Lessons

Lesson Info

Animating Vector Shapes (2D)

Let's go look at another project now this one will not be in the final final downloads just because we have rights to show it in training but it does the artwork does belong to another client so we won't be able to distribute that the projects are the assets to this project's I'm just letting you know right now that this one will be a little different so but it does show you in a real world situation how some of these animations air created and these air all animations for a corporate product, corporate production and the elements were given to me the same way that I just showed you with the coffee cup they were brought in as illustrator files illustrator layers and the original illustrator files I had to break down into those groups just like we had here, but in this case I had to do several different things actually let me come teo different one first that isn't quite using the same I know we'll go ahead. We'll jump in here. Why not? Everyone wants to see three d, right? So we're goi...

ng to get into three d but it's two d in a three d world and this is the type of thing that we do a lot of in after effects were using to de elements and I know you had asked me about, you know, animating to d layers whether they're photoshopped players or some kind of animated layers where you give the impression that uh that you've got things moving in three d space and we are we're moving things in three d space and we're going to get into three d space a lot more in the next segment but I'm kind of teasing and leading into it here because I think the more we saturate how that all works the better so in this case I've got this animation I may just show it to you this part is only a few seconds long and it will animate quickly we're just doing like a fake uh camera dolly and and there would be something showing up on this guys iphone right um right now it's just blank um I would have had another layer that would had other animation in there and that's we would have would have added that could have been animated, masked and matched in after effects and then we could add that to it so but instead of trying to play with the depth of field and the camera which were waken play with if we have time to show that because there is depth of field capabilities in the camera they're just sometimes it takes a lot of going back and forth and playing with those moving things scaling things enough where your your camera zoom is working in the range of depth of field I again I go for what's quick in what cheap and that's how I roll with it. So first thing I do let's look back here and see what is built here so I've got this is the car that I used for the back end, and if I look at it, this is also used in another animation where I had to spend the wheels, so I've got rotation of the wheels front rear, so if I take the wheels off, there's just breaks and nothing back there, so I actually did animate the wheels and those are just rotation again, like our animations yesterday, I've got my anchor point is set right at the hub of the wheel that way, when I rotated, it rotates just fine. And then, of course, it's got an easy ease in when it comes down and it comes to a stop. So when he's rolling along later on, when I move this car around because I use it in two or three places, the wheel's come to a stop, so they're they're just turning the hubs that a little bit out around there if you really look at it. So here we go well played again and we'll see it's going out there so it's not perfectly centered, you can see there's a little bit of wobble in that in that wheel when it's going but when the car is in motion and then comes to stop you just don't see it because again we've got motion blur on top of motion blur so you can see the motion blurs happening on this wheel and then when the cars in motion later in the second part of this you'll see that the car comes in and stops you don't see anything happening there so this is the car that I used it's just basically the car layer and the two wheels but I repurposed this two or three times within the whole project so close that up that's for the next one okay, so let's get back here so I've used this car and I've also brought it back in time I've moved this whole layer so the wheels are turning if I had it out here you'd see the wheels that turn down there in the corner see it right down in here me go to fit there we go so we would see those wheels will be turning if I I left it there way don't want that car's parked right so there we go so I just took that same uh same sub comp and just moved it down in time so what I've done though is I have an effect on here in one way you can tell whether something's got an effect or something else is happening see this little uh I d down here there's little fx down there that means there is an effect applied to that layer see that little effects on there you can turn that off and turn off your effects too just just just hides them doesn't doesn't get rid of them it just turns him off so the effects aren't working and that's kind of helpful if you've got you know one hundred layers in there and they're all some effects air going and you're just trying to scrub through and get your animation your path and everything going sometimes it's good to just go down the line turn off the effects on the layers that don't need it right that minute and then before you do your final render or your test renders then turn it back on but what I've done for that effect iss my camera lens blur and my blur radius is set over time so if I look at this I see here's my camera lens blur and it's zero now because everything's kind of in focus I'm not doing a dolly pull in iraq focus yet until the camera actually moves up then as I move it up it gives thie illusion that the focus is being pulled just on the guy holding the phone so I've just increased the amount of the blur radius for the camera lens blur that can be found here in effect blur and sharpen and then thie camera lens blur option it's right here so clarence sharpen camera lens blur now the camera lens blur is a little processor intensive so just to warn you if you have it on ah lot of layers it does kind of slow things down a bit sometimes so just be aware of that and it also depends on what you're doing with it here I didn't change anything left it default and just increase the amount off the blur radius so I didn't go in and play with the shape or anything okay? So I've done that to that layer I've also done that to this background of the city where it's gotten effect too so I've got the camera lens blur applied to that even though that may or may not happen in the real world it's the effect that I wanted I wanted that city skyline to kind of go away uh be less of a focus than on the guy so instead of fading it out or making it disappear which was another option I think we played with that option actually just faded too white and they said no leave the city in there so always give yourself room toe back