After Effects Workshop

Another insightful After Effects workshop, if I do say so myself (The features available in that software are absolutely limitless, and I fear I have only begun to scratch the surface of what it can offer us when it comes to utilising it on our animation works). 

During this workshop, we were taught how to animate a moving car, which is a considerably simple (To those familiar enough with After Effects) and cheap method when done in this software, and so today I felt that I had the chance to oil those rusty hinges in my memory banks and familiarise myself once more with the basic tools.

To start off, we were made to separate the wheels from the body of the car in Photoshop, roughly adding in a black backing later on to make it seem that the other side of the vehicle was still there (Also when the wheels move, any ugly little bits will be pretty well hidden in it). After all that was done, the Photoshop file was then imported into After Effects.

We messed around a lot with null objects and masking, that was practically used as a control for any image you wanted to parent it to. And so I created at least three of those for the two wheels and the Porsche (Right, I figured a red and blue truck might have been too obvious to my classmates by now...) itself, one pretty important bit was connecting the two null objects used for the wheels together after we cleaned up the wheels a little more by masking them with an ellipse, so that you could animate them at the same time.

The way to do this was to first ALT+click on the stopwatch of the rotation tool for one of these null objects, and then select the squiggly line icon that appears, and drag it over to the other null objects, which should then connect them together. After that, you need to figure out which one you want to be the parent, one null object should have a normal equal sign while the other should have one with a dash over it, the one with the dash over it will be the parent and the control for both objects, and you will also notice that the rotation values are not highlighted in red unlike the other.

When that was all done with, we then pre composed all of those layers together, which we then inserted into a brand new composition. While the entire thing could be animated as a single object, you only need to double click on that file to reopen all those separate layers into a new window (Something I still find a little annoying with After Effects since I don't realise that it happens way too many times while I am working), especially when you wish to animate the wheels. And so we animated the car to move across the screen in the new composition, and animated the rotating wheels and slight jerkiness of the car in the other.

After that, it just came down to the speed and the easing of the frames (The easing effect can by the way be removed in the graph tool). Other things Matt Burton also taught us was the use of the Camera with One Node, and motion blur. To insert a motion blur into your object, you only really need to select its icon on the object of your choice, and it automatically seems to know which frames to blur. We could however also adjust the quality of that blur in the advanced section of the composition settings, just toggle with the Shutter Angle and Sample per Pressure values.

Here's something I managed to dish out today, I know it looks really rough and I could have done a lot more, so shh: