Lessons
Day 1
1What's New in Adobe After Effects Creative Cloud?
05:52 2Navigating the Interface & Managing the Workspace
11:10 3Importing Assets & Layer Styles
35:43 4Blending
16:04 5Creating Sub-Compositions
12:13 6Working with Layers & Blending Modes
22:34 7Parenting Layers
29:20Working with Text Layers
16:35 9Animating Text & Presets
48:14 10Animating Text on a Path
11:53 11Creating & Animating Vector Masks
35:47 12Q & A
08:16Day 2
13Applying Effects to Layers
55:54 14Liquify Filter & Puppet Tool
21:29 15Converting Illustrator Files to Shapes
33:03 16Animating Vector Shapes (2D)
25:24 17Exploring & Understanding 3D Space
42:15 18Extruding Text & Vector Shapes
12:26 19Bending Comps & Footage Layers
29:23 20Cinema 4D Lite with Adobe After Effects Creative Cloud
56:54Day 3
21Stabalizing Shaky Video Footage
21:08 22Motion Tracking Basics
24:50 233D Tracker
24:55 24Green Screen Compositing with Keylight
1:05:39 251Rotobrush & Rotoscope Techniques
29:57 26Rotoscoping Techniques Continued
20:33 27Rotoscoping with Green Screen
23:19 28Dynamic Linking with Adobe Premiere Pro Creative Cloud
06:58 29Using Expressions for Cartoon Lip Sync
24:03 30Live Action News Template Breakdown
15:11 31Q & A
15:29Lesson Info
Extruding Text & Vector Shapes
Yesterday we touched on extruding text and three d get it just kind of touched on it a bit. Now I've got one here that I've created that, uh is already rendered so I'm going to just start from that point and show what geometry that we've created with this again it's just a text layer like this one which is actually a duplicate of this one this is just a two d text layer click on the three d to make a three d and then I play with the geometry of it and in this case um I think I went with akane cave bevel and extruded it a lot let's try thousand pixels so has this long extrude on it, okay? And then the bevel depth is a little heavy so let's goto one let it catch up there we go so what's making this look like a three d an actual three d physical three d object well, that is because we have a camera and we have a spotlight without either of those it would just look flat. Um, if I turned the light off that's what it looks like so without a light um it's just a blob because the light is what...
shows us what all the textures look like and so what in this case I did just move the camera because here's where I would use the camera animating a camera versus doing annul object and that is if I'm just looking at something and I'm just going to do a track around it it's kind of a dolly track like they've got here in the studio that got thes dolly tracks down here for the cameras to glide on and uh that's kind of what you're doing when you've got your focal point is right in the middle and you're just animating your camera around that's basically what you're doing so let me show you that here um this one I've got my position already in here so it starts at this point and then I've moved the camera around two over here but that render up here for second case that's where we end up so it goes from there tio here and in between it does this nice smooth camera move so let's see what that looks like from the top hey bring this down to about half and look at the top of you and let's come down to about twenty five percent there we go so here's our three d layer that's just there we're looking down at the top here's our spotlight right here we see that its shining down there and then our camera is back here somewhere so we have to come back out here and look and see where our camera is where's our camera may come way out and I'm over it I don't have a visible there we go make it visible there we go so come back out to twelve and a half okay so now I can see where my camera is going so if I scroll through this or scrub through this I can see there's the path of my camera now what I have done is I've locked my point of interest in one place because I don't have it animating I'm only animating the path so let me come back here to this point let's actually start this animation over from the point of interest let's go to two views horizontal okay and then this one I always liked it keep I like to keep this one top we'll make this one the top so we can keep it consistent with our other examples. This one will be camera one and it will fit up to hundred percent. Okay, so this is what we're looking at. This is where we're working. This is our work space here. Here is my camera now haven't started animating yet but this is my first key frame so I just clicked the stopwatch on position and I leave it there so I know I want to zoom in on this and I want to kind of see some of the other side but I wanted the to appear that the camera's going into it so I just get it just grabbed the camera like I did before just grab it and shove it in there and see what it looks like. Okay? That's about where I want to end up the problem that I did there is I didn't move on the timeline all I did was changed my position I do that all the time. That's a real world got you you know, you do that you'll move something. Okay? That's great. And you go down you look at your timeline ago. Oh, no, I have to have to undo that. Well, there's there's two things you do that you can undo. Go back to that point in time and start over or let me redo. Let me copy that key frame, guys. I really like where it landed. Then I'll go back and undo undo change value there we go now I can come out a few seconds. Come out now, let's, try three or four about four seconds. Want a nice smooth animation and then paste and there's my kiefer, they didn't really lose anything is just enock word way of having to get there, okay, so there's my two key frames and everything in between, but notice that it is kind of a flat let me drop this resolution here so we can do just a