After Effects Tips, Tricks and Resources

A 3-Minute After Effects Tutorial: Fluttering Butterfly

There was a question this week on how to make a fluttering butterfly in After Effects, so here is one made with a simple random expression and two wings and a body.

1. Create a wing and a butterfly body in Illustrator or use a masked Photoshop file for the different body parts.
2. Create a comp in After Effects.
3. Put body and wing elements into the comp.
4. Make layers 3D.
5. Drag the anchor point of the wings to the edge where you want the wing to hinge.
6. Position wings relative to the body.
7. Add an easy random expression to the wing layers to create some fluttering. Something like rotationY random(-56,62) to a wing is fine.
8. Add camera and parent to the Null.
9. Add a nice nature background and blur this slightly for some depth of field or use camera DOF.
10. Rotate camera using the null to simulate movement.

For more than one butterfly, use this comp as a particle or you could parent the butterfly layers to another null and duplicate to create a flock.

Originally published: 14-05-2006

Smokey Logo Tutorial with Trapcode Particular

Here is a tutorial on creating a smokey logo effect. Fire up After Effects and Trapcode Particular and follow these steps:

1. Create a comp.
2. Create some text or drop logo file in here. This is your logo comp.
3. Create another comp and drop the logo comp in here.
4. Create a solid layer above the logo and add Trapcode Particular.
5. Set up Emitter to 60000+ particles, emitter type layer, layer is the logo comp layer, set velocity high at start of layer then slow where the logo is still, copy and reverse keyframes at the end of layer to loop it.
6. Set Particle to smokelet, size 4-6, play with settings until you get desired smoke look.
7. Go to physics, set physics time factor to 3-4 at the start then around 1 where you want the logo to behave still, and reverse yet again at the end to be able to loop them.
8. Add a camera and a null, parent null to cam.
9. Add rotation to the null on Y axis +90, 0, -3, -90 to rotate the camera in 3D space.
10. Done. Easy Peasy smokey logo.

Originally published: 07-05-2006

After Effects 3-Minute Tutorial: Psychedelic Background

1. Create a comp.
2. Create a solid.
3. Add a fractal and play with the settings.
4. Add CC radial scale wipe, start at 100% completion at the beginning of the timeline, 0% at end.
5. Add another CC radial scale wipe, start at 0% completion at the beginning of the timeline, 100% at end.
6. Play with settings in between keyframes to get a weird circular motion.
7. Duplicate layer, time stretch and play with the blending modes.
8. Add an adjustment layer.
9. Add colour, glow etc. to the adjustment layer.
10. Done.

Psychedelic stuff — animate to music and get hypnotized.

Originally published: 23-04-2006

After Effects 3-Minute Tutorial: Techno Background 101

A tiny little tutorial on how to make a techno background (but the principle is the same for any type of fractal noise related backgrounds):

1. Create a comp.
2. Create a solid.
3. Add fractal noise.
4. Turn evolution of fractal noise on.
5. Play with fractal noise settings.
6. Add text.
7. Animate text using animation preset.
8. Add stylize FX.
9. Add colour.
10. Done.

Originally published: 14-04-2006