This is a short, quick and easy tutorial showing how to use the graph editor to control the velocity of keyframes within after effects. I go over using the easy ease function and how to manipulate the bezier curves using the graph editor. This is a very basic tutorial but if you’ve never opened the graph editor to change the temporal interpolation of keyframes then you may want to watch to see how it’s done.

ANIMATING WITH INK EFFECTS
(software required: Photoshop, Illustrator, After Effects with Trapcode’s Particular)

In this tutorial I’ll recreate a similar look from an older Gnarls Barkley video. The principles I’ll cover are foundational and can be used for some incredible animations other than simply imitating a great music video. Some of what I covered in the Photoshop Bling tutorial is being used here directly in AE. So for those who were wondering why you’d use the Bling effect unless you were designing a hip hop album… remember it’s the principles that that are most valuable… the end result for these tutorials is just to get you excited to go out and create your own. Specifically I will focus on the following in this tutorial:

- Using Alpha and Luma Mattes in After Effects
- Frame by Frame animation using CS3’s Illustrator, Photoshop, and After Effects

A basic to intermediate knowledge of After Effects and Trapcode Particular is needed to follow along.

Rather Watch a Video Tutorial?

You can also purchase the video tutorial version for only $9.99. It’s 32 minutes long and 155MB in .mov format.

STEP ONE: Setting up your ink file for creating a matte

Import your video footage of ink. Create a new Comp called “ink blots.” For this shot I actually placed a wet paper towel in the base of a square fish tank and filmed from below the glass fish tank as i dropped food coloring onto the wet paper towel. You don’t need to worry about professional lighting or the deep amount of texture that you see here. That will all be taken care of post as we make some adjustments. If you dont’ have the time or equipment to shoot your own ink bleeding, you can simply download a clip from revostock.com to use for the matte. Here’s what my original footage placed into a Comp in AE looks like:

Desaturate your video footage. [Effect/Color Correction/Hue&Saturation]

Adjust your levels until you blow out your background to be completely white but keep as much detail in your ink bleed as possible. [Effect/Color Correction/Levels]

The result for my footage looks like this

STEP TWO: Creating a Luma Matte

Drag one of these free water color textures from Gomedia into your “ink blots” composition - or buy the whole pack of textures here. This is being used simply to add some texture and an organic feel to our ink bleeding.

Desaturate it repeating the very first step. I scaled the texture to fill the screen as well. Now apply a layer style to it of “Gradient Overlay”

So now I’ve got 2 layers inside of “ink blots” composition. The top layer is the ink I desaturated and adjusted the levels. This layer is going to be used as a Luma Matte for the layer below it. The layer below it is the gradient textured watercolor from Gomedia that we just created. The top layer is the layer that will matte (or mask for Photoshop users) the layer below it.

So by setting the Track Matte to Luma Matte Inverted, we reveal the gradient textured gomedia watercolor in the shape of our ink video footage above it. Luma matte reveals whatever is white and masks whatever is black (and any shades between). We set it to Luma Matte Inverted because our ink is in black and we want that to be revealed, not the white space around it.

The results of a Luma Matte Inverted applied to our gradient textured gomedia watercolor layer:

STEP THREE: Applying an Alpha Matte

The Luma Matte looks great! However, I’m not satisfied with the amount of texture being revealed. I suppose I could adjust the levels of my original ink footage to control that, but here is another way to add more texture to this and cover the usage of Alpha Mattes.

Create a new composition called “new ink blots”. Drag the composition “ink blots” from your project window into the “new ink blots” composition. Then drag a different water color texture from Gomedia into the same comp. You should have 2 layers in the comp “new ink blots” - layer 1 is “ink blots” and layer 2 should be your Gomedia water color texture. Remember the layer on top will be used as your matte (mask). So you will be revealing the water color texture and using the “ink blots” as your matte.

