Motion loop and living holds
In our first after effects lesson of the second year we we were introduced to the idea of loops and living holds; here we began by looking at an existing animation to get an idea of what direction we would be heading in, in our lesson.
Motion loop - this is a piece of information that ends and starts in the same place. This means that a key frame can be placed at the start and at the end resulting in the image going back to the original state at the end even if it has moved throughout the animation. This is useful if you want the start and and end to look exactly the same.
Living hold - is a production tool where the action has stopped but the animation is still moving; thus slows down production.
Grouping - this can be used so that layers work together, to do this you used the parent tool which allows layers to be grouped. The advantage of grouped layers is so that you can move the layers at the same time.
Coding - instead of using the tool option panel, I can input the code myself. For example to do this I'd select the transform tool and pick one such as rotation, then hold alt and click the tool. A text box will then pop up which allows me to add information to effect. For example I could right wiggle(5,50), the frequency and magnitude must be separated by a comma.
Wiggler - it is a shortcut to creating key frames. Features that you can change are the frequency which is how many frames per second and the magnitude which is how big the motion is. The positive to using the wiggler is that its very fast to create however once the key frames are there they are set in place and therefore to change them you would have to delete the effect and re add it. *remember when wanting to change the magnitude make sure you are clicked on the transform property for that layer*.
This session was also a recap on the skills that we had learnt in first year. As I learnt After Effects in college, I remembered the basics but I did need a quick refresher. Even though we did recap on some other basic tools we learnt how to use a new tool, and this was called the Wiggler.
To start out animation, we had to create a standard portrait in Illustrator, to do this I had to make sure that each component of the portrait were on separate layers! This is key! This is so that each individual component on the animation could be animated and thus controlled separately. We could create the portrait on anyone we desired however, I based mine off of Daenery's Stormborn of House Targaryen from Game of Thrones.
When opening up Illustrator I had to set the document up for this specific work and the layout had to be 1920 by 1080, this is so that my illustrator file is the same as the composition that I would be working in with After Effects. I had gathered different images of Daenery's and chose my favourite of the bunch, I then set the opacity at 50% and I then started to draw over the different features of her face, neck, hair and outfit using the pen tool. When I was happy with the brief design I then saved my file and I then imported the file into After Effects. When doing so, I went to "Select File" --> Import File --> Daenery's and just before pressing OK, I changed the option for ILLUSTRATOR/PDF/EPS Sequence and I changed it to COMPOSITION - RETAIN LAYERS
To begin animating my work, I used the transform tools; I have used them before so I remembered what would work best where. I made the arm move with the statue with the rotation tool, just to make it a subtle movement, and wouldn't look too jarred. The background was simple to apply as I just imported the background in from my desktop and made sure that it was set 'SET TO BACK'.
After creating this, I then created one of Marceline (the Vampire Queen) from Adventure Time...
Living hold - is a production tool where the action has stopped but the animation is still moving; thus slows down production.
Grouping - this can be used so that layers work together, to do this you used the parent tool which allows layers to be grouped. The advantage of grouped layers is so that you can move the layers at the same time.
Coding - instead of using the tool option panel, I can input the code myself. For example to do this I'd select the transform tool and pick one such as rotation, then hold alt and click the tool. A text box will then pop up which allows me to add information to effect. For example I could right wiggle(5,50), the frequency and magnitude must be separated by a comma.
Wiggler - it is a shortcut to creating key frames. Features that you can change are the frequency which is how many frames per second and the magnitude which is how big the motion is. The positive to using the wiggler is that its very fast to create however once the key frames are there they are set in place and therefore to change them you would have to delete the effect and re add it. *remember when wanting to change the magnitude make sure you are clicked on the transform property for that layer*.