hi I'm Ben Marriott I make weekly motion design and animation tutorials and this
week I'm starting a new series where I'm going to break down every single
transition in that animation this week the first transition
all right this project is available for download down in the description for you
to dissect further I made this project after going on a plug-in diet where I
stopped using plugins that helped with easing so I could focus on really
getting comfortable in the graph editor and that was probably the time where I
felt my animation skills improved the most so I built this animation a lot
around sort of really snapping eases and sort of smooth transitions just to
really try to push myself to my to my limits at the time
I summed up by making all the illustrated elements in Illustrator which is really only the mug
and the jug the mug I'll duplicate and the coffee bean as well for reference the
circles and those elements were easy enough to make in After Effects just using the ellipse tool
for part one of this project breakdown we really are only
gonna focus on this first transition here so we're going to break down this 1
second of animation in excruciating detail now let's dive into our black cup
pre comp and the first thing you'll notice when we get in here is that it's
all in grayscale it's in black and white that's because they're doing all of the
color correcting and adjustments when the adjustment layer at the top of this
comp called color the 3 effects I have on this adjustment layer are CC toner which
creates a kind of a gradient map that allows you to map selected gray values
to specific color values and because this is straight up brown across the
whole thing I could have achieved a similar look by using the tint effect or
tritone I like to use CC toner because it gives you a little more variety to
the shades save you on this really light brown area to be a little more saturated
you could do that if you wanted or desaturate it it's very easy to adjust
and it gives you a lot more control and the hue in the saturation I just sort of
amping up the contrast and the saturation and in this first section
both of these coffee cups have pretty much the same animation with these
there's one on the right the lighter one just having some extra sort of milk and
the jug added to it so I decided first to animate the cup on the left and then
duplicate that and add the extra stuff to the one on the right after I was
finished with it so let's dive into that first cup so here's what we've got
inside that cup pre comp we start off with our static mug the coffee being
splashed in the coffee cup rotating so we get a sort of top-down
view and then transforming into this sort of circling dot which would be
one half of the Ying Yang symbol that it forms I'm gonna get into
detail on the splash animation in a later video because that is part of the
last transition of this loop so let's start the work area just after that
splash settles and let's shy this layer so they don't clutter our timeline
the main layers we got here is this coffee which is the liquid from a side
view matte for that liquid cup lines which is the outline of the cup and handle
this yin-yang background which is the circular form from the top view the
coffee top which is the top surface of our coffee and the top of the cup here
which scales down from being aligned to the full circle I started by animating
with the cup top because it is the simplest single element that once it was
animated to my satisfaction it would give me some of the most information
about the animation that I could use to help me sort of make and inform
decisions and have a speed and parts of other shapes of the animation let's all
of this so we can just concentrate on this element I also started in Reverse
so I have this circle drawn here and its size is 400 by 400 pixels and then I
keyframed it with one axis of the sides moving down to zero now I didn't use a
scale property to do this and I'll show you why if we bring up a scale property
keyframe it unlink it and if I drag down one axis of the scale it is the same
sort of action of making it thinner but the stroke width would also gets scaled as well
and you get stuck for this sort of hideously looking a variation between
the line width which I almost always hate and what the time you get to zero
it's not even visible anymore so that would defeat the purpose of what
we're going for so let's undo those in the size property does the same things
the scale would do but it keeps the stroke width the same without having to
use any fancy expressions now if we're going to the graph headed up by
selecting these keyframes clicking here let's make some more room for this
you could see we've got a fairly strong ease out and a much snappier ease in and although I
animated this layer first to set the speed for the rest of this section I'm
still going back and fiddling with easing now and then once more elements
were animated simply try out some different speed options the next thing I
animate was the cup lines layer again here you'll see that it has two paths we
have one which is the handle of the cup which makes up a main body of
the cup and I also have in pink here a mask and that's just a mask
subtracting out this top line here because we're making that with an
ellipse tool that we've already animated now the outside path of the cup which is
the bottom one here is animated with only two keyframes so I keyframed its
first position which is a side of the cup and then in
about ten frames when our ellipsis is a full circle I have adjusted these sort
of anchor points to match that circular shape that's all the animation I needed
to do for that path I also use it a plugin called ease copy which is
completely free and one I covered in my top free plugins videos so I can simply
select the keyframes from that cup top ellipse layer and select copy from these
copy overhere and click paste these which copy the ease exactly from those
from the size property to this latest path property this cap handles a few
more keyframes because it has more curves and when you keyframe between two
paths positions each of these individual anchor points here or moving the
straightest path between the two keyframes and that can cause the Bezier
handles at each point to go a little strange and unpredictably in that
movement so I've just added some extra keyframes along the way to keep them on
the right path until the end of this transition I was kind of drawing them
frame by frame which is sometimes just the quickest way then we have our coffee
layer down here which is a black rectangle using this above layer as an
