Book Image

Hands-On Motion Graphics with Adobe After Effects CC

By : David Dodds
Book Image

Hands-On Motion Graphics with Adobe After Effects CC

By: David Dodds

Overview of this book

If you’re thinking seriously about making and publishing your videos with professional editing and animation, look no further! Adobe After Effects is a popular tool among video editors and YouTubers to enhance their videos and bring them to life by implementing visual effects and motion graphics. This book will take you right from the basics through to the advanced techniques in Adobe After Effects CC 2018. You will start by setting up your editing environment to learn and improve techniques to sharpen your video editing skills. Furthermore, you will work with basic and advanced special effects to create, modify, and optimize motion graphics in your videos. Lastly, you will not only learn how to create 2.5D animations, but also get to grips with using Cinema 4D Lite to build and animate complete 3D scenes. By the end of the book, you’ll have learned how to package a video efficiently with the help of the projects covered.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)
Hands-On Motion Graphics with Adobe After Effects CC
Contributors
Preface
Assessment
Other Book You May Enjoy
Index

Animations, nulls, text, and rendering


In this section, we will learn how to animate using Null objects. We will also learn about rendering our projects.

Parenting and Null object animations

Now, we are going to animate our designs. We have created designs that live in the Precomp folder. Double-click on the first precomp you made. In this precomp, you have a nested comp and a Solid layer that you made for your background. Select and center the top precomposed shape layer:

  1. Press the R button to reveal the Rotation parameters

  2. Go to the left-side of the panel, and hit the stopwatch for the Rotation parameter

  3. Move 90 key frames down to the right in the timeline

  4. Scrub the Rotation parameter

This will automatically create a key frame, as shown in the following screenshot:

Animation rotation

Go back into the Main comp, and press the spacebar to preview your animation. Give yourself a pat on the back for creating your first animation! Let's animate the next pattern precomp that we created by observing the...