- Hello everyone, this is Evan Abrams.
And in this After Effects tutorial,
we're gonna be creating some diverging paths
like this thing you see over here, pretty nice.
This is a very on trend kind of look,
you can see it in a lot of places.
I wanna show you a fairly simple method to make this happen.
There are, of course, infinite methods
to do just about anything.
We're gonna start with these paths
that kind of fly through space,
then we're gonna add some layers of detail
to make this feel a little bit more grounded.
Even though there is no ground in space,
we need something in there so we know
which way we're going, how fast we're moving.
And, of course, if you get stuck in this tutorial,
please ask me questions in the comments
and I'll try to get you through.
And if you make something cool out of these techniques,
and I know you will, tweet them at me @ecabrams
or tag me on Instagram, @ecabrams on there as well.
So if all of that sounds good,
then don't divert yourself from this tutorial.
Sorry.
(upbeat music)
So for this method, and this is just one of many methods,
we're gonna start in Illustrator
drawing the paths that we want the shapes to travel along.
We could instead move the objects around
and then have paths flow from those,
which also has its own advantages,
but in this tutorial we're gonna go for the simpler
more two-dimensional approach
of letting the drawn paths drive the movement.
That allows us to kind of art direct
all of this movement, all of these lines,
all the curves outside of After Effects,
really plan out the direction we want these things to go,
and then go in and make stuff move.
We'll cover that other method if people are really into it,
I guess let me know in the comments,
but let's get started.
Here in Illustrator, it's gonna be
a little bit more show and tell,
because I don't think you need to see me draw these paths,
but I'll teel you that in general,
when I wanna draw something like this
that has a lot of this path animation,
the art board has to be large enough to accommodate
all of the length of the path that we wanna take.
Now, I usually start by drawing down
a bunch of these 16 by nine, 1920 by 1080 HD,
if that's the final framing
that we're gonna deal with, grids.
So I wanna put a bunch of these boxes down,
so I can appreciate the framing that I'm gonna be causing
when I draw my paths.
If this thing has to play
on a one-by-one kind of Instagram screen,
then you probably wanna drop down
some squares along your path.
This is gonna alow us to do things like put down a grid,
and then, consider how our path is gonna look
when we look at our final composition.
So planning out all of our compositions,
all of our ratios, all of our rules,
in this space is a lot easier
than trying to do it on the fly.
So in here we've got our grid elements,
we're drawing in the start
and the end position for these lines.
And then, for this I set up a few rules
about what I'm willing to do with these curves.
So if I select one of these lines,
you can see that they're all very regular curves,
and I'm using this grid here
to sort of determine how far I'm gonna be pulling
these bezier handles to make sure
that all of these paths are kind of in line
and uniform with each other in some way.
And there's no right or wrong way to do it,
I also don't worry about the colors,
because these are really just here
to figure out the shape and the path that we wanna take.
From there, we wanna save our work,
we're gonna make sure we've got
our different paths on different layers,
'cause that's gonna help us out.
And then we're ready to import this into After Effects.
Now, you probably noticed I've got Overlord,
the extension, open in here.
Often, I'll use that to transfer paths
from Illustrator into After Effects,
but for this, all we really need to do
is open it up in here.
So we'll just go in here, and we'll just find those paths,
we'll open those up and that's gonna give us
this nice, tall comp here.
So even if our export is gonna be 16 by nine,
we're gonna work on all of our animation
in this big, tall comp.
We're gonna start by grabbing those paths,
and we're gonna go Create, Create Shapes from Vector Layer.
So this is taking that vector information from Illustrator,
and now we're turning it into information
we can work with here in After Effects.
Now, there's a little bit of zeroing out
I'm gonna recommend you do.
When you select a layer, you can hit U + U,
and it'll bring up everything that's changed at that layer.
In here, with this transform of group one,
and that position is being changed,
I like to zero that out,
which is going to move all of that contents to zero zero.
And then the anchor point I like to reset that
to its default value,
which you would think would snap this back
right to where it belongs,
but sometimes you have to readjust this stuff
just to make sure it's all going
right where you think it should be.
Zeroing out these values is gonna help us later on
to avoid some confusion that can happen
when we start using some little scripts
to move this stuff around.
So there we go, we've had it all snapped back together.
I'm holding down command when I move layers to snap them.
And everything's been kind of zeroed out.
So now we want to take something
and have it follow this path.
