving out of the frame. Now let's zoom in and position the last point of the line so it's at the center of the sphere when the animation finishes. This will help the illusion we are aiming to create be accurate. Now, press you on the new stroke layer and adjust the timing of the trim path animation to match the outtro animation of the sphere. Move the trim path animation to align with the sphere's movement and make it last for 1 second. The timing looks great, but the easing of the two layers is different. Let's fix that. Select the keyframes, press F nine, or FNF nine on Mac to reset the easing, and then adjust both layers in the graph editor. Let's see how that looks. That looks nice. Let's preview the entire animation we've created so far. Everything looks fine, but I think the scene would benefit from a slow Zoom in animation to make it less static. Let me show you what I mean. Since the camera already has an animation, we don't want to mess it up. In situations like this, we can use a null object. Let's create one real quick. Now, after creating a null object, open the top view, convert the null to a three D layer. Then rename the null to null camera and position it near the camera. You can use the top view to do that. Then parent the camera to the null. Now, along with the existing camera animation, we can create another position animation for the camera using the null object. Go to the beginning of the timeline, move the null backwards slightly to give room for the Zoom in animation and create a keyframe for the nulls position property. Then let's find the point in time where our bright sphere exits the scene. That is where is the end of this scene. We can select the bright sphere and pre 5. Seamless side panning transition: Hi. In this lesson, we'll work on this entire long scene that includes four animated sequences or four short scenes. We'll create simple panning transitions for the first three scenes and a cool Zoom in animation for the last scene, which will lead us into the next one. This combination of transitions is commonly used, so it's important to master creating it. Let's get started. As I mentioned in the previous lesson, when working with designs from Illustrator, instead of creating everything from scratch and after effects, it's essential to open the individual Illustrator files saved earlier. This allows us to check if we need to separate any layers for animation. While there are elements we can create directly in after effects, like text boxes and line animations, it's always a good idea to ensure the design file is ready for animation. So let me open all the relevant seeing files. I told you in the previous lesson, you don't need to open them since you already have the finalized Illustrator files. For now, just watch and listen. What's most important for me is for you to understand why specific layers are separated and the others are not. Let's go over the designs and decide which layers should be separated. For example, I see there's a gear here that I'll definitely want to animate in after effects. First, I'll ungroup this design, select the layer, and then separate it using the release to layers function. Afterward, I'll drag the layers out of the main layer and delete the empty one. Now that the layers are separated, we need to check if we've achieved the correct separation. For example, I see that the circle of the gear is in a separate layer. In this case, I don't need it to be separated, so I'll select both the circle and the gear while holding Shift and then group them together. Next, I'll delete the empty layer. Since this layer will be animated in after effects, I'll also give it a name. In my projects, I don't waste time naming all the layers in the Illustrator files because I know I won't use most of them in after effects. Only name the important layers. Awesome. Now, I'll do the same for this design. For example, since I know I want to create an animation where the lock unlocks, I'll make sure the two parts of the lock are separated. I'll also label these layers to make things easier in after effects. I can call them lock one and lock two. Let's see what we have in this design. I'll leave it as it is, since I can create this in seconds in after effects. Before importing the designs, don't forget to save the changes made to the designs. I'll enter each file and press Controls. Alright, now it's your turn to work with me. Let's import the designs one by one while choosing to import them as composition with layer sizes. Now, I'll show you the best way to prepare these designs and after effects to create the panning transition we plan. When creating a panning animation, it's essential to know how many scenes will be part of the animation sequence. In our case, we have scenes three, four, five and six. Scene seven comes after the Zoom in animation in scene six, so it won't be part of the panning transition. This means there are four scenes to include in the panning animation. Let's create a new composition. You can do this manually or use the shortcut. I'll name it scene two. The important part here is that we need to adjust the compositions width to fit all four scenes. I'll use the width box as a calculator and multiply the full HD width 1920 by four. This gives us a composition wide enough to include all the scenes we need for the panning animation. Now, we'll create these scenes within the composition. In such cases, I bring the design precomps into the composition as guides or references. Let's start by importing scene three and aligning it to the left. Next, bring in scene four and activate the snapping function to place it directly beside scene three. Repeat this for the remaining scenes. We won't add scene seven since it's not part of the panning transition. Now we have one large composition combining all four scenes. We can begin creating the objects for this scene using Illustrator layers or by creating elements from scratch and after effects, we'll do both. It's important to show you how to create design elements from scratch and after effects because along with learning transitions, I want you to discover after effects capabilities you might have missed. Let's start by lowering the opacity of the layers to use them as references. Turn off the transparency background to see them better and lock the layers to avoid accidentally moving them. We'll begin by creating the title in the first scene. If you don't see the text menus, open them from the Window menu. Let's open the paragraph tab as well. Now, let's adjust the color, the font, and the size of the text. We can check for the exact numbers in the Illustrator design. Now, adjust the leading as well. Once done, switch back to the selection tool and place the text in position. Let me correct a spelling mistake here real quick. Now, let's create the text box below the title. Since we'll need multiple text boxes, we'll create a new composition that we can duplicate and modify as needed. Press Control or Command N. Let's name it text box one. The size doesn't need to be too big. HD resolution dimensions will work for now. You can see the right dimensions here. All right. Let's change the width first and then the height. We can adjust it later if necessary. Now I'll teach you how to create an automatically adjusting text box that resizes based on the text inside it. Let's start by creating the text layer. In this case, we'll write course. Let's see the size this text needs to be in the design. The size is 50. Then adjust the text to the center and make sure it's aligned left to right. Now let's align it to the center of the comp. Then align the anchor point by holding Control or command and double clicking the anchor point tool. Now, let's create the text box. Go to the Effects and Presets panel and search for text box. This ready made preset is super useful, but dragging it to the layers panel won't work. To use it, double click on it. Once applied, place the text box below the text and adjust its parameters. First, make it interact with the text layer, turn off the stroke and color the box white. Then change the text color to black. Great. Now let's select the text box and open the scaling and the padding options. Next, adjust the padding of the box to scale it a bit and then let's set the corner roundness. Check the exact value in the Illustrator design by selecting the box with the direct selection tool. This way, I can see the rounded corners of this shape. Then I can go back to the project and set the roundness to the correct value. Once done, the text box will automatically resize whenever the text changes. Now let's adjust the compositions size because as you've noticed, it's too big right now. Let's find a nice proportion for it. We can divide the dimensions we have here and see how it looks. That looks fine. Awesome. Now let's go back to our scene and bring this precomp here. But before that, let's tag the scene to comp and blue for a more organized project. Now drag the text box into our scene. Let's place it in the right position. If you want to scale the text box to fit exactly with the design, you can do it by scaling the layer and activating the collapse transformations function for better quality. Alternatively, we can go inside the precomp and scale the overall padding. Let's set it to 70. That looks nice. Let's activate the collapse transformations function anyway, in case we decide to create some scaling animation for this precomp later. All right. Let's move to the next part. We need to create another text box here. For this, let's duplicate the text box precomp we have from the project panel. Enter it and change the text. You can copy the text from the design in Illustrator. Awesome. Now let's bring this precomp to the scene and place it in the correct position. Next, we need to create the lock. This is a perfect example of a case where it's better to use the Illustrator layer instead of creating it from scratch and after effects. Okay, so let's enter the precomp created from the Illustrator file and copy the necessary layers. But before that, let me show you something. The sphere that needs to be part of the lock one layer is currently on a separate layer. Your case, you won't see this because you're using my final files. Watch and listen to what I'm about to show you. This is a situation that can happen often. During the preparation process, we might miss a few things and it's important to know how to handle these situations once we're already in the animation phase. For instance, working with an extra layer won't ruin the project, but I prefer to avoid unnecessary layers in the timeline. If you try to fix this issue by editing the design file and saving it after importing the layers into after effects, it can mess up your project. Therefore, it's crucial to identify and resolve such issues before adding keyframes to the layers. In this case, I can delete the layers folder and the precomp for this scene from my after effects project. Once done, I'll go back to the design file, cut the sphere, and paste it into the relevant layer. After deleting the empty layer, I'll save the file. Then I can reimport the design into after effects without worrying about breaking anything in the project. Now I'll bring my new precomp to the scene to use it as a reference, just as I used the previous precomp before I deleted it. I'll enter the precomp, and now let's get back to work together. Copy the two layers of the lock and paste them into our scene. Place them in the correct position and don't forget to collapse the layers so that if we scale them in the future, they'll remain in the best quality. As you can see, after scaling the layers, they will lose a bit of quality. Let's collapse these two layers. All right, I'll bring them back to normal and let's move on. A quick reminder. Click here if you don't see the collapse function. Great. Now let's move on to the next part. First, duplicate the text box precomp again and change the text inside it. Now, I see that the comp size is too small for this one, so let's adjust it real quick. That's better. Now bring this precomp to the scene. Don't forget to collapse the comp, and let's move on and bring the gear layer from the precomp of the design. Enter scene five, select the gear layer and copy it from there. Now go back to the main scene and paste it here. Let's zoom out to see where it is and now bring it to the correct position. Awesome. We've finished creating the first three scenes that will be part of the panning animation. Now, let's address how to handle situations where we want to combine a composition with three D layers into our two D scene. In such cases, it's better to create the three D scene in a separate pre comp rather than dealing with three Dlayers directly in the main comp. Let's create a new comp, name it three D box, and set it to full HD resolution. Now let's learn a quick way to create a three D box. First, we need to create the walls of the box. For this, select the rectangle tool and double click on it to create a shape with the exact dimensions of the comp. Our next step for creating all the walls of the three D box is to duplicate the shape we created four times, so we have a total of five shape layers. After that, ensure the snapping tool is activated and now move the shapes to the sides. Then move the rest to the top and bottom. Next, select the anchor point tool and adjust the anchor points for each wall so that when you rotate them in the three D space, they rotate correctly. Great. And now let's convert all the layers to three D layers. Select all the duplicated ones and press R to open the rotation property. Now we need to adjust the rotation axis for each layer to create the box. For the walls on the sides, we will adjust the Y rotation axis. For the top and bottom walls, it will be the X axis. Nice. Now we can close the layers and parent the duplicated layers to the first one. By doing that, we can control the position of the entire box from one layer. All right, so let's place it here and set the Xaxis to 2000. Now let's select this scene from the project panel to use it as a reference to color the walls. If you're using the latest version of After Effects, you can use the eyedropper from the Essential Graphics panel. But if not, you can do it the old school way and change the color from the layers properties menu. Great. Now let's deal with the upper and lower shapes because they're too short. For this, open the scale property and uncheck the constrained proportions to scale them only on the Y axis. We can set it to 175. Let's do the same for the upper part. Awesome. Now we have a three D box. Since we already know that we want to create a Zoom and animation to transition to the next scene, let's create a camera. Now, let's press P and place the camera so the box will be inside the frame. I see we need to adjust the size of the upper and lower parts again. Let's fix that real quick. Just try a different value until you see the shape aligns with the rest of the walls. All right, we're done creating the three D box comp, and now it's time to bring it into our main scene. First of all, let's go back to scene two and then drag the three D box pre comp into it. Let's use the align tool to align it to the right side of this scene. Do not activate the collapse transformations function for this comp because the layers will interact with the dimensions of this comps resolution, and that's not what we want. We'll revisit this part soon. But first, let's learn how to create smooth panning transitions for this entire scene. To start, we need to create the line animation because this is the main object that will lead the entire scene. Now when I have a bunch of scenes used as a reference, I love to set a different opacity for each precomp to know where each scene ends. This helps me understand where the line and sphere should be placed. If we didn't have reference precomps to use as guides, I'd create three shape layers, 1920 pixels wide and 1080 pixels tall and spread them across the scene to act as guides. All right. Now let's learn how to create the line animation. First, we will create the line. Make sure no layer is selected, then select the Pen tool and set the stroke color to black and the stroke width to two. Then turn off the fill, zoom in on the preview, and start drawing the line. Don't create the line too close to the scene as we need some space for the sphere, create the first point here. Now hold Shift and create the next point. Then release shift to create the diagonal path freely. Don't worry about the misalignment here. Just keep creating the line. Let's finish the path somewhere in the center of the last scene in this comp. Finally, rename the layer to line or stroke and temporarily scale the stroke width so we can see what we're doing. Awesome. Now let's learn how to create the animation with the sphere. For convenience, let's isolate this layer and turn on the transparent preview background. Now, before creating the sphere, let's also isolate the first scene in this comp so we can use it as a reference. Make sure no layer is selected, then create a small sphere. We can select the first design scene to sample the right color of this bright blue sphere. Now, let's turn off the stroke and set the size of it to some rounded value. If you don't see the size property here, you can find it in the shape layer properties. Let's not forget to change the name. Great. Now we no longer need the reference, so we can start creating the animation. We practice this process in the logo animation course when creating a super cool logo animation for a made up tech company. For those who watched it, this will be a great refresher. For those who haven't, this will be a super cool trick to learn and use in your next projects. Let's start by selecting the path of the shape layer. Next, go to the Window menu, scroll down and open the built in script called Create Nulls from Path. Once you have the panel open, choose the trace path option. This will generate a null object with keyframes that represent its motion along the path. For now, the animation loops by default, but since we need it to play only once, we'll fix that. Select the null object, go to the Effects Control panel and uncheck the loop option. Now the null will travel along the path just once. Now to make the line appear only where the null moves, we'll apply the trim paths effect to the stroke layer. After adding the effect, we'll link the end property of the trim paths to the progress property of the null. This will synchronize the visibility of the line with the movement of the null. Next, we need to attach the sphere to the null. For this, hold Shift and then parent the sphere to the null. This will snap the sphere directly to the null's current position while creating a parent child relationship between the two. Now since the corners of the line look too sharp, we'll add a rounded corners affect to the stroke layer. Adjusting the radius to around 50 will smooth out the edges and make the line look cleaner and more polished. Now it's time to animate the sphere and the line together. To start, we can bring the stroke with back to two. Then let's disable the solo function to see back all the layers. And save the project before moving on. All right. Now let's go to the start of the path animation and turn off the transparent background so we can see what we are doing better. Next, let's bring the null object above to focus on it and press you to see its keyframes, which we will adjust and animate. Let's leave the first keyframe at zero. Now, let's stand on the second keyframe and change the value until we see the sphere pass the text box. We can set it to 20 for now. Let's see how that looks. I think it's too fast. So let's place the second keyframe at the two second mark and see how that looks. All right. Now let's go to the four second mark and move the sphere a bit forward. By doing this, we create a nice slow motion effect in the animation. Great. Now let's move 2 seconds again and position the sphere somewhere after the second text box. Then after another 2 seconds, let's move it forward a little more to create that cool, slow motion effect. Slowing down the sphere before transitioning to the next scene is not just for aesthetics. We do this to give the viewer enough time to read the text boxes. In our case, we are giving the viewer 2 seconds to read. However, if you have longer titles, you can give a bit more time. All right. Now let's repeat the same process for the final part. At the ten second mark, let's place the sphere somewhere around here. Then at the 12 second mark, let's move it a bit forward. Great. Now let's go to the 14 second mark and set the value to 100. Now I want to talk about something very important when creating path animations like we just did. A crucial thing to know about this technique is that when you adjust the points of the path, for example, if we want to bring the final position of the path a bit higher, you'll need to ensure everything aligns correctly. Let's do it real quick. First, stand at the final position. Then select the Pen tool, zoom in a bit and select the stroke layer. Click once on the last point and place it somewhere in the center of the frame. After doing that, the path is changed, and therefore the animation of the null is also adjusted. This means we need to go over all the keyframes and ensure that the position of the null, which is the sphere is still accurate. Okay, here, let's say we want to correct the sphere's position. To do this, make sure you are standing on the keyframe before adjusting the value and only then adjust the values. All right, I think everything else looks good, and we are ready to check the animation. At this stage, the animation looks great, but to make it even more engaging, we'll add some micro animations to the objects above the text boxes. For instance, we can rotate the gear and animate the lock to create an unlocking animation. These small details will give the scene more depth and personality, bringing the overall design to life. Let's start by creating a cool animation for the big title we have here. I want to make something interesting happen with the text when this sphere touches the text box at this point in time. Let's say this title represents a logo for the company and you've been asked to create a complex animation for it. This is a good example of when it's helpful to pre compose the layer and work on the animation inside a separate precomp. This case, let's not spend too much time creating something overly complex. I just want to show you when and why precomps are useful. For now, let's add some sparkles. First, let's precompose this title layer so that we don't clutter the timeline with too many layers. We can name the precomp main title. Make sure to select both options and then hit OK. Now, let's enter this precomp, align the layer to the center, and adjust the comp size to fit the animation we'll be creating. Press Control or Command K and let's see what will be the best dimensions for this precomp. Alright. Now let's make sure no layers are selected and create a sparkle shape using the Ellipse tool. We can name this shape sparkle. Once done, let's add the pucker and bloat effect to turn the circle into a sparkle shape. Let's try setting it to -90, maybe -80. That looks better. Perfect. Next, let's animate it. Go to the beginning of the timeline and instead of using the scale property, we'll animate the size of the shape. Soon, you'll understand why this is a better approach. First, set the size to zero and create the first keyframe. Then move 1 second forward and set another keyframe with the same value. Now at frame 15, set the size to 100. Let's easy ease the keyframes and adjust their velocity. Let's preview the animation. It looks good. Now duplicate the sparkle layer and let's place it somewhere in the bottom right area of the text. Now press S to open the scale property and shrink this duplicate a little. This is why we animated the size property instead of scale. It lets us resize the layer without messing up the animation. All right. Now let's return to the main comp and position this precomp to match the design. Don't forget to enable collapse transformations for the highest quality. The next thing we need to do is to time the sparkles to appear exactly when the sphere touches the text box at 1 second and 15 frames. To do this, let's enter the sparkle precomp and shift the animation so it starts at the right moment. Finally, to make the sparkles look more dynamic, create a small delay by moving the smaller sparkles animation a few frames forward. That looks great and we are ready to move on. Now I'll change the blue color of this precomp. To do that, I'll locate it in the project panel, change the color there, and then adjust it in the layers panel. It's blue because it was created from a precomp that was colored blue in the project panel. Now let's preview the scene. I think it looks great, so we can move on to animating the lock. First, we need to find the best timing to start the animation of the lock. We'll start the lock animation at 5 seconds and 15 frames. Select the lock two layer, open the position property, and create the first keyframe by lowering this part of the lock so it looks closed. Then move forward by 1 second and raise it back up. Let's place it here. Now, let's easy ease the keyframes to make the motion smoother. Then let's adjust the timing and see how it looks. It seems okay for now, so let's proceed to animating the gear. First, let's find out when to start it. We'll start its animation at 9 seconds and 15 frames, and this time we'll use the rotation property. Let's create an interesting rotation sequence. First, create a key frame with the current value, then move forward by 15 frames and rotate the gear backward to -45 degrees. Now go forward by 1 second and 15 frames and set the rotation to complete one full turn. For this, we need to rotate it in the opposite direction until we see one rotation and a positive 45 degrees. Now let's adjust the motion and preview the animation. I noticed that the second rotation seems too fast, so let's fix it using the graph editor. First, we need to select the problematic keyframes, then enter the graph editor and adjust their handles. We'll leave the first rotation as is and only adjust the handles of the second pair of keyframes to smooth it out. That's much better. With this, we've finished animating the