really quick render and let me do a quick ram preview on this just so that speeds up and you can see what happens here. Um I don't have any e's in on the last key frames so it's going to kind of abruptly stop um so that's something I know I need to do and I kind of want to look around it before heading right into us. I might want to put a curve on my track so it's not just going straight at it, so, um I'll show you how to change that motion here just a second when this finishes rendering enough to show you actually we'll just do that right now, it's not bad it's not horrible and nobody would probably really no, but it does kind of look like it's just swinging around it doesn't look like it's actually tracking or moving, so what I do here is when I click on one of these key frames noticed that I've got these little handles in here. Let me zoom in a bit on this so you can see what I'm referring to here now see these little points handles here actually, I know it's a handle, but to you it's probably just like a little square dot, but if you see one of these on something that's, a path or something that's, an emotion path or a rotation or anything like that. That means that's, a handle that belongs to this anchor point here, that key frame so I can grab that and pull it out and move it that now turns that linear move into a busy a move I've now created something that actually moves in ben's, uh, along the path suddenly come back down here where we can see the whole path. So I've got one on each end to see there's another handle here so I can pull that out and I could make a nice, smooth arc. So it's, kind of like the dolly track we have in here is a nice smooth arc. So this camera could be on a nice, smooth arc, but it stays focused on the extruded text here. So as it's traveling along that path, will see that it makes this nice, smooth park that comes into it just kind of clicking through to get it to jump through. I could also take that handle and make it do like an s curve. Because, again, it's a busy, eh? And then if I also wanted to go a little crazier, we pull this one out here, you can also do this from the side. Let me go, teo side view let's go the left side view and I do this all the time too on a moving stuff in three d space I'll look at my side view and see if I've got handles I can grab there and may have to zoom in a little bit to see it there it is there so you can do this type of thing where I'm actually having it go up so now it's making it arc up it's no longer on the floor but it's also going up and landing down in so I've got it going in three dimensional space I've got my camera moving still looking at the same point but it's it's now moving in three d space so this is from the side view see here's decided the extrusion that we've got here you can't see that a little spotlight over black or easy but it's there so here it's still looking there here's our camera from the side it's making this arc and then here it is from the top okay and it's going to make that little s curve in there and then hear it isthe on this side we'll see what kind of crazy motion that just made by doing that may turn that to adapt of resolution not sure if I showed this yesterday if you want to speed things up um, this little button here for fast previews, you click that and go to adaptive resolution that helps speed things up quite a bit. You can also go to draft mode, which is, like, really quite nasty, but it does show you quickly what your camera moves are, and that helps speed things up. I do that a lot from doing camera moves, but I don't really care about the quality. I just want to see if my camera's moving in a good space so we could do that and that'll speed up our motion really quick here, so we'll see that it's actually kind of done zooming in but continues to move on the track, so going to ease in on this key frame assistant easy, easy to another quick ram preview okay, so now we can see where the camera is moving and if we like it or not, if we don't but that's how I'll typically animate a camera around a logo or some fixed element that I know I need to stay focused on it, but I'm just moving the camera to give it some some kind of interest, so I've got that, um actually rendered here, so let me let me hide this and I have one rendered in full resolution here, so let me go full and you can see it's nicely rendered except this playback bars in way, try it one more time. That was actually in ray trace, um three d, mo, um, so it yeah, it has, uh, it has this nice extrusion, uh, that was available in c s six. So that's, when we first started noticing that.
Class Materials
bonus material with purchase
Ratings and Reviews
jackflash
Jeff Foster seems like a great, knowledgeable guy. But this course is so disappointing. The classes are disorganized, convoluted yet shallow, and waste an awful lot of time. And they’re just lectures — you’re just watching him do stuff — no lessons where you can work along with him to really absorb what’s going on. My biggest complaints are 1) It seems like he didn’t prepare very much, so we end up watching him go through features one by one, sometimes just to try to find the thing that’s going to illustrate the point he’s trying to make; and 2) he’s unnecessarily confusing. Here’s an easy example. In the “parenting” class, which hinges on one layer’s relationship to another, he created identical layers and named them identically. So he’s explaining that “blue solid” is the parent to “blue solid.” And then he proceeds to discuss the layers, which are numbered #1, #2, #3, by calling them “the first layer” (#3), “the second layer” (#2), and “the third layer” (#1.) After Effects is complicated enough! Maybe I’m spoiled by having learned Illustrator with a wonderful Creative Live course. This is not that.