We can select a layer, we can twirl into it,
we can grab that path, and now you can go Window,
Create Nulls from Paths.
This is a little script that's been shipping
with After Effects for a while,
and the option we wanna go with is Trace Path.
When we click Trace Path, that's gonna create a null,
and we can see it out here, it's been plumped up,
and wouldn't you know it,
we've created that trace path
by selecting the green path outline,
and if I hit U + U and look at all these properties,
you can see that we have a progress here,
this is the progress along the path.
And you can see that that null
is following along that path, fantastic!
That's exactly what we want.
So I'm gonna just change these keyframes here
to go from maybe zero to three.
We can actually delete this expression in here,
'cause this is just causing this to loop,
if there are keyframes on here.
So we don't need that.
Everything else we can leave as it is,
and now we just need to stick whatever object
is gonna be traveling along the path to this layer.
Now, I think I'm just gonna double click up here,
make a circle, make it, I don't know,
200, this is just to illustrate what's going on,
then we would pick whip from this object
to that null holding down Shift,
so that all the properties get zeroed out,
and the child gets locked right on the parent,
and then you can watch it go along the path.
Notice it follows the tangent of the path as well,
so if this were a triangle or a square,
you could see it following the tangent of that path.
So let me just solo these three things,
so we're only dealing with this one case.
And then you can go ahead and repeat it
for however many paths you have.
But the green path, we want this to trim on
as this layer is going.
So thankfully we can go ahead and select the trace path,
just tap the U key once to bring up its keyframes.
And now, selecting the group,
I'm gonna add a trim paths to it,
twirl that open, take the end here,
and I'm gonna pick whip that end percentage
to the progress percentage.
And we can't really see it super well here,
so what I'll do is take this stroke,
make it black, good, and make that thicker, great,
say like so, and now, as you can see,
these two things are following each other along.
Now, if you tweak the progress of this path,
then, the end here will follow along
and everything will work out perfectly well
as it seems to draw on this path, perfect!
So then you'll repeat this for the other paths,
and you'll want to go to this progress,
probably ease these keyframes,
you'll probably wanna add some nuance to this.
So the motion is a bit more exciting,
it has points of acceleration, deceleration,
things get very interesting there.
Let's cooking show this a little bit,
and move ahead to when we're ready to actually start
following this path in a composition.
We would go ahead and make a new comp,
let's say, we could work in the 1080 by 1080 space,
maybe we're gonna put this on Instagram.
Let's call this camera movement.
We would then take our paths
and rather than using that janky one that we just did,
let's use the paths from the intro example
that you would have seen.
And right now we're not looking at anything
because we're staring into the middle of the space.
We're gonna make this 3D,
we are going to make a new camera,
50 millimeter, whatever.
The big important part is make sure it's a one-node camera.
Hit okay, call open its position,
go ahead and separate those dimensions,
separating the dimensions is helpful.
And now we're gonna dial that y position down here.
It's gonna come down, so we're gonna be looking
at the starts, the origin of our situation.
2700 sounds good.
Let's set a keyframe there.
If you remember from previously,
the whole animation resolves at around three seconds,
so we can actually take this to negative that number.
Oh, that's a bit too far.
Let me just back it up a little bit,
here we are.
So now we're at the end.
And now if we observe the animation,
oh, we're way ahead I think, as it starts to go,
so we're gonna need to massage these keyframes.
So now the camera is following along
as these paths go and dip and move and go places.
Pretty good, so far so interesting.
You're gonna want to go into the graph editor though
and play a round with these values.
Maybe the camera should be getting off to a slow start,
because it didn't anticipate for this to be going so fast,
then it tries to accelerate to catch up,
and you really need to play around
with the relationship between the camera speed
and these objects speed so that we can feel
how quickly they're going, are they accelerating?
Are they decelerating?
Are we accelerating and decelerating?
So you're gonna want to play around with that
to find what actually feels right for what you're doing.
If this is about chasing these things,
and they're getting ahead of us,
you would probably want them at the top of the frame,
and you would adjust this curve,
or these points in order to make that happen.
If we're traveling along with them,
then we would probably change this curve slightly
to make that happen.
So it's all about the nuances of this curve,
when should you be seeing what,
also consider moving in and out,
using the z position, whoa!
So that can be nice, if you wanna take
like a kind of a rising upwards as you go,
so we can get even more of a view of this thing,
and then maybe follow those down into the hole,
zoom, you could do that.