first three parts. Now it's time to improve the animation and learn some handy tricks for refining keyframes. First, let's focus on enhancing the line animation. To make it easier to see, let's turn off all the reference precomps and change the preview background color to a neutral gray. You can do this by pressing Control K and adjusting the composition settings. Next, let's isolate only the layers that create the line animation so we can focus on them without the rest of the layers interfering. This way, we can see the line much better and we are ready to improve its motion. Let's press you on the null layer to reveal the keyframes. The first step is to convert these keyframes to easy ease by pressing F nine or FNF nine on Mac. This will smooth out the animation. Now, let's adjust the preview panel so we can see the entire scene to check how the animation looks after easing the keyframes. As you can see, the animation looks smoother, but because of the easing, we might notice some odd pauses in the motion where the sphere slows down too much. These pauses occur because there are points where the spheres speed drops to zero, and that's not what we want. We aim for a fluid and continuous animation. Don't worry, we'll fix this soon. For now, let's make this sphere enter the scene quickly, as we're aiming to create a match cut transition from the previous scene we animated in the last lesson. For this, let's enter the graph editor and drag the handle of this keyframe to the left. This will make the sphere enter quickly at the beginning. Ignore the pause we have here for now. We will fix this in a moment. Let's move on. Let's make the sphere go a bit faster at this point in time. We can do this by adjusting the velocity of these two keyframes, ensuring not to affect the previous keyframe. If you're wondering why we didn't use the keyframe velocity panel, it's because doing so would affect the velocity of the previous keyframe, as well. As you can see, if I set the influence for both keyframes to 85% and check it in the graph editor, we can see that this action affects the motion before and after this part. So I'll press Control or Command Z to undo the action and bring the handles back to the state where we adjusted them manually. Let's see how that looks. That looks fine, but there are still pauses during the animation, and we'll address them very soon. For now, let's continue adjusting the keyframes where we want the sphere to speed up like at this point in time. Let's adjust the handles of these keyframes just as we did earlier. If we want to be very precise, we can try to maintain the same velocity for these sections. Let's make this sphere go faster when it transitions to the next scene. Now, let's adjust this part as well. Try adjusting the handles until you see the velocity around 80 or 85%. Make sure the influence is within that range. Now let's adjust the velocity of the final part when the sphere moves to the next scene. Looks nice. Let's now go back to the main scene and review the animation once again before fixing the pause parts in the motion. All right. As you can see, we now have a much smoother motion, but the pauses still look odd. Let's finally address those. First, we need to understand why this is happening. These pauses occur because after easing the keyframes, there are parts in the animation where the spheres speed drops to zero, like in these areas. To fix this, all we need to do is increase the speed during these sections. We could manually bring each key frame up, but that wouldn't be very efficient. Instead, we can select these keyframes and double click on them to open the keyframe velocity panel. Here, check the continuous checkbox. This ensures that the keyframes are connected, allowing us to raise them slightly so they don't reach a speed of zero. Let's apply the same technique to this other section. Let's check how it looks. That looks much better. Now let's fix the other parts where the speed drops to zero. Check the animation in the tricky parts and adjust the handles to create a smooth curve. All right. Let's watch the animation from the beginning to the end. I think it looks amazing, and we can now save the project and move on. After creating the initial animation, I always review it once more with the rest of the scene to check if any adjustments are needed. The timing here is good. In this case, I feel the locks opening animation happens too quickly, so I'll open its key frames and drag the last one a second forward. That looks much better. I also want the gear animation to last longer. I'll open its key frames and move the last one too. Let's say, second 12. I think it looks awesome. Let's close the open precomps here before moving on. Nice. Now that we've adjusted the animation, I'll delete the reference precomps and create a proper background for this composition in case we want to add special colors later. To create a background, we can use a solid layer or a shape layer. In this case, I'll create a shape layer because it's easier to control the color. First, ensure no layer is selected. Then choose the rectangle tool and turn off the stroke. Select the appropriate color. We can sample it from here. Now, double click the rectangle tool to create a shape the size of the composition. Let's rename this layer too, BG one. I prefer to create three separate background layers for each part in case we decide to use different colors for specific sections. Open the properties of the shape and change the size. If you're using an older version of after effects, you can also adjust it from the layer itself. Let's uncheck constrained proportions to modify only the width and set it to 1920. After that, recheck constrained proportions and align this layer to the left side to serve as the background for the first section. Now I want to share a quick tip that can be very useful when creating panning transitions, like the one we're working on here. To make it easier to control the panning animation, we can use the background layers as guides. This will make more sense shortly. For now, let's turn on the stroke, set its color to black, and adjust the width to ten. Next, duplicate this layer and place it for the next section, ensuring it aligns correctly. To make this easier, activate the snapping function and grab the layer by the specific area you want to align. This ensures the snapping works as intended. Let's create another one for the third section. Now we have three backgrounds, each representing a scene, and we can clearly see where each scene starts and ends thanks to the strokes we added to the backgrounds. We will use these as guides when creating the panning animation. But before moving on to do that, let's purge the project. After effects, the purge function clears the cache or memory, freeing up resources and improving performance, especially when things start to slow down or you need to refresh preview renders. Once purged, let's return to the master composition and bring in the long scene we created earlier. Position it above the first scene, and now we need to find the correct starting point. Since we're aiming for a match cut transition, the second scene should begin exactly when the sphere from the first scene exits the frame. Let's scrub through the timeline to pinpoint that moment. Somewhere around here. Now, let's crop this precamp at the end. And now let's bring it to the second scene so it starts right after the first one. First, we need to align it to the left because that's where the scene begins. Next, we need to find the point in time where the sphere enters the second scene. This is a good moment. Let's trim it from the beginning to this point in time. Finally, let's place the second scene to start right after the first one. Now we have a nice match cut transition from the first scene to the second. Now we are ready to practice the panning animation. First things first, we need to find the point in time where the sphere moves from the first part to the second. As you can see in our case, this happens at the keyframe at the four second mark. From this point in time, the sphere goes to the next section. Let's place the time indicator here. This is where the panning motion should begin. In the master composition, open the position property of the precomp and create a keyframe at this point in time. Let's zoom in on the timeline for accuracy. Next, go back into the precomp to find the exact frame where the sphere enters the second part of the scene. It happens here at second six. Returning to the master comp, you'll notice the time indicator is already at the right spot. From this point in time, start moving the precomp to the left side. Ensure a smooth and continuous motion, don't move it all the way to the left. Instead, stop a few pixels before reaching the next section. Use the action grid to guide you. This is where the stroke layers we created earlier come in handy. They clearly indicate the boundaries between scenes. By using these guides, the panning animation becomes much easier to control and aligns perfectly with the transitions between parts of the long scene. Now let's move 2 seconds forward in the timeline because we know that the sphere will move slowly for 2 seconds once it enters the scene. At this point, move the precomp to the left again until the end of this part is visible, guided by the stroke of the background layer. This ensures a seamless and continuous panning motion that matches perfectly with the sphere's animation. Let's keep aligning the animation of the sphere with the panning movement. Since the sphere moves every 2 seconds, move 2 seconds forward in time again, shift the precomp left, and position it over the third part just like before. Repeat this process. Move 2 seconds forward, shift the precomp, and align it with the final part. And now when moving to the last section, bring the pre comp all the way to the left side to reveal the end of the scene. Note that relying solely on snapping for alignment here might not work perfectly. So take a moment to manually adjust the placement. To ensure everything is correct, toggle the transparent preview background on and off to check for any gaps or empty areas in the composition. Now let's review the animation to see how it looks. To summarize, all we've done is align the panning animation of the pre coom's position with the sphere's internal motion. The result looks great so far, but I want to enhance the movement at the beginning of this scene. Let me explain. I don't want the precomp to stay static at the start of the animation. Instead, I'd like to create a subtle continuous movement that leads into the first entrance of the sphere. To do this, let's stand on the first keyframe and move the precomp to the left. Then move 2 seconds backward in time. To work more precisely, you can position the time indicator here and change the time value directly in the settings to nine. Now let's move the precomp to the right. After that, let's go to the start of the precomp and bring it to its initial position. Let's see what we've got. The precomp starts moving with the sphere, but not in the right direction. 6. Preparing a scene for a 3D up-panning transition: Hi there, and welcome back. We'll start this lesson by reviewing the next scenes we need to animate. This time, we'll focus on the scenes featuring the characters, the laptop, and the key. We need to create transitions for each of these scenes. Pro tip, try not to work on more than three or four scenes at a time. Handling too many scenes simultaneously can complicate your animation process and mess up your project. For example, we could jump into animating the next scene after the key scene, but I prefer not to do that right now. Will do it after I finished creating the animation for the four scenes before at first, which will help me work more efficiently and stay organized. With that said, I'm planning to create a nice panning transition animation for the first three scenes and then we will create a Zoom in transition when we reach the laptop. This time, we will not create a simple side panning animation. Instead, we will make an upward panning animation and to make it more interesting, we will do it in three D space. Now let's start working on the scenes and preparing them for animation. Quick reminder, you don't have to do this because you already have the finalized Illustrator files after I finish preparing them for animation. For now, I want you to watch and focus on the process and listen to me as I explain the thinking behind the preparation process. Don't worry. I'll let you know when it's time to grab the mouse and take action. Before I begin, let me close all the irrelevant files I have here. All right. Now I will open the relevant ones, starting with scene eight. Awesome. Next, I'll open scene nine and scene ten as well. These are the scenes that will be floating in the three D space. We will deal with the laptop scene later. Now I'll start preparing the scenes, beginning with the eighth scene design. First, we need to think about which layers we want to separate for animation. So I'll ungroup the design. Then I'll make sure there are no groups left here. This can stay as a group for now because I don't need all the objects here to be on separate layers. Now while this layer is selected, I'll separate the layers using the release to layers function. Then I'll bring all the layers out of this layer and delete the empty one. Next, I'll ensure all the layers fit within the canvas to avoid cropping when importing. Now, I also want to separate the time indicator from the group because I plan to animate it later. I'll double click on it. Press Control X to cut it, open a new layer, and press Control Shift V to paste it in the same position on the new layer. Name this layer UI panel one, and for now, I'll copy this name and paste it to the layer with the time indicator illustration. Great. Let's move on to the character. First, I'll ungroup this design. Since this isn't a course on character animation and I don't want to overcomplicate things, I'll only animate the character's hand this time. This is the part that will move in after effects, so I'll cut it and paste it onto a new layer. I'll also label the layers related to the character for clarity. Now I'll check for any adjustments needed in the design. For example, I don't need this blue color here, so I'll delete it. However, after deleting it, I see that I need this part to animate the hand properly, so I'll bring it back and color it to match the rest of the boy. This demonstrates how important preparation is. It can prevent a lot of headaches later. Always plan what you want in the animation and prepare the design files accordingly. I'll continue separating this part from the hand because it needs to float in the air when the character moves its hand. Once I'm done with a small UI panel, I'll move on to deal with the finger. I'll cut the finger and paste it onto a new layer above the small UI part because I need the finger to be on top of it and not below it. Now, I'll label the layers for easier organization in after effects. Just like last time, I'm only naming the layers I plan to animate. Sometimes I name all the layers in my design files, but this time, I want to keep it quick. Just remember, if you're not into naming everything, at least label the layers you're going to animate like I'm doing here. All right. I think this scene is ready, and now I'll move on to prepare the next one. This scene is very similar to the previous one, so the process will be the same. Therefore, I'll speed up this process. First, I ungroup the design and separate the layers. Then I identify which elements need to be separated for animation, like the time indicator. After that, I label the relevant layers. Next, I toggle the layers on and off to ensure everything is properly separated and continue separating other parts like the character's hands. I'll ungroup the hand once again to cut only the arm part without the shoulder part. Now I'll make sure I'm selecting all the objects relating to the icon and then cut it from the layer. Finally, I'm creating a new layer above the icon layer and pasting the finger here. Now I'm making sure all the layers are separated by toddling the layers on and off. Then I'll make some adjustments, like in this area of the hand. I'll bring the finger up a little bit. Now I'm making sure to bring the cloud layers into the scene, and then I can move on to the next scene. To be honest, I'm planning to create this scene from scratch and after effects because I want to teach you how to make a three D laptop. Still, I'll separate the layers just in case. I won't name these layers though, since we'll handle them directly in after effects. As for the clouds, I prefer to prepare them in a separate Illustrator file containing all the cloud designs in one place. This is especially helpful when working with designs found online, like the Cloud designs I got from Freepik. When I use a file I downloaded from the Internet, I usually do not work on the original file. Instead, I'm saving this file as a new Illustrator file that will be used specifically in the project I'm working on right now in case I need to use it in the future again. I'll give it a name and ensure it's saved as an Illustrator file. Now I'll prepare this file by deleting unnecessary layers and separating the clouds. You may not see the purpose of this step now, but in other cases such as working with similar design elements like icons, avatars, or other repetitive components. It's useful to have them all in one file at consistent sizes. For now, I'll separate the layers. I'll ungroup the design and use the release to layers function as usual. But as you can see, it didn't work. At this point, we need to see the all separated layers under the main layer, but we don't see them right now. The designs you download from the Internet can be tricky sometimes. For example, after separating the layers, it seems they are grouped inside another group. In this case, we need to ungroup the design once again and only then release the layers. Great. Now we see all the separated layers. I'll bring them out from the first group, delete the empty layer, and then take them out of the second group and delete it as well. Now I can check that each cloud is on a separate layer. I'm showing you this process to highlight that sometimes the assets we download from the Internet require in death checking and adjustments. Always investigate the file and prepare it to fit your needs. Now we're ready to jump into after effects, but before that, we must save the files we worked on. All right. Now it's your time to grab the mouse and get back to action. Before importing the next scene, let's organize the project a bit. As you can see, the project panel is starting to get messy. First, let's create a new folder called assets and drag all the folders with the Illustrator layers into it. Next, let's create another folder called precomps and move all the precomps we've created into it. We can leave the scene comps outside for now because we want to have quick access to them during creating the project. For now, select the rest of the precomps we have here and drag them into the precomps folder. Now let's import the next relevant designs into the project. We'll bring in scenes eight, nine and ten. That's enough for now because these scenes need to work together. All right. Now since they work together, we'll create a new big composition for the upward panning transition animation. Press Control N or Command N on Mac to create a new composition. This time, we'll set the panning motion to go up. First, bring the width back to the default, name this comp scene three. Now let's multiply the height by three so we can get enough space to fit all three scenes vertically. Awesome. Now we have a new composition. Now, once again, I will show you my method to create this big scenes that include three different small scenes as in our case. I want you to get used to creating scenes from scratch and after effects. First, we need to create guides to indicate where each scene starts and ends. For this, we'll use the rectangle tool. Now make sure you set the stroke color to black and for the fill color, you can set it to gray. Now with the timeline selected, double click the rectangle tool to create a shape layer. Then let's open the shape properties and uncheck the constrained proportion for the size to set only the height to 1080. We can check the constrained proportion back on. After that, let's align this shape to the button of the comp. Now we will duplicate this layer and place it in the center of the comp. We can use the snapping tool for that. Finally, let's duplicate it once again for the upper part. All right. Now we have guides showing where each scene will be. These will help us organize the objects across the scene. Lock the guides and start creating the first part of the scene. Let's open the design for scene eight. Now let's copy the main elements we have in the scene. In this case, it's the character layers and the icon layers. Let's start by copying all the layers related to the character. Now let's go back to the main scene and paste the layers here. Position them in the bottom part of the comp. You can turn off snapping if needed. Let's place them in the right place. Then go back to the design and copy the UI panel layers. Let's place them somewhere around here. If you zoom in, you might notice that the layer order gets messed up during the copying process. Adjust the order for both the UI panel and the character layers. I'll explain why this happens and how to avoid it in a moment. For now, let's discuss something important, and it's answering the common beginner's question about how we can know when to precompose layers and where not. This scene is a perfect example to answer that question. When you want to create micro animations involving specific layers, you should precompose those layers. This makes it easier to work on the animation, similar to what we did with the main title animation in the previous lesson. This scene, I want to animate the time indicator, which is part of the UI panel. Therefore, I'll precompose the related layers and name the precomp UI panel one because there will be another one in the next part. Now let's enter the new precomp and adjust its size. The precomp currently has the same dimensions as the one from which the layers will be precomposed. To fix this, use the region of interest tool to select the area you need, then go to composition and select Crop Comp to region of interest. Now to align these two layers to the center, let's first parent the time indicator layer to the main UI layer and then select the main UI panel and align it to the center of the comp. Finally, let's press Control K to adjust the size of the composition. We don't have to do this. I just love to round the dimensions for a more organized project. This setup makes animating the UI panel much easier. When you return to the main comp, you'll notice the UI panel is in a different location because the precomp size was adjusted. Simply reposition it. Next, repeat this process for the character layers. First, we will precompose the relevant layers. We can call it man character. Then let's enter the precomp and adjust its dimensions. When adjusting the comp size, leave some extra room at the top because the character will throw the UI panel it's holding. Let's adjust the comp dimensions and then enter the comp settings to round the values of the dimensions. We can leave the height as it is. Awesome. Now let's go back to the main scene and adjust the position of the character preComp. Now it's time to add the cloud layers. As mentioned earlier, I prefer importing them from the separate Illustrator file we prepared, go to the AI folder and drag the Cloud file into the project. Import it as a composition with layer sizes. Once imported, let's now choose some big Cloud design to add below the character. I'll pick this one, drag it into the comp and scale it as needed. Let's try 500. Too big. Let's make it 400. That's better. Don't worry about the low quality. Later we will use the collapsed transformation function on all the illustrator layers in the scene to have them at the highest quality. For now, let's move on to the next part and start putting together the next scene. Let's enter scene nine, and as we did before, we will copy the relevant layers. But before doing that, I noticed that I didn't name the layers of the character in Illustrator. Already have the final files, so everything is fine on your end. For now, just watch and listen because this situation can happen to any of us during a project. It's important to understand how to deal with it. First of all, you can rename the layers and after effects. But what if I want to rename the layers in the original file to keep everything organized in case I need to share this project with someone else or send the project file with all the assets and designs to a client. In such cases, I prefer to adjust the names in the original file. Will rename all the layers related to the woman, then hit Controls to save the file. Now when I go back to after effects, it won't recognize the layers because the file was updated and the layer names are different, which after effects doesn't recognize. This will show us missing files. In such cases, where we haven't started animating the layers and we find the issue in the early stages like now, we can simply delete the comp and the folder of this design and then reimport it. Later, we'll learn how to deal with the same problem when we've already animated the layers. For now, let's get back to work and continue setting up the scene. Do you remember when we copied and pasted the layers earlier and the layer order wasn't correct? Then we had to adjust the order of the layers. Now, let's learn why this happens. It's very simple. After effects, the selection order plays a significant role. The first layer you select will appear on top when pasted. I want the time indicator layer to be first in the layers stack, I need to select it first when I'm about to copy the two layers. This means we need to start by selecting this layer, then the second one, and so on. When we paste them into the main scene, the layer order will be correct. The same applies to the woman's layers. If we want to preserve their order, we need to start selecting them from the topmost layer and work