Designing After Effects Assets in Adobe Illustrator

Someone posted this article on Facebook. For people who are just getting into After Effects animation, this can be helpful when designing assets. Photoshop is great for some things but it is raster based meaning things created in it are a set pixel ratio, and scaling it up will reduce the quality. Illustrator is vector based so your images basically have infinite resolution. Because the two programs are both made by Adobe they work very well together, so making adjustments to an imported illustrator asset file, will show up in your After Effects project. Illustrator is also a more advanced tool as far as asset design in many ways, because that is really what it is meant to do, while After Effects is primarily a compositing program. Consider using illustrator to design your assets and export and import them into your After Effects project. Especially for more detailed objects. And check out the article if you want. It just gives some advice on asset creation and proper importing of layers and what not.

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Storm

Because animations are so time consuming I rarely get to make a project that tells a story. I normally only make a short animation that exemplifies some new skill or tool I learned from a tutorial. At some point in high school I saw the animation Storm based on Tim Minchin’s spoken word poem. I absolutely loved the flat animation that used textures, depth of field, and creative perspectives. This video inspired me to try my own animations. I started working in Adobe Flash as an introduction. I was never particularly good at drawing but using the adobe illustrator software made it much easier to bring shapes to life.

I watched the following time-lapse videos after viewing the Storm video and I got a better idea of how much artistry goes into designing characters for detailed animations. I really loved how this video told a story that completely matched and was consistent with the poem. This is a video that I made in high school in an attempt to emulate the Storm style. It is mainly obvious in the wineglass!

Illustrator to After Effects

Illustrator can be a great tool for creating shapes, designs, graphics and many other illustrations that aren't so easy on After effects. But when you try to bring in a Illustrator file it can be a hassle sometime because After Effects does't make the illustration into vector files, this leads to pixilation, and control over the whole shape harder. When bringing in a illustration file into After effects there are a few tedious set you have to take. This is only needed if you have CS5 but if you have CS6 they make it a lot easier and you don't need any these sets.
Illustrator to After Effects

1. Open illustrator file
2. select all of the paths and shapes in art board
3. hit command "C"

4. Open After effects
5. create a new composition
6. lay - new - solid
7. paste the paths and shapes from illustrator
8. go into the drop down and see how many masks there are
9. select only the path of each mask
10. command "C"
11. then take the pen tool and click on the art board
12. This will create a shape
13. Go to the drop down of the shape, make sure there is enough shapes same as the mask under the drop down (if theres 12 mask paths, make 12 shapes under the shape layer
14. you already copies the mask paths
15. select the shapes paths all 12 and paste those masks
16. turn the view off the solid layer and you will see the new shape layer on art board
17. Go in and see what shape path effects what part of shape and label it.

Scott Pilgrim is Possible!

This week I'm posting about Scott Pilgrim vs. the World. This is a movie based on a graphic novel and because of that it incorporates a lot of graphic novel and video game elements as effects. I enjoy this movie quite a bit because of these elements and how the effect the look and feel of the movie. There's a lot of effects used to add excitement to the film by making it feel really fast paced and choppy. More importantly I feel like a lot of these effects are totally replicable with the skill set we now have in After Effects. I post a lot about effects like this, by that I mean effects we are able to replicate, but that's because I think it's really cool. Being able to look at a movie like this and say "I could do that" is pretty cool. granted it takes a lot of work to mimic anything like this but with the exception of the flaming sword I think it's all stuff that we've gone over in class. There's a lot of 2D elements layered over the video track, like the "LEVEL UP" graphic and the others like it. Those are things we could make in Photoshop or Illustrator and incorporate into  a movie with ease. I just can't believe how cool effects like this are so simple to create. Don't get me wrong, it's a lot of time effect to put these things together but it's totally doable with what we know now.

First Impressions

Wanna know something funny? The first day I walked into class, I had no idea what After Effects even was. I'm so clueless sometimes it's a bit ridiculous. In any event, now that I know what it is, I'm extremely excited to be part of the class and learn the program. After playing around with it for just the first few days I've been trying to think about the possibilities of the program and what it could mean for my future in game design. I've worked a little with Photoshop and Illustrator, and I'm taking a class this semester that works with Flash. By the end of my time here at IC I would love to be proficient in each program to be able to adapt my drawings and sketches into polished concept art and animations.

The short time I've spent with After Effects has opened my mind up to even more than that. I'm still not decided on exactly what I want to do... I seem to have run the gambit of game design and don't know exactly where my niche is. Art, writing, and production seem to be where I find myself always returning to. But talking about all these intros to movies has made me think critically about them, and the possibility of doing something with movies or television is always in the back of my mind. One of my favorite movies of all time is 300, so when we talked about it and I began to realize that we were working with the very same program that made the special effects possible, I got very excited. I'm a pretty good artist and I really want to use my drawing skills with the After Effects program to create some cool animations like the ones in the credit scene, and I've told some friends that maybe someday I'll be able to create some cool intros for their film projects.

One of the coolest things I've seen done with the After Effects program is people on YouTube making live action, or real-life videos of games, or spoofs on them. Specifically for the game, Skyrim. This is one such video that if I could, I would love to make:

By the end of this class, I hope to have my own Skyrim Badass video on youtube. Cody, I know you're out there, lets do it.

Flash Tutorials

In this class so far we have mostly used Photoshop and After Effects, but despite the fact that we talk about Flash, we have never actually used the program or learned how to use it. Well I decided that I was quite curious how it different from After Effects especially after watching Becca's intro project. After doing a bit of research I found a few basic tutorials that can help understand Flash and how to use it.

The first one that I found is called Entheos.  It provides different tutorials on animation and effects concentrating on a specific effects in each sample. It also provides tutorials on Action Script and other miscellaneous effects. Plus, just in case you feel like learning more, Entheos provides other Flash Resources and articles. Entheos also provides tutorials for Photoshop (since the two programs go hand-in-hand) which are also really helpful and provide some really awesome designs and ideas, as well as Dreamweaver and a few other programs.

After watching the simple animation tutorial I found that Flash reminds me of a mix of Photoshop and After Effects. The layout of Flash CS5 resembles the layout of Photoshop CS5 but it obviously has the controls of After Effects. Personally, this made me feel far less intimidated with the program because I am far more familiar with the controls than I would have expected.

Another site that gives you tutorials on pretty much anything you need is Toxiclab.org. It allows you to research whichever program you want and then provides you with different examples and articles to help you. Flash, Illustrator, and Photoshop are among the programs you can learn.

Finally there is Tutorialized which provides a ton of tutorials for graphics in Maya, Illustrator, Photoshop, and of course, Flash.


I hope people take advantage of these because, while they are basic, I found that the tutorials provided a really good foundation for learning Flash, as well as Photoshop. Since we have been concentrating on After Effects so much in class I figured these can give us the basics of Motion Graphics in another outlet. Good luck to all, I hope you enjoy them as much as I did.