What's happening guys Dan Debenham here and today we're looking at animating
something along a custom path within After Effects
pretty much like this
so let's get into After Effects and let's see how that's done
okay so now that we're in after-effects we've got a comp setup I'm going to drag
our graphic on in this case of plane and I'm then going to just go up to layer
new and stick in a new solid and I'm going to just make sure that's okay yeah
that's fine and I'm going to drag it to the back of the pan emotion as you can
see it's back so I can see the plane and I'm gonna lock that off I think so that
I can't move it so the other thing we can select on here now is the plane okay
so with that done and dusted we're going to do is deselect everything so nothing
is selected and then going to go up to the pen tool
and from there I'm going to draw on a pink path that is just straight across
the screen so as you can see path is drawn on now I'm just gonna adjust this
path a little bit just make it a little bit longer so this just extends out
beyond the graphic as you can see the only two things that can now you can now
select are the path and the plane so I'm going to do with the plane is I'm just
going to reduce in size a little bit so it's a little bit smaller that is
specifically so that it can go off the edge of the screen and just end it with
a tail showing all that no showing all over this what this animation is going
to do so we've got three things so there we've got a shape a plane and a
background or a a side layer something to do is drag it straight back to the
beginning so what the timeline back to the beginning here
and I've got the whole the things in on place there I'm going to go to this
shape layer I'm going to go to content shape and then I'm going to go to path
and I'm going to click on a path and I'm gonna copy it so command + C I'm then
I've got to go to the plane and I'm going to position and I'm gonna paste it
under command of V and as you can see now I've pasted that path into the plane
so we now now no longer actually need that shape layer because it's pasted all
information into the plane basically so now when I press play it's going to
animate the plane automatically across that path we want to extend that out
just grab the last keyframe and so the end keyframe will just extend it out to
as far out as we want it to be and in this case looks
we're that the plane is flat when it's flying along that animation as you can
see slowed the animation down slightly as well so it's made it travel across
the screen in the amount of time once so that however long you want that to be
you can make those keyframes as long as you want them to be but I just dragging
out the end keyframe initially also the start as well you can do that so I'm
going to grab position and rotation and I'm going to rotate the animation and we
rotate that and I'm going to get to keyframe and then I'm going to move it
forward slightly and I'm going to try and keep it so the sort of runs in line
with the path that we can see just so that it gives it a little bit of motion
and it just does it just makes it look a little bit more like it's flight and
this is basically the first part of an animation that you can do and for the
first part of making your animation look like it's doing something rather than
just floating straight across the screen and it is really as simple as that so we
back in here and we're we're just animating that around a little bit and
we're just making sure that he just fits where we need to go as you can see there
are keyframes being added every single time I had just a rotation of this just
to make sure that I think After Effects and it was exactly where it's going to
be and trying to keep the plane sort of in the direction of travel as best I can
this is a pretty quick tutorial so I'm not trying to be too accurate with this
although I would expect that when you were doing it and you were doing it for
a job reclining you will be doing it in its most accurate way as possible making
sure they look like it should be okay so once that's done and dusted we'll go
back to the beginning now we saw sorted and we'll just hit play and also happens
so here we go and there we go he's washing along like
nobody's business absolutely fantastic and that basically is all there is to it
it's quite simple it's a very very very quick and easy thing to do animating
a custom path of course your custom path can be any shape you want it to be and
it can also be going in a direction as I said previously you can start it later
by bringing the first keyframe forward and you can start it you can finish it
later by extending the last keyframe out it is pretty easy to do and you can also
add more keyframes in in the middle if you wanted to do different things but
that's a more complicated issue as I say that's it it's very very simple very
very easy and very very quick if you did like this tutorial and you thought it
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good stuff and I'll see you guys
you