hi I'm Ben Marriott, I make weekly motion design and animation tutorials and this
week I'm going to talk through how to get that hand-drawn effect from vector shapes all in After Effects
let's begin
all right here is our animation and this at the moment is a hundred percent
vector and this is made with a shape layers and files that I've imported from
Illustrator and I'm going to show you how to apply hand-drawn effect over the
whole thing using a single adjustment layer and then how to add some extra
hand drawn elements on top of that as
well but first let's move into another comp
where we've just got a single line and I'm going to use this to explain the
principles let's start by adding a new adjustment layer with ctrl alt Y and
let's call this adjustment layer handdrawn effects because we always label
our layers now there are three elements that I think are most important to a
convincing hand-drawn look the line boil the line texture and the framerate line
boil is what we're going to address first boil refers to the
inconsistencies between different frames of frame-by-frame animation because
they're rarely drawn exactly they appear to sort of boil at the edges where the
lines kind of dense and normally in frame-by-frame animation there's an
effort to try to minimize boil but here we want to create the look of these
inconsistencies for our boil we're going to use a turbulent displace effect as we
added it's gonna warp our line quite a bit so let's change the amount down to
two and the size down to 40 and then complexity up to two as well let's zoom
in a bit to get a closer look the amount property up here is how far the line
will Bend how far away from its original spot it will be at its maximum if we
increase that you can see it'll poke out more and the size probably here is how
large the area of the warping is it's kind of tricky to explain without them
sounding like the same thing but if we increase the size you can see that sort
of our original amount is kind of pushed as well in the other axis I like to
think of it the size is the width of the wave and the amount is the power of the
wave a low amount is good for a sort of lose pencil drawing a higher amount
you'll get even looser let's stick to two for now and the size of 40 is going
to match that too you should play with these two values until you get a look
you want and you can always come back can adjust and at the moment it's very
subtle as we flick it on and off you can see some slight variance in the line
that's gonna become a lot more apparent as we add the animation which we're
going to do now so let's add some animation using the evolution property
click over here and drag out our evolution you can see our line source at
animate and the kind of bulging pattern we're going to use an expression to keep
that bulging consistent if we hold alt or option and click on the stopwatch
next to the evolution property it's gonna bring up our expression window and
we're gonna type in the expression time * 500 time here is a variable that
gives the time of the playhead in seconds and we're using it here because
it's a number that keeps increasing and we're gonna multiply that by 500 so it's
gonna give us a faster animation all right we can see our boil is starting to
happen here but it's still not right it looks like a consistent wave because each
frame is based on a slight evolution of the previous frame before hand because
of our expression on the evolution property so to make each frame different
from the previous one we're gonna need to really increase the
speed of the animation so let's increase this to 1500 now if we play back it's
gonna go nice and fast but it's still a bit too jittery for me at the moment I
only want it to change every 4 frames normally I would add a
posterize time effect to the adjustment layer but that will affect the timing
and framerate of the animation below it which we do want to be much higher than
our boil so we can add the post-race time effect just to this animation
property we need to do that by in our expression window I'm gonna make a new
line I'm going to type in posterize with a lowercase p, Time with an
uppercase T with no spaces and in parentheses 6 afterwards and semicolon
seem to get that's the end of the command this means that an animation
with their time times 1500 session will only show at 6 frames a second and now
with that comp is that 24 frames per second so that's every 4 frames or on
force in the old language now to play that back that starts to look like a
respectable boil to me now let's just increase the settings up here and have a
closer a question of what's going on now you can see every six frames it
looks like our line is being completely generated anew and doesn't look the lady
to the previous frame at all let's get back to our subtler settings now let's
move on to the line texture here we want to make the line look like it was drawn
with a pencil and add some variants to the edges
the line we're going to do that again with a turbulent displays effect so
let's just select this effect and duplicate it with control D let's rename
this turbulent displace texture this one turbulent displace boil just so we
don't get confused now here we want the size and the amount to be opposite so
you want a small size we're going to change that down to two and let's have a
larger amount let's push that up to thirty we also want a high complexity so
let's go to four now see we've got a bit of extra grit to our line if we zoom
in a little bit and flick this on and off you can see it a lot more clearly if
