Lessons

Lesson Info

Importing Assets & Layer Styles

This project is just cem cem basic animation what I've done is I've just brought in a single photo shop layer and if I look at it it's just a photo shopped file with a single image on it in fact I can come down here and selected in my project panel come down here to edit original I added original and it will open it up in photo shop yes, I accept the license because it's the first time I'm launching photo shop under my idea on here and because I did that I will probably need to do that again because I had to authorize it at an original and there it is so we can see that's just a single layer ah photoshopped layer in there so I can quit photoshopped we don't need it now save our resource is so I I tend to quit aps if I'm if I'm on limited machine or if I have you know a lot of projects going on that need all the resource is the machine could give me so that's just my photo shop player and I'm going to animate this in time in this particular case I want to animate this ball and this is w...

here we start getting into key frames now I'm going to give myself a little bit more real estate space here notice I'm grabbing the little line here down in the timeline I'm grabbing that moving that that allows me to expand or contract some of these uh window areas here so down here in my timeline I've got my time indicator that's this little guy right here and that's where in time we are on the timeline and right now I don't have any key frames in here I just have this ball up at this layer here this layer is in this position so I can twirl that twirl down this carrot next to the layer twirl it down some more ah I can expand this a bit so we can see all of our different options and notice we've got little stopwatch is here on the side of every transformed function and I've got anchor point position scale rotation and opacity those can all be animated overtime because that's all we're doing is we're creating instances of time and by giving it a key frame we say at this point this is going to be this at this point it's going to be that and you do everything else for me in between so it's s o if I wanted to make this you know zero percent capacity there and then have it fade in it would just be a matter of setting the stopwatch here at uh my first frame and then having it fade moved down and having it come up to one hundred so I could go down to zero and then have it come up to a hundred so that's all key frames are they just tell you to do things during a specific part of time now if I want to wipe out my key frames I just click the stop watch it just deletes them and they're gone and that can also be a danger to you have to be careful we have a complicated you know animation and you'll click that stopwatch and oh my gosh all my key frames were gone that's what command z is for command z is our friend so if I just want to make this thing balance I'm going teo click my first position it's at the up position here click the stopwatch that's going to set my first key frame then I come out here to about the halfway point I'm going to drag it down there's a couple different ways I can move my uh layer content I can click and drag it and I can hold down the shift key which is going to constrain my motion so I bring it down here to the bottom and now I've got half of my bounce it goes down to the bottom I wanted to come up to the top again so I can either click and drag it to move it all the way up to the top again and hope that I got it pretty good I've got a guide up there so that helps me or I can simply just delete that key frame bring my play back head out here to where I want it to be select the first key frame because I want to make a loop on what this to bounce up and down up and down so I'll copy that key frame and then paste and there it isthe so I've got the exact same location right there okay, now I've got uh a bounce that happens here it's it's it's ah pretty nasty it looks like an atari game game of wrong there so how do we make this a little bit nicer how do we smooth that out? Well, what happens when a ball bounces does it just bounce and hit a ceiling? Not typically no it will bounce and then has like a little bit of hang time up there so what I'm going to do is write click on this key frame and down here my contextual menu I've got a key frame assistant I'll come over to eazy e's out that means I'm easing out of that position I'm in this position I wanted to slowly move away from that position so that's when you ease out of something ah and on the other end of that is when it comes back up it doesn't just hit that line I wanted to ease into that position so I will right click on that key frame come down to key frame assistant eazy e's in so what that does is it slows it as it comes into the station the train is pulling into the station it doesn't come in and hit a block and everybody goes flying out of the train it eases in so if you think of it that way of a car or something you got passengers you don't want to jolt him this isn't it tron you know you're not making sharp right angle turns he had at one hundred miles an hour so you want everything to ease and now when I ran preview that it gives me a little bit of a hay little hesitation gravity is going to take over and if I want to slow that down a little bit I can change my key frame velocity and by doing that I right click on the key frame down here key frame velocity and by default it's always thirty three and a third percent I could go to fifty percent and that will smooth it out even more so I could