This time you will be using an Alpha Matte. The difference is that an Alpha Matte will only matte the non transparent areas of the layer. So now that we’ve already created a Luma Matte in the “ink blots” comp, all the white space you see is actually transparency. You could change the background color of your “ink blots” comp from white to another color to understand the transparency if needed. Set the Track Matte of the water color textured layer to Alpha Matte.

Each time you choose a track matte the layer being used as the matte is automatically turned off so that you don’t see it. You will only see the layer being matted (masked). This time turn on Layer 1 “ink blots” and set the layer mode to Overlay.

The results:

I decided there is a little too much green in there so I desaturated the water color layer 2. Now we want to make this ink blot symmetrical. Set up a new composition and call it “Gomedia.” Drag “new ink blots” into that composition and apply the Mirror effect. [Effect/Distort/Mirror]

And… I’ve got a symmetrical ink blot! Raaad!

STEP FOUR: Create another ink blot and apply it as a Luma Matte and an Alpha Matte

I set up my 2nd ink blot in a new comp called “ink blots 2″ - repeating the steps from earlier. (Desaturate it, adjust the levels, and apply a mirror effect to it.) My second ink blot looks like this [see pic below] after doing that. (do not apply a gradient overlay layer style to this one):

I added a white solid below ink blots 2 layer. [Layer/Solid...]

Set the white solid Track Matte to Luma Inverted Matted.

I now have my inkblot in solid white and I’ve changed the background of the comp to a dark gray. The gray actually transparent.

I dragged my “ink blot 2″ from my project window into my “Gomedia” comp i created earlier. It now looks like this… the white ink is what we just created and the gray background is transparent.

The white inside the middle of the ink looks good. And the background will be white as well. The only problem is that if i want to put any layer behind white ink bleed in the middle, I will not be able to fly my camera thru that layer because the white is solid rather than transparent. So, that’s easily solved…. we have 2 layers in our “Gomedia” comp so far - layer 1 “ink blots 2″ and layer 2 “new inkblots.” I want to use “ink blots 2″ as an Alpha Matte for the layer “new ink blots.” I set it to Alpha Matte Inverted because I want the area where the white is to be transparent.

Now the white ink is transparent and i can put a layer in back of it or i can fly my camera right thru the center and keep going. Eventually I will set my background to white. But for now it is gray just so that i know which areas are transparent.

STEP FIVE: Working your video footage into the scene

Here is the footage of my singer on a green screen.

There all sorts of tricks and tips to green screening footage. I will not cover those here because with the effects we will be using, we do not need a perfect key. I am using Keylight that comes with AE. [Effect/Keying/Keylight 1.2]

I placed my singer with the background keyed out into my “Gomedia” composition. Made a copy of it and flipped it. Using the steps from earlier, I desaturated and adjusted the levels of the singer until I had results that were solid black & white.

Then I set my layers to screen mode so that only the whites will show.

Now I have repeated those steps (key, desaturate, levels, and place into Gomedia comp) with another shot of my singer that used a different camera angle. Notice my layer order. Because we took the time to Alpha Matte “ink blots 2″ earlier, I can place the footage below the layer “new inkblots” and have it show. If we had left it solid white as it is in our comp “ink blots 2″ we would not have been able to do this.

STEP SIX: Animate birds using Illustrator and Photoshop.

Using Gomedia’s Flock of Birds from the Arsenal, I want to choose one flock to animate.

I chose several individual birds out of the flock and layered them directly on top of each other. Make sure each one is on a separate layer in Illustrator. Choose File/Export/Photoshop.

Make sure “Write Layers” is chosen underneath Options. I don’t need Maximum Editability checked. Name it and the open Photoshop.

In photoshop, I opened the .psd I just exported. Then I need to open the Animation window. [Window/Animation]

In the top right corner of the Animation window I clicked the arrow and chose “Make Frames From Layers”

Now I have separate frames that have been created from each layer in my .psd. I can control the amount of time each frame is displayed by selecting the frame(s) and clicking on the black arrown in the bottom right corner of a frame that is selected. I chose .1 seconds. I can preview the animation by clicking the play button inside of the animation window.

