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 the workout composition

We have set up everything needed to animate the workout animation. We have set up anchor points and linked the layers, which was essential for the character animation. Now, we will look at the animation of the layers, working with the Graph Editor and using expressions in After Effects.

Animating the hand layers

Let us start by animating the hands of the character, as follows:

  1. Select both the Left_Arm and Left_Hand layers, and reveal the rotation property by using the R shortcut.
  2. Now, place the playhead at 1 second, and enable the stopwatch of the Left_Arm and Left_Hand layers.
  3. Then, place the playhead at 2 seconds, and change the values of Left_Arm to +25.0 and Left_Hand to +12.0:
Figure 5.14: The Left_Arm and Left_Hand layers’ animations

Figure 5.14: The Left_Arm and Left_Hand layers’ animations

Now, we will perform similar steps for the Right_Arm and Right_Hand layers.

  1. Select both the Right_Arm and Right_Hand layers, and reveal the rotation...