do the same thing going in that I have coming out key frame velocity my income in velocity because I'm easy excuse me easing in is going to be uh fifty percent as well so now when I do iran preview it's a little better so that's how you that's how you get those key frames to work now if I want to slow down the entire thing I just moved my key frames just pull it out yeah, I wanted to take a whole second to do abouts so I'm just going to move my key frames in time here and that's going to slow things down and the same is if I want to speed it up then I can push him a little closer together and actually get move this work area here this little bar up here is our friend wanna ramp review things or you want to render a final uh peace out you want to move your work area here so that's that's what's going to be looking at not the whole timeline so just move that down now we got it really moving fast. Okay, so one thing with this, uh, with these key frames if I want to make this, uh, key frame in the middle kind of follow where I'm I'm moving my last key frame and stay in context I can just right click on it and I can click rove across time and that way when I move this key frame that one always stay in position there so that's really handy if you want to have a lot of different objects doing the same thing and what you want them to all be you varied like if I had twenty of these balls and there are one two all bounce it different different intervals then I could do that duplicate the layer and then just, you know, modify it very easily that that that works if you have several key frames in between your ends. So that's really nice. Okay, I've got got one already done here. Well, that's our straight bounce and then we can play with that a little bit more, uh, by giving it more of a cartoon effect. So now it kind of builds a little character starts to come to life a little bit and the way we do that is using a bunch of key frames on a bunch of different transform functions here and notice that not only do I have my position key framed in here, but I've also got my scale key framed in there and it's not a global scale either. If you'll notice my scale is not exactly one toe one my horizontal and vertical has changed. So let me show you how that's done so come down here to roll that down through all that down. So now I know that I want it to be, uh, the scale to be exact right about well, we'll just say it's going to be exact up here and then again at the end it will be the same, so if I wanted duplicate that key frame without having to just go copy and paste I just I wanted to be where it is and what it's doing at that point in time. I just want to add a key frame. At that point in time, I just moved my playback head where I wanted to be. And over here, there's a diamond in between the two arrows. And as I roll over, you can see it has a, uh, well, spot like that. It has a little roll over, says at a remove key frame at current time. So I just click that little diamond it turns yellow. You'll see a key frame pops up there. So now that means that anything I do in between here it's going to resolve and come back to that point. So if I wanted to smash down here a tte the bottom when it makes contact, then I have to make sure that this little link down here is unlinked there's a little chain there constraints of proportions. Make sure that's unchecked there and now I can smash it out a little wider. Squish down a little bit there and now it's kind of hovering, so I actually have to move it down a little bit. Notice how I said before there, uh, there's a couple different ways of moving things on your own. Comp and another way is to actually do it by the numbers and I use this a lot click and drag on the numbers because I have a little more control than just reaching out here and grabbing something especially if you have a lot of layers sometimes you'll have fifty or a hundred different things on your project you hear clicking away and you may grab the wrong thing and drag it move it this way you know for sure that that layer is the one that you're you're focused on so I can click and drag that bring it down so that's going to be my squish mode well I don't want it to really squish you know up here in the air it's not going to squish still hits down there so I can drag this key frame up so it just does it a frame four so it's a smooth transition even though it doesn't really do that in the real world it won't squish before hits the ground but it does smooth it out just a little bit and we want it to come up so we could either have it squish and then come up and that's workable that's doable if we really want to exaggerate this thing we want it to go overboard because that's what we do here we like to do things really exaggerated here we go so we're gonna have this guy overreact to its motion and by adding that vertical squish after the horizontal squish, it forces it into a directional motion there. Okay, so another thing that we've done here, uh, that gives us a realistic look is we've got this motion blur that's built in and that's this, uh, this guy right here, you see, this enables motion blur gotta highlighted, and I've also got it checked on the layer so I could enable motion blur, but I could have it only motion blur certain layers if I have several layers in there. Uh, so if I want motion blur to be applied to a layer, I was make sure that I've got it selected. So this is what the animation looks like without the motion blur not a big difference in this case because it's kind of cartoony is it iss, but if we wanted