I am ready to make a video clip out of this animation by choosing file/export/render to video. By default, the settings are set up to render the frames on a transparent background. Keep that setting. Now I’m ready to use my new bird flying movie in After Effects.

STEP SEVEN: Add birds into my final composition

I made new comp with my animated bird. I will be using this comp as a custom particle in using Trapcode Particular.

create a new solid (the color does not matter).

With the solid layer selected I then apply Particular

By default, there are white spheres animating out over time from a center point. I’m going to change a lot of the setting for Particular. Each one of those white spheres will be replaced by my movie of the bird flying. so as i adjust the setting for particular and watch the white spheres change direction/quantity/etc. I need to keep in mind that these spheres will be my flock of birds. I’m going to keyframe the amount of particles per second. this will keep my Emitter from continuously creating new particles. I only want a flock of them. Not an endless cycle of birds emitting. I have chosen 100 particles/second and will skip down in my timeline about 1 second and keyframe 0 for the amount. this will cause a slight trail of birds at the tail of the flock rather than an abrupt absence of birds.

I want to change my Emitter shape from a Point to a Box. This will allow me to emit from a larger area and look more natural for my flock of birds.

Now I have the option of changing the size of my Emitter. I can also come back and adjust these after I’ve turned the white spheres into my movie of birds.

Choose “Custom” from the tab under “Particle Type.”

An option to choose my custom particle is now available. When I click the tab it shows the list of my current layers. I chose “birds” from the list.

I need to tell the Time Sampling to Loop my movie of the birds.

And now I need to adjust the size of my particle (birds).

The results of my custom particle. I can go back to my Emitter settings and control the velocity & rotation of the particles being emitted. Each instance is different depending on what I’m trying to emit and the results I want.

I dragged the comp of my birds from my project window into my “Gomedia” comp. Created a copy and flipped it.

The final steps are to create a new camera. Select all of your layers inside of “Gomedia” comp and make them 3d layers. By default the Z position will be 0. I left them at zero and animated my camera towards all of the animated artwork. For additional interest, I could space out the layers in Z space and get a feeling of depth as the camera animates towards the artwork.

Conclusion

I’ve covered Luma Mattes & Alpha Mattes. I also covered frame by frame animation using Illustrator, Photoshop, and AE. Hopefully you’ve picked up on some techniques that can be used in many other creative ways. I also used the same technique of desaturating a layer and then applying a Color Overlay Layer Style to it for a great look. This was originally covered in depth in the Bling Tutorial. Have a great day and feel free to post links to some creative ways you are using this tutorial. Peace.

Ink Bleeding Effect from Go Media on Vimeo.

And again, if you would like to view our Video Tutorial for this to get a further understanding of how it’s done, you can purchase it for $9.99

So in this tutorial I’m going to show you how to create a spray paint effect using After Effects. It’s a fairly simple process but I’ve got a few tricks that you may not have thought of. Here is a sample video of what you’ll be creating:

Here are the AE project files.

So let’s begin.

1.) Open After Effects
Lets create a composition that is 720×540 and call it “final stencil”.

2.) Make Paint
Now we are going to make a spray paint effect. There are lots of different ways to achieve a spray paint effect. I will show you two different techniques in this tutorial. First, create an adjustment layer that is the size of the composition and call it “paint 1″. Apply “vector paint” to this layer. Change your vector paint settings to look something like this.

Make sure the vector paint effect is selected and you should see a toolbar next to your comp window. Select the brush and paint on some spray paint similar to this.

3.) Animate Paint
Within the Vector Paint controls change the playback to “Animate strokes”. Once you do that the Playback Speed becomes available for you to change. Put it somewhere between 3.5 and 4. Now when you scrub in the timeline you should see the stroke you just made animating from start to finish.

NOTE: Where you are in the timeline when you make your first stroke using vector paint determines when the stroke starts animating. So if you were not at the begining of the paint layer when you made the stroke, you’ll notice that the stroke doesn’t start animating on the first frame of the layer. It starts animating when it reaches the point in the timeline where you first made the stroke.

