Book Image

Creative Motion Mastery with Adobe After Effects

By : Vishu Aggarwal
Book Image

Creative Motion Mastery with Adobe After Effects

By: Vishu Aggarwal

Overview of this book

Visual effects and motion graphics are everywhere, shaping the film, TV, games, websites, and application landscape. Navigating a field this complex and ever-expanding demands more than mere familiarity with tools; you need to stand out to get ahead. Creative Motion Mastery with Adobe After Effects is the definitive guide that not only equips you with the essential skills to distinguish yourself, but also takes you through real projects that you can add to your portfolio. Guided by a hands-on learning approach, you'll master the UI, workflow, and diverse projects such as text animation, shape layers, and rotoscoping. With this newfound knowledge, you’ll take your graphic design and post-production skills to the next level using chroma keying, particle simulations, and 2D and 3D tracking. You’ll progress faster than someone taking a formal course in Adobe After Effects! And it’s not all about creating; you’ll import graphics from Illustrator and Photoshop and apply post-production effects to give them a new life. Finally, you’ll discover how seamlessly you can export and manage your projects, ensuring end-to-end coverage of all you need. By the end of the book, you’ll have a thorough understanding of Adobe After Effects, equipped with the skills and practice you need to propel your career in graphic design.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
1
Part 1: Working with Motion Graphics
8
Part 2: Post-Production and Visual Effects
13
Part 3: 2D and 3D Tracking, and Rendering

Animating text on a path

Let’s now see how we can animate our text to move along a path:

  1. Open the Follow Path composition if it is not already open. You can do this by double-clicking on it in the project folder. This composition contains some text reading Follow Path.
  2. Select the Follow Path text layer. The selected layer will be highlighted in the Composition panel with a line drawn across it. This line is referred to as the path.

    If you do not know how to draw a path, it will be explained in Chapter 4, when we cover how to create shape layers and paths. The path shown in this composition was created using the Pen tool in Adobe After Effects, which will also be discussed in the next chapter.

    For now, though, we want to animate the text along the highlighted path.

  3. To do this, go to the dropdown of the Follow Path text layer. From there, open the dropdown of Path Options, and then select Mask 1 in the path. This is the path that we can see in the composition.
  4. ...