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

Creating shape layers

We will look into how to draw shape layers in the composition. New shape layers are added in the composition of After Effects. We can apply Fill and Stroke to a shape, modify the vertex points of the path, and apply animation presets.

Before we start to work on shape layers and tools, let us create a new project with the composition as follows:

  1. Go to File | New | New Project.
  2. Now, click on the composition icon in the Project window, or go to Composition | New Composition….
  3. Name it Start screen.
  4. In the New Composition dialog box, select the HD.1920x1080.25 fps preset under the Preset drop-down option.
  5. Set the duration to 10 seconds as follows: 0:00:10:00.
  6. Select OK to create the composition.

The preceding steps can be seen in Figure 4.1:

Figure 4.1: Start screen Composition Settings

Figure 4.1: Start screen Composition Settings

Now that we have created the composition named Start screen, we will look into the shape tools to create a...