4.) Roughen the Edges so it looks like spray paint.
Apply the “Roughen Edges” effect to the paint 1 layer. The trick here is to bring down the scale parameter in the Roughen Edges effect. Change your effect settings so you have Border = 20 and scale = 10. The “boarder” parameter controls how much of the edge it will roughened. Now our spray paint is made and your project should look like this:

5.) Add Paint Drips
Let’s add in some paint drips for a little more realism and styling. Go and grab the Spray Paint vector pack and isolate a few drips and copy them into a new Illustrator or Photoshop document. I’ve copied my spray paint splatters from Illustrator into Photoshop as pixels, this way After Effects won’t be rendering these layers as vector art. Save your isolated drips as “drip 1, drip 2, and drip 3″ and import them into After Effects.

Now let’s add these to our comp. Drop one of the Drip psds into the timeline and solo the layer. Take the elliptical mask tool and draw a circle mask around main part of the spray paint. It should look like this:

Now we are going to keyframe the “mask expansion” so the drip will animate. Keyframe the mask expansion to go from “-61 pixels” to about “74 pixels” with a duration of about 20 frames. Now when you scrub in the timeline you should see the solo’d “Drip” layer animating. Ok, click to solo button again so we can see our “paint 1″ layer. Depending on what colors you are using you may need to add a “Fill” effect to the “Drip” layer so it matches our original “paint 1″ layer.

5.a) Blend the Drip
Now that your drip animates and it’s the same color as our “paint 1″ layer let’s put them together. Here is how I did it.

5.b) Finish the Drips
Now do the same procedure to the other Drips and combine them with the “paint 1″ layer. You should now have something that looks like this.

6.) Do It Again for Variation.
Now, we are going to start from step #2 and create a whole new paint layer. One thing you want to make sure you realize is that we need to create another composition because the
“Roughen Edges” effect will effect all the layers below it when it’s applied to an adjustment or solid layer.

Create a new composition and call it “paint vers 2″. Do the same thing that is in steps 2-4 just make the stroke from right to left instead of left to right. You should have something like this:

7.) Combine the 2 comps
Drag “paint vers 2″ from the project window into the “final stencil” composition. You should now have something like this:

Now we are going to add drips to this paint layer as well. This time we can just duplicate the drip layers and add the “Fill” Effect to change their color so it matches the “paint vers 2″ color. Now you should have something similar to this:

8.) Making the Stencil Comps.
Make a new comp that is 800×540 and call it “paper”. Add a new solid layer and put a rectangular mask on it and then rotate the layer a bit. It should look like this:

8.a) Create a paper texture
Now we are going to use this shape as a track matte for our texture. Go and grab a paper texture from our texture pack and import it into the project. Drag the paper texture into the “paper” comp. Make sure the paper layer is underneath the solid layer and set the solid as an “alpha matte”. Now your paper layer should be using the solid layer as track matte. You can scale and position the paper layer to your liking.

8.b) Make a “Stencil” comp
Make a new comp that is 800×540 and call it “stencil”. Drag the “paper” comp into this comp. Now this is where we make our stencil. As you can see, I’ve used the Go Media logo as my stencil, but you can use practically anything. It’s probably best to use something that’s vector, like an illustrator file or a text layer within After Effects. This way you can use the alpha channel as a track matte. So create some text, or use the Go Media logo and on the “paper” layer select “Alpha inverted Matte” Now the Go Media logo, or your text should be cut out of our “paper layer”. Now you should have something like this…

8.c) Make More Spray Paint
So here is where I show you another way of making spray paint. This technique is less mechanical and seems more realistic to me. Create a black solid that is 400×400 and put a circular mask on. Now apply the “scatter” effect to the black solid layer. Set the scatter amount to around “70″.

