Recently I ran into this fantastic resource by Erin Lux(@erinluxx) who does illustrations for Harper’s Bazaar. She was kind enough to let me post it on here. Motion graphics is something I’ve only recently become aware of due to researching key art but now that I know what it is I see it everywhere.

“motion graphics is an in demand field and can be a rare path to financial stability for creatives, if there’s any way I can help open that path up to people who may not have had the resources to learn in the first place I would like to do that!”

Tutorials

Parallax Effect

The Parallax Effect – After Effects Photo Animation Tutorial

Write-on Effect

Write On Brush Stroke Text Effect – After Effects Tutorial

Motion Tracking

How to Stick Text to Moving Objects | EASY After Effects 2020 Motion Tracking

Recommended Plugins

TextEvo: Quick and easy type animation. Don’t animate type by hand unless you’re feeling fancy. TextEvo takes five seconds and looks nice enough in at least 90% of situations. (Animate it by hand for that last 10%)

Motion3: Assortment of extremely useful tools

ButtCapper: Quickly change stroke caps instead of twirling down a thousand times (when you try to do the write-on effect you’ll find this very useful)

Overlord: Seamless layer importing between Illustrator and After Effects

Ourobouros:

GifGun: Render gifs out of After Effects instead of having to do a two-step process with AE and Photoshop

Useful Effects and Presets

Tip that took me too long to learn: You can drag the effect onto the layer you want it on OR you can select your layer and double click the effect, saving you a surprising amount of time

Posterize Time: Add to comp to adjust frame rateTip! Use to get stop motion effectWave Warp: Good for hair/water/etcRoughen Edges: Use to add “life” to clean/sharp shapesTritone: Set a highlight, mid, and shadow color.Tip! Make your image white, grey and black and use tritone to adjust colorsSet Matte: Alpha mattes for shape layers, good for avoiding excess layers from masks

Expressions

Create self-scaling text box

(Please just do it with the expression instead of manually resizing a thousand boxes…….from someone who has manually resized a thousand boxes because typing the expression seemed like “too much work”)

How To Create An Autoscale Text Box In After Effects

Number Slider

Animated Counting Numbers in After Effects | Slider Control

Seamless Loop Your Wiggle

freq = 1;

amp = 110;

loopTime = 3;

t = time % loopTime;

wiggle1 = wiggle(freq, amp, 1, 0.5, t);

wiggle2 = wiggle(freq, amp, 1, 0.5, t – loopTime);

linear(t, 0, loopTime, wiggle1, wiggle2)

Position one layer evenly between two others

1. Start with three layers.
2. Animate the positions of the first two layers in the Timeline panel.
3. Select the third layer, press P to reveal the Position property, and Alt-click (Windows) or Option-click (Mac OS) the stopwatch button to the left of the property name.
4. Enter the following in the expression field:

Misc Tips & Tricks

• Align your shape’s rotation to the path using Auto-Orient, under Layer > Transform > Auto-Orient and selecting “Orient Along Path”

• Easily loop footage: Interpret footage > Main > Loop
• Every spot you can enter a number in AE is a calculator! Need a rectangle half the length of your comp? Go into Comp Settings and type “/2” to divide the length in half. Also very useful for setting position keyframes.

• When scaling shapes with a stroke, changing the size with Scale will distort it, change the scale with the Path Size instead

Useful Keyboard Shortcuts

The post Tips and Tricks for Getting Started with After Effects! appeared first on Gilded Octopus .

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