- [Instructor] Jello, everyone.
This is Evan Abrams and in this After Effects tutorial
we're gonna make your Jello jiggle.
And, oh, let me just do a quick Google search
to see if that's, oh yeah, that's something disgusting.
I'm sorry if for saying that to everybody.
Here in After Effects, what we're doing
is we are taking rigid shape layers
and we're giving them this nice, organic wobbling,
just like you would see with this disgusting food item,
I think it's called Jello salad.
I don't eat it myself and I look down on its creation.
So, that's just a fun fact about me and Jello.
Just like making a real Jello though,
this is very simple, it uses very few ingredients,
and you really only need what's in the box,
by which I mean, what's in After Effects.
You don't need any inverse kinematic IK things.
You don't need any physics simulations like Newton.
Everything we do is gonna be made with stuff
just in After Effects.
So if you've not gone out and invested the time
in learning those other methods, don't worry about it.
This is a simple, homemade recipe that you're gonna enjoy.
And let's start it off by making a new project for me,
just opening After Effects for you,
and making a new composition.
So we're working at 1920 by 1080, duration four seconds,
frame rate 29.97, okey dokey.
And we're gonna call this composition that we make,
we're gonna call this the lump.
So we're gonna start by making one lump of Jello
and then duplicating that
so we don't have to do as much work.
And to make the lump of Jello,
we're just gonna use shape layers.
So I'm gonna use a rectangle I think.
Just double-click on the old rectangle,
and I'm gonna sort of build by numbers.
I would recommend for you to do
your designing ahead of time.
This is one I've prepared earlier,
then I take it out of the oven, ooooh, how impressive,
but these are numbers and things
I've figured out beforehand.
I would recommend for you drawing this stuff out
and doing that kinda thing.
But for me, I'm gonna make a rectangle of such and such size
and then we just add and ellipse to this
and then making an ellipse that you know fits in with that
so that it creates this fun little silo shape.
And then we don't need a stroke,
we do need the fill, and that's it.
We've got this gross green-looking silo, awesome.
We are gonna all that, I guess, the mass of the Jello.
I'm gonna duplicate that and create layer
that we will call the shine of the Jello
because this is gonna be the little highlight,
which is actually just made of a stroke.
So to that end, we don't need this fill,
we do need this stroke.
The stroke color is gonna be based on the fill color
with less saturation, more brightness,
and we don't need all these lines to be stroked.
We just want the outside.
So we're gonna add a merge paths, like this,
so merging them together.
And then we're gonna add a trim paths
because we don't need all of this to have the stroke on it.
So we're just gonna trim that up, trim it up,
maybe like 15% of it is good.
We use the offset here to offset it, kinda like there.
That looks good.
And then I'm just gonna shrink these down.
So shrink this down to like 250, 250 like this.
So this is gonna allow me to animate that offset later,
which you know what,
we'll cross that bridge when we get to it,
but for now, this stroke should be rounded caps, awesome.
So we've got the shininess, we've got the mass of the Jello,
now we need those gross looking candies in there.
So those I would make out of some rectangles, I guess.
And you know, these rectangles are gonna be kinda tiny.
What is this, 20 by 20, yes fill, no stroke.
Fill color is gonna be
like a bright pinky kinda thing, awesome.
Maximum roundness please.
And then we're just really like
making these bean-looking things.
So one of them is gonna be that big, and duplicate it.
One of them's gonna be half as big.
And then just moving them,
nudging them away from each other,
calling up their rotation like this, 45.
That might be a minus 45 like this.
So we've got these gross candies floating around in there
and what you might do is alter their opacity a little bit,
or maybe you'll stick them behind this green thing,
but this makes it look like they're kinda floating in there
and nothing will sell that better
than over the length of this animation
altering their position and rotation, setting key frames,
and I'd say by about two seconds,
I want the little one to go down a little bit,
I want the big one to go down twice as much,
and I would like them both to rotate
just a little bit like that.
So over the course of this animation,
they're gonna be like floating
and settling to the bottom of this Jello
because I think that's thoroughly gross.
And now we can take this lump and we can make the lump bend.
We're ready to get into the meat and potatoes
and other food elements.
Man, I'm hungry.
I'm just gonna take this lump, drag it onto the new comp,
and I've created a new composition,
the same size and duration of that other one,
and out here is where we're gonna put
the old pin tool on this thing.
So click the puppet pin tool,
a wonderful tool for deforming things.
It can get a little sketchy sometimes,
so we're gonna try to work with it, not against it.