Now we are going to animate the mask expansion to create the “spray on” effect. I’ve keyframed mine from -135 to -18 with a duration of about 5 frames. I also dropped the opacity down to about 80%. Once you have done this once, duplicate the layer and move the position to the next point you want to paint. You’ll also want to offset the duplicated layer in the timeline. Do this over and over until you have completely painted on your stencil. You’ll notice that I also used a “Drip” layer to add a little bit of style and realism to this comp. Here is how i did it.

8.d) Create the Bottom Comp
Create a comp that is 800×540 and call it “Bottom”.
Drag in the “stencil” comp and the Go Media Logo into this comp. Draw a rectangular mask on the stencil layer that subtracts all the paint and is the same size as our original paper comp. This will probably take a little manual tweaking. Make sure the text is in the same place as it was in the stencil comp. You can copy and paste the position attributes to make sure they are the same.

8.e) Create a “no paint” comp.
In the project window highlight the stencil comp and hit “comand+d” to duplicate that composition. Then double click on it to open it up. Then change the comp name to be “no paint”. Then delete all the paint layers so you just have the paper layer and the Go Media logo layer as a track matte.

8.f) Create another stencil comp? Yes!
Create a new comp that is 800×540 and call it “stencil build animation”. Now drag your “stencil” comp, “no paint”comp, and “bottom” comp into this comp.

Now solo the “stencil” layer. Add the “CC Page Turn” effect to this layer. Now keyframe the page turn effect so that the stencil folds into frame. You’ll want to keyframe the fold position. I keyframed the position from -128,270 to 705,270 with a duration of about 1 second. You’ll want to make sure that the paint in your “stencil” comp doesn’t start painting until the page turn transition is complete.

Now once the page turn is complete and the paint has finished painting, select the “stencil” layer and hit “command + shift + d” to duplicate and cut the layer. Now on the second “stencil layer” keyframe the “CC page turn” effect to animate out the way it came in. You can literally copy and paste the keyframe from the 1st “stencil” layer to the 2nd stencil layer. Now you need to make sure that the “bottom” layer is underneath everything and is positioned in the timeline so it only is visible when the page turn effect is animating out. Your comp should look like this:

Now you’ll notice that when our stencil animates out of frame, the backside has paint all over it.

This is where we want to use our “no paint” comp. as the backside in our “CC page turn” effect. Once you set the backside to be the “no paint” layer, you can hide that layer.

Once you set the backside to the “no paint” layer, your comp should now look like this:

Now make sure that the “bottom” layer is visible at the same time the Page Turn effect reveals the “bottom” layer. You’ll want to do some simple masking so you don’t see a jump in the black paint when the bottom layer becomes visible. The reason this happens is because both the bottom layer and the stencil layer have the paint layers on them. This is also because my original paint was set to 80% opacity. If it was set 100% this would be less of a problem. But just do a simple mask that follows the page turn as it animates and we’ll be fine. The image above shows the simple mask job I did.

9.) Combine the Stencil Build with our “Final Stencil” Comp.
Drag the “stencil build animation” comp into the “final stencil” comp. Align the “stencil build animation” layer in the timeline so it starts to animate after all of our red and yellow paint finishes animating.

10.) Adding a Little Bit of Style.
So now the basics of this tutorial are complete. The only thing left is to take this animation a bit farther and keep adding in elements and making this piece visually interesting. Create a new comp called “square paint comp”. Use the vector paint effect to create a nice background similar to the one I used. Don’t forget to animate the stroke like we had done before. I also created a stroke effect on the vector paint by duplicating the paint layer and making the brush size bigger. I then brought the opacity of that layer down to about 65%.

10.a) Use 3D Space and a Camera
I then turned all the layers into 3D layers, added a camera and started to do some keyframing on the camera. I added a simple wiggle to the point of interest which give the camera a little shake. You can also add lights, motion blur, depth of field effects and anything else you can think of…go crazy! I hope you enjoyed learning about these techniques! Have fun!

