if you use adobe after effects or you're thinking of using it sometime in the future today's video
is really going to help you out because i have some free plugins and scripts that you can make
great use of in adobe after effects and we're going to start off today with something called
the fx console and these are going to be linked down below but do follow along so you understand
exactly how these things work and later in today's video learn how you can get access to skillshare
premium now skillshare is an online learning community with thousands of different courses
across a wide range of creative areas these are things like logo designing just graphic design
in general web design photography and so much more so yeah stay tuned to the very end today's
video to learn more the fx console is really really handy and you can download it for free
on mac or windows and this thing is going to help you search for effects in after effects
so i'm just going to skip the installation process to save time in today's video to show you how this
thing works just on a random composition i'm going to generate a star here much like in illustrator
when you want to have an anchor point central to your object we can do that in after effects here
so how does this effects console actually work so as long as you are clicked onto a layer
press control and space bar and then this will appear
and from here you can access effects very very quickly
instead of actually coming up here to the top right we now have this console right on the screen
so for example i can actually press control spacebar and
just type in the fill and voila we have that fill
see this effects console is just a quicker way to access effects in adobe after effects
there are a few smaller features with this console but the main appeal here is that
you have access to those effects really really easily by pressing ctrl spacebar so the second
edition in today's video is something called butts capper and it's made by the guys at battle axe
now these guys make a lot of high-end plugins and scripts and they're really really useful
in high quality one of their most famous plugins is the rubber hose which is relating to how arms
and legs move in animations but yeah down on the bottom here we do have some freebies
and there are some really neat ones here and i haven't actually gone through all of them
myself but we're going to look at the butt capper plug-in today you might want to take
a look at these other ones as well in your own time and also do remember that you're
going to have to quit after effects if you were installing something like a script or
a plugin whilst it's open so i'm going to go ahead and do that right now and be right back
so to demonstrate bug happen i'm going to just draw a random shape
and then make sure it's got no fill so it's just kind of a strict path
now when you're actually working on animation in after effects a lot of the time you do want
the end of the stroke to be rounded off and in adobe illustrator we would call this a round cap
and normally when you're working after effects there's a long way around to actually do that
and it's by coming down into this path here it just takes a long time to go through this
process each and every time but we can find the buckhapper plugin right here and we can
drag it and actually just position it into our workspace like so and again this is just going
to speed up our workflow in after effects which is invaluable in the long run so this rounded
icon here will round off the ends of our stroke like so it is really handy just to have it here
off to one side when we're working as opposed to coming into that path each and every single time
the next plugin today actually comes with after effects and you don't need to install anything
come up to window and then create nulls from pass.jsx if you click that you're going to get
this window over here now this plug-in works with the points on a stroke path
as you can see here i've got four different points on the stroke when you're trying to animate things
like this it can be very time consuming to fiddle around with each individual anchor point
but the create nulls from path makes things a lot easier and i'm going to show you how right now
so if you highlight the stroke and then click points
follow nulls you would get this error message that comes up
well if you come into the shape layers and in the path down here
you need to highlight the path in this menu and then click the tab
this makes effectively four different nulls and each point i showed you before
will follow these nulls
if i click the shape layer you will see it's made the effects up here at the top and if i
move them like this it actually alters in real time and you can set keyframes just like normal
so i press p to drop down position and then just move it forward two seconds on my timeline
drag this null over to the left now that null will follow that it gives you more control and it does
maybe make the timeline a bit more busy but it's very very handy for complex animations it's very
intuitive so if you involve the very technical animation it's going to be very very useful
we also have null follows points which essentially is just the inverse
you can see my four nulls are here they're all on the points
so if i go into the path now and i move this one down here
and then if i click up you will see that the null always follows that path and so you can
do some pretty complicated animations with this it does give you more flexibility on how
you animate things in after effects and finally with this plugin the trace path creates a null
from one part of your past to the other so make sure you've actually highlighted the path
then click trace path and this null has appeared on the line and what it's doing
is it's actually starting from the left and it's continuing all the way over to the right
what you could do is you could put a car or something on top of this and then you could
say animate the car that follows this path as a kind of a road that's just one way you could use
this there are many ways to do that but this is one of the most time saving methods of doing it
the fourth script in today's video guys is called dojo ease script
so you need to scroll down and find this link here and just like you always do with scripts
and plugins you need to put this into the program files of after effects and when you finally open
up after effects once more we do have this window here of the doji is script if you've used after
effects for any length of time you will know that often animation can just look pretty boring so
an example here just moving this circle from left to right in an orderly steadily fashion
it just looks pretty boring and you're probably going to want to bring this animation to life
so if i highlight all of my keyframes on this animation and then i come over to the dojo ease
plugin you will notice i have these options here in this drop down menu what they do is they change
the easy graph meter which will dictate how your animation actually moves in a fluid fashion and
what i use quite a lot is the medium ease and let's have a look at how that plays out now
and there we go it kind of starts off slow speeds up and then finishes slow
which is a lot a lot better than just having a plain old boring animation again this is another
time saver that stops us having to come into the graph editor over and over again we just do
things as one click of a button you could go more aggressive and use a strong ease and you can see
in the graph editor in real time how it affects things you can come into the settings menu and do
more detailed in-depth more involved adjustments to every single thing you do but also a really
cool one is the overshoot effect so let's go back and highlight the keyframes and then give that a
try if you press ctrl click on your keyframes it will return them back to normal keyframes
the other shoe adds a little bounce or wiggle at the end of the animation
which just brings it to life that much more
but yeah these were the plugins that will save you time and they're all free remember they're
not something that you're gonna pay for if you can save time for free in after effects well
i think that's a win so yeah the sponsor of today's video is skillshare and skillshare is
an online learning community with millions of different users taking thousands of different
classes now you can actually learn new skills or nurture existing passions or you might even
discover a hidden talent that you might have now i'm actually currently taking a course by
gestapo torres and i'm brushing up on my skills even though my routine is pretty jam-packed
throughout each day now skillshare normally costs just less than ten dollars per month
but the first 1 000 people who click the link down below today and sign up to skillshare will
be granted a free trial to skillshare premium so yeah click the link down below and sign up to
skillshare and discover new skills today but yeah if you want to learn more about graphic design or
after effects do click a video on screen and until next time guys design your future today peace
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