we zoom out you can see were nice subtle dance to this line now now we're going
to add a posterized time effect to this adjustment layer so let's set that to 12
this means that the animation under this will all run at 12 frames per second
traditional frame by frame animation was mostly done at 12 frames a second
because not only was it a much less time consuming because you'll need to draw
every other frame but it gives the animation a sense of character and
texture to the movement similar to how high frame rate video footage tend to look a
bit too fake and too real if you've left your motion smoothing setting left on
your TV you'll know that everything looks like a soap opera high frame rates
in animation certainly aren't any worse than twelve frames a second but twelve
frames per second is so tied to hand-drawn animation that helps give
that illusion a little bit of movement on this line that's at animating at 12
frames per second and if I remove the posterize time effect at 24 frames per
second you can see it's a lot smoother but if you turn it down to 12 it just
looks a little more you know textured a little crunchier and I think it works
well for this effect let me know the comments if you like a lower frame rate
like this for animation or if you prefer a buttery smooth 30 frames per second or
higher and for more line texture we can apply the effect roughen edges you can
see soon as we add it that's already doing a lot of work here now we're
applying this directly to our line shape layer because this won't work well on
our adjustment layer will add a nice variation and tooth to the edge rail
lines but it only affects the edges of an alpha channel of a layer so on an
adjustment layer it will do nothing it can look much nicer than a turbulent
displays effects set to a low size but it does take up even more rendering
power and it isn't as easy to adjust when you've got a lot
a lot of layers and not on a single adjustment layer without going to the
trouble of setting up a controller layer with lenting expressions so I said this
more of a sort of optional extra if you really want that extra detail I like the
edge time for a pencil effect to be set to your rusty but do have a play
around with all of these options and see what effects you get let's set the
border down to one just so it doesn't cut into our line too much and break it
that it does it's sort of higher values which could definitely be a useful in
mimicking other line textures for our pencil let's stick down to 1 maybe 1.5
yeah let's also set the scale to 200 so these dents in our line
happen further apart now let's copy this adjustment layer with control C and
head over to our pencil composition alright here's our pencil composition
and as soon as we turn on that adjustment layer and add our roughen
edges effects you can see it with a nice bit of grit to this animation now and
this is looking good but I think we can add some more life to it with some paper
textures I'll go through the full process of creating these in my living
textures tutorial so I've got three textures up here my project let's drag
down the paper texture here this is just a looping 4 frames of a piece of paper
and we're going to set it to multiply so that gives the look that everything here
was drawn on top of this sheet of paper we're gonna add another texture light
up here which has these sort of special effects and I'm going to set
those to screen and this is going to mainly cut into these sort of black
fields here which gives those added extra grit now I'm being pretty subtle
with these effects here especially with the one on the multiply layer because if
you go too heavy with the multiply it can start to look real sort of crunchy if
we duplicate it a few times you can see it gets you know a bit too intense and
that's not quite a look we want here I like itself and I've also got this
sketchy pencil texture as well right after which I'm going to drag in I'm
gonna scale this down to about 50% so we've got a nice tight pencil scribble
and I'm going to chuck that over a few colors here so we've got one for a
yellow here and first we're going to parent that pencil texture to this
yellow layer and select luma matte inverted so now that yellow layer is only visible
through these pencil scratches and it gives the nice illusion that this was
drawn every frame filling in this yellow by scribbling with a pencil and let's
duplicate that for our other colors too now this is our final result and you can
see how valuable this can be especially at the end when we've got a fairly
static image and you need to hold on it without much going on the looping
textures of the boil add so much life - pretty much a still static frame and it
sort of gives the illusion that a lot more is happening then there actually is
so it's just a few effects they can easily copy paste and adjust we've
turned this into this so the project file for this is available for download
down in the description I removed some of the textures which I've purchased and
don't have you know the rights to to sell on but I do recommend you make your
own textures it's relatively simple and you know you will end up using them all
the time if you use any of the techniques you've learned here please
tag me on instagram at ben_marriott_ so I can see what
awesome stuff you make please let me know down in the comments what other
effects you'd like me to break down I'd love to hear from you and please don't forget to
subscribe hit that Bell icon share and like I'll see you next week