- Hello everyone, this os Evan Abrams.
And in this after effects tutorial,
we're gonna animate on this script font logo here.
And in this case, we're gonna animate this logo on
using a right on technique.
Now, this has probably happened to you.
We have a lot of variable stroke widths,
we have a lot of overlapping parts.
It is a mess.
Script fronts are a mess.
So in this tutorial,
I'm gonna show you a couple of techniques
to kind of make sense of this
and hopefully, make the process a whole lot more manageable.
And speaking of making things more manageable,
the logo we're gonna be animating
is for company called, Wipster.
Wipster make a terrific app for reviewing video
with clients and teams.
I use it in pretty much all of my client projects
where I need them to review or make notes, or give feedback.
Wipster lets you upload video
and clients can just comment right on the frames
to highlight specific parts
or times that they're interested in.
It really makes the communication a lot smoother.
If you wanna give Wipster a try,
use the link in the description,
and start adding Wipster to your workflow.
Now let's over the after effects
and try to get this logo animated.
That's a pretty natural segue, right?
So we're here at after effects.
Let's look at a couple of techniques
that can help you with complex,
script-based fonts and logos.
It doesn't have to be words.
Anytime you're emulating kind of a
pen moving scriptd kind of thing,
you're gonna run into these kinds of troubles
when you try to write them on.
What troubles am I talking about?
Well, if you're familiar with write on techniques,
all this next few minutes is gonna seem pretty normal.
We've got our layer, that is our complex beautiful object
so we would probably draw a path over top of it like this.
We just wanna cover up the path that's really over doing
in the sort of basic method, you know.
And everyone tells me that I'm very basic
so this is a good fit.
Now, I sure you'd notice, I'm gonna be accelerating
some of these steps 'cause you don't need to watch me draw
a path to understand drawing a path.
Basically though, you wanna make sure that your path
is as in the center as you can.
So you might need to tweak your path just a little bit
to get it where you want it.
Now the next move is pretty simple.
We're just gonna go to the shape layer, twirl into it,
we're gonna add a trim paths here.
Trim paths allows us to animate paths on and off.
We're gonna set a key frame here at the start
where the end at 0%.
And then we're just gonna move ahead a little bit,
add a little bit more of it in,
move ahead a little bit more,
drag this along to maybe there,
and then finally, move ahead and finish the whole thing off.
We're gonna grab the key frames in the middle and ease them.
And this is gonna be the motion that we want this thing
to animate on.
Now we have to do ism thicken this up
so it covers everything.
And oh boy, do we have to thicken that up.
And then we would probably go into the stroke.
We change it from butt cap to round cap
and into round joints.
And then the next step is just changing
the track matte option of the layer below
to be track matte, alpha matte.
So layer below is looking at the layer above,
and you get this kind of thing happening.
What's the problem with that?
Well, right off the jump,
you have this kind of thing happening,
where it's revealing too much.
It's revealing disconnected parts of this logo.
Obviously, you can go in here and you can just grab the path
and try to shift it's points around
to try to make little errors like that go away.
But there are gonna be parts that happen like here,
like this middle part here.
And this is a pretty simple letter
where this is totally unacceptable,
where this kind of overlap is not what we want at all.
It wouldn't make sense that a pen would write this on.
Well, since this traditional method had failed us,
we might as well quit.
But nope, there's a lot more in this tutorial,
so I'm gonna show you how to fix this kind of thing.
We're gonna use a few masks to clean up this matte.
So this layer on top is a matte layer.
We're using it to define the visual area of what's below it.
Now, we can use masks on that layer
to add and subtract form it.
So, I just click up here, tool creates mask.
And now, when I draw on this shape layer,
I'm gonna be drawing a mask.
And the mask I'm gonna draw is gonna be cutting through
this part right here.
I wanna try to match the curve as close as I can.
It doesn't need to be perfect,
so that I isolate just that area.
I'm gonna hit M to call up the mask,
and we're just gonna change it to subtract.
So as you can see, now I have successfully
cut that part away.
So even though this is animating up, whoosh!
I don't have to worry about it too much
because you know, there it goes.
And I don't need this to hang out all the time.
It's not super necessary that this path always be there.