downwards. When pasting them, the layers will then retain the correct order. So when copying layers, pay attention to the selection order. All right. Now we have a bunch of layers in the scene, and we know that we need to create some micro animations for them. With that said, here's a question. What do we need to do at this point? In this situation, we need to precompose the layers. Let's start by precomposing the woman's layers. Now, let's precompose the UI panel layers. Let's call this precomp UI panel two. Awesome. Next, let's enter the UI comp and adjust the comp size as we did earlier. First, I will parent the first layer to the second one so I can align both of them to the center at once. Then I'll check the dimensions of the first UI panels comp and set the same dimensions for this one. Great. Next, I'll check the dimensions of the first character's comp and set the same dimensions for the women's comp. That's why I love to round the values of the dimension. That way, it's easier to remember the numbers. All right. And now let's enter the woman pre comp and adjust the dimensions of this comp. Let's now move the layers to the right place. To finish things up, let's bring a nice cloud into the scene. I think this one will work. Now, let's scale it. I think 600 will fit. Great. Let's save the project before moving on to the next part where we see the laptop and the next scene inside the screen. To make things more interesting, I decided not to use the laptop from the design. Instead, I'll create one from scratch in three D, using the Cinema four D render engine built into after effects. Cinema four D render allows us to extrude shape layers and add real three D depth to them. We add this feature when installing after effects. This can be more interesting if we animate the laptop opening up. I want to teach you how to combine a complex scene with both regular three D layers and cinema four D rendered layers. But for now, I don't want to change the renderer and the main scene because the cinema four D renderer can be demanding on the computer, especially with high resolution comps. Let's create a new comp for the laptop. We will convert the render of this pre comp into a cinema four D renderer to create the three D laptop. Soon you will get what I mean. Let's make this a full HD composition for now and hit Okay. Now let's bring the laptop from the design to use as a reference. And before starting to create the laptop, let's align it to the center, turn off the transparency background and lock this layer. Now, let's start creating the laptop. First, select the rectangle tool to create a shape for the upper part of the laptop. Turn off the stroke and open the layer to adjust the shape's dimensions. Uncheck the constrained proportions and let's round the numbers here. Let's now round the corners of this shape. We can set it to 20. Great. Now, move it to the side and change the color to light blue as in the design. Simply sample this color. Bring the shape back to the center. Before we move on, I want to note something important. Notice that I move the shape inside the layer and not the layer itself. This causes the anchor point to be off center. If this happens, use the anchor point tool, hold control or command, and double click on it to center the anchor point. Let's continue designing the upper part. Next, we need to create the screen. For this, duplicate the shape in this layer. You can do this from here or go old school and do it from the layer. So open the layer and the contents of it to select the rectangle we have here. Once selected, press Control or Command D to duplicate it. Open the size properties of the news shape and scale it down. We can select the scene from the project panel to see how it should look, or we can use the laptop layer we have in the scene as a reference and for sampling the right colors. Now, go back to the new shape. Once selected, let's color it white and add a black stroke. Let's set the stroke width to ten. Now I see that we need to adjust the dimensions of this shape a little bit as they might not match the first shape perfectly. We can uncheck constrained proportions and adjust each axis individually. Scale the width a bit and reduce the height. That looks better. Now adjust the corners as well. Finally, refine the dimensions a little more. Perfect. All right. Now let's create the second part of the laptop. For this, we can duplicate this layer. Let's turn it off for now. Next, let's open the second shape and use the smaller rectangle we have here to transform it into the laptop's track pad. First, turn off the stroke. Now, sample the correct color. Then open the first shape and change its color to a lighter blue. Great. Now, go back to the second shape and adjust its dimensions. Make sure to uncheck the constrained proportions and let's try to set the width to 200, the height to, let's say 150 or 120. That looks good. Move it down and let's start creating the keyboard. To create the keyboard, we need to create another shape inside this layer, make sure the layer is selected. Now, create a symmetrical square inside the layer by holding the Shift key while drawing it. Let's now open the new rectangle and adjust its dimensions. We can set it to 35. Now, let's round its corners to fit the design. I think we can set it to ten. Then change the color to a darker blue from the reference. Now, let's learn how to create multiple copies without manually duplicating them. First, make sure this shape is selected, then click on AD and choose the repeater effect. Now, let's adjust the parameters for this effect. Let's make ten copies. Next, open the transform properties of this effect and adjust the position. In our case, we can set it to 46. Awesome. Before moving on, we can close the properties of this shape. Now, duplicate this rectangle shape with the effect applied and move it down. Use the selection tool to do that. Once in place, press Control or Command D to duplicate it once again and then place it below the second row. Finally, let's do this process one more time. It's important for me to show you this process to help you understand how to use the shape layer tool. Shape layers are one of the most underrated topics in after effects for beginners, but I hope this process helps you realize how useful they are. Now let's convert it to a three D shape. First, scale down the reference layer and move it to the side to keep things from getting in the way while we're working. Now turn the upper part back on and move the lower part down. Use the snapping function to grab the layer from the upper area so it will snap to the upper part. Great. Next, bring the anchor point of the upper part to the bottom of the layer. Then bring the anchor point of the bottom part to the top area. Now convert the layers to three Dlayers. This way, when we rotate the X axis of the layers, they will rotate in a way that simulates the laptop opening and closing. We can set the X rotation axis of the bottom part of the laptop to -80 for now. The same goes for the upper part. But for now, let's leave the X axis of this one at zero degrees. Awesome. Now let's change the renderer to the cinema four D renderer. Wait a few seconds for the update. If you don't see the little renderer menu, you can also go to the composition settings, head over to the three D renderer and change it from there. If you don't see this option, it's probably because you didn't check the box for Cinema four D functions during after effects installation. In that case, save the project, exit after effects, uninstall it, and reinstall it, making sure to include cinema four D functions. Now when we open the layer, we'll see geometry options where we can set the extrusion depth. Let's change the view to see how it looks. As you can see, it's now a real three D object. Let's set the depth to, let's say 30. Next, let's do the same for the second part. On second thought, 30 seems too much. Let's set it to 20 and change it for the first layer as well. Note that the more depth you add, the harder it will be for your computer to preview and render the scene. Now let's go back to the regular view and continue designing the laptop. As you can see, there are slightly darker colors in some areas of the laptop design. Let's learn how to do that, starting with the bottom part. Open the contents of this layer and select the shape you want to add an additional color to. In our case, this is the first rectangle. While this shape is selected, go to add, then side and click on color. Sample the color from the design. Now move on to the upper part of the laptop and color its sides as well. Let's select this layer press R and now rotate it so we can see the sides of this shape. After that, don't forget to select the rectangle you want to adjust in the contents of this shape and only after that add a side color. If you don't select the rectangle, it won't work. This time, I'll choose a brighter color. With this, we have finished designing the laptop. Can now delete the reference layer, bring everything back to normal, and move on. Let's bring the rotation of the upper part of the laptop to zero. The next thing we should do is adjust the comp size because we don't need all these empty areas around the laptop. Make sure to check the preview box to see what you are doing. We can set the width to 800 and the height to 750. That looks good enough. Now we have a pre comp with a cinema for D render and we can go to our main scene and bring this pre comp into it. Let's place it here for now and organize our project before moving on, starting with closing all the open precomps we have here. Keep scene two and the master comp open. Next, let's tag our new scene in blue so all the main scenes will have the same color. Then let's bring all the newly created precomps to the precomps folder. We can also move these precomps, including the main characters precomp. Finally, let's move the folders of the Illustrator layers to the assets folder. Let's not forget the clouds folder as well. All right. Now we are ready to start animating the scene. Since we've been using after effects for a long period of time, it's a good idea to purge the software to clean up everything in the back end, preventing errors during the animation of this complex scene. And now before moving on to the animation, let's add the titles for each of the scenes. To do it, we can copy them from the main design. Scale down the font and adjust the leading as needed. Now, to keep the timeline organized, let's place this title beside the layers of the scene. Then duplicate the text layer and move it up. Let's also bring it to the right position in the scene. We can place it above the second UI panel pre comp. Once done, let's go back to the design to copy the second title. Don't forget to adjust the font size and the leading. Great. Now, we have one last thing to do before starting the animation, and that's bringing the rest of the clouds to the scene and converting all the layers to three D layers because we want to create an uphanding animation with a nice parallax effect. First, let's start by converting the layers we have here into three D layers. Click here if you can't see the three D icon. Now before bringing the rest of the clouds, let's create a new camera in the scene. When working with a three D scene, it's better to create a 35 millimeters camera, even if we won't animate it. This makes spreading the three D layers more convenient since we know exactly where the camera is located. Now let's open the clouds folder and start scattering them around the scene. First, bring in this one and place it beside the first scene layers. Now let's find a nice place for it in the scene. We can turn off the snapping to move the layers freely. Now open the scale of this layer, scale it to 400, collapse it, and let's position it somewhere around here for now. Great. Now, before bringing the next cloud into the scene, let's practice working more efficiently. First, convert this cloud to a three D layer. Then duplicate this layer and move it to the desired position. While this layer is selected, hold down Alt or option and drag the next cloud onto it to replace it. This avoids bringing in the second cloud manually, adjusting its scale, and converting it to a three D layer. Now, let's use this technique and continue arranging the rest of the clouds in the scene. For now, spread the clouds across the scene as you want. Soon we will check the design to adjust their location. Speed up this process now. All right, I think it looks good for now. Next, let's organize our timeline because we have a lot of layers here. First, tag all the clouds in purple. Now, let's select all the layers that belong to the first scene, including the character precomp and tag them in a different color. Let's say green. After that, select the layers of the second scene and tag them in orange. This way, we can easily differentiate between the layers of each scene. Now, since we're dealing with three D layers, the order of the layers doesn't affect the scene. Let's move all the clouds above the other layers, separating them from the scene layer. That way, it will be easier for us to spread them across the three D space. Great. Now let's switch to the top view and start adjusting the position of the clouds to create some nice depth in the scene. All I'm doing now is just moving the clouds closer or farther from the camera to create an interesting look for the scene. Moreover, the more the layers are spread, the better the parallax effect will look like when we create the panning motion. If you are not sure where to move them, select the pre comp of the design to see how it's supposed to look. I think we need to add another cloud here. Let's duplicate this one, move it down and replace it with another cloud. Looks good. Now, let's continue distributing the layers in three dimensional space. I'll speed up this process now. As you can see, I'm using both views for this task. When I want to move the layer closer or farther from the camera, I use the top view. For moving the layers up down or side to side, I use the active camera view. We can also adjust the position of the rest of the layers in the scene. All right. With this, we've finished setting up this big scene, which includes three scenes in it. Now we're ready to start animating it. We'll do that in the next lesson, so see you there. 7. Animating a 3D up-panning transition: Hi, we will start this lesson focusing on animating this scene. First, we will animate the main elements, and after that, we will animate some micro animations that need to happen here. First of all, let's remember how the previous scene ended. I see that we plan to create another match cut where the small sphere goes up. This means that this sphere needs to enter our new scene. Therefore, let's copy this layer and paste it into our new scene. You can select the camera to paste it above this layer. Let's bring this layer down. But before that, delete the keyframes on it. Press you and click on the stopwatches of the position and the scale properties. We can go back to work with One View. Now let's think of a way to animate this sphere. I want this sphere to enter the scene from the bottom part and go up while pausing beside the titles. That is, I want to create a panning motion, but this time, an upward panning. All right. Let's make this sphere enter the scene and stand beside the title. Let's bring it down here, out of the scene, align it to the center, make sure we're at the beginning of the timeline, and now create the first keyframe for the position property. We can zoom in on the timeline to see the timestamps as seconds to create the animation more comfortably. Now let's move 1 second forward and bring the sphere beside the title. In these situations, as I already mentioned before, we need to give some time for the viewer to read the text. Therefore, we will make the sphere stay at this point for about 2 seconds, move to second three and click the stopwatch to create a keyframe with the current value. All right. Now I want the sphere to slowly move to the next position. Let's move 2 seconds forward in time and bring the sphere to the second title. Let's make this sphere stay here for 2 seconds and then move 2 seconds forward again to bring it to the third scene. We can use the align tool to place it in the center at this point. Awesome. The next thing we should do now is improve the path of the spheres position because it's too straight right now. For this, we can use the convert vertex tool. So long press the Pen tool and select the convert vertex tool. Now click once on this point, then press V to go back to the selection tool and start adjusting the handles of this point. Drag the handle created by the Vertex tool to the left to make the path a bit rounded. All right. Now let's adjust the first keyframe as well and make the sphere go up at the beginning. I think it looks nice, and we can move on to the next part. Let's click this keyframe and bring the handle down. That looks fine for now. Let's check the final part. I don't think we need to adjust anything for the final part. Let's move on to improving the motion. For this, first things first, let's convert all the keyframes to Easy Ease. Now let's enter the speed graph editor and start adjusting the handles. Let's make this sphere enter the scenes super quickly in the beginning, so our match cut transition works perfectly. Looks good. Now let's make this sphere move to the second title slowly, then gain speed and slow down again before it reaches the title. Let's see how that looks before moving on to the final part. Looks great. Let's do the same for the final part. Let's see how everything looks together. Awesome. Now, after finishing the animation for the main element in this scene, we can move on to creating the panning up transition animation in the master comp. Why is this the main element of the scene you ask? It's because the animation of the sphere decides where we will transition from one scene to the other. Let's go back to our master comp and add the new scene we just created, making it work with the previous one by creating a match cut transition. First, let's crop this comp where it ends. For this, we can enter it and see where the last keyframe is. Let's stand here and press in to shorten the work area to this point. Now, right click and crop the comp. Back to the master comp. Let's zoom a bit into the timeline and see where the exact moment is where the sphere is out of the scene. I see that's happening somewhere around here. Let's crop this comp to that point. Now, let's bring our new scene. After that, position it so we will see the first scene inside it. That is, bring the pre comp to start from the bottom part, since that is the beginning of the scene and start this comp from the point where the sphere is about to enter the scene somewhere around here. Let's crop this comp from the beginning and move it right after the previous scene. By doing that, we created a perfect match cut. This sphere's motion seamlessly transitions from one scene to the other. Awesome. Now we are ready to create the panning up transition. As I mentioned earlier, the animation of the sphere will decide where the transition needs to happen. So first, let's stand at the beginning of this scene, and now let's create the first position keyframe for this comp. Next, let's enter the scene and stand at the point in time where the sphere arrives at the first title. If we are not sure where it is, press you on the sphere layer to see its keyframes. Now we can follow the keyframes here to help us create the panning keyframes in the master comp. At this point, we can move the scene up a little bit to create a gentle panning up animation. Let's see what we've got. Looks nice for now. Next, let's enter the scene again and stand at the point in time where the sphere is still standing. Back to the master comp. Now let's move the comp down a little more to continue the gentle movement. We don't want the scene to be static when the sphere is not moving. It will look better if there's a bit of movement in this situation to avoid a boring pause. All right, so now we know that after the pause, the sphere will arrive at its next position after 2 seconds. Therefore, we can change the number here to 31, which will place the time indicator exactly 2 seconds forward. Now let's move the comp somewhere around here. After that, let's move 2 seconds more and create a gentle upward animation for the pause moment by moving the comp down. Then after 2 seconds, let's move the comp further down to get to the final scene where we see the laptop. Note that if you want to use the aligned tool to align this comp to the upper area, it won't work since there are keyframes on this comp. Therefore, manually ensure that the comp is perfectly aligned. That's where the guides we created come in handy. Now we can start adjusting the motion of our panning animation. First, let's convert the keyframes to eases and then enter the graph editor to adjust the motion. For the first keyframe, we can match it with the motion of the sphere. All right. Now let's match the transition parts when the comp goes from one scene to the other approximately the same way we did for the sphere. Make the motion start slow, gain speed, and slow down towards the end. Let's do the same for the final part. And now let's see how that looks. Awesome. I think it looks nice, and now we can adjust the weird pauses we created after easing the keyframes. To fix this, we can select these keyframes and double click on them to make them continuous. This will allow us to grab these keyframes and move them up a bit so their speed won't be zero. So now after the sphere arrives, the upper panning motion will continue. Let's do the same for the rest of the pause moments. I'll speed this process up a little bit. Let's see what we've got. All right, everything looks great. Now, after creating the animation for the main element inside this comp and then creating the transitions, we can finally create some nice micro animations inside the scene. We won't make something complex. That's not the goal of the course. I just want to show you the process of creating complex projects with scenes containing a few animated sequences. All right. The first micro animation we will create is the animation inside the first UI panel when the sphere arrives here. While standing at this point in time, let's enter the first UI panel pre comp and animate the time indicator we see here. Can create the first keyframe here. Let's move the layer so it starts from this area. Now let's move 1 second forward and move it to the right. Finally, let's adjust the velocity and see how that looks. Let's go back to the main scene and see how that looks again with the rest of the elements in the scene. I think it's too fast. Let's make it last for 2 seconds instead of one. While standing here, move the last keyframe to this point in time. Looks great. Now, from this exact point in time, let's create some micro animation for the character. Character animation isn't the main topic of this course, but I do want to teach you some key tricks for animating characters and after effects, especially without rigging them using rigging plugins. So stand at second one and enter the character pre comp. Now before starting to animate the layers, when working with characters, I drop the opacity of the layers to 50%. This makes it easier to see clearly where the parts are connected. Need to know when the parts are connected because I need to move the anchor points of the layers I will animate. Like in this layer, let's select the anchor point tool and move it to the center of the area where the two layers are connected. If you move it to the wrong place, the movement will look weird. But when it's in the center, it will work fine. Place it here and check the rotation. Looks good. Next, we can parent the finger layer to the hand layer, so it will move together with it. That looks great. Now we can also parent the UI icon to the hand as well. This way, all the relevant layers will move together. Now from this point in time, let's create a nice rotation animation for the hand to make it look like it's throwing the icon. First, let's create the first keyframe where the rotation is set to -30. Now let's move 1 second forward and rotate the hand, set it to zero. Finally, move another second forward and copy the first keyframe so the hand will return to its initial position. As we do for all types of animations, we first create the initial movement and then improve it. Now that we have the base movement, let's make it a bit more interesting by making the hand go down before going up. Then we can make the hand go downward just before reaching its final position. This technique is one of the 12 principles of animation called follow through and overlapping action, which makes the motion of elements feel more natural and less robotic. Now from this point in time, we need to make the icon fly in the air. We will create the first position keyframe here, then go to the 1 second mark and bring the icon up. Finally, copy the first keyframe to make it return to its initial position. When checking the animation, I see that the icon starts going up too early. To fix this, let's move the first keyframe five frames forward so the animation will start later. Let's do the same for the landing animation. Let's make the landing happen earlier. Now the icon layers start going up at the right time. Awesome. Now we can create a nice rotation during the flying animation. Press R, create the first keyframe, then go to the landing keyframe and make the icon complete one full rotation. Looks nice. Great. Now we can bring the opacity back to normal and start improving the animation we just created. Starting with the main animated element in this animation, which is the hand, because the hand is the layer that the rest of the layers are parented to. First, let's convert all the keyframes to easy Es. Now let's change the velocity to 85% and see how that looks. I'll check the animation two times to make sure. I think it looks great. Now let's easy ease the rest of the key frames. Looks good. But I think we can make the icon stay a bit longer in the air by adjusting the handles like this, making the layer slow down when it's reaching the top position. Let's watch it one more time. All that looks great. Now let's go to the main scene and move on to