Everything is on the table here.
You are the master of this scene,
nothing will surprise you,
you can move around as you like.
But even with all of the camera movement,
we're still a little bit lost, right?
Here in the middle,
is the camera moving back and forth?
What's happening?
We don't have enough points out here in the scene
to really tell us what's happening.
We can sell this a lot better.
So what I would recommend is having
some kind of texture, some kind of detail
that tells us we're moving from one area to another.
We can accomplish that by just putting
something in the background.
So let's make a big rectangle.
And with this rectangle, I'm gonna want it to be
three dimensional as well,
so you can see it goes way up here,
and I'm just gonna go ahead,
unlink the sizes of this rectangle,
and I'm just gonna make it super large.
Super large like this,
so that takes up the whole space.
And then, what I think I will do
is I will give it a gradient fill, oh, a cool gradient,
and I'm just gonna stretch these points
to run from this corner up to this corner, good.
And now I'll change that fill,
and I'm gonna use some of these libraries over here.
Let's go from this dark color,
and now let's go to maybe, I don't know,
maybe this not-quite-as-dark color,
and we'll see if this has improved our scene at all.
So now we're going up and it's becoming darker,
oh, and we're moving away.
So I think what we'll wanna do
is actually expand this out,
keep expanding, keep expanding.
So now, our journey takes us from lightness
into darkness.
That's okay.
What I would really recommend is,
because we have a 3D layer and we have a 3D camera,
we might as well do something that plays in 3D.
If we can play with the depth here in some way,
we'll know that these things are moving,
if there's a stationary thing for them to pass.
It's for those reasons that if we go
into the original intro, and again,
this is gonna be a little bit more showing and telling
than doing for this part,
notice this little star field,
that we kind of blast through,
turn off these little rectangle layers,
this star field makes us feel like we're moving
because we're actually moving through something,
we move past it.
And we can tell that these objects
are moving relative to those other objects.
So those are all just a little trap code form
a few spheres that have been put out into the world,
a base form that is, quite frankly, very large,
but with not too many particles in them,
you don't need that many particles
in this kind of a box.
And then just using the disperse
to kinda make a little bit wacky and star-like out there.
And you end up with particles
that are gonna be in front of and behind
your main actors here, your main subjects,
and I can add a nice little bit of depth
as we're moving through this scene.
You're gonna have access to trap code particulars,
you can also just drop some 3D layers out there
to tell more of that story,
or you can use other particle systems as well,
it's wide open.
Another element that can really bring this together
are these speed lines that as we're moving past,
zoom, zoom, zoom, zoom.
These tell the story of speed all on their own.
Each of these is just a little rectangle,
and I'm animating the anchor point
to cause these to drift past.
A little linear anchor point change.
That allows me to use their position
to move them left and right,
and then just adjust them in time, ahead and behind,
to get this kind of staggered look.
And that's what you can do for any object
that's gonna be flying past here.
These don't have to be 3D at all,
there doesn't have to be anything interesting about them.
They're just kind of floating on by our view.
But all these elements will work together
to convey this feeling of speed as we're going,
we got the camera movement,
we've got objects for us to pass,
and then, we've got objects coming at us.
And these kind of build up this feeling of progress,
this feeling of change.
And speaking of change, should you ever need to come back
and alter some of these little trails,
because we've linked everything together,
using expressions and using that path
to become these nulls,
you can grab points of these paths
and move them around willy and nilly,
and everything will adjust accordingly.
We can add points, we can take some away,
doesn't have too big of an impact on the trace paths.
Just remember that as you make this path longer or shorter,
because we're measuring by percentage of path,
it's gonna change kind of the speed and timing nuances
of this little object's journey along the path,
but there aren't that many keyframes,
so you should be okay.
But a lot of this movement,
and a lot of what looks good about this
really comes down to taking your time
and designing what you want this movement to be,
where you want these trails to go.
But I hope this gets you where you wanted to go.
Thank you so much for watching
and spending some time with me here
on the ECAbrams tutorial channel.
If you had any troubles making this happen,
then please let me know in the comments,
and I'll try to get you through,
I try to answer all the comments when I'm able.
And as always, if you make something cool with this,
I would love to see it.
Tweet it at me, @ecabrams, or tag me on Instagram,
@ecabrams on there too.
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