Started working on the tutorial "Logo Animation for Motion Designers in After Effects"
Breaking apart the logo and isolating the flowers to make adjustments
Using the pen tool and the pathfinder to break the bud apart from the rest of the flower for easier animation later
Did the same process to isolate the leaves and stems
Finished the process of breaking the flower apart
This lesson was simply about how to prep the file to import into After Effects
Placed each individual piece of the logo into their own layer and named them
Imported the logo file from Illustrator along with 3 other files for this lesson and organized the compositions into different folders.
Turned the poppy shop files into a pre-composition, which allows the image to be resized without each item re-sizing based on where it's anchor point is
Created a solid white background using the layer tab
Clicked on the title/action safe grid to find the center of the composition and then move the flower to the middle so it's placed for the beginning of the animation
Starting the actual animation process, the next lesson begins with placing puppet pins into the leaves
Once the leave's pins were placed, I moved ahead in the timeline 50 frames and set keys so the original position was the ending place for the pins. Back at the start of the time frame, I arranged the pins so that the leaves would begin in a curled in position.
In the middle I adjusted a couple pins so the opening of the leaves looked more natural, which set an additional keys. Then I staggered the keys for one leaf so both leaves aren't unfurling at exactly the same time. Selected all the pins and applied easy ease to them, but in the middle changed the two pins to auto-bezier because easy ease had caused them to pause in the middle.
Converted the stems into shapes using the "create shapes from vector layer" menu option, making them easier to animate. Needed to give the stems 30 frames to grow, beginning just after the leaf animation, so I moved 30 frames forward from where I wanted their animation to start and set keys for the stems ending position. After setting the ending keys I moved 30 frames back to the starting position and pulled the stems down into the leaves so they appeared to grow from the base of the leaves and set keys.
Moved the anchor points of the flowers from the center of themselves to where they attach to the stems.
Next created a scale animation for the buds. Set the starting key for the first bud on the same frame that the first stem finishes growing on, with the bud's scale set to 0%. Moving 20 frames forward, I set the ending key for the bud with the scale at 100%. Repeated the same process for the other two buds.
To add exaggeration to the animation of the stems and buds, starting with the first stem, I copied that stem's last key and pasted a copy 5 frames behind it. Then I grabbed the vertices at the tip of the stem and moved them up slightly so it extends beyond it's finishing position before popping back into place and then applied easy ease. Applied the same process to the other stems.
Repeated the same process for the buds except the buds scale up to 105% before going back to 100%
Created 3 pre-compositions, one for each bud and stem set, so that when I try to create a swaying motion for the flowers, the stem and bud will act as one unit. Then, to make selecting a specific flower easier, I went in to the composition for each flower, and using the region of interest button, drew a box around the flower and then cropped the comp to the region of interest.
Applied the wiggle expression to the flowers so they appear to be swaying in a breeze.
Began prepping the letters for their animation. Drew down two rulers aligning one with the bottom of the letters w/o descenders and the other between the bottom of y's descender and the p's descenders. Using the rulers to keep the anchor points of each letter on the same baseline I adjusted each letter's anchor point to the middle of the bottom of the letter.
Set a key for scale at 0% at the 4 second mark, moved 12 frames forward and set a key at 100%, and between those two keys I set another key at 105%.
Set two keys for the letter's original position 12 frames apart, and set a key in the middle that moved the T up 30 frames so it appears to be dropping into place. Also set an easy ease for all 6 keys. Did the same thing for the rest of the letters, with each appearance staggered 2 frames later than the previous letter.
Set a key for the flower's starting position in the same frame that the 2nd P starts to touch the flower, then set a key for the flower's landing place. In between the keys I brought the flower up so it looked like it was being launched.
Went into the graph editor and adjusted the speed graph to give the flower the appearance of momentum.
Set a rotation key at the beginning of the flower's jump/flight, then set a rotation key to -20 degrees at the end of the flower's animation. To make the flower rock back and forth after landing, every 5 frames after it lands I set a key at half the value of the previous key, but alternated between negative and positive (-20,10,-5...) until I hit -1.25 and then I set the last key at 0. I also set easy ease on all the keys
Going into the composition with all of the flower, created two null objects naming them freq slider and amp slider. To convert them to working sliders I went to effect>expression controls>create slider.
To make the sliders usable, in the wiggle control I replaced the "freq = .5" by highlighting "freq", using the pick whip in the expression rotation and pointing to the frequency slider. Repeated the process to replace "amp = 7" with it's corresponding slider control.
With the sliders set up I made some keys to control the flower's wiggle when it's tossed in the air.
Finished "The Poppy Shop" section of the logo animation tutorial. I rendered out a short quicktime video of the animation I made along with the tutorial after beginning with the first project file provided.