the next thing, which will be animating all the micro animations for the next scene from the point in time where the sphere arrives at the second title. But before that, let's watch the animation we created for this scene to see if the timing of our micro animation here is okay. Looks awesome. Now we can move on to the next part. So first, we need to stand at the moment in time where we want the micro animation to start. In our case, it is when the sphere stops at second number five, and as with the previous part. Let's start with animating the UI panel. Create the first keyframe at this point in time. Let's start the animation of this layer from the left side. Then let's move 2 seconds forward. That is to second eight and move the time indicator to the right. Let's adjust the easing and see how that looks. Great. Now we can animate the woman character exactly as we animated the man character. So enter the precomp and now start by lowering the opacity of all the layers. Next, adjust the anchor point of the main layer we will animate and start creating the rotation animation exactly as we did for the first character. But before the animation, don't forget to parent the finger and the icon layers to the hand. All right. Now this time, we can set the first rotation key frame to a value of 20 degrees. We can zoom in on the timeline to see the timestamps as seconds. Let's create the first keyframe. Now, move to second eight and create the same keyframe. Then in the middle of these keyframes, set the hand rotation to zero. Now let's improve the animation by making the hand go down a bit before going up and then go down again before returning to the original position. Similar to how we did for the man character in the previous part. Now from this point in time, we can make the icon fly in the air. Then let's move to 6 seconds and 15 frames and bring the layer up. Finally, let's go to 7 seconds and copy the first keyframe here. Let's also make it rotate during the flying animation. Everything looks okay for now. Let's now select all the layers, bring the opacity back to 100 and see how that looks. I think the icon rotates on the wrong axis. Let's change its last rotation key frame to minus one so it rotates to the left side. Now let's adjust the keyframes and check what we have. First, let's improve the animation of the hand. Enter the velocity panel and set it to 85%. After that, let's improve the animation of the icon. As we did the previous time, let's make it slow down while hovering in the air. For some reason, the animation seems super slow. I think I didn't match the timing and duration of this animated sequence correctly. Let's go back to the first character comp and see what the animation duration is there. Let's focus on the timing of the hand animation. This animation lasts for five frames and after five frames, the icon starts to fly. Let's see what we did in the woman character comp. I see now, we need to shorten all the animations here by five frames. First, let's bring the hand keyframes a few frames backward. Next, bring the icon keyframes to start from 5 seconds and 20 frames. Then bring the last two keyframes of the hand to start from 7 seconds. Let's see how that looks. I think we can move the middle key frame of the hand here. I wanted to show you that sometimes during the process, we can make mistakes and not perfectly match and time the animations. This is why it's so important to take the time to check every animation a few times before moving on. Even after adjusting the timing of the woman character, the animation still doesn't last exactly like the man character's animation. Man character's animation last exactly 2 seconds while the woman character's animation lasts 2 seconds and ten frames. That's okay for me because the second title is a bit longer and it's good to give the viewer an extra ten frames to read it. With that said, let's now improve the look of the scene with some cool depth of field effect using our camera in the scene. Since we want the sphere to interact with our camera depth of field, let's convert the sphere layer to a three D layer as well as the rest of the layers in this scene. That way, the camera will interact with all the layers we have here. And we will be able to create an interesting look for the scene. First, let's open the camera options and then activate the depth of field here. Now, let's open the top view and adjust the focus distance. Since we place the most important layers at this position, we need to bring the focus distance here. We can adjust the value manually. Now let's play around with the aperture and the blur level to get a nice depth effect in the scene. I think it looks great, but I do think we need to adjust the positions of some of the clouds to achieve a more balanced composition. If you want to learn more about creating better compositions and designs and understand where your composition needs adjustments, I highly recommend checking out my eBook, motion by Design. In this book, you'll learn essential design principles and the fundamentals of graphic design, allowing you to create more engaging and high quality scenes in your animation projects. It's basically everything I learned in four years of college while earning my bachelor's degree in visual communication condensed into seven super easy to understand chapters. Knowledge will help you stand out from other motion designers, give it a chance if you're serious about your career. Back to the lesson. Now I will speed this process up. All I'm doing here is moving the position of the clouds to create a more balanced composition. Okay. Now let's go to the master comp and see how everything looks together. I think we should zoom out a little bit because right now the scenes are too close and everything looks too big. Let's go back to the scene. Since we have a camera here, it will be very easy to make everything look a bit smaller by moving the camera backwards slightly, and we will do that by adjusting the Zaxis. Adjust your active camera preview to fit the preview panel so you can see the entire scene. Let's select the top view and do the same. Now let's move the camera back a little bit. That's enough. Afterward, don't forget to adjust the focus distance accordingly. All right. I think it looks better now. Let's check it in the master comp as well. I think everything looks great and we are ready to move on. Let's enter the scene we worked on and now delete the guide layers we created in the beginning because we no longer need these guides and instead create a new solid to use as a background for the entire scene. As you can see in the design, there is one color for the background for these three parts. Let's right click here, go to New and select solid. Let's sample the blue color from the design. We can rename it to BG Sky. Then make sure it's comp size, and hit Okay. Let's now bring it below all the layers. Now we are ready to move on. Let's close all the precomps we have here and go back to the master comp to see what our next step should be. I think at this point we can make something more interesting instead of just presenting the title. For example, we can add some sparkles. Let's enter the second scene and use the sparkles we created for the first title of this scene. Let's enter the first main title precomp, now copy the spark we have here. But before that, let's use this opportunity. Let's press you to see where the animation on these layers ends and crop the layer accordingly. Now let's copy them. Now go back to the main scene and after that enter the box scene. Now, scroll down in the Layers panel, select the title and paste them here. Finally, let's zoom out in the timeline to find the sparkle layers and adjust the timing of the sparkles when we see the final title here. We can start their animation at around second 17. Let's check the timing. Let's move them to start from the second 17 and 20 frames. And now let's not forget to adjust the position of the sparkles according to the title location. I will place the big one somewhere around here, and after that, I'll bring the small one below the letter end. Let's see what we got. Okay, let's now go back to the master comp to see it with the rest of the scenes. Everything looks nice and we are ready to finish animating the third scene by creating the Zoom in transition to the laptop, leading into the next scene. To do this, we'll add the design of the next scene into the laptop comp and use the camera we have in this scene to create the Zoom in animation. During this complex transition, we'll encounter a lot of issues, so get ready to learn some awesome tricks. To start, we first need to prepare the design file and Illustrator. You don't need to do anything since you already have the finalized design file. Just watch and listen. Open the design of this scene and start by ungrouping the design so I can separate the layers. After that, I'll get them out of the grouped layer and delete it. Now since I already plan to use the small sphere inside the key to use as a transition object for the next scene, this sphere will turn to the background of the scene after that. This is why I will make sure to separate this layer from the key so I can animate it separately. Now I'll label the important layers and save this design before importing it into after effects. Now it's your turn to get back to work. Let's drag the 11th scene into our project. This case, we won't create this scene from scratch and after effects. We'll use the design precomp we already have here. First, let's enter the laptop comp and bring this precomp inside. Now we need to convert this layer into a three D layer so it interacts with the rest of the elements. Now, let's adjust the size of the comp and place it at the center of the laptop screen. To fit the precomp, exactly in the laptop, we can set the size to 23.5. Let's zoom in and make sure it's aligned to the center of the laptop. Great. To make things more interesting, I want to create an opening animation for the laptop. First, we need to find the point in time where it needs to happen. We can start from the point where the sphere is about to move We can open the key frames of the sphere and see where it's happening. The sphere is starting to move toward the laptop from second seven. Place the time indicator here and enter the laptop comp. We can turn off this precomp for now. Now, let's open the rotation properties for both layers and use the X axis rotation to create the opening animation. At this point in time, set the value to -90 for the lower part, and for the upper part, set it to 90. Now let's move 1 second forward and set the value to zero for the upper part. For the lower part, we can set it to -80. Now let's adjust the velocity and see what we've got. I always go back to the master comp to see how it looks in the finalized form. As you can see, the laptop is already opened before the sphere arrives. That means that we need to delay the animation slightly. Let's start the animation from somewhere around here. Enter the laptop precomp and shift the keyframes to this point in time. Let's go back to the master comp and check it once again. That looks better. Now let's turn the scene 11 precomp back on. Now we need to make the precomp move together with the upper part of the laptop. For this, while the laptop is already opened, let's parent this comp to the first shape layer, which is the upper part of the laptop. Awesome. Now it's attached to the laptop screen and everything looks fine for now. Next, we can move on and start creating the Zoom and animation. To see how much to Zoom and with the camera, we need to see the dimensions of this precomp. Soon you will understand why. For now, let's enter this precomp and add the fill effect to the background. Our goal is to change the color of the background to make it visible on the white screen of the laptop. This way, we can clearly see the borders of the scene. All right. Let's go back to our main scene and start creating the Zoom and animation. First, we need to find the point in time to start zooming. I think we can start right after the sphere arrives in this scene. Open the position property for the camera and create the first keyframe at this point. Now move 2 seconds forward and start adjusting the position values. But before that, make sure you can see the top of the scene. This way, we'll know when to stop zooming with the camera. Now, we need to bring the camera closer to the laptop screen until we see the key precomp covering the entire frame. For this, make sure to move the camera down and up as well. The depth of field is interfering right now, so access the camera options and turn it off for now. Great. Let's continue adjusting the camera's position. I see we've already reached the upper border of the scene. That's why we colored the background to gray. By doing that, we now know that we can stop zooming with the camera. Let's check how it looks in the master comp. We can still see an empty area here. That means that we need to lower the camera and zoom in a little bit more. Let's check how that looks in the master comp now. I think that looks better now. Let's turn on the action grid here to see if the scene is aligned to the center. Looks great. Now we can go back to the scene and improve the key frames we just created for the camera. Before we move on, I want to point out a minor mistake we made here. Let me explain. When we entered the scene to adjust the zooming of the camera after checking it in the master comp, I didn't stand exactly at the second keyframe of the camera while adjusting it. That means we created a new keyframe for the adjusted camera position instead of replacing the old one. This is why we see another keyframe here. This keyframe represents the adjusted camera position, but it's not at the correct point in time. Therefore, we will stand at the second keyframe, delete it, and move the new one to the correct position. This is one of the most common mistakes beginner motion designers make. Showed you this mistake so you remember to make sure to stand at the keyframe before adjusting its value. All right. Now let's adjust the easing of the camera's motion to make it look less robotic and see how that looks. That looks very good. Now let's check it in the master comp as well. All right. That looks great. Now let's go back to the scene and continue animating it. We can now bring back the depth of field for the camera. Now, since we don't need blur for the scene when entering the new scene, we'll animate the blur level. Let's create the first keyframe for the blur at second nine and then after 1 second, set the blur level to zero. Let's easy ease the keyframes and see how that looks. I think this animation happens too early, so let's move it 1 second forward to start from second ten. Let's see how that looks. I think we can start at 15 frames earlier. Okay, I think it looks better now and we can move on to the next step. This time, we'll learn how to achieve the highest quality resolution for a project when dealing with such a complex scene. Even if we set the preview quality to full, the scene might still not look sharp. First, let's learn what we can do to improve the look of the scene involving the key. The first thing to understand is that activating the collapse transformations function won't work in this case because it will mess up the elements inside the precomp created with the cinema for D renderer. So don't think this is because of the camera blur. We don't have blur at this point in time. In these situations, we need to activate the collapse transformations function, but not for the time period when the laptop is shown. Stand at the point in time where the camera animation is about to end. Then select the laptop precomp and press Control Shift D to split this precomp at that point. Now, we'll collapse only the second comp. Furthermore, to hide the unsharp parts, we can increase the blur at the end of the camera animation. For this, first, let's move the blur animation to end with the camera animation. Now at this point, set the blur to 20. After that, to make a smoother blur animation, let's stand at this point in time and set the blur to 50. By doing this, we've created a smooth and unseen transition between the uncollapsed comp and the collapsed one. All right, I think it looks great and we can now move on to creating the transition for the next scene. Remember, you need to give the viewer enough time to read the text. To check this, read the text yourself and see how long it takes you. I think we can start the transition from second 13. Now let's enter the laptop comp and then enter the scene pre comp. Now to create the transition, place the sphere above all the layers and create a scaling animation for the sphere. At this point in time, create the first keyframe. Then move 2 seconds forward and scale the sphere until it covers the entire frame. Now, collapse this layer to make it sharp and then adjust the key frames. Let's set the velocity to 85% and see how that looks. Looks great. To wrap this scene, let's collapse the rest of the illustrator layers we have here for better quality. Finally, let's turn off the fill effect we have in the background layer. Don't forget to collapse this layer as well. Let's go back to the main scene and see how that looks. All right, I think it looks great. Now let's create some nice text animation in this scene to make it a bit more interesting. Since we cannot do something creative with the Illustrator layer, let's copy the text from the design and create a new text layer in after effects with this text. Align it to the composition and place it in the correct position. We can now delete the old layer. Now I'll show you how to create a cool, wavy text animation using text animators. I won't explain it in depth because I cover this in my course, text and motion. If you want to learn more about text animation and after effects, go check it out. All right. First, we'll create an animator for the position property. Set the position to -80 so the text moves upward. Next, open the range selector and the advanced menu. If we move the offset, you'll see the text animates every character, which is not what I want. I want the animator to animate every word, so I'll select words in the based on menu. That's better. After that, I'll make sure the animation starts from the first word in the text, animating from left to right. For this, we need to change the shape of the animator. Let's try ramp up. Now when I go from -100 to 100 in the offset, the text starts to go down and that's not what I need. I want it to go from down to up. Let's change the shape to ramp down and check it again. Yes, that's much better. Now we can start creating the animation. Let's begin the animation at second 11. Create the first keyframe for the offset property and set it to -100. Move 1 second forward and change it to 100. Then adjust the easing of this animation. Set the E's height to 20 and the Es low to 80. Let's see what we've got. Great. Now the text moves up in a wavy motion. Next, duplicate the animator we created. Then press you to see the keyframes and move the second animators keyframes five frames after the first one. Finally, open the second animator and change the position value from -80 to 80. Now, if we check the animation, we will see that we created a nice wavy text animation. Everything looks good. I think we can now go back to the main scene and see how that looks. If you're previewing at full resolution, it might take a few seconds, so be patient or lower the preview quality to quarter. The text looks great and the timing is fine, but I see we need to place the sphere above the text layer. So let's get back to the pre comp and place the sphere layer above all the layers. Now let's go back to the scene and check it out once again. All right. Everything looks good. At this point, we can crop the timeline. But don't crop your scenes exactly where the animation ends. Always give yourself a few extra seconds. Now let's go to the laptop comp and crop the timeline there accordingly. Now let's close the not relevant precomps and go to the main scene to adjust the timeline there as well. I'll crop the timeline here to this point in time. All right. And now let's close all the open precomps and go to the master comp to watch the entire animation we created so far. And before that, we can stand at second 16 to bring here the workflow area. By doing this, it will be a little bit easier for after effects to preview the project. Okay. Everything looks super nice, but I'd like to finish this lesson by creating a subtle zoom in animation when we enter the key scene. Let's enter the scene and create a new null object. Convert the null to a three D layer. After that, let's open the top view and place the null beside the camera. Now let's rename the null. And finally, parent the camera to the null. Now we can create the Zoom in animation without affecting the existing camera keyframes. Close the top view and change the quality to quarter. Now let's start the Zoom in animation at second 11. Create the first keyframe, move to second 14 and 15 frames, and adjust the nulls the axis position. We might also need to adjust the X axis to ensure a symmetrical zoom in, bring the camera down a little bit. Let's see how that looks. First, I think we need to start the Zoom and animation a bit earlier. Let's start it from second ten and 25 frames. Okay, so the zooming starts at good timing. Now let's go back to the master comp to see if that looks symmetrical. After watching it a few times, I noticed that we need to bring the camera up a little bit because right now it looks like it zooms in and goes down. So enter the scene and adjust the X axis to bring the camera down a little bit. Let's watch it one more time. Looks good. Let's watch it in the master comp as well. All right, that looks much better. We're now ready to move on to the next lesson. Before that, let's go to the project panel and move the folder for the 11th scene into the assets folder to keep the project well organized. To start the next lesson smoothly, let's purge the cache, which is always a good idea after working on such a complex scene. With that said, we've just finished creating the most complex scene in the project. From now on, it'll be pure fun as we explore some other interesting transition techniques. But before you continue, make sure to take a short break. Your brain and body needed after such a long session. See you in the next lesson. 