In fact eventually, this is gonna come out the other side,
bloop, right there.
And then I no longer need this masks to be hanging out.
So, on the set of key frame, there, pinch this one up
so that on this frame, the mask is in place,
and on this frame, I'm just gonna drag it away
because we don't need it to be cutting holes,
and making things complicated.
It's a bother.
Now, we need to clean up the other side of this.
So, as this is coming up, it shouldn't splay out in this way
we need to add a second mask to make that go away.
So, I'm juts gonna go ahead and grab the old pen tool,
make sure that I'm creating masks on this layer.
I'm holding down space bar so I can move the points,
so I'm alternating between waggling my handles
and moving points,
and then we can go change this to subtract,
and we have got this cut happening.
And again, this doesn't need to hang out forever.
I'm gonna change it to none, and I'm gonna scrub through
to see when is that no longer gonna be useful.
Now, I guess this gonna need to hang around
for a little while.
So I'm gonna set a key frame here, key frame here,
where the path is going to be gone.
Set it to subtract, and then it goes away, all right?
So this is gonna come up.
And now we just need to shore up this little point
through here.
What is going on during that period?
Now we do that by using yet another mask.
So, at this point, everything's cool.
And then at this point, we're gonna start to
have some more mask action.
So I just go up here, and I use the ellipse tool,
and again, I'm making sure I am creating masks,
and I'm just gonna put, draw a little circle,
trying to make a circle that's roughly the same size
as the stroke size, right?
So I can go in here, maybe put this like here.
I'm gonna go in key frame its path.
Now we're just gonna move ahead a little bit.
Now we're gonna try to make this follow that edge.
You can tell this is the edge of that mask
as it's coming down.
So we're gonna try to make it follow.
And you can see I am moving ahead a few frames at a time
'caus I don't wanna necessarily put key frames
on all of them.
I'm trying to make this thing follow as close as I can
to that edge.
Now you'll notice, I still need to fill in some of that part
so I'm gonna make sure I am dragging up this point here
to cover it.
So it's going from a circle to kind of a weird bean shape.
And you may just have to scrub through
and make sure for example, this is an ugly thing.
That's not a good look.
So again, you gotta tucks that up.
All right.
So once you're done, all of your mask fiddling,
you should end up with something nice and smooth like this.
And you haven't really created that many key frames.
I know it seems like a bunch of key frames,
but sometimes there's no avoiding work,
and it can really help you get that manual control
over these tough knots that you really want.
However, there is another way I wanna show you
that relies on you, opening up illustrator.
Whoow, whoow, please stay with me.
We are gonna up illustrator.
What I wanna do is break this complicated logo
up into many simple little parts that I can understand
and animate a lot easier
without them interacting with each other.
How do I do that?
Well, like I said, we are gonna open up illustrator.
And usually when you get these kinds of logos,
they are all one thing.
If you start by using text in breaking it into shapes,
this will be a little bit easier.
But sometimes, art work comes at you like this.
Now what I have to do si convert it into many more shapes.
So for example, I've got the first part of the W.
The second part of the W, this I part.
The first part of the P, the second part of the P.
And I carve this all up in illustrator.
I take this big thing, I take the whole thing.
I like to duplicate that layer
so I can preserve the original.
Then I'm gonna go in here with the path tool.
You hit P to call up your path tool.
That makes sense in illustrator
'cause it make a lot of sense in after effect.
And we're just gonna draw some nice bright lines out here.
And I'm gonna draw some lines.
So I'm drawing my line, I don't know if you can see
because the color of my anchor points here,
or the thickness of my line,
but I'm trying to draw a line that describes the curve
that I think the pen stroke should be taking up through here
so it's gonna go pshhh.
Now I also wanna draw a line that describes this curve here.
So I wanna describe sort of the curve that's missing.
All right?
So this might require you to zoom in, and move points around
if you're having trouble with pint snapping,
you might have to turn snap to pixel off
that makes sure that you are indeed snapping to points.
And again, I wanna try to describe this curve.
Usually, you want these handles be kind of halfway
between here and there, so it kind of makes the tangent
of that.
I need one more, I need to cut this part up here.
But this should give me most of the parts that I require.
So, now I can select this thing.