out of something special if you're working for somebody else and they are directing it and they're telling you what you do know what not to do always give yourself out don't ever paint yourself in the corner well well it's gonna take me forever to redo that part you know that's why I love using effects and layers and layers styles and adjustment layers things like that because you're not destroying any data it's always there so in this case we've got the blurring going on in layers but how are we moving this uh this is in three d space but I'm not really moving the layers if you'll notice if I look at my position I've got no key frames on these layers the layers aren't moving at all I could move them if I really needed teo move them but I'm actually I'm moving the camera so if I look at the camera and I twirl that down my transformed functions well see um wow there's no key frames there how does that camera move? Well, we'll notice here here's our parents over here I've applied the parent to a null object and you may be saying what the heck is a knoll object knowles are used in three d because they are something there it's basically a controller it's anel ament that is a non visual element that is just a kind of a place holder in time in space and you can move it you can do it you can move it in three d space I've created it in three d space here so you can see the little cube is on there that means I can move it in three d space and anywhere I move it the camera is just going to follow in sense I'm not worried about yeah I'm not really zooming the lens on the camera I've just placed these these layers exist in three d space at different intervals and they're a different different scale so like the car you might be a little different scale but it's closer to the camera so it might be smaller scale then the guy who might be kind of medium scale where the background maybe really large scale but in three d space they may be very far apart so let's look at what the scene looks like from the top remember our camera views yesterday um I can look down at the top and then I can zoom out let's go to about let's look at about twelve maybe is that enough even let's look and see um I'm going to look at me move this up there we go so I can get all my layers on here so if I look there's my null right there and there's the position that it moves it moves that much which means it's pulling the camera see this little pink dot here that's the camera that's the base of the camera so since the camera is parented to that know all we can see how far it moves on here so my background is way back here somewhere there it isthe looking down at it it's really big it's my background like a studio set it's his big backdrop back there my guy with the iphone in his hand is right there and then the car is just right here in front of him a little bit but I've been able to exaggerate I wanted the trunk of that car to be like he's kind of standing by the car so I wanted him fairly close to it but I want you force the focus out just by using the plug in, right? Yeah, the effect so I go back to my camera view then go to fit up to one hundred then we start seeing where it all comes together now so I've just moved this nal object in three d space I've only got one move in there it goes from there to there that's it. So what happens? How does that how do we create that? Let me just create a noon all object I'll show you exactly how this process works so we go to, uh, layer knew noel object case there's my nal object by default it's just two d uh if I twirl down my transformed functions, we'll see that it's just too d here. Uh, if I click this little box right here that's my make three d box once I click that it turns that into a three d object in space doesn't mean it has volume it just means it can now move in three d space we're get into that a little more after our lunch break but uh at this point I can now move this no object around so I don't know where I want to move it or how I want to move it until I can see what it does so what I'm going to do is actually change the camera from parenting to the old noll object to the noon all object just click and drag my little pick whip there and now I can see where it goes so if I don't do anything to it the only thing that happens is the blur's on those layers that we added see that the camera's not moving but the blur's just happened so what I want to do now is move this in position in times I hit p for position click my stopwatch that's my first step and then I have to look and see what my time you know get on this was that uh three seconds about looks like it's right in three seconds that's where the old one wass lets go two three seconds here and what I'm going to do is since I'm moving in ze space I want to move toward my character and I'm just clicking and dragging my z uh numbers here just clicking on the number for the uzi space and then I can go to my ex and why space and see how I can move that and then up a bit. So this is kind of trippy it's kind of cool actually to do it this way because its feels like you are the camera guy, no offense, I mean, our camera guy's doing a great job here, but we get to pretend we're you for a minute, so you get to play with this a little bit and really get that position locked in and see how that path is working so we could do something crazy, like, go over here first, you know, from this angle ups he's sitting in the cars who can't show that much of him and we don't want show the background now that much, but we could do something crazy where whips around like that and then goes over to him. So you have a lot of options here by moving just the knoll object around, so I just converted that to a rodeo busier uh and this I'm going to ease in key frame assistant eazy e's in. So I've got this kind of crazy camera move here, see what that's gonna look like let's, render it and see so it may be a little wild, but you get the idea wherever I move that noel object that's going to just pull the camera around as if it's on a track or a dolly or a jib or something so on dh then I'm faking the depth of field I'm faking it with the camera blurs it's again wherever you can cut you have shortcuts especially a project like this I think I had for this whole project I probably had at least thirty or forty scenes like this that had to be built on dh so wherever you can repurpose parts wherever you can save time cause everything's always a rush you know every project he gets like it's always due on monday and you get it on friday so you know you do you do as much as you can to cut corners wherever you can on get the effect because it's the end result that matters the most and you can quote me on that because I will always stand behind that statement it's always the end result is what really matters I mean what do you see it's all subjective you know what is it that you see? Okay, so let's take a look at one more project out of here because it moves a little bit differently again we've got a camera we've gotta