8. Complex zoom-out transition in a 3D space: Hi there, and welcome back. Before we start working on the next scene, I want to show you a potential issue that you might encounter and how to fix it. For now, you don't need to do anything, just watch and listen. During the project, after I had already imported the designs into after effects, I noticed that one of the layers in these designs needed to be fixed. However, as you can understand, I had already animated this layer in After Effects. Here it is. Let's see what happens when I change the name of this layer and how we can resolve any issues that might arise during this process. First, I'll fix the name in Illustrator and save the file. Now, when I go back to after effects, it shows that the file is missing. This happens because the names no longer match. In situations like this, we need to search for the missing file in the project panel. Double click on the missing file, then select the design that the layer belongs to. In this case, it's part of the design for scene eight. I'll select it and make sure to uncheck this box. This way, after effects will automatically detect the specific layers instead of importing the entire file again. Great. Now everything looks correct and we're ready to explore the next scene in Illustrator before importing it into after effects. Want to remind you that you still don't need to do anything because you already have the finalized design files. Just observe what I'm doing and soon we'll import them together into after effects. All right, the next scenes will be working on our scene 12 and scene 13. Since we'll create a transition between these two scenes, I'll also open scene 14. Now let me prepare the scene before animation, starting with scene 12. We will create this scene from scratch and after effects since we already have a text box pre comp prepared. We can simply duplicate it and update the information inside. That is exactly what we will do to create this scene. However, I'll still separate the layers and Illustrator just in case. The most important thing is to remember to save the file after making any adjustments. Let's move on to the next scene. For this one, I want to use the layers as they are. We won't create this from scratch and after effects, so I'll make sure to separate them and give this design some extra attention. First, I'll check that each element is separated. While clicking on each object, I'm looking at the layers panel to verify that it's separated. Then I'll move the podium layers up slightly to ensure they're imported without being cropped. Once everything is ready, I'll save the project and move to the next scene. For this next scene, I'll also separate the layers because I'll definitely use them in after effects. After verifying that each element is separated, I'll save the project and prepare to import all three scenes into after effects. Now it's your turn to join me. Let's import these three designs into our project together. So bring scene 12, scene 13, and scene 14. As always, the first step is setting up the scenes. Let's start by creating the first scene in the animated sequence that involves these three scenes. As I mentioned earlier, we'll create this scene from scratch. Let's begin by creating a new composition. We'll name this comp, scene four. Make sure it's in full HD resolution and ensure it's not set to the cinema four D renderer. All right. Let's get started with this scene. First, let's create a new solid for the background. We can sample the color from the design pre comp. Next, locate the textbox precomps and duplicate the last one to use it for our new scene. Enter the duplicated textbox precomp and update the text. You can copy the text directly from the design. Let's go back to Illustrator and copy the text. Back to After Effects, let's paste the text and adjust the font size to 50. I'll reset the leading as well. Let's go back to the selection tool now and bring the new text box into the main scene. We can place it somewhere around here. Now, let's duplicate the last textbox precomp in the Project panel to create the next text box we need for this scene. Next, enter the new text box precomp and replace the text using the design from Illustrator. Copy this text, then go back to After Effects and paste it here. Before moving on to the next one, let's adjust the precomp dimensions to fit the text box properly. To do this, press Control or Command K and set the width to fit the text box. Make sure the preview option is checked so you can see the adjustments in real time. A width of 840 should work well. All right. Now let's bring the new text box into the scene and move on to create the rest of the text boxes we need. We can duplicate the last textbox twice and then select the two new ones and open them simultaneously. Let's start with this one. Go to Illustrator, copy the next text, and then paste it into after effects. As you can see, we need to adjust the font size, so let's set it to 50, then enter the comp settings to adjust the width. This time, we can set it to 900. Okay. Now let's go to the last textbox pre comp and adjust the info here as well. I'll reset the leading here and I'll do the same for the previous one because I think I forgot to do that. Great. Now let's go back to the main scene and bring the new text boxes here. Don't worry about the position of the layers for now because we will adjust them in a minute when converting them to three D layers. All right. Now, once all the text boxes are created, close the precomps and let's move on to animating the scene. Start by locking the background layer. Next, convert all the text boxes into three D layers. After that, create a camera, making sure the depth of field is turned off for now to speed up after effects performance, select the camera and press it twice. In my case, it's already turned off. We'll enable it later once we finish animating the scene. Now, let's add another view preview, then select it and make sure we set it to the top view. Next, let's start positioning the layers across the three D space, ensuring they are all evenly spaced. Let me show you what I mean. Let's start with Text Box four. Move it toward the camera. We can press P on this layer to reveal the position properties and now we can adjust the Zaxis, set its Zaxis position to -500. Now, leave Text Box five in its current position at zero on the Xaxis. Next, move text box seven backward to 500 on the Z axis. Finally, move the last textbox further back and set its axis to 1,000. Now, all the text boxes are evenly spaced. That is, each of them is exactly 500 pixels away from each other. Next, we'll animate the camera to create a backward motion. But before animating the camera, let's use the active camera view to adjust the X and Y axis of the layers and the scene. Our goal is to ensure they stay within the boundaries of the frame when we create the backward camera movement. All that looks good. Now we can start animating the camera. Start by positioning the camera at 750 on the Zaxis. Set a keyframe here. Then let's zoom in on the timeline and move to around the eight second mark. At this point, move the camera backward to where we have enough space to transition to the second scene that comes after this one. I think we can set the Zaxis to -2,400. Let's preview the animation to ensure there's enough time to read all the text boxes. While the camera moves, read the titles to ensure there is enough time for viewers to read them. In scenes with text, this is how we can determine if we're ready to start the next scene. I think we have enough time. Now, before moving on, let's adjust the position of any layers that go out of frame. That looks better. Next, scrub back and forth in the timeline to see if there are any other layers we need to adjust. I think we can lower this one slightly and move it a bit to the right. Looks great. Now it's time to bring the next scene into our composition. Insert the precomp for scene 13 into the main scene comp, convert it to a three D layer, and place it somewhere around here for now. Enter the precomp and delete the background layer. Also, delete the title layer since we'll create a new text layer for it later. It's better to create text layers and after effects because it makes it easier to update them if the client requests changes. Now, select the podium layers and align them to the bottom of the composition. Make sure to change the alignment setting to composition and then click here. Awesome. Now let's go back to the main scene and continue building this animated sequence. First, let's figure out the best placement for this scene. I think somewhere around here should work. Now, select the camera, move 2 seconds forward from the last keyframe and move the camera backward. We can set the Z axis to -3,300 for now. Next, let's create an intro for the podium scene. Go to the eight second mark and place the precomp down here so it's not visible. Now, open the position property and create a keyframe with the current value. Then move to the point where the camera finishes its movement and position the precomp up here. To create a seamless transition to the next scene, ensure the podium covers the entire composition at the bottom. To achieve this, go to the final keyframe of the camera movement and bring the camera a little closer. Will make it easier to animate the camera moving down into the next scene with the blue background. Now, move 2 seconds forward and adjust the camera slightly backward to create a gentle zoom out animation during this scene. Again, ensure the blue podium fully covers the width at the bottom. If this doesn't make sense yet, it will soon. For now, let's add the title that will accompany the podium scene. This time, let's create the text layer for the podium scene directly in the main scene and not inside the pre comp of the podium. This way, the entire sequence will look a bit more interesting because we will achieve a nice parallax effect in the final result. Now let's convert the text to a three D layer and position it in front of the podium. Somewhere around here, let's press the semicolon key to open the grid. That way, we can see if the layer is aligned to the center of the comp. As you can see, this approach makes the scene look much more dynamic. Right now bring the text below the camera in the layer panel and press P on the camera to open the position. Next, go 2 seconds forward and move the camera down until the blue podium is no longer visible. As you can see, the text boxes are still visible. Let's create a simple outtro animation for them. Start at the eight second mark where the camera enters the new scene and press T to open the opacity property. Create the first keyframe with the opacity set to 100%. Move 1 second forward and lower the opacity to zero. Apply an easy ease to these keyframes and check how it looks. I accidentally animated the podium scene's opacity as well, so I'll delete those keyframes. Now, to make the outtro animation more interesting, let's add a delay between the disappearing text boxes. Start by fading out the first text box visible in the scene at the seven second mark. Now, move five frames forward and fade out the next text box. We'll leave the third text box as is and move the final one, five frames further before fading it out. Let's see how that looks. All right, I think it looks good. Let's review all the animations we've created for this scene so far. I think we need a little more time before moving down after the scene with the podium, as we need more time to read the title here. To fix this, let's move the last two keyframes of the camera 1 second forward. Then check it again and read the title to ensure there is enough time. That looks better. Now, let's adjust the easing of the keyframes, starting with these two. Convert them to easy ease and open the graph editor to tweak the handles. That's better, but I don't like the pause here. Let's select these keyframes, hold out, and double click them to enable the continuous checkbox. Now move them up here. Next, bring the first keyframe down here as well to make the motion more consistent in speed. Bring it to the same speed level as the next keyframe. Let's see what we've got. Looks good. Let's remove the pause in this part. Now let's exit the graph editor, then apply easy ease to the last two keyframes. Then go back to the graph and adjust the motion to make it a bit more interesting. Let's see how that looks. Afterward, adjust the timing to ensure there's no pause here either. Let's see how that looks. So I see the motion looks a bit odd. It happened because after adjusting the key frames, we got a moment when the speed of the motion is at zero speed. In such cases, we should always adjust the easing by tweaking the motion speed and constantly checking how it looks. I'm showing you this process to emphasize that creating smooth and pleasant motion often takes time, so don't be afraid to experiment with your key frames. That's the best way to learn how to control motion effectively. All right. I think this animation looks super smooth now. Let's move on to adjusting the animation for the intro of the next scene. First, let's apply Easy Ease to these keyframes and adjust the velocity. In the graph editor, it should look like this. Awesome. Now, I'll move this keyframe slightly to the right to align it better with the scenes intro. It seems the scene enters too quickly. Let's move the first keyframe 1 second backward and see how it looks. My goal is to create a subtle slow motion effect. We could also try moving the camera's first keyframe 1 second backward to see the effect. I think it looks much better now. But I think that now the entrance of the podium scene can start a bit earlier. Let's move the two last keyframes of the camera 2 seconds earlier to start from second 11 and see how that looks. Awesome. It looks super cool. Now, let's create a nice intro animation for the text. We'll use the text animators for this, but this time, we'll create a three D animation. To do this, first, enable three D functionality for the text layer. Then create an animator using the position property. Thanks to enabling the three D functionality, we now have a Xaxis and the position controls. Let's make the text enter from this position. Set the Xaxis value to -330. Next, change the shape to ramp up and set the animation to occur per word. Now, let's create a smooth three D animation for the text intro. Set the offset to zero for now because I want to add additional properties for this animator. Select it and now let's add blur to this animator. Let's set the blur to 30. Then add the opacity property and set it to zero. Now, when the offset is at -100, the text will inherit all the properties set in the range selector. When the offset is at 100, the text will return to its initial state. Let's bring the offset to -100 and now go to second eight and 15 frames to start the animation from this point in time. Create a keyframe with the offset set to -100. Move forward 2 seconds to 10 seconds and 15 frames and set the offset to 100. Adjust the easing and see how it looks. I think it looks great. Now we can move on to inserting the next scene, which will appear after the camera moves down. First, go to the point in time where the camera finishes its animation. We want to find the right point in time to start the next scene. To make our life easier, we can find the perfect moment by selecting the camera and pressing you to reveal the key frames. This will show us the moment in time where we can start the next scene. Let's bring the next scene into the timeline. Now convert the layer to a three D layer and use the top view to position it correctly. For the transition between the blue podium and the blue background of this scene to work seamlessly, open the position property of the podium precomp, copy its Xaxis value, and paste it onto the new scene. This way, both are at the same distance from the camera. Next, use the Y axis to move the new scene downward. Position it here. Let's check how it looks with the camera motion. I think the transition works very well. Now, move 1 second forward and add a slight zoom out motion. Make sure not to move the camera too much backward. Let's see how that looks. It seems too fast at the moment. Let's move this keyframe 1 second forward. That's better. However, there's an unpleasant pause here. Let's select this keyframe and use the graph editor to smooth it out. I think it looks much better now, but I don't want the motion to ease at the end. To fix this, I'll hold Control or command and click once on this keyframe to convert it back to a linear keyframe. This should fix the speed at this point and make the motion continuous. That looks much better now. All right. Now I want to show you a cool trick for creating a parallax effect during the transition. We've got these great icons inside the precomp. To make them interact with the camera and the main scene, we can enter the precomp and make some adjustments. First, adjust the panel view so we can see all the layers. Then convert all the layers into three D layers. Switch to the top view and start spreading the layers along the Xaxis in three D space. What we're learning here is that we don't need to move all these layers into the main scene individually. Instead, we can keep them inside a separate pre comp, adjust the design as needed, and still make them interact with our main scene. You'll see how this works shortly. For now, let's continue adjusting the position of these layers. I'll speed up this process now. I'll leave the title layer in its current position so it remains at the center of the three D space. Moreover, we could create a camera inside the precomp and refine the scene further, but adding a camera here isn't necessary. Let me show you why. If we go back to the main scene, we'll see that although the layers are at different distances, they're not interacting with the camera in the main scene. There's no parallax effect. To fix this, all we need to do is collapse the precomp layer. Once collapsed, the animation will show a nice parallax effect, meaning the layers inside the precomp are now interacting with the main scenes camera. We can even delete or disable the camera inside the precomp without affecting this setup. Let's go ahead and delete the precomp camera and scale up the background layer inside the scene. Set the scale to 135, then check how it looks in the main scene. Now when we check the scene, we can see there's a little problem caused by the interaction between the camera in this scene and the icon pre comp scene. As you can see, the background is too big and some icons are beyond the boundaries of the scene. I'd prefer to have all the icons inside the frame. This means we need to make some changes inside the icon scene. It would be awesome if we could see the changes we make in the icon scene reflected in real time in the main scene. To view the changes we make inside the pre comp directly in the main scene, lock the main scenes view panel from here. Then enter the precomp and drag its view panel to the side. This way, we can see both views simultaneously as we make adjustments. Let's start with the background layer. Let's scale the background to 130 and collapse this layer to maintain the highest quality after scaling. Let's collapse all the illustrator layers here for better quality. Next, adjust the positions of the icons while observing the main scene to ensure everything looks good. While I'm moving the layers inside the pre comp and watching how that looks in the main scene, my goal is to create a balanced composition where all the icons are within the boundaries of the scene. I'll speed up this process now. Before moving on, always go back and forward in the timeline to see that the adjustments you made look good through the animation. I think it looks much better now. Let's close the precomp panel and return to the main scene to see how everything looks together. Awesome. Everything looks great. So now we can move this scene into the master comp. Before that, let's tag it in blue to match the rest of the main scenes. Now go to the master comp, expand the timeline and bring this scene in. Look for a good point in time to start this scene. For example, when the sphere from the previous scene opens, that's a nice starting point. Let's place the new scene there and check how it looks. Let's lower the quality to speed up the preview render time. It seems there's too much empty space before the text boxes appear. We can fix this timing issue with a few techniques. Let's crop the com from the start to the exact moment the first text box enters the scene. Now we can make the new scene start even earlier, right from the point in time where the sphere is about to cover the frame. However, since there's a background layer in the new scene, we can't see the sphere animation. In this situation, we can enter the new scene and adjust the start time of the background layer. Let's set it to start from frame ten. Let's preview how that looks. It's not quite right. Let's go back to the scene and just the start time again, perhaps from here. Let's check it again. I think we can start the background layer at this point, let's align the layer to the time indicator. Now, let's return to the master comp and crop the end of the previous scene to match this exact point in time. Since the sphere's color matches the new scene's background color, we achieve a smooth, seamless transition. This is another simple trick to create interesting transitions in your project. Let's continue watching the animation to check for any issues. To see it better, let's scale the preview panel and set the preview to fit. Now let's keep watching the animation to spot any issues. I noticed something. As we are about to transition to the podium, we can still see the blue background of the scene with the icons. Let's enter the precomp to understand why. It's the blue background from scene 14. Our goal now is to make this precomp visible only from the right moment in time. This means that we now need to find the moment in time when this scene needs to start to be visible. Since this scene doesn't need to be visible yet, we'll open the camera view to pinpoint where the transition to this scene begins. Let's crop the precomp to start from that point. Awesome. Now the blue background is gone. Next, let's use this opportunity and crop the text box precomps when they already finished their animation. Let me show you what I mean. The last one finishes here, so we can crop them all up to this point. Great. Now, let's take this opportunity to tag these precomps with different colors to keep the timeline organized. Let's watch the animation again. I just noticed that the blue background is still visible because the camera can see its layer. Pay attention to this area. Let's open the camera key frames, and now we need to make the blue background of the next scene not visible for more frames before the transition happens. In this case, we can work with two panels again to troubleshoot. Lock this panel, open the icon scene. Let's turn off the top view. And now drag this panel to the right side. Let's scale the layer slightly and see if that solves the problem. First things first, let's find the moment in time where the problem occurs. Once identified, select the background layer and press S to reveal its scale property. Now adjust the scale value until the problem is fixed. In our case, we can set it to 125 to resolve the issue. Looks better now. But when we check the main scene animation, the issue persists because the camera still captures the layer. In this case, we'll use a simple but effective solution and it's adjusting the camera keyframes. Let me show you what I mean. Go to the keyframe when we are about to transition to the next scene. Make sure to stand on the keyframe, then move the camera forward slightly. This will position the podium to cover the problematic area. All right. Now everything looks good. However, since we previously scaled the blue background, we need to reset it to 130 in the precomp to maintain consistency. As you can see, at this point in time, the background seems too small because the camera goes backward at this point. Let's enter the icons precomp and scale the background. Let's set it to 130 and see how that looks in the main scene. Looks awesome. Let's finalize the scene by adjusting the icons inside the precomp for a more balanced composition. After making changes, always check the scene to ensure everything works well. It looks great. We can also refine the camera motion slightly as it's not smooth enough. All right, enough with the final touches. Let's move on to the next step. I think the next step should be adding a nice depth of field effect to the scene to make it more visually engaging. But before that, let me adjust the camera position here because I can still see the blue background. Enter the scene, select the camera, press you, stand on the keyframe, and adjust the position. All right. Now everything looks perfect. We're ready to enhance the scene's appearance by adding a beautiful depth of field effect. Let's start at the beginning of the scene where all the text boxes are visible. Now, press the A key twice to open the camera options. Turn on the depth of field, and let's open the top view so we can adjust the focus distance to the right location. I think we can align the focus with the camera's position. Since the camera is moving, each text box will get its moment and focus during the motion. Now, let's increase the aperture to 150 and see how it looks. Looking at the depth of field now, I think we should increase it a bit more. Let's try 200 for the aperture and set the blur level to 200. That looks better. Now, I want to remove the blurriness when the podium scene enters because I want the entire scene to be in focus. At this point in time, let's create a keyframe for the blur level. Then 1 second later, set the blur level to zero. Apply Easy Ease to these keyframes and preview the result. All right. I think that looks nice. Let's go back to the master comp and review all the animations we've created so far. Before previewing the animation, we can stand at the end of the icon scene animation and press in to shorten the workflow area. This will make it easier for after effects to preview the project. As you may notice, After Effects struggles to preview the laptop scene smoothly because we use the cinema four D renderer there. To make the preview process easier, let's enter the scene and locate the point in time where the laptop is no longer visible. In our case, this happens somewhere here after the Zoom animation. Since the laptop isn't visible anymore, we can enter the laptop precomp and crop the three D layers for the laptop to end at this point. This way, After Effects doesn't need to render those layers unnecessarily, improving the preview performance. Let's continue watching the animation. At this point in time, I notice there's too much aperture in the depth of field. Let's enter this scene while watching the text boxes, try to adjust the depth of field values to get a better look. For example, we can set the aperture to 100. That looks much better. Now, I want to change the order of the text boxes. Want to do it so we can practice changing precomps with different text inside each one because this is a common action the client can ask us during the project. Let's get started. First, select the precomp for the first text box visible in the scene. Then go to the project panel and open the precomps folder. I want this specific text to appear first. With Text Box four selected, hold Alt or option and drag Text Box five over it to replace it. Similarly, replace Text Box six with Text Box four. Showing you this process because sometimes a client will ask you to change the order of titles in your project. For example, in this case, I wanted the explainer videos title to appear first in the scene, so I decided to reorder the precomps. Now, let's do it one more time with the final text box in the scene. And now we can adjust the position of the precomps in the scene. So just move back and forward to check where to move the problematic precomps. After verifying that everything looks good, we can conclude this lesson. In the next lesson, we'll continue animating the rest of the scene and explore even more creative ways to design engaging transitions. So see you in the next one. 9. Smart object use for scene transitions: Hi there. In this lesson, we are going to create a transition from this scene to the one with the colorful background using the text layer, join. We'll mask the previous scene with this word, revealing the next scene below it. Sounds impossible. Let me show you how easy it is. For now, as you already know, you have the finalized design files. Don't try to follow along because I'm showing you how I prepared these scenes before importing them into after effects. All right. I'll also open scene 16 because we'll create another transition to this scene. I'll also open scene 17, just to prepare it for the next lesson. Notice that this is part of my workflow. I always work on three or four scenes at once, no more than that. I highly recommend you adopt the same approach when working on projects with many scenes. All right. In this scene, I'll make sure that I'm separating all the layers, especially because I need those two diamonds separated. Don't want to create them from scratch and after effects. Then I'll name the diamond layers. Finally, I'll rotate them to zero degrees, animating their rotation and after effects will be more convenient. Once that's done, I'll save the file and move on to the next one. I'll separate the layers in this scene as well and do the same for the next design. Let me speed things up for now. Now, since I plan to create a nice text animation with the letters in this animated sequence, I'll go back to the previous scene design and now I'll make sure to separate each letter from the group. Then I'll name the layers according to each letter. I'll speed this process up now. Great. I can save the project now. For the next scene, I won't separate the letters because I already have them separated in the previous scene. I'll just make sure to save the file. Awesome. Now let's get back to work together. Before importing the files, let's drag the previous design file folders to the assets folder. Then we'll import the next three scenes. So bring scenes 15, 16 and 17. Great. Let's also move these folders to the assets folder before continuing. All right. We'll start by creating the transition for scene 15. To do this, let's expand our timeline and find a good point to start the transition, somewhere around the 55 or 56 second mark. This ensures there's enough time to read the text here. Now, let's enter the next scene and learn how to use the joint text layer as a mask for our transition. First of all, we need to create the text layer and paste it into the master comp. Above the scene we want to mask. In this case, it's scene four. Let's grab the text tool and create the text. To make it easier, set the text size to a large value. 