Usually, I end up having to duplicate it.
I'm just holding down alt or option
to drag it down like that.
And now I'm gonna select all the stuff.
Go shift M, and that's gonna call up the shape builder tool
then I'm gonna build a shape.
So I'm gonna just drag between these two.
I'm gonna add those two shapes together.
And then we're gonna hold down alt,
click these two shapes and make them go away.
So now I've got the first part up here,
and then the second part is gonna be without here,
and yes, to these two.
So that's gonna make my two shapes.
Now I've got enough points that they can stick back on top
of each other, and you'll notice,
they're exactly the same.
That's the rest of the stuff.
Then I like to move these to be on their own separate layers
so you end up with this part, and then this part,
ad then this part.
So you end up with all these separate parts.
Then, we're just gonna import those into after effects.
You just save this in illustrator file,
import it into after effects,
and you end up with something like this
that I've prepared earlier.
We're getting really into the cooking show territory.
So I have all of these layers and I've got them organized,
and ordered, and named.
If I wanted to animate this on, I would start animating
from one side to the other.
And really, if you want to just stagger all these layers,
that gonna get you halfway to where you wanna go anyway.
Something that can really help you out here,
here's a little tip that I learned a while back,
is using a pretty garbage line to describe the motion.
So just like we did at the beginning,
we create this path, this mask path,
we use the trim paths to animate it on.
And all we're doing with this line
is describing the motion.
So I'm gonna make this you know, a nice bright white
so you can see what's happening.
We're only using this line to describe the timing
that we want.
It's really only here to show us
how quickly things come on,
how much of a thing we wanna reveal at a time.
Now we can use this line by observing where it is,
at what parts of the animation,
when do we actually need to bring on the different layers.
So for example, W two, doesn't need to start until here
because the line hasn't touched it yet.
As soon as it touches it,
that's when we can bring this layer on.
Now we can move ahead and the I, this I stick part
really doesn't come on until, 'til right here.
That the only time when it's getting overlapped,
so that's gonna happen.
So then I would just go through all of this
and shift all of these layers in time
so they only start when the line is going to touch them.
I'm just going to do that now while the video speeds up.
And once you're done,
your layers would look kind of like this.
They have this kind of a shape to them.
So now you don't need to look at this layer.
In fact, I've made a guide layer.
Now you can kind of see the rough timing that's gonna happen
from there, you can use various techniques
to bring these parts on.
If you wanna use track mattes, if you wanna use masks,
you can do that.
I personally like the fine control of masks.
If you already use masks like I did,
you would end up with something like this.
I think a pretty good looking thing.
One of the tricks I use to make masking this
on and off a lot easier is I draw the final shape,
I go around the whole thing,
and hen I key frame backwards.
So I start here, and then I work my way backwards.
It allows me to have really nice fine control
over this leading edge.
So I can have it be wavy if I want,
I can have it be concave or convex if I want.
It really gives you some nice fin control.
And I like to go through, and really just hit the main beats
and then try to fill in the middle parts.
It doesn't take as long as it looks.
But overall this technique, hopefully should help you
get where you wanna go a lot faster.
I can't take away all of the labor,
good work always takes effort.
But hopefully, these can help you solve your more complex
write on problems.
All right, that's it.
Hopefully these techniques will help you
animate on your script logos
that you throw a bunch of blocks of text.
It can really save you a lot of time to plan this stuff out
and hopefully, this gives you the tools to do that.
If you've had any trouble with this tutorial,
please let me know in the comments.
I know there are a lot of specific edge cases that come up.
And there isn't always a clear, straight line
to get you to where you wanna go.
It's like there's no straight lines in script fonts.
And if you wanna find out more about Wipster,
please use the link in description
and start improving your review process today.
If you've enjoyed learning about this kind of thing,
you like learning about motion graphics, after effects,
please subscribe to this channel.
We got new tutorials up every week,
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Make sure you subscribe and turn on notifications
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It's pretty helpful.
I Evan Abrams, I'm on Twitter at ECAbrams.
Ask me any questions, comments you'd like.
Just tell me what you wanna see on the channel,
and we'll try to make it happen.
Thanks a lot for watching
and I'll see you around the internet.