to have a more realistic look like we shot it with a camera and that's typically, what were trying for in most animation and motion graphics these days is to give it some realism. That sense of realism is the motion blur. I'm going to be showing you something later on a new feature in aftereffects cc is pixel motion blur because this motion blur works with anything that's actually moving on the layer if something and if the layer is moving or something uh then it will it will blur whatever's in motion text anything anything that's moving in the layer but if I have say some video footage or I've rendered out an animation and now I'm bringing that animation into overlay something else and I want a motion blur that I couldn't I'd have to use a third party plug in and typically that was real smart real smart motion blur ari vision effects see if you have an older version of aftereffects get ari vision effects real smart motion blur r s m b google it it's a great plug in and it essentially does the same thing that the new pixel motion blur does here in aftereffect cc but motion blur is your friend that's what's going to give things a smoother look going to look more realistic uh and give us a lot more to it so uh to create that loop I've just taken this particular cop and I've brought it into another cop and we're going to be getting into that in our next segment maura's faras making nested, calms and pulling things together but just to show you that it's just a matter of bring I've got a cop here that I've created that same piece with uh and actually in this case I just duplicated the layer a bunch and cropped it so this is another thing if I've got this animated right here to this twenty frame point and I want to duplicate that layer a bunch without a lot of confusion as to where it starts and stops I just select that um layer and I've got my time indicator at that last point that last key frame and I can ah shift command de or that would be shift control d on the pc and you'll see that it splits that layer into two places right at that point so I'm not I'm not worried about any of this out here the rest of that layer could go away some just going to delete and it's gone so now that layer is there enough I wanted to stretch it out I could I could still pull it out there the information's there it just cropped it to that point so now if I wanted to duplicate that I just do a command e or control d on the pc and I could do that three or four times however long I want and if I select all of these layers and then right click and go to key frame assistant and then sequence layers and um actually I don't want overlap I just want them to sequence out there we go that will give me this loop I obviously want to stretch out my work area so you can see more than one of all of those so there we go I'm just gonna do the four for now so now when I ram preview that boom boom boom there's my loop okay, and then of course I've got one where we'll get into a little later with, uh, more of the balls all happening at different times and we've got them got them all scaled and bouncing the different times in there so that's kind of fun I cover some of this material on my beginning after effects for beginners except I used pineapples in there jumping around so if you want to go see that video as well that's upon the creative cloud uh I mean creative life um site is well, er I think this time are there any questions I want to get caught up on those so they're not going to well, actually we do have a couple questions that you may be covering later but you mentioned that you use an external hard drive and that you and you have your air so we have a couple q's about that that we thought maybe we should just pop in and get those answers. Your clarify? Sure. Great. Yeah eso duke in park city has asked given a choice of cashing to an ss d that is the boot and an os drive or the external usb drive or a second internal hard drive would you put the cash on the external drive or let the ss devi super busy? It really depends that's if you only have usb that might be a bit of a bottleneck but yet it will be less taxing on your boot drive so the whole idea is to cash somewhere besides your boot drive that's the main thing and that's why I use this thunderbolt ssd with my portable because with thunderbolt it's a really fast port super fast uh it's not as fast as if it was an internal but it's you know probably fastest thing I have access to um if you have an e sada port on a pc max don't have them unless you have them added in uh but if you haven't got a port on your pc you can get an e sada external ssd is well and that's super fast throughput is well, if you've got a tower, they're running a mac pro here so we've got a tower with two hard rise already internal so since it's an internal drive that's why I'm using that as a cash secondary you know, dr is a cash on this it just speeds things up instead of having make your, uh, your boot drive you do all the work so it really helps absolutely way do have a couple more questions coming in, but they're kind of on the general end of things, so I think we're gonna hold off, let you get through some material and still later, okay, great okay as I was saying before us far as bringing footage in it's just a matter of locating where your footage is where you want it tio pull from you just go find it from your external driver your internal drive wherever you have your content and then you go and you select the file and in this case this is a photo shop file and that's the one I showed you before it's the