alpha matte this liquid matte layer is essentially a copy of our cup lines
layer just scale down a little bit and giving it a fill as well so it'll matte
out just this internal section which means that coffee liquid layer will stay
confined to this pink area of the cup then we have our coffee top layer which
is essentially a duplicate of our cup top layer which is an ellipse scaling up
with a size property and have its position just moving slightly upwards as
well so it ends up in the very center of that circle and that just gives a little
bit of extra parallax during these two frames while it's in transition
I'm also animating the scale property of the shape as well so when it gets to
this top-down view it's going to continue scaling up very gradually to
fill up this entire shape and then quickly scale down and reveal this yin
yang background that we've got now if we look at this scale property in the graph
editor you see it's scale starts at 100 and then creeps up very slightly until
it reaches its peak here and then just quickly sort of accelerates and scales
down really fast and during that scale down is where we have this cup handle
disappear as well you can see I've got a couple of key
frames with its path just sort of shrinking into the mass of the cup if
you need to get rid of any elements in a transition you're doing it's great to do
it during the fastest movement where your eyes being directed towards another area
there's a go frame-by-frame you can see how this path sliding in very
slightly towards the cup but because this movement is so fast and dramatic I
think we could even get away with just cutting away from that handle
and not having it transitioning inwards at all so there we have one cup rotating in
faux 3d space now let's go into the composition for the other cup which has
all the milk and the color changes inside this composition was an exact
duplicate so it has the exact same animation with some additional elements
added this milk jug here is just that pass that we've imported it from
Illustrator and the only animation we've got on that is its position values and
its rotation that way we've got it sort of swinging from the right pulling up at
the same time it's rotation is sort of making this top line sit absolutely
vertical as it exits out the screen and then we've got our milk pour main layer
here which is parented to that jug now this one in particular can be done a
variety of ways in After Effects and because this project is two years old
I'm not exactly sure that this is really the best way to do this but I have this
anchor point attached at the very top here it scales all the way up to 200% as
it gets longer so I'm increasing that scale to make it pour down into the cup
and then when the jug releases it I have its position sort of moving downwards to
fall into the cup and then I have this mask here making it disappear as it
enters with a nice rounded edge and I've got these two layers on top and this
first one is a circle with a mask to create this sort of rounded edge as the
milk pours and the second one is a small circle for a rounded cap to this sort of
milk pour which sort of follows the downwards into the coffee now this
section in particular looking back could have been done a lot more effectively
with maybe just a single shape layer and animating the path every few frames
I think striving for efficiency is great I'm certainly much more of a stickler
for that now than when I animated this but the result is really what counts in
the end sometimes you've got a hack a few shape layers together for a few
frames just to make it work and I think that's completely fine if you do that
and then I've got a duplicate of that layer called a milk pour in coffee which
is exactly the same but for when it appears inside the coffee which is just
as the darker fill on it and I've got a lighter coffee in coffee layer down here
which is sort of the milk as it appears inside the coffee and sort of has this
gradient as it pushes upwards now this took me a few times to get right
originally I had the gradient coming outwards from the top of the pour here
which seemed intuitive at the time but it just really didn't look right so
after watching some reference and kind of thinking about what was wrong with it
I discovered that you know the coffee is gonna get lighter from the bottom up as
the milk sort of settles at the bottom and then dilutes upwards so to animate
the milk rising I think I have this mask let's change
the color to something pink so you can really see it and that sort of Rises
from the bottom and I just have two keyframes on that Matt's path and it
goes from the bottom here right to the top and also animated the feather on
that mask as well so it's a lot more feathered as it starts diluting and less
feathered when it's just first poured into the coffee here I've also added
some keyframes to the fill effect here so it starts off being pure white and
then as it gets more diluted it becomes gray until the whole thing is this gray
color here also apply to fill effect to our coffee top layer here so that fades from
black to white as well now those little elements like the changing of the the
fill and the gradient and where they are the coffee rises up from those aren't
all essential elements but I really think that they add a lot to the
animation they were by far my favorite things to animate and when looking back
on it now those are the little touches that I like the most and I think they
really help sell the overall animation and here's what both cups look like an
action I've also keyframe the position of both
of these comps here so the white comp moves down and the black column moves up
so they end up diagonally sort of opposite facing each other and here's
what they look like in context of the whole animation
and that was a long time for me to explain one-and-a-half seconds of
animation now you can see why I'm breaking this up in two parts now next
time it may not be next week I'm probably gonna do a few more tutorials
in the meantime before we get back to this project the next time we do I'm
gonna cover this yin yang transition that we've got going on here but if you
can't wait until then this project file is available for download down in the
description now if you use any techniques of processors from this video
please tag me on instagram at ben_marriott_ because
I'd love to see what you make please let me know down in the comments if you'd
like more of this series where we go in-depth into a very specific very
detailed minut the minutiae of an animation I'd love to know you think
please don't forget to subscribe hit the bell icon share and like as well thank
you I'll see you next week