Once you've selected a layer,
you've selected your puppet pin tool,
you may come out here and click on some stuff,
as much as you'd like.
But I'm gonna call up a grid first,
just so I'm very accurate with my pins.
I'm gonna stick one pin down here,
and that's a good spot for it.
As soon as you click, it makes this grid,
well it's not really a grid,
it's a bunch of triangles, it makes a bunch of triangles.
You see, I've set like a thousand triangles
and there's so many settings to get into,
you've got your expansion,
which is expanding sort of the influence of these things,
I'm gonna be just setting pins, one at the bottom,
one sort of in the center of this mass up here,
and then I'm gonna try to get one
that's about half way in between, like there.
And what these do is they stick to the mesh
and you can see just with me dragging this around,
rrrrrr, like a monster.
They allow you to deform things with this mesh.
So having more triangles will increase the resolution
of that deformity and I recommend a fairly high number
but it can be machine intensive, so just keep that in mind.
And it's not deforming this with vectors.
It's deforming it with pixels,
so all that beautiful vector information,
infinitely scalable stuff that we did in here, forget it.
I'm glad I drew it fairly large
because now that we're using the pin tool,
things are gonna get stretchy and warp-y and alias-y
and it's not gonna be too pretty,
but it's not gonna be very noticeable
and you'll see why in a minute.
Now I need a better way to control these things
because right now in this mesh,
in the deform, in these puppet pin tools,
I can only change their position.
And what I wanna do is have them bend in a nice arc,
without having to spend too much time futzing around with
well, I'll move this one pin over here,
and then try to match the curve a little bit with this one.
No, no, no, I will not be doing that, no thank you.
What I'm gonna do is use a bunch
of null objects to control these.
Also because I don't like coming in here
and touching these things.
I want all my controls to be visible and easy to manipulate.
So, first I'm gonna take these key frames off.
I don't need them.
And then I'm gonna layer, new, and make a new null object.
And this is gonna be called, I dunno, lump control one,
and then I need lump controls two and three, awesome.
And I want these lump controls
to be exactly where these pins are.
So I've got pin one, pin two, which is at the top,
and pin three, so let me just switch those around.
So I'm gonna copy the position information of pin one, copy,
and put it into the position of lump control one.
And then copy from the middle pin to the middle control
and then from the top pin to the top control, awesome.
You'll also notice I'm not parenting things,
because the relationship needs to be
that these pins are controlled by these controls, alright.
Simple enough.
And these controls I want to be parented to each other.
And that's because I'm going to take those
and I'm gonna rotate them
when I put key frames on the rotation,
slide those ahead to 10 seconds.
I want them to deform in this nice arc,
this very graceful, very predictable arc.
So let me just deform those like this.
I'm gonna ease those so the motion is gonna be like this.
They're gonna start bent and end vertical like this.
For these to control these, what I need to do
is use an expression
because if I just hold down alt, click on this,
and then call up the position here,
let's say I just linked position to position,
I go like this, that is gonna be a big oopsie.
And that is because these positions
are now relative to each other.
So it's position is (0, -178).
That wouldn't make any sense to the pin tool.
We need to give it information that makes sense.
So what I would like to do though
is write an expression to help it make sense.
So I'm gonna start by making a variable
and that's gonna be L, which in my mind, stands for layer.
So L equals, and the layer is going to equal,
for this one anyway, lump control three.
That's the layer we're interested in looking at.
Put a semi-colon down there to say
we've said everything we want to about L.
And then were gonna say L.toWorld, capital W on world,
and then in some brackets, L.anchorPoint,
capital P on point, and that should do it.
So what it's saying is,
don't look at the values of lump control three,
look at its values in relation to the world,
and the world in this case is this frame dimension.
So what that does is it puts that pin control right there
and that's working out very wonderfully.
So duplicate that and alt-click down here,
paste down here, cool.
And this is of course gonna look at control two.
And then this one here is gonna look at control one.
And that should do it.
So if we play this back, look at that sweet bend.
And we can use these layers just to control this.
I find it a lot easier than we could
if we were using the pin tool alone.
We can still apply expressions like the inertia bounce
that we're gonna do to that pin tool.
But using rotation makes a lot more logical sense to me
because that's what we're doing, we want this nice arc.
So bend them in a predictable arc, right.
And I said inertia bounce, so it's time to go
to the good folks are Graymachine.
Just Google inertia bounce, inertial bounce, After Effects,
and you'll come to Graymachine
and you can copy their beautiful expression,
very often used.
If you're not using it, you should be.
It's wonderful stuff.
So copy that and then we're going to alt-click
on the rotations and paste it in here.
