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

Setting up the workout composition for animation

First, we will start with the animation of the workout composition. We will learn how to animate the Illustrator layers of in the workout composition, creating an animation of the character in the Illustrator file, and we will learn how to link the layers using the parent and link feature in After Effects.

Before we start animating the layers, we need to fix the layers’ anchor points and convert the eye layers into the shape layers of After Effects.

Fixing anchor points

Let’s start by fixing the layers’ anchor points so that the layers can animate as per the movement of body joints. Change the anchor points as follows:

  1. Select the Head layer in the timeline and go to the toolbar to select the Pan Behind tool and move the anchor point of the Head layer to the bottom center of the head, near the neck point. We are going to do a similar setup for the rest of the layers as well.
Figure 5.6: The Head layer anchor point mapped ...