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 a bar graph line

We will create a graph line using the Pen tool to indicate the graph values from 2020 to 2026. The Pen tool is a great tool for creating custom shapes and Bezier paths.

Follow these steps to create the bar graph line:

  1. Select the Pen tool in the Tools panel and make sure Fill is set to None, Stroke is a white color, and the Stroke value is 10.
Figure 4.38: Pen tool settings

Figure 4.38: Pen tool settings

  1. Now, make sure that no layer is selected in the Composition panel, then click on the bottom of the 2020 bar. We create a vertex point on the 2020 bar and place vertex points on all the years’ bars going from top to bottom and again from bottom to top. This depicts that the graph is sometimes going up and sometimes down, which is how a statistical graph naturally is. This is shown in Figure 4.39. Rename the layer Graph Line.
Figure 4.39: Graph Line created using the Pen tool

Figure 4.39: Graph Line created using the Pen tool

  1. Go to the Elliptical...