Yes indeed, good stuff.
Make sure I didn't get the rotation,
there you go, good stuff.
So now it is going wap, wap, wap, wap, wap.
Perfect, we're nailing it.
It's working out.
And there's one little detail that I wanna add now as well.
See this shine that we put on here?
Wouldn't it be great if that reacted
to the shape changing here?
So what we're gonna do is go into the lump,
go into the shine, hit U U to uberframe
all the stuff we've changed,
put a key frame here on the offset
and alt-click on it as well
to put that inertia bounce on there
and we've got one key frame,
which is where we know it should be here at 10 seconds.
Well, where should it be before that?
Well, it should be slid down kinda like that.
So it's like the light is hitting that side
and then jzerrrpp, kinda like that.
Then we just need to ease this first key frame,
hitting F9 or you know right click e-frame, easy Es,
probably shouldda mentioned that before,
but it didn't seem important,
but yeah, so it's gonna do that at the same time
that this is doing this,
and it works out perfectly.
Congratulations, you have made one lump.
This is not lump two, this is lump in motion.
So take your lump in motion, put it into a new composition.
This is gonna be, this composition is going to be
the full Jello.
Please never Google that expression, the full Jello.
It's probably some gross thing, I don't wanna know.
But here in the full Jello,
we're going to duplicate a lump in motion
and we're gonna just offset it a bunch,
duplicate, offset it a bunch,
and you know going the other way,
you know same thing, duplicate them,
and you know, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pa.
Pop, pop, pop, pop, pa.
Moving them over like that.
Those look evenly spaced enough.
Put them down here, cool.
And if we play that back, wub, wub, wub.
It looks kinda like a full thing of Jello wubbing around.
Let's see, I'd also like to have
the ones that are kind of on the edge,
have them go down a little bit, kinda like that,
kinda make a rounded bump of these things.
Don't really know what the shape of Jello is supposed to be
but kinda like that.
Fwub, fwub, fwub.
A detail we can put in here
is something like a plate under these things,
so maybe use the old rectangle powers,
hit U U, call up all the things that are different about it,
don't need that stroke, ah do, do, do, do.
Maybe like this, whee, maybe like this.
That's good, that's good.
The rectangle should be rounded.
Definitely rounded, awesome.
And then move that down here like this.
You can still see though, some of these ends
are kinda sticking out.
I would just use a mask to make that go away.
So let's stop looking at that stupid grid.
And I'll just go, eh, let's put a mask around like this.
Do you have a little lump sticking out?
Not anymore, nope.
How about you, you got any?
Yeah, let's get rid of that, absolutely.
And this last one?
For sure, gone.
And that just trims it up very neatly.
I think that's very good.
So now we've got the full Jello.
Put that into a new comp, holy moly.
I'm just gonna hit Tab here and show you,
you know, just got so many of this flow chart,
just so many layers of this stuff,
but whatever, who cares.
So, we've got the full Jello into its own composition,
this is where I would put in a new background
of some kind, like a solid, neat.
And then call up the position, set some key frames,
10 frames is the magic time
where we're gonna have this thing come in.
I'm gonna scale this down a little bit,
have it enter like so.
Look at those positions.
Maybe have it ease itself in.
So yeah, it's schlurp.
And then it just wobbles, just sits there, wobbles.
Um, there are some limitations
to using the puppet pin tool, I will say.
But this is a great way to deform vector artwork
or any artworks really, pixel artwork, do it up.
You can make assets in Illustrator or in Photoshop,
come in here and deform them.
And if you want them to wobble like Jello,
now you know how.
So this has been Evan Abrams, teaching you how to
make things jiggle like Jello in After Effects.
If you're enjoyed learning this thing,
please subscribe to this channel.
We talk about motion graphics in After Effects on here.
Hopefully you've enjoyed yourself.
If you have questions about this technique,
please let me know in the comments.
I try to get back to them when I can
and if you want your hands on the project file
to see what the guts of this thing look like,
then there's links to that.
It's available at evanabrams.com.
If you want to ask questions about After Effects
and motion graphics in general,
hit me up on Twitter @ecabrams or on the Facebook page.
Links to all that stuff in the description.
Also in the description, you will find the expressions
that we used in this particular tutorial.
It should all be listed down there for you to copy and paste
at your leisure so you don't have to worry about typing
or reading me type.
Anyway, this has been Evan Abrams.
Thank you so much for watching.
If you found this useful, please share it with people,
subscribe to this channel, and if you subscribe,
I'll see you here for our next tutorial.
Thanks again and have a nice day.