basketball and if I can bring it in is a composition or as footage and if I bring it in his footage it's going to allow me to ask it's goingto ask me do you want me to merge all the layers? Because it does have a background layers got that white layer and then it's got the basketball and so I can choose to bring it in merge which flattens everything out or I can say choose layer I can choose layer one or two and I am going to choose layer one and that's my basketball layer there there we go just double click it and it shows me that's the layer so uh, since I've got this layer and I want to get rid of it, I can throw that in the trash or just click the delete key there another a way that I can import if I have uh, several different um several different layers that I want to keep all in in in the composition say I had a lot of things in there I can import as a composition open that ah it always ask me if you want the layer styles editable because the layer styles in photo shop can be edited in after effects and we'll get into that layer as well. S so what that did is that brought that in is a composition so I can actually open that cop up and notice that the cop is the actual size of the photoshopped file it isn't a video aspect but I may not want that to be video aspect I may just want to animate this and then I'll bring it into another com plete her on so I can animate right on this comp if I want to notice that my background is as a separate layer um and it put all of the content of that photo shop file as two separate layers in here so I've got a layer one we can see the little thumbnail up here and then I've got a layer to see the thumbnails up here is well so that's another way to bring something in um if I want to either edit or replace a layer let me bring in that just the layer to again by accident um I'm going to choose footage and I want to choose layer to select ok so if I do that instead of having to go in and re uh import something, delete and then reimport I could just replace that by right clicking on it go to replace footage goto file go back here and open and choose the correct layer so that way, if I accidentally got layer to instead of having to go through the process of deleting than re importing aiken just replace it and the nice thing with that is to if I have an animation that has something moving all on it and I want to duplicate my entire project, I couldn't do that on dh actually swap out what the corps image is I could change this from a basketball to a baseball or a soccer ball or something like that as long as the scale was exactly the same everything would have to match perfectly on my original photo shop layer to do that and have all the animations makes sense because if it was a different scale, obviously the balances wouldn't be the same that wouldn't be correct. So that's that's really important? Teo uh keep track of that if you're going to repurpose some of your aunt donation okay, so um let me, um let me get into our layer, stiles just a little bit here, we're going to just start from scratch here with some layer stiles and I'm going to delete that layers. I've just got the basketball out here, and I'm going to change my composition settings here because I was talking about if you had transparency on a layer. Um, let's, go ahead and make that a white background and let's change this too. A little different aspect ratio. There we go. So now I've got this basketball out here and let me see where we were at one hundred percent should be one hundred percent of our scale. Everything's good. They're, um, they just increase my scale. There's a couple of ways, I can increase my scales. Well, I can click and hold down the shift key, and I can move things this way when I'm scaling. Uh, I can also do it by the numbers, and this is where keyboard shortcuts are really helpful. I can do scale just by hitting the ski on the keyboard and notice that brings up just these numbers for scale. I can hit p for position. I can hit a for anchor point. We're going to get into that in a minute and then, uh, again hit t for rapacity. Yugo what? T yeah, t would be for transparency, but then you'd like to call it opacity, so that's, that's one that doesn't really jive, but you yeah, I always say it out loud when I go t for a passage, so that allows you to do that so s for scale, we can see that we're at two hundred twenty three percent, which is a really no, no, you don't want us rez up things that aren't, uh, aren't by nature already high rez, because they're goingto have jaggi edges it's going to be, you know, kind of nasty looking, so you don't want to go that much, but just for the sake of being able to show some of her layer stiles here, I want teo, bring that up so just a little bit, and then I can change on my comp here noticed that on my comp window, I've got a fit up to one hundred percent is my scale right here? And then over here, the resolution pulled down is set to auto, and if I go to full, then I'll have full resolution. If I want to change the scale to a hundred percent, then I do that there. So that way I'm seeing my full resolution, I'm at one hundred percent if I want to drag around the comp window and stay in one hundred percent, because obviously I'm viewing something larger than the comp window itself let's hold down the shift or the space bar and I can scroll all around so I can see okay there's the edges of my layer hears everything else just by holding down the space bar and that works and pretty much every tool okay, so if I want teo uh add layer styles to this it's pretty