know all object here we've got things coming in we've got the background is fading in so I've got some opacity changing over time here so my background fades in for this scene and remember the car that I showed you earlier uh his car comes in and it's moving a certain point okay, so what I had to do for this one was tryingto figure out why do I have three instances of his car? Because I made one animation that had to be used several places and what I did is I had the wheels spinning down like he's stopping then I had a pause in there and then I have them speeding up so this was actually timed for another animation where he's driving along stops for something and then takes off eh? So I had to use him for this one but I had to change my timing so I've got him coming in he comes to a stop and then I had to have him sitting there a little bit longer than I originally had planned. So instead of going in and changing the original animation which would have screwed up you know one or two other animations I have the option of just taking that frame and then freezing it in time. So what I did here is I took my time difference here remember how we scaled our time or changed our time in the basketballs yesterday? This is a really time option for this so let's say I went from time and then went from time remapping I had a hard time trying to do freeze frame with this for some reason, so I had to go to time re mapping and, um, that I think that was the way they ended up doing that. Let me look at my layer time on this. Yes, you bet we're getting a couple questions in the chat room. Um, eric sesh in new york asked why I'm here in the camera to annul object rather than just moving the camera? Well, for one thing, it's, that painting yourself in a corner, I think I can move the null object very easily where if I'm moving the camera, if I'm physically moving the camera, moving everything about the camera moving it's, look at point, we're gonna get into that little more after launch with playing with the cameras, and and we can see that sometimes you can get really out of control with the camera. There is an an auto rotate tool that'll show you and sometimes the tools that try to make things real simple and being very difficult. Esso in this way, I've just got the one camera and the knoll object is the element that it's it's following, so everything about it follows that I'm not zooming the camera, you can do all of that, and you have a lot of control over doing that, but again, in most cases, just doing a quick, uh quick zoom in or a quick pan on things the null object it's much easier to control it's much easier to go back and re time later because if I had to control both the movement, the focal point, the zoom all of those things have had to make changes to all of those controls that's a lot of key frames to have to manage over time somebody says we start this about your three frames earlier you know those are the times you want to pull your hair out and you just you want to punch somebody because they're goingto happen they're always going to happen so on this I've got I've got him just frozen in time here for that little bit of time and I just tweaked it a bit I didn't end up re mapping this one cause I remember I wanted them to peel out a little bit so I just stretched it out a bit so I just stretched it out, got his wheels turning and then got him turning against I had him kind of peeling out. I think I may have screwed it up by playing with it there, so playing with the timing but I had it stories just sitting down there and then he was supposed to peel out a little bit before taking off I think I may have just messed it up the same thing with this supposed to be his wife's car she's in the little mini again the wheels on these are just little wheels the little wheel graphics like that that I've got the anchor point in the middle and the wheels will spin and then they come to a stop and then they take off again and kind of like the movies the old movies all western movies so the wagon wheels where it looks like the wheels are going backwards it's just the visual effect that things happen here yeah you got a question how do you turn to the layers three in there er very simply they are just this button click right here right there it's this little box here you just click that once in its three d that's it so that can happen to video layers that any layer that's in there you can convert it to a three d layer not sure that adjustment layers can be turned into three d cameras can't be obviously if there's no box there then you can't convert it to a three d layer that's your that's your cue if the box is available to click he can convert it to three d so for this animation uh we've got yes yeah I kind of screwed it up he's sitting there spinning his wheels I should have smoke coming out of there so and then they take off so fades in he comes in and she comes in voice over the story they take off fades out to another scene again that's using repurpose sing as much as you can your objects your graphics um again this was all illustrator I think the original file I may have had an original file that had some of these graphics the background element is just another design I got from my stock photo dot com er and bought that graphic for this and the rest were were drawn and given to me by the client which is why I can't pass these on because I don't I don't own the content to distribute I have permission to show it in here but there'll be other projects we will get into a three d and the cameras and all that that that I will be able to give you but they just won't have thes same vector resource is so how will also had another question which we'll see if this is something that you can answer form what's the difference between final effect of camera lens blur and cosy and blur what are the resource is to choose camera lens blur over cosy and blur as well well the galaxy and blur it will actually kind of it's different math but it blurs everything just kind of uh kind of like noise like a noise pattern where it's all very random randomized and in arbitrary on that's just the amount of that and uh so your controls of that are very simple. If you just want to soften something up, then you can use the galaxy and blur. But if you really want a camera blur that has boca, which gives you the little little round, you know, circles around the lights and gives you that kind of effect, or you really want to have a show, the, uh, the aperture of the the blades of the aperture in a different size or shape or whatever you really want. Exaggerate that. Then the camera lens blur works works really well for that, but it gives it more of a realistic blur that you would get in a camera that's. Why they call the camera let's book, but sometimes just for a simplicity, say, I'll just go right to gaza and blur. If I just need to blur something, I just go right there so instead of using the processor power so much to render out camera, lens blur didn't get away with it. I'll use that.