Animating along a Path

This lesson was about learning another method of animating a shape to move in After Effects. Once the program is open, create a small shape – I did a rectangle. Centre the anchor point of the shape. Then go to the pen tool and empty the fill and stroke so that you can create invisible lines or paths. With the tool selected, create a wiggly line as the path that you want the shape to move. The next step is to open the path layer up, go into contents, shape 1, path 1, open that, select it and shift selecting ‘path’ underneath. Click ctrl + c to copy the values of the path.

In the shape layer, go to transform and select position. Then paste the copied values in, so that you have essentially inserted the path into the shape’s transformation. If you play through now, the rectangle moves. Right-click into the shape layer, into transform, auto orient, and where it says orient along path click ok. You can grab the final keyframe and the animation can be stretched out to be slower, or compressed to be faster.

 

 

Trim Paths

 

Create a new composition in After Effects, go to stroke and this time, make sure it is a solid colour. Draw an ellipse (circle) and select the layer to thicken the stroke where it says px. The goal is to make a loading icon, so it shouldn’t be too thin. After this, open the layer and next to contents, click add and it opens up a menu where the trim path option appears. Select this and you’ll see ‘start’ and ‘end’. Changing these values moves the stroke, and can make the circle disappear completely. Animate the start at 100% and after two seconds, at 0%. Do the same for the end value, but slightly after the start one, so after the start sequence ends, put it to 0%. No position change. This should be the result, and I really like how it looks, especially knowing how easy it was to make.

 

 

This technique can be used in many different ways. We learned how to do a cool motion graphic of blinking lights/bursts, which was really simple and looks awesome at the end. In a new AE composition, click on the pen tool and make the stroke white (or any colour) and create a short line. Bring the anchor point of the line to the bottom of the comp. In the layer, click add and then repeater, and duplicates appear. In ‘Repeater 1’, at the copies, 3.0 can be seen. Change this to 6.0 so that there are six identical lines.

Next, in transform, go to repeater 1 and in position, turn the first figure to 0. Then, in rotation, rotate the lines and play with the values until they look like a star, and are brought closer together. Zip the layer up. Add trim paths the same way as last time and using the start and end, make a burst. Then stopwatch the end, and like last time, make the lines chase their own tails. You then have a bust, which you can play with animate things like rotation and scale, to add some pop. This can then be duplicated and staggered and numerous other things can be experimented with, like he colour, scale and position, all optional and customisable.

 

 

After learning these two skills, we had the opportunity to create a short animation. I decided on creating a rocket taking off from the Earth and shooting through space because it would give me the chance to use parenting, and apply the techniques I learned recently. I animated the space background to move down slowly so that it looked like the rocket was moving through space. I realised that animating along the path was not easy to use because of this, but I managed to work my way around it, with a small mishap along the way, that made the rocket spin when I didn’t want it to. I used the puppet tool and applied a loop out expression to the blasters, and added in several planets, some with smaller ones orbiting around them, using parenting. I also included a comet, although I wanted to add meteors too but I ran out of time. Still, the result was pretty cool, and I managed to include many skills learned from previous lessons.