much the same as it is in photo shop where I can get it from layer layer styles and then say I want to do drop shadow um adds it down here right down here in the timelines I control down my drop shadow I can increase the distance khun scroll down here increased the size which is basically the feathering of it and I can change my capacity of the drop shadow uh I can change my blending mode we're gonna get into blending modes and mawr in our next segment and, um, go a little farther with that. Um so you're blending most khun can be brought up at this point, so by default they'll be multiplex that's a drop shadow that means anything that goes underneath it will be dark and instead of just this gray blob on top of it, so if you're familiar with photo shop, a lot of these tools are going to look familiar to you go oh yeah, I know that works but it was well notice here we have the capability of animating these so unlike in photo shop where you you're dealing with still images primarily I mean you can do some animation and ah animate something's over time and even layer styles but in here we can animate everything's I can animate my opacity, my distance and my size those are the three things I want to adjust over time and ah that because I just hit my stopwatch is there I've just created key frames for those so now if I was to come out here to about two seconds let's come out to one second this is pretty pretty long I want it to come away um and I want the balto look like it's bouncing down against the ah surface there the white surface then I'm going to do two things I'm going to change my scale so I've got to come back here to my first frame click the stopwatch for scale come out here to one second and this is where I'm going to make it smaller and notice when I did that it actually makes the drop shadow look like it fell away well, what we want to do is do just the opposite we want the drop shadow to get closer to it tighten up, we'll have a little more definition around it and it'll also get darker okay? And I may actually want teo changes just a little bit can go a little lighter at this point there we go. Okay, so now I've got this where it will bounce up and down this way and like we did before with our bounce I can just grab these key frames that just select and drag all those key frames I copy them and I come out here paste in there I've made a loop so let me get this down a little for let's move let's go make all of these key frames rove across time it's not gonna let me do that globally there we go now it's not gonna let me do that at all, okay? Sometimes it doesn't, so we'll just move on and get this just manually move these in so over our one second loop here otherwise it'll take for ever to bounce way don't want that. Okay, so so it's I mean it's not perfect. Obviously I'd probably want to try to do that in three d but you can see that you can manipulate your layer styles over time as well as your other functions like scale and, uh position in that type of thing. Okay, so again we've got other layer styles that we can apply to this as well, just like we have in photo shop we can also access them with our contextual menu by right clicking on the layer, coming up to layer styles and going to something like a bevel in boss and give it um a little smoother um beveling this one is so we've got our in her bevel uh all the same types of devils and bosses bev als er you've got your and added uh altitude and your angle which also effects everything if you've got it on global there's global lighting and they're so messy lose global light that's off okay so you can change your angle and I think I went to outer bevel no wonder it wasn't looking right accidentally let go and I moved that okay so my size would be up here here's my altitude and so obviously want to make it rounder uh same type of thing as in photo job we've got our screen and or multiply which is our light colors we can bring that down a little bit so it's not quite as much if I didn't really want that to be black say I wanted to be a dark orange I can grab color out here the eyedropper and that helps and then I can adjust how much of that shows so it is a little more of a curve to the object itself again um it's animating because it's um looking at the global global lighting so those are the types of things that you really want to watch when hear when you're working on and this is where we probably want to nest our compositions later on so um any questions on layer styles our anything with the layers, guys have any questions? Let's do? Yeah, we do actually have another question. Also about about stimulating the three d image. Um, thomas in austin asks, how would you do an inner glow to simulate that effect? An inner glow with? Well, it probably wouldn't be, um, probably wouldn't be applied to something like this, but there are ways that I have used in inner glow to create a drop shadow on an object inside, actually, it so it's a great way to actually simulate ah, lighting and I've done this in a little more advanced stages, like with green screen. Sometimes you want to create an edge light or something. You want to create lighting that doesn't exist. Um, so one way to do that is to actually apply and inner glow and in this case, let's, see here, right, click on the layer goto layer styles, goto inner glow and what the inner glow does throw down here? Set the screen. Now you have to exaggerate things before you can really see what they're doing. So if I exaggerate this, I can see that it's it's all the way around it's not coming from anyone angle.