500 should work well. Next, hover over the anchor point tool, hold control or command, and double click it to center the anchor point of the layer. Then make sure the text is centered in the paragraph panel and aligned to the center of the composition. Now to use this text as the mask layer, we'll use the track Matt function. Set scene four to use the text layer as an alpha mat. Now we'll see the scene only inside the shape of the text. With the help of this setup, we can scale the text layer and create some interesting transitions with it. The next step is to position this text layer so it starts at the point in time where the scene begins, not where the transition happens. Place it at the start of the scene like this. This ensures the scene is visible from the very beginning. Since the Alpha function limits the scene to the shape of the text, we need to position it accordingly. All right. Now there are two options to create the transition. The idea is to scale the text so it covers the entire frame. Let's look at the first method. I don't want you to do this with me. We won't use this method. Instead, we'll go with the second method. I'm just showing the first method so you know it exists. For the first method, I'll start by creating the initial keyframes for the scale and position properties somewhere in the middle of the animation. Then go back in time. Let's say about 4 seconds and adjust the properties until the text covers the entire frame. Scale it and move it so the letter I will be in the center when this animation starts. Now, if I turn back off the Alpha layer, which is our text, the transition can work. For it to work, we need to continue adjusting the scale and the position until the letter I covers the entire frame, which can take a lot of time and be annoying because we control two properties. I think you get the idea. Now I want to show you the second method which you can do it by controlling just one property. Let me bring everything back to normal and you can grab the mouse and do it together with me. For the second method we'll first convert the layer into a three D layer. Now instead of scaling it, we'll use the position property on the Zaxis to adjust the size of the text. This way, we bring the text closer to the default camera view. Now, all we need to do is to ensure the letter I is covering the entire frame. After that, let's create the first keyframe. Next, move about 2 seconds forward and adjust the position so it matches the original design. But for now, we don't really know where exactly to place the text, so we need to see the original design to know it for sure. To do this, bring in the design layer, lower its opacity and lock the layer. This way, we can see clearly where the text should be. Let's keep adjusting the position. We are almost there. I'll now zoom in to adjust the position as closely as possible to the design. Awesome. Soon we will see where to start this animation. But for now, we can unlock the reference layer and delete it. Now when we turn off the visibility of the text layer, the alpha mat will activate and we'll see the transition created. What's left is to refine the timing. Let's check the animation and read the text to check when we finish reading it. That will tell us the ideal moment to start the transition. Let's move the keyframes to start at the 54 second mark. Now, place the last keyframe at second 56, so the transition lasts for 2 seconds. Finally, adjust the easing and see how it looks. I think we can make it shorter about 1 second because it feels too slow. I think that's better. Let's also activate the motion blur for this layer and see how it looks. I think it's much better with the motion blur. All right, so now we need to change the color of this text to white because this text needs to appear in white for the scene he belongs to. Since it's a mask of the scene below, we can't directly change the text layer's color. Instead, we need to enter the mask scene and create a new white solid layer. We will use this layer to color the text. In a second, you will get what I mean. Place this solid above all other layers and start it from second 14 for now. Let's create a simple intro animation for it using the opacity property. This is what will make the text appear in white when we check it in the master comp. Now, let's go back to the master comp and see how it looks. I want the text to appear white at this point in time. So let's enter the precomp and move the solid so its final keyframe is at this moment. All right, I think it should work. Let's go back to the master comp and check it again. Looks great. We can now move on to the next step. Now is a good time to insert the next scene. Let's drag scene 15 into our timeline. We need to ensure it starts before the transition occurs, so we don't have an empty area when the text masks the previous scene. That means we need to start this scene a few frames before the moment when the text starts moving backward. Let's place it at 53 seconds and 15 frames. Great. But now we have a small problem. We're seeing the word join twice. Let's figure out what to do in situations like this. To fix this, crop the mask layer to the end of its animation. After that, at this exact point, we'll start the actual text layer inside the scene. Make sure you're at the correct point in time, then enter the scene and start the text layer from here. By doing this, we'll see the mask layer for the transition in the master comp, followed by the actual text layer inside the scene. It's a nice trick for creating text based transitions. Moreover, if you want to use the text layer instead of the Illustrator layer inside the precomp, expand the mask layer and split it at the point where the animation ends. While standing at this point in time, press Control Shift D to split the layer. Now select the second part and press Control X to cut it from here. Then enter the scene and paste this layer here. Next, press the left bracket key to bring the layer to this point in time and turn on this layer. After that, delete the first and second keyframes to match the text position exactly as in the master comp. Finally, we can turn off the Illustrator layer and go back to the master comp to check if everything is okay. If you're wondering why I did this process, it's because I prefer to have an editable text layer in the scene just in case the client asks me to change this word later. Now we can go back to the scene and delete the Illustrator layer from here. Before moving on, let's also disable the motion blur since we don't need it here because the text is not moving. Great. Now we can move on and create the sparkles we need for this scene. In this case, we already have them in the second scene. We created nice sparkles for the main title in this scene, which we can find in the first part of this long scene. Let's enter the main title pre Cump and now copy the two shaped layers we have here. Now let's go back to the scene we are working on and paste them here. Let's now place them in the right position, the big one we can place here. Now for the small one, we can follow the design and place it in this area. After that, delete the Illustrator files. Looks awesome. I'll just reorder them because I prefer the sequence this way. All right. Now let's animate the diamonds. I want to create a slow motion animation for them during this scene. Before we start, let's duplicate one of the diamonds to use it later for another transition. We can turn it off for now. Back to the slow motion diamond animation. It's super simple. First, open the rotation property for both diamonds and adjust their angles. Next, go to the beginning of the timeline and open the position property for both layers. Create the first keyframe, then move to second six and adjust their positions upwards slightly. For the first key frame, move them down a bit more to emphasize the motion. Let's see how that looks. That looks great. Now, let's add a subtle rotation animation for both diamonds. For the small diamond on the left side, we can set the rotation to -20 and create a keyframe. Now for the bigger one on the right side, set the rotation to 20. Select both layers and press you to reveal the position keyframes. Now let's go to the end of the position animation and rotate them both. Set the rotation to 40. For the smaller one, set it to -40. Let's see what we've got. That looks nice. Next, let's create a pop up animation for the main title using the scale property. For now, let's decide to start this animation at 1 second and 15 frames. First, create the initial keyframe for the scale with its current value. Next, move 1 second forward and create another keyframe with the same value. Then in the middle of this animation, scale the layer two. Let's say 120. Finally, adjust the easing and check how it looks. It's awesome, but I think the sparkles should start after the pop up animation. Let's move them to start afterward. Now let's learn how to create a super cool animated gradient background. There are many ways to do this, but I'll show you the best method I know. To keep things organized, let's precompose this layer because we'll add additional layers to create the animated gradient background from scratch and after effects. Make sure to check this box. The easiest way to do this is by creating a few spheres using a shape layer. Make sure no layers are selected, then create a medium sized sphere in the scene. Set the size to 800 so we all be on the same track. Let's place it here for now and change its color to this one. Now, move this sphere to this position. Notice that if you move this sphere, without first selecting it in the layers panel, you might accidentally move the shape inside the layer instead of moving the actual layer. This causes the anchor point to become uncentered. If that happens, simply hover over the anchor point tool, hold control, and double click it to center the anchor point for the layer. Next, duplicate the sphere and change its color to this one. Continue duplicating and changing the colors until you have all the colors ready. Now, arrange the spheres near the corresponding colors in the design. To make it look like a gradient, create a new adjustment layer above all the layers and add the fast box blur effect to it. Let's change the name of this adjustment layer to blur and now set the blur radius to, let's say 80. We are almost there. Now we need to avoid the empty areas in the comp to do that, we can scale the spheres, select them all and set the scale to 150. You can reorder the spheres if you want a slightly different result. In my case, I'm happy with the current order, but I think setting the scale to 130 instead of 150. Next, create a white solid layer because as we move the spheres, there might be empty areas and the white solid will help blend them better. Before animating this sphere, let's scale down the orange sphere and also make the spheres blend better by selecting the adjustment layer and scaling the blur radius to 120. All right, now we need to move the spheres randomly. To do this, open the position property for a sphere and use a simple expression. For this, hold down Altar Option on Mac and click on the stopwatch Ca next to the position property. Type wiggle, then select it from the list. Inside the parentheses, we one, 50. Click outside the expression textbox and see how it looks. It moves too little. Let's increase the second number to something higher, like 550 and check it once again. That's too much. Let's set it to 500 and reduce the first number to 0.5. Let's see how that looks now. That looks better. Now, right click on the property and select Copy expression only. Then select the other spheres and press Control V to paste the expression. Let's go to the beginning of the timeline and see how it all looks together. That looks awesome. Let's try turning off the white layer and turning on the original background to see how it looks. I think it looks better this way. We can also adjust the blur radius to make the gradient areas appear larger. To do it, all we need to do is increase the blur radius we have in the fast box blur effect we have on the adjustment layer. In my case, I will leave it at 120. All right. Let's return to the scene, collapse the precomp, and see how it looks with the rest of the layers. I think it looks very cool, but it's a bit too fast. In this case, don't enter the precomp to adjust the expression. Instead, use the time stretch function. If you don't see it, right click here, go to columns and select stretch. Click on it and change the value to 200 to slow down the precomp. This way, the animation of this com be two times slower, which looks much better in my opinion. Awesome. Now, before moving on, let's collapse the Illustrator layers in this scene. All right. Now it's time to use the diamond layer we duplicated earlier to create another cool but super simple transition for the next scene. We'll use this layer as an object to hide the current scene. While the diamond covers the entire frame, we'll start the next scene. Simple but super useful. Let's see how to do it. First, we need to cut this layer from here and paste it into the master comp. Let's watch this animation a few times to decide the best point in time to start the transition. I think we can let this scene play for about 3 seconds and then introduce the large diamond. But before that, let's add a light Zoom in animation to the current scene as it looks too static right now. Stand here, create a scale keyframe, and then move to second 59. Why exactly to that point? No particular reason. I just want to create a slow Zoom in animation. Scale the precomp to 105. Let's see how that looks. H h that looks great. By the way, we didn't start the scaling from the beginning of the precomp because that would cause the join text to change size at some point, which is not what we want. Make sure to start the Zoom and animation only after the join text is no longer visible. Great. So once we finish with the scale animation, and we can now collapse this precomp for the highest quality. All right. Now let's paste the diamond we cut from the last scene and use it to create the transition for the next scene. Press Control or Command V to paste the diamond. Awesome. Now we need to find the right moment to start animating the transition. I think we can start this transition at minute one for now. Now let's place this layer in the center of the comp and to start creating the transition. First, we need to scale it up until it almost covers the entire frame. Awesome. Now since we scaled this layer, we lost his quality. To fix this, let's collapse this layer. Great. Before moving on, let's shorten scene four because there's nothing happening at this point in time. We can crop this precomp to end at second 55 or 56, enter scene four and crop it to the 16 second mark. Perfect. Now we can crop it here because it's no longer visible at this point in time. Now let's decide the best timing for the transition to the next scene. I think we can start it at second 57, first, bring the big diamond here. At this point, we can turn off the grid so we can see better what we are doing. Then scale the diamond up further, set the scale to around 1,000. Idea is to scale it enough for the diamond to fully cover the upper and lower parts of the frame. Let's try creating the transition when the scale is at 800. To start, move the layer to the left side out of the frame and then open the position property. Create the first keyframe here. Then go 2 seconds forward and move the diamond to the opposite side of the frame. Now, in the middle of the animation, make sure the diamond fully covers the frame. Open the scale property, create the first key frame, and move it to the beginning of the layer. At this midpoint, set the scale to a larger value while adjusting the position to ensure it covers the frame. Finally, move to the end of the animation and return the scale to its original value from the beginning. We can copy and paste the first keyframe here. We can also add a gentle rotation to the diamond to make it more interesting. In the middle of the animation, create the first keyframe with the current rotation value. Then at the beginning of the animation, set it to -45 and at the end, set it to 45. Now, we need to make sure the diamond still covers the entire frame after adding the rotation animation. Sand in the middle of this animation and ensure the diamond still covers the entire frame. Looks good. Let's adjust the keyframes to make the motion more dynamic. Let's remove the pause we see here before we jump to the graph editor to fix this, let's first try to convert the middle keyframes to regular ones to see if it will help. Select the middle key frames, hold control or command, and click on them to convert them into regular keyframes. That looks better, but we can improve it further by using the graph editor. Let's adjust each properties keyframes to enhance the movement. First, select the middle position keyframes and make them continuous so you can adjust the handles smoothly. Let's see how that looks. Now the motion of the position looks much smoother. Next, let's refine the scale keyframes. Move the handles to the sides and see how that looks. Looks nice, and I think we don't need to adjust the rotation key frames, as we already have a nice and smooth motion. We can now move on to the next step, which is trimming the last scene we worked on. The animation ends around this area. So let's leave a few seconds of buffer for safety and trim the comp at second five. Back to the master comp. Let's crop this scene to the point where the diamond fully covers the frame and then insert the next scene. In our case, it's the design of scene 16. Now, let's press you on the diamond layer and crop it to the end of its animation. Now we have a nice transition from scene 15 to 16, which is another idea you can use in your projects. Before wrapping up this lesson and moving on to the final lesson, let's bring the diamond layer down here so it stays grouped with the two scenes it was used for. After reviewing the animation one more time, let's organize the project panel to prepare for the next lesson. First, we can drag the animated background precomp to the precomps folder. Now, since we use the design precomp of scene 15 as a main scene in our project, let's rename this precomp. This will now be called scene five. Next, let's color it in blue. Color it blue here as well. Great. In the next lesson, we'll animate the remaining scenes for the project. But before jumping into animating the next scene, let's take this opportunity to save everything we've done so far and purge the project to clean it from the cache. This way, we can start the next lesson fresh. Awesome. With that done, I highly recommend you take a ten minute break now so you can start the next lesson feeling refreshed. 10. Mood-Changing transition: Welcome back. We will start this lesson by creating a unique transition based on changing text, as well as the environment and overall vibe of the scene, transitioning from a dark mood to a brighter one. During this process, we'll also practice mastering keyframes by creating a super cool bouncing ball animation. Let's begin. First, let's enter the next scene pre comp. As always, we'll start by preparing it for animation. Let's begin by creating the text box. To do this, search for the text boxes in the project, duplicate the last one, bring it into the scene, enter it, and change the text. Press Control or Command Enter to exit the text tool. Finally, go back to the scene and position the text box in the right place. Once it's placed, you can delete this layer from the scene. Now that we've created the text box, we can start setting the initial keyframes for the bouncing animation of the sphere. Let's call it the ball in this lesson. To do this, we'll use the position property. At this stage, we're not worrying about the duration of the animation. For now, we'll create keyframes at 1 second intervals and adjust them later. Let's go to the beginning of the timeline and position the ball outside the scene so it enters from the upper area. Create the first keyframe here. Then move 1 second forward and place the ball on the text box. Zoom and if needed for better precision, adjust the position slightly if necessary. Next, move forward another second and place the ball in this area. Zoom out and position it roughly where it needs to be. Continue by moving 1 second forward again and place the ball on top of the letter I. The goal is for the ball to bounce first on the I, then on the M, and finally land beside the letter P. Move 1 second forward and lift the ball to create a bounce. Then move another second forward and position it on top of the M. Let's zoom out in the timeline, and now move one more second forward to create another bounce. And finally, another second forward to land the ball beside the P. Let's zoom out to review how it looks. At this point, it's clear that the animation doesn't look polished yet. This is part of the process. We start with an initial animation and refine it over time. All right, now select all the keyframes and convert them to easy es. Then enter the graph editor to adjust the velocity of the key frames. The goal is to make the ball move quickly when it lands and bounces back, creating a realistic motion. Now after the ball hits the ground, he needs to bounce up super fast. We can increase the speed at the bounce point to make it look more natural. Let's see what we've got. To improve the motion, we can curve the path points where the ball is in the air. We can use the convert vertex tool for this. Select the layer, click on each point to convert it, and later we'll adjust the handles. For now, focus on curving all the points. All right. Now we can press V to return to the selection tool and start adjusting the handles to make the motion path more rounded. Move the handles of each point to make it smooth and rounded. Et's see how that looks. Soon, we'll address the pause moments. But for now, let's finish creating the bouncing motion. Enter the graph editor and continue adjusting the keyframes, just like we did for the first bounce. That means we need to make the ball drop super fast when it's about to hit the letter I. And then we need to make him bounce fast as well when it's about to go to the next letter. Let's repeat this process for the next bouncing point. Finally, let's make the ball drop fast at the end of its animation. Great. Now we're ready to fix the pause moments where the ball hovers in the air. To do this, select the problematic keyframes, double click on them, and check the continuous checkbox. Then adjust the motion upward slightly so the speed doesn't drop to zero. Repeat this process for all the moments where the ball hovers in the air. That's looking great. However, as you can see, the animation is too slow. It currently lasts 7 seconds. Let's see how it looks at 3 seconds. To speed up the animation while maintaining the spacing between keyframes, select all the keyframes, hold Alt or option, and drag the last keyframe to the time indicator's position. Watch the animation a few times to see if the timing feels right. Let's zoom out and watch it once again. I think it looks great, so we can move on to creating the falling letters animation. We'll start by animating the letter I from the moment the ball hits it. Position the timeline indicator at this moment, then select the letter and press P to reveal the position property. Create the first keyframe here. Next, move forward in the timeline. Let's say to the two second mark and move the letter downward until it exits the frame. Now, repeat the same steps for the moment the ball hits the letter M. So selected and press P. Now create a keyframe and then move 2 seconds forward and bring it down out of the frame. All right. Let's convert the keyframes to easy Es and see how it looks. I think it looks very nice, but we can improve the motion even more. Let me show you how. To make the animation more natural, let's enter the graph editor and adjust the motion curve so the letters start moving slowly and speed up toward the end. That looks much better now. We can further improve the animation by adding some rotation to the layers during the position animation. Let's start with the first letter. Create the first rotation key frame, move to the end of the animation and rotate the layer, let's say by 50 degrees. Now, convert the keyframes to easy ease and preview the animation. I think it rotates a bit too much, so let's adjust the final rotation key frame to 40 degrees. Now, let's do the same for the second letter. Let's see how that looks. That looks awesome. Finally, we're ready to create some bouncing animation for the remaining letters to add an impactful motion when the ball hits the ground. This will also help draw the viewers attention to the new word formed after the two letters drop. First things first, let's tag the two letters we've already animated with a different color for better organization. We can lock the background layer. Now grab all the other letters. Make sure you're at the right point in the timeline, open the position property and create the first keyframe here. Next, move 1 second forward and create another keyframe with the same value. Now, move to the middle of the animation and shift all the letters upward while holding Shift to keep them aligned. Before moving on, let's place the text box below all the letters so it will appear behind them. Now let's improve the animation. Our goal is to make a bouncy animation when the ball hits the ground. For this, first, let's easy ease the keyframes and in the graph editor, adjust the curve so the letters move upward quickly, hover in the air briefly and then land quickly. Let's see how it looks. I think it's a bit too slow. Let's stand in the middle of this animation, then select all the layers and while holding Alt or option, drag them to the times indicators position. That's much better. Now, let's make the letters jump one after the other by creating a delay in the animation. Leave the letter P in place because we do want it to start to bounce first. For the other letters, select them and move them one frame forward by holding Alt or option and pressing the right arrow key. Repeat this for each letter. Et's watch the animation a few times to see if it feels right. That looks awesome. Next, let's change their colors during the bouncing animation using the fill effect. To do this, first let's search for the fill effect in the effects and presets menu. Now let's drag the effect onto the first letter. Now let's turn it off for a second to sample the original red color from the letter. Then turn it back on. Now let's press you to find the moment when the letter starts to bounce. At this point in time, we now create the first keyframe with the current color. Then move to the end of the animation and change the color to white, matching the design in the precomp. So let's go back to the effect and change the color to white. Convert the key frames to easy ease and before moving on, let's purge the project. After effects can sometimes slow down, so it's a good habit to purge the project every few minutes to ensure smooth performance. All right, back to business. Now, copy the fill effect from the first layer, select the rest of the letters. Press you to reveal all the keyframes and paste the effect onto them. Now let's press you one more time to see our new keyframes. Then adjust the fill effect keyframes for each layer to match its position animation. Just select the fill effect keyframes and align them with the position keyframes. Let's do it for the rest of the layers. Once done, let's see how that looks. That looks awesome. Now, let's close all the layers and review the entire animation we've created so far in this scene. That looks very cool, but I think the ball goes too much to the left after its first bounce. To fix this, we can drag this point to the right. I think it looks much better this way. Now, let's create an Outro animation for the text box, starting from the moment the ball hits the ground. We'll use the scale property for this. Create the first keyframe at this point in time, then move 1 second and set the value to zero. Now, let's easy ease the keyframes and make the text box scale down quickly at the beginning of the animation by moving this handle to the left. Finally, to wrap up this scene, let's create an outtro animation for the blue background, to transition the vibe of the scene from dark to bright. We can use the shape tool for this. Make sure no layers are selected, then select the ellipse tool, change the color to the blue shade and create a large sphere. Set the size to 1,500 to ensure we're all on the same page. Align the sphere to the center of the composition and position it to start at the three second mark. Place this layer below all other layers but above the dark background. Now use the scale property to create an intro animation for this background. Let's now move 1 second forward and scale the shape until it covers the entire frame. Let's set it to 155. Finally, let's make this shape enter the scene quickly at the beginning of its animation. Let's preview it. All right, the timing looks perfect. Let's set the preview to fit so we can watch it one more time in a bigger preview. All right, I think everything looks okay in this scene in terms of the animation. Now let's go back to the master comp to see how that looks with the previous scene, where we got the big diamond here used as a transition object. As you can see, the ball starts to fall too early. This means we need to delay all the animations in this scene so that the animation begins when the big diamond passes the center of the frame. Let's start the animation here from frame 15. To do this, ensure no layers are selected. Press you to reveal all key frames on all layers and select all the key frames. Now drag them together to the new starting point. While we're here, let's type the letters in yellow for better organization and collapse the illustrator layers to ensure they appear sharp and clean. Let's also rename the background layer to background blue. Now, when we check the animation in the master comp, everything looks great. However, I noticed that the text box is interfering with the other animations and drawing too much attention. Let's fix this by entering the scene and starting the outtro animation of the text box right after the ball bounces on it for the first time at the beginning of the scene. That looks much better now. Great, Let's go back to the master comp and close all open precomps. Then color this scene in blue and rename it to scene six. Don't forget to update the color tag here as well. Now is a good time to save the project before moving on to the next scene. In the next scene, we'll focus mainly on creating the opening animation. Let me show you this in our main design document. Before we begin, we'll create a transition from the current scene to the next one. First, I'll open the design for this scene to prepare it for animation. Remember, you don't need to follow along because you already have the finished files. Just watch and listen. As always, I'll start by ungrouping the design and separating the layers. After ensuring all the layers are properly separated, I'll name the important ones that will be used in after effects. In this case, these are all the layers related to the eye design. Then I'll press Control as to save the project before importing it into after effects. Alright, now it's your turn to follow along. Import the design into the project and place the Illustrator layers folder into the assets folder. Then open the new scene to prepare it for animation. If you're wondering why we're not creating the transition from the previous scene to this one before animating it, here's the reason in cases like this, where I plan to create a seamless panning transition between two scenes, it's better to finish animating both scenes first. After that, we'll combine them and time the transition properly. Let's get started. First, turn off the text and background layers so we can focus solely on the eyes layer. Now we will start animating this sequence by animating the main eye layer. Animate the main part of the eye, right click on the layer and convert it to a shape layer. Once that's done, delete the original layer and rename the new shape layer appropriately. Now we have a shape layer that allows us to animate its path. Turn off the remaining layers to get a clearer view of what we're working on. Open the shape layer, navigate to the group, and select the path of the shape. You'll notice that it has too many points which makes animating it more complicated. To simplify, we'll delete some of these points before doing so, let's activate the proportional grid because it will come handy when we start adjusting the path. Now let's simplify this shape by deleting a few points on its path. Make sure not to delete the middle points of the shape. We can use the delete Vertex tool to remove the unnecessary points by clicking on them. Once done, switch back to the Pen tool to make further adjustments and then use the selection tool to fine tune the shape. Curve the middle points by clicking on each point and dragging the left handle to the left and the right handle to the right. Repeat this process for the bottom point as well. Now that the shape is ready, we can start animating it. Since this is the final form of the eye, when it's fully open, go to the 1 second mark and create the first keyframe for the path as it appears now. Next, move to the beginning of the timeline and bring the upper point down to the center. Then bring the bottom point up to the center, Zoom and to ensure the points are perfectly aligned to form a straight line. Awesome. Now we have an opening eye animation. However, you'll notice some unpleasant shapes forming along the sides during the animation. Let me zoom in for a second so you can see what I'm talking about. I don't like the pointy edges we see here. To fix this, open the stroke settings for the shape and adjust the joints to make them rounded. Set both parameters to round it. Now the edges look much smoother. When the eye opens and closes, it looks much better this way. Now, let's bring back the rest of the eye layers and ensure they are all contained within the main eye shape we just animated. To do this, we'll use the Track Matt function, select all the eye layers and drag their Track Matt pick whip to the main shape layer. We're using Alpha mat, so the shape layer is automatically hidden. Just don't forget to turn it back on. That looks nice, but there's a small issue. We can't see the outline of the shape because the eye layers are placed above it. To fix this, duplicate the shape layer, move the duplicate above the eye layers, and turn off the fill for the duplicate. Then for the original shape layer at the bottom, turn off the stroke. Now, the upper layer is used for the black outline while the bottom layer is for the white fill. The stroke looks a bit too thick, so let's set its width to eight. Awesome. Now collapse the Illustrator layers, and let's make this animation a bit more interesting by adding a subtle scale animation to the two eye layers. Go to the 1 second mark, select these two layers and create a keyframe for the scale property. Now move to a point where you can clearly see the layers and scale them up. Let's now select the I three layer and set its scale to 200 for a more interesting look. Next, drag the keyframes to the beginning of the animation and preview it. I think it looks great, now let's refine the animation. Unselect all the layers, press you to reveal all the key frames, select them all, convert them to easy ease and enter the graph editor. Adjust the curves so the animation starts quickly. Let's see the result. Looks great. Now, let's create an intro animation for the eye outline. We don't need to animate the path for this. Instead, we can use the Pen tool to create a simple line that matches the shape of the outline. Make sure no layers are selected and draw the line. Rename the new layer to stroke, and now to animate it, use the trim paths effect. At the beginning of the animation, set the end property to 50 and create the first keyframe. Then set the start property to 50 and create another keyframe. Move 1 second forward. Now let's isolate this layer for better visibility and set the end to 100 and the start to zero. Awesome. Now we have the opening line animation. Let's refine it by rounding the ends of the stroke as the sharp edges don't look good in my opinion. Looks much better now. Once that's done, easy ease the key frames and adjust the animation in the graph editor for smoother motion. Great. Finally, let's unsolo this layer and align it to the center of the composition. Now let's time this animation with the eye opening animation. First, let's tag the eye layers in orange to keep the timeline organized. Next, move all the eye layers to start at the 1 second mark. Since we don't need to stroke layer after it finishes its opening animation, crop it to end at the 1 second mark. That looks super cool. If you'd like, you can move this layer lower in the layer stack for better organization. Now that we've created the main animation for this scene, we can go back to the master comp and start creating the transition from the previous scene to the scene we just animated. I want the ball to move left, reach the center, and then start the opening line animation. Do this, we can either place the scene in the master comp or we can keep the master comp clean and bring the ICmp to this scene. First, we need to understand where the scene should begin. In this case, it's from second five, where the bouncing letters animation ends. By doing this, it will be much easier for us to create the transition between these two scenes, especially since these two scenes share the same background color. Stand at the five second mark where the previous animation ends and bring the scene to start from this point in time. Now move the ICN comp to the left so it's initially out of the frame. Great. Now we are ready to create the transition. We now create the illusion that the ball moves to the left. Before moving on, let's organize the timeline by cropping layers that are no longer needed for the rest of the animation. For example, crop the layers of the first two letters that are no longer visible in the frame after they finish their animations. We can also crop the dark background layer as it becomes fully covered by the blue sphere after its animation finishes, making it unnecessary. Let's double check if there are any other layers we can crop before continuing. Question, what layer can we crop now since it's no longer visible in the scene? In this case, we can crop the text box layer as it finishes its animation at 1 second and 15 frames. Now, I want to show you a new trick to create the illusion of a panning to the side transition without scaling the width of the scene or combining the two scenes into one, as we practiced earlier in the course. Our goal is to create the illusion of the ball moving to the left and transitioning into the scene. To achieve this, start by creating a new null object and name it transition. Let's start the in a little earlier so we can see it during the panning animation. Place the Sine at 4 seconds and 15 frames for now and make sure the precomp is perfectly aligned to the left side of the composition. Make sure it's perfectly aligned. Next, parent the e scene to the null object. Then parent the remaining layers that are still visible from the previous scene to the null as well. In this case, that includes all the remaining text layers. Note that you don't need to parent the ball. Now when we move the null, we'll control both scenes simultaneously. This allows us to create the panning animation easily. However, since both scenes share the same background, we can optimize things by entering the e scene and turning off the blue background layer. As you'll notice, this doesn't affect the look of the main scene. Let's start animating the null object. Begin by setting the null start position at this point in time. Press P to reveal the position property and create the first keyframe. Move forward 1 second to 5 seconds and 15 frames and shift the null to the right until the eye scene is perfectly aligned to the center. Let's zoom in to see it better and adjust the position value manually. That looks good. Now, let's improve the easing of the animation using the keyframe velocity panel. At this point, it may look a bit odd. To make the illusion work, we need to animate the ball. Before doing that, let's adjust the timing of the Scenes animation. The cene should start a bit later because we don't want the line animation to begin during the transition. It should start after the transition ends. Let's make the Snee start from this point in time at second five and 15 frames where the transition ends. To do it, let's enter the I Precomp. Now, select the relevant layers and shift them to match the new starting point. Let's go back to the main scene to see how that looks now. That looks much better now. With everything in place, we can start animating the ball. From the point where the transition starts, create the first keyframe for the position of the ball. Then move to the end of the transition, enable the action grid, and position the ball at the center of the frame. It may feel a bit confusing to you right now, but bear with me and you will understand what we are doing in a second. All right now match the velocity to the movement of the null to ensure the animations aligned smoothly. You preview the animation, you'll see the illusion of the ball moving to the left into the next. Now to make the transition more interesting, let's stand in the middle of the transition, then open the scale property of the ball and create a keyframe at this point. Then go to the beginning of the transition and create another keyframe with the same value. For the middle keyframe, set the scale to 200 and for the end of the transition, set it to zero. Finally, let's es ase the keyframes and using the graph editor make the motion of the ball slow down in the middle of the animation. This adds an extra illusion that the ball is moving closer to the camera, creating a simple yet visually engaging panning transition. And with this, we are ready to create the next transition. But before that, let's save the project. The next step will be creating the transition for the upcoming scene, which features an awesome dive animation. But before adding it to the project, let's organize everything and create the outtro animation for the current scene we just worked on. To begin, let's locate this pre comp in the project panel and change the name to I comp. Place this precomp into the precomps folder for better organization. And now let's start working on the outtro animation of the current scene. For this, we first need to find the moment in time to start the outtro animation. Don't forget to make sure that there is enough time to read the text here. In our case, we can start it from second seven and 15 frames. So now let's enter the I Precomp and create an outtro animation from this point in time. To simplify the process, let's reverse the intro animation. So first, let's open the key frames for the layer and now move 15 frames forward. Now copy the intro animation keyframes, paste them at this point, and reverse them to create the reverse animation. Do the same for the upper layer, which is the stroke of the main shape. I'll copy the key frames and paste them here and reverse them to create the reverse animation. Let's see how that looks. I think it's too slow. To fix this, let's stand at second four and drag the last keyframes to this point in time. Let's watch this again. That looks better now. Now, at the end of the animation, let's select all the eye layers and crop them since we want to have a clean timeline. Then duplicate the stroke layer, place it above all layers, then bring it to the end of the animation, and now open its keyframes to reverse the animation. In my opinion, it's too slow. Let's bring the last key frames to second four and 20 frames to speed this animation up a little bit. That looks better. Now let's go back to the main scene and trim the timeline to the end of the animation of the scene. In this case, it's when the eye closes. But let's not trim the timeline to this point. Let's give ourselves an extra second just in case we need to adjust the timing of the animation in the scene in the future. Awesome. So now we are ready to start creating the next scene and the next transition. This time we will learn how to create a super cool tunnel dive animation using simple techniques. But before that, as usual, we will check the design file to prepare it for animation. You don't need to do this, so just watch for now. To be honest, we won't use the Illustrator layers to create this scene. We will create it from scratch and after effects. If you're wondering why we're not using the original layers from Illustrator, it's because each layer has a different size, which can make the rounded corners inconsistent after scaling. Additionally, I want to show you how to create simple scenes like this directly and after effects to save time, rather than relying on Illustrator or Photoshop for everything. Now, let's get back to work together and import the design file into our project. We'll use this precomp as a reference to color the scene we'll create from scratch. First, we'll create a new composition. Press Control or Command N, name it scene seven. Make sure it's a full HD composition and click Okay. Let's close any open precomps to keep our workspace clean and select the design precomp for reference. This dive scene is very simple to recreate. To start, select the rectangle tool, ensure the stroke is turned off, and set the fill color to white for now. Then double click the rectangle tool to create a rectangle that matches the size of the composition. To give it a polished look, adjust the corner roundness to 90, which you can find in the rectangle properties of the shaped layer. Next, change the rectangle's color to the dark blue from the design. Once that's done, duplicate the layer and update its color to match the next shape in the design. Make sure to sample the right color. Now let's keep duplicating the shape and color the new duplicate according to the design. We need to have six shapes in total. All right. And now we are ready to start to animate. Start by selecting all the layers and moving to the beginning of the timeline. Let's zoom in on the timeline so we can see the timestamps in seconds. Now, open the scale property by pressing S, set the scale to zero for all layers and create a keyframe. Move forward to the 1 second mark and scale the shapes so they exceed the composition size slightly. 110% should work well. Once the keyframes are set, select all of them and adjust their velocity to 85% in the keyframe velocity panel. It's too fast. Let's bring the last keyframes to second two to slow it down a little bit. That looks better now to create the illusion of the diving animation, we need to delay between the layers. Let me show you what I mean. First, let's stand at frame number ten. Let's zoom out in the timeline, and now leave the first shaped layer in place while selecting the rest and shifting them ten frames forward one by one. Once done, let's check what we've got. In my opinion, it's too slow and it's happening because the delay is ten frames. Let's make the delay five frames instead of ten and see how it will look. This adjustment creates a much better flow. Now the scene looks much better and now to make the dive last longer, we need to repeat the entire animation one more time. To do this, select all the layers and duplicate them using Control or Command D, place the new layers above the original ones and tag them with a different color for better organization. Start the second sequence five frames after the previous one to create a seamless continuation. Let's preview how that looks. I think it's great and we're ready to finish the diving animation. To wrap this up, we'll use the last layer as a mask for the entire scene. For this, we'll apply the silhouette alpha blending mode to the layer. This setting will turn the layer into an Alpha mat for all the layers below it, creating the effect of an opening for the next scene. Now let's precompose all these layers and name the precomp tunnel comp. Make sure both options are selected before hitting Okay. Awesome. Before moving on, locate this scene in the project panel and tag it blue for consistency. Next, go back to the master comp and bring this scene into the timeline. At this point, we need to figure out the best timing for starting the new scene. I want it to begin right after the line from the previous scene closes. In this case, I just go back and forward in the timeline while watching the animation to understand what can be the best moment for the scene to start. Maybe here. Et's place it at 7 seconds for now and see how it looks. It's great. But if we turn on the transparent background in the preview, we'll notice some empty areas. This happens because the previous scene ends too early. To fix this, enter the previous scene, press Control K and add a few seconds to the timeline. Then zoom out, expand the layers, and especially extend the blue background layer. With this issue resolved, we can crop the tunnel comp after it fully covers the frame at 1 minute, 8 seconds, and 20 frames. Once the transition into the tunnel scene is working correctly, we can go back and finish the animation here. At this stage, we'll create a flying animation for the gray sphere that leads the entire project. This will enhance the illusion of diving into the tunnel scene. Let's get started. First, we will create the sphere. Grab the ellipse tool and make sure no layers are selected to avoid creating a mask. Draw a small sphere and set its size to 50. Switch back to the selection tool, select the layer, and move it into position. Turn off the transparent background and rename the layer to sphere. Next, let's align the sphere to the center and move it down out of the frame. Make sure you're at the beginning of the timeline. Press P to reveal the position property and create a key frame. Move forward 1 second and position the sphere somewhere around here. Then move forward another second and place it here. The goal is to create an interesting path for the end of the tunnel dive animation. Let's keep positioning the sphere in a wavy path. Now, let's refine the path by rounding it. Use the Vertex tool to click on the points and round them. After that, press V to switch to the selection tool and adjust the handles to create a more dynamic and visually engaging path. Once you're happy with the path, we can improve the animation by adding the illusion of the sphere moving closer to the camera and further away, similar to what we did in the previous scene. Question, what property do we use to create this illusion? To achieve this, we'll create a scale animation that matches the timing of the position animation. At the start of the animation, leave the scale as it is. Then increase it to 200. After that, bring it back to 100, then scale it to 201 more time. And finally, bring it to 100 once again. Let's see how that looks. It's a bit boring for now. So let's easy ease the key frames and watch it once again. Soon we will address the pauses in the position animation. At this point, we'll adjust the position animation for smoother motion. Let's select the position keyframes, enter the graph editor, and tweak the curves to make the sphere enter the frame quickly. For now, let's make the sphere slow down as it approaches a curve, speed up while navigating the turn, and then slow down again before reaching the next turn. Finally, we will have the sphere exit the frame quickly. Let's see what we've got. Great. Now let's select the position property once again. This time, make sure we do not have any weird pauses during the motion. Let's watch it once again. Looks awesome. Now let's exit the graph editor and move on. If everything looks good, we don't need to make further adjustments to the scaling animation. Let's bring back the tunnel comp and return to the master comp to see how everything looks when combined with the previous scene. It looks awesome. Now we can move on to the last scenes. These are simple enough that we don't need to create separate comps for them. We can complete the animation within this comp. The next two scenes are the final ones in our main design file. Since they're straightforward, we don't even need to import their design files into after effects. We'll create them from scratch in just a few seconds. First, create a new pre comp to hold this part of the animation, name it final and ensure its full HD with enough duration for this segment. Let's make it 30 seconds. All right now select the precomp so we can sample the colors for the background. We'll create a new solid layer and sample the dark blue color from the design. Name this layer background dark, make sure it matches the comp size, and click Okay. Now, return to the second scene and copy the first title we use there as it's the same title that needs to appear in the final scene. In real projects, this is often used for logo animations presented both at the beginning and end of a project. In our case, the main title precomp, this is our logo animation. Before moving on to the next part, which includes the scene with the website address, let's return to scene seven and bring in the final comp we just created. This will allow us to time it with the tunnel animation. Find the precise point in time for the final comp to start. Turn on the transparent background to help visualize the timing. It needs to begin just before the tunnel starts disappearing. Let's set it to start at 1 second and 15 frames. However, as you can see, the sparkles begin too early. To fix this, we'll need to adjust their timing. So enter the final comp. Remember that any timing changes here will also affect scene two since the same pre comp is being used in both. To avoid this, we'll create a duplicate of the animation. Locate the precomp in the project panel and duplicate it. Then go to the final comp and replace the existing precomp with the duplicate by holding Alt or option while dragging the duplicate onto the layer. Now, enter the duplicated scene and adjust the timing of the sparkles to start at around 2 seconds. Now, let's go back to scene number 11. Polish your project before rendering: Hi there, and welcome back. Before rendering the final project, it's important to ensure that all layers and precomps are presented in the highest quality. To achieve this, we need to collapse the precomps in the project. I also love to find the layers inside the precomp that I didn't use and delete them. It keeps the project clean and well organized. This is what we will focus on in this lesson. We'll make sure every precomp is of its best quality and delete the unnecessary layers from the project. Now, after collapsing the scene, we should always check if it has affected the animation or the visual appearance of the scene. This is because collapsing precomps can sometimes be tricky, especially when dealing with complex scenes that involve different types of layers and nested precomps. For now, let's start with scene six. We'll collapse it and check the result. Everything looks fine. Now let's enter this scene and see if there are any layers or precomps we can collapse to improve quality. We can collapse the e precomp. Let's enter it and see if there's anything else to collapse. Inside, we can collapse the Illustrator text layer. For the background, we don't need it, so we can remove it from here. We can exit this comp and take a final look. It looks good. Let's go back to the master comp. For the diamond layer, you can activate the motion blur if you'd like to add a slight blur effect during the animation. Let's see how it looks. Personally, I prefer it without the motion blur. All right. Moving on. Scene five has already collapsed. Let's collapse scene four and observe the results. As you can see, collapsing scene four changes the dimensions of the elements inside. This happens because when we collapse the precomp, the layers inside interact with the current comp, which is the master comp. In the master comp, we don't have a camera like the one in Scene four. As a result, the layers appear as if they were placed directly in the master comp without a camera. Let's uncollapse it and see what we can do to retain the highest quality in this scene. First, let's collapse the podium scene here. As you can see, the image changes slightly. This is due to the same reason I explained earlier. However, in this case, the layers inside don't have a camera. After collapsing the precomp, the two delayers inside behave as if they were outside, interacting with the camera in this scene. To make the layers inside the podium scene interact correctly with our camera, we need to collapse them. Collapsing alone won't fully solve the issue. While we will see an improvement in quality, the layers still won't interact with the camera as they should. To fix this, the most important step is to convert the layers inside to three d layers. By doing this, they will interact perfectly with the camera even after collapsing the precomp. It might seem confusing right now, but don't worry. We'll practice this in other scenes and you'll get the hang of it very soon. If you remember, we have already practiced this process in the previous lessons. Let me explain. This is exactly what we did earlier with the precomp containing the icons. We converted the icons here to three Dlayers so they can interact with the camera outside this precomp because we wanted to create a cool parallax effect. Now let's try collapsing one of the text boxes here. Collapsing makes the layers inside act as if they are part of the current comp. As I explained before, this comp has a camera, but inside the text box precomp, the layers are two D. Therefore, they don't interact with the camera here because cameras cannot interact with two D layers. However, if we enter the precomp and convert the layers to three D, the camera in this scene will interact with them as if they were directly in this comp. In this case, collapsing doesn't significantly change the quality of the text boxes, so I prefer not to collapse them. However, this was a simple example to help explain the concept of how collapsing works. All right, let's close all the precomps we opened here and return to the master comp. Now we've optimized this scene for the highest quality and there's no need to collapse it further. Doing so would complicate the project since the camera in scene four does not exist in the master comp. After collapsing, the camera inside the scene is disabled and the layers behave as though they are part of the master comp. But since we've already achieved the best quality within the scene, we won't collapse it further. Let's move on to scene three, which is the most complex scene in the project. Let's see what precomps or layers we can collapse. Here we have the laptop precomp, but we've already handled it while animating this scene. We know that we cannot collapse the first part of the precomp because the layers inside would immediately start interacting with the camera here, which would cause some visual issues. The second part is already collapsed, so we're good with that. Next, we have the woman character precomp. If I zoom in, you can see it looks slightly pixelated. However, if I collapse it now, there won't be any noticeable change. This is because the Illustrator layers inside the precomp are not collapsed. So we can enter the precomp and collapse the layers now. Since we want these layers to interact with the camera and the scene, we'll also convert them to three D layers. Now, if we zoom in and collapse the precomp, the quality will improve slightly. Let's move on and do the same with the UI panel precomp in the scene. Collapse it, enter the precomp, collapse the layers, and convert them to three D layers. Now let's move on and repeat the process for the second UI panel. Let's head over to the area of the first part of this big scene to see the UI and the man character precomps. Let's start with the UI precomp. But this time, let's first convert the layers to three D and then collapse them. As you can see, the layers have shifted positions. This can happen sometimes due to differences in how the elements were precomposed in their original comp and then cropped or adjusted when the precomp dimensions were set. Anyway, it's not a problem at all. All we need to do is center them again. Note that the align tool won't work here since the layers are now three D. To fix this, grab the main layer and move it to the center. The second layer will follow because it is parented to the main layer. You can press the quotation mark key to activate the action grid, which helps identify the center of the comp and align the main layer accordingly. Back to the main scene. Now when we collapse this precomp, it might shift to a strange position. This happens for the same reason I explained earlier. To fix it, we need to center the anchor point of this precomp first. Let's hover over the anchor point tool, hold control or command, and double click on it. Then switch back to the selection tool and move the precomp to the correct position. Awesome. Let's move on now and handle the man character precomp. Let's adjust the preview so we can see it. Now first let's collapse it. Then enter the precomp, collapse the layers, and convert them to three D layers. When we do this, you'll notice that the layers have jumped to a new position. However, this scenario is more complex because we have many animated layers here. I don't want to manually move them as it could interfere with the animation. To solve this, we can create a new null object. Position it near the main character body layer and convert it to a three D layer. Then parent the animated layers to this null object. Be sure not to parent the layers that are already parented to the layers we just linked to the null. Now when we move the null object, it will control the entire animated sequence. If the null object jumps to an odd position, don't worry. Just adjust it so the character is correctly placed. Once everything looks right, we can delete the null object and check that everything is in order. Great. Now let's return to the master comp, center the anchor point, and position this precomp correctly. Now we have all the elements in the highest quality. Next, I want to crop the layers that are no longer visible in the frame after the camera moves past the areas with the characters. I think it's somewhere around here. As you can see, at this point in time, the layers below the laptop scene are no longer visible. Therefore, we can crop all these layers to this point in time to be sure, we can open the camera keyframes to see the moment when we are about to zoom into the laptop. As you can see, it happens at this moment. Now we need to return to the master comp and thoroughly ensure that at this specific point in time, the layers positioned beneath the computer are no longer visible. Great. Now we know that we can crop the irrelevant layers up to this moment. We can start by cropping the UI and the man character from the first part of the scene, as well as the cloud the character is standing on and the text layer. We can do the same in the second part with the woman character. By doing this, we make after effects rendering process a bit easier later. All right. Let's go back to the master comp. Now, as for the previous scene where the three D layers inside were already managed by collapsing the relevant layers and pre comps, we don't need to collapse the main scene here. Collapsing it would complicate the look because there is no camera in the master comp. Therefore, we will not collapse the main scene here in the master comp. Awesome. We're almost done. Let's move on to scene two. Let's enter this scene and see if there are any adjustments we need to make inside. In this scene, all the precomps are already collapsed. The only precomp that isn't collapsed is the three D box precomp. If we collapse it, the three D layers inside this precomp will automatically interact with the dimensions of this scene, which would cause distortion and a weird appearance. Therefore, we won't collapse it. However, we can enter the precomp to check if there are any illustrator layers we need to collapse. Looking inside, I see there are no layers here that need collapsing. Let's exit this pre comp and close scene two to return to the master comp. Here, we can collapse the main scene since there's no combination of three D elements inside that would affect the look of the scene after collapsing it. To be honest, sometimes I don't always remember or know if collapsing will distort the scene's appearance. That's why I always check the look, enter the scenes and precomps and try to figure out what's causing any issues, whether it's a pre comp or a layer that doesn't need to be collapsed. Don't worry if you feel a bit confused. Just remember to follow this process before rendering and adapt your layers and settings as needed while checking everything thoroughly. For example, after collapsing the scene, we notice that all the layers appear sharp and clean. However, this creates a small hollow in the areas where the background layers connect. To fix this, we can enter this comp again and blend the layers together by creating a new solid layer with the same color as the background. We can call this solid layer BG big. Make sure the solid layer matches the comp size and place it below all the other layers. This will resolve the issue and eliminate any empty spaces in the scene. Now you can go back to the master comp and see that we don't have the problem now. Let's now finish dealing with the first scene. If we collapse it, the appearance will change because there is a camera inside this comp, whereas the master comp does not have a camera. The three Dlayers inside the comp automatically adapt to the data in the master comp, which lacks the camera from the SN comp. However, we don't need to worry about collapsing this scene since it was created using shape layers only, and shape layers always render at the highest quality. With that taken care of, let's organize our project panel before rendering. We can drag the tunnel precomp into the precompse folder. We can also move this folder to the Assets folder. Let's also move this precomp into the preComps folder. Now let's review the entire animation before rendering. It's essential for motion designers to watch their animations a few times and after effects before rendering. This helps catch any issues that can be resolved now instead of finding them later after rendering. So let's watch the animation patiently and focus to see if we miss something. All right. So during the preview, I noticed that I forgot to add a text layer to this scene. Let's go to the design file and copy the text. Then we'll enter the scene comp and paste the text. First, let's create a new text layer and paste the text. Now, let's align it to the center of the comp. Let's switch the selection tool and position the text layer above all the other layers so we can see it during the tunnel animation. Now let's create a position animation for this text flying towards the camera. This will enhance the illusion of the diving animation. Start by converting the text layer to a three D layer. Next, center the anchor point. After that, create a position animation from the beginning of the scene. Let's say at the start, the text will be positioned somewhere around here. Then by the time the tunnel ends at about second three, we'll bring the text layer closer to the camera. Let's preview how that looks. I think we don't have enough time to read the text, so let's adjust its initial position to place it slightly farther from the camera. We can also lower it a little bit. Let's watch it again. Looks nice. Additionally, let's create an opacity animation to give the text a smooth intro. All right, I think everything looks okay. Now let's return to the master comp and see how this scene looks together with the previous one. It seems the text enters too early, as there's not enough time to read the previous text. Let's delay the text entrance to this point in time. Enter the scene and adjust the opacity keyframes by dragging them here. Let's see how it looks now. The most important thing with text animations and animated projects is ensuring that the viewer has enough time to read the text. That's why it's crucial to watch these moments several times and test if there's enough time to comfortably read the animated text. Our case, I think we're good. But before moving on, let's try to see how this flying text will look if we activate the motion blur for it. This is something I love to test when I have large objects or fast flying layers in the scene. I think it looks much better with the motion blur, so we can exit the scene and continue reviewing the rest of the project before rendering. Now I notice that I misspelled the website name. This is something that can happen easily, which is why it's essential to thoroughly check the entire project before rendering and sending it to the client. So if you misspelled the text like I did, let's fix this real quick. Great. Now we can close these precomps and continue checking the project. Okay, now, I feel that the text in the last scene goes by too quickly, leaving too little time to read it. Let's see how we can extend the duration of this scene. This is a great opportunity to demonstrate how to handle changes in complex comps with many layers and precomps affecting each other's timing. Currently, the text is visible for less than 2 seconds ending at second three. To give the viewer more time, we need to extend the tunnel animation. Let's enter the tunnel precomp and begin by resetting the blending mode of the last layer to normal to cancel the masking effect. Next, select the last six layers of the tunnel and duplicate them. Move these duplicated layers up and shift them to the right, they start five frames after the last shape. Zoom in and make sure there is five frames delay between them. Let's tag them with a different color to keep things organized. By doing this, we've added a few extra seconds to the dive animation. Now set the blending mode of the last layer to silhouette Alpha, so it makes the scene disappear at the end of the tunnel animation. With this adjustment, the tunnel dive animation now lasts longer. This means we also need to adjust the sphere animation to match the new timing, go to the end of the tunnel animation, select all the sphere keyframes and drag the last ones while holding out or option. Now the tunnel opens a few seconds after the original animation, so we'll need to delay the final comp accordingly. Let's start it from this point in time. Before moving on, let's see what we've got so far. After verifying that the timing works, we can extend the animation of the text so it flies for a bit longer. For example, we can move the last keyframe to this point in time to make the fly last longer. Let's see how that looks. I think it looks great, but it won't hurt to make it last a bit longer. Let's place it at the four second mark, and let's check it one more time to ensure everything looks smooth. I think it looks great, but there's something bothering me, the lack of contrast at the point where the tunnel opens and transitions to the final comp. To add more contrast and depth to this transition, we can create a new black solid layer. Soon you will understand why we are doing this and how it will help us to solve the lack of contrast issue. Place it above the final comp and let's start the layer at the same point as the final comp. Now if we lower the opacity, we will get the illusion of a nice shadow. That will create a contrast between the tunnel animation and the last scene. Now we can set the opacity. Let's say to 80 and at this moment, before the tunnel is about to end, create the first keyframe. Then as the tunnel opens completely, bring the opacity down to 0%. Apply EZ Es to the keyframes to smooth the transition and see how it looks. I think this makes the transition look much better. We can now crop this layer to the end of its animation. This is a small trick that I use when I have tunnel opening transitions in my projects. It's super easy to create and it looks very natural. All right. I think we've addressed all the issues here. So let's go back to the master comp and rewatch the entire animation. But before that, don't forget to save the project to secure the changes we've made. Now, let's review the animation. After checking everything, it looks good, so we're ready to render the project. However, as you already know, I'm a bit of an organization freak when it comes to project panels, so let's organize it even further. First, let's clear the project of any unused assets. You can do this step after rendering or after the client approves the animation. In our case, we'll do it right now. To clean the project of unused assets, first locate the comp that includes the entire project. In our case, it's the Master comp. With the master comp selected, go to Edit dependencies and click Reduce Project. After Effects will now delete all unused assets from the project. How does it know which assets are used? This function removes assets that are not used in the selected comp. Since the selected comp is the master comp and it contains all the relevant elements, we know it's safe to delete anything not included in it. Awesome. Now we can further organize the project panel. Start by placing the three precomps into the precomps folder. Next, open this folder and organize its contents. Select the folder and create a new subfolder inside it called Titles. Drag all the textbox layers and title comps into this folder. Great. That's how your project panel should look. We can leave the main scene comps outside for quick access if needed. Before rendering, we can purge the project one last time to ensure it's completely clean. Awesome. Now one last thing. This time, it's really the last thing I want to show you before we render the project. Now, let me show you what to do if the client requests the project file or if you need to send it to someone else to work on. In such cases, we need to collect the project. To do this, go to File dependencies, collect files. Click Save and a small panel will appear. Here, ensure that collect source files is set to all and then click Collect. Save it in the AE folder of the project. Adjust the name if needed, then click Save. Now you'll have a new folder containing everything used in the project. Go back to the AE folder, and this is the folder you can zip and send to the relevant person. After unzipping, they will receive a folder with all the files used in the project, ensuring there are no missing file errors when they open the after effects project file. Now we're ready to render the project. One thing I like to do to achieve the highest definition is to change the color bit depth to 16. This setting enhances the color quality significantly. Avoid using 32 bits because it increases render times and most importantly, it alters the appearance of effects like layer styles, glow, shadow, and more. Let's set it to 16 bits and press Okay. Next, ensure the master comp is selected so after effects knows which comp to render. Then go to composition, add to render Q. Alternatively, you could render it using media encoder. But honestly, there's no difference if you're rendering a single high quality MP four file. Like this one, that's called H 0.2 64 40 megabits per second format. Next, select the location to save the render. Create a new folder in the project's main folder and name it something like samples or finals. Now let's enter this folder. Rename the file to match the project name and add underscore v01 at the end to indicate this is the first version of the render. This helps keep track, especially if adjustments are needed after client revisions. All right. Now click the render button and wait for the process to finish. Once the render is complete, go to the output module and click the link to open the folder where the file was saved. And that's it. We've finished the course. You can now close the project, exit Illustrator, and organize your workspace. Before wrapping up, take a short break and when you're ready, come back to complete the homework assignment I've prepared for you. Thanks for watching and I'll see you in the next one. 12. Home Task: Hi, and well done on finishing the course. Now it's time to test yourself and see what you've learned. I've designed three different small projects, each structured with four scenes. I've already saved each scene for each project as a separate Illustrator file, and in each file, the layers are pre separated and ready for animation. Each project, you'll see a video showcasing the transition I want you to create. The scene designs are very simple and that's because I want you to focus on the transition animations. You can start animating right away, but if you don't feel confident enough, you can check out how I created the transition in the after effects project file, which is available for each home task. This will give you the chance to explore and understand my approach to creating the transitions. Don't expect to create a high quality transition on your first try. Even when I created these transitions, it took me a few hours to figure things out and tweak a lot of keyframes until I got the results I wanted. With that said, I wish you the best of luck and I can't wait to see what you come up with. Have fun and buy for now. 13. Outro: Hey, there, it's me again. I just want to say thank you once again to everyone who watched the course and trusted me to help you learn after effects. I hope you not only picked up some new skills, but also boosted your creative confidence along the way. I'd love to see what you created. So if you feel like sharing, post your animations or home task on social media. With that said, I wish you the best of luck. And if you have any questions, don't hesitate to ask. I'll do my best to help you out. Bye for now and I'll see you in the next one.