Source File

Like a lot of motion designers I spend many hours trying to accomplish complex animations in a short amount of time, while attempting to optimize my workflow within After Effects, Photoshop, and Illustrator. This tutorial utilizes Trapcodes Particular, which is one of After Effects more popular 3rd party plugins. Creating an animation like a flock of birds is very versatile and is a great filler animation which can add a lot of style to a piece. You can also adapt this technique to create other flying creatures…. perhaps a flying skull with flapping wings?

Here’s a short clip of the Go Media promo reel that utilizes the bird animation that you will learn to create. (To view the entire promo reel, click here and scroll down to the bottom of the tutorial).

[kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/LdC5vVI6VDg" width="425" height="350" wmode="transparent" /]

What you’ll need:
A working knowledge of Adobe After Effects
Trapcode’s Particular Plugin
Adobe Illustrator.

So what we are going to do is create a flock of birds in After Effects using Trapcodes plugin, Particular.

1. Open up After Effects
Create a composition called “bird.” Set your composition settings to something similar to this:

2. Set up your Wing Layers
Once you have your composition set up, create two new solid white layers both about 300×300 pixels. Name one of them “right wing” and the other “left wing.”

3. Create your Bird Shape in Illustrator.
We need to create our wings which will be animated in After Effects (AE). All you need is a silhouette of a bird shape. So you can draw this yourself in Illustrator. Fortunately, Go Media has already done the job in their “Flock of Birds” vector pack (soon to be released). So once you have your bird created, simply click and select the shape like so:

4. Paste the shape into After Effects as a Mask
So, with your bird path selected in Illustrator go to Edit>copy. Now, go back to your opened after effects project, select the “right wing” layer and Paste in the path by either hitting “Comand/Control+V” or by going to Edit>paste. Also paste the path into the “left wing” layer as well.

5. Remove half of the bird and line up the anchor point
Now you have the bird shape copied into After Effects as a mask. You can turn off the “left wing” layer for now. Now you will have to delete some points from your mask because we only want half of the bird on each of our wing layers. Be aware of where you put the mask shape in relation to the solid layers’ anchor point.

You will want to to have the center of the bird’s body to be right on top of the anchor point. An easy way not to screw this up is to just move the mask, NOT the layer. Select the mask and hit “Command/Control+T” to free transform the mask around the layer. Notice on the images below where the anchor point is.

So once you have the right half of the bird assembled, you’ll want to turn on the “left wing” layer and do the same to that layer. Delete some points and align the mask up so it completes the bird shape. And remember to move the mask NOT the layer. We want the anchor points to practically be in the same place on both the layers. Once you are done you should have something like this. Notice the anchor points.

6. Turn both layers into 3D Layers
Now for the fun part! Turn both “wing” layers into 3D layers by clicking the switch/button that looks like a 3D box.

7. Expressions instead of Keyframes
Now instead of keyframing the wing layers to make them appear like they are flapping, we are going to add in some expressions. This isn’t a tutorial on expressions so I won’t really get into how they work. In a nutshell, expressions use math and scripts to animate certain properties of a layer. And that’s exactly what we are going to do - use expressions to animate our wings. Easy huh?

So, twirl down the transform properties of the “right wing” layer. Create an expression on the “Y rotation.” To do this “option/alt click” on the stopwatch icon next to “Y rotation” property. You should see something like this:

Now, you’ll want to replace the text in the expression to read: 60*Math.sin(15*time)

On the “left wing” layer create an expression on the Y rotation as well. Except this one will be: -thisComp.layer(”right wing”).rotationY

Your layers should now look like this:

8. Add in a Null Object to control movement
Now that you’ve added those expressions, your bird should at least be flapping. What we are going to do now is add in a null object layer to control the entire movement of the bird.

Go to layer>new and create a new Null Object. Rename the null object to “center”. Turn this into a 3D layer by clicking the button that looks like a 3D box. Now parent your other two wing layers to this new null object layer. If you do not see the Parent column you may have to right click on “layer name” and select the column from the list.

Once you parented the layers to the “center” layer, we will need to change some of the parameters of the “center” layer and add some more expressions.

9. More Expressions
Twirl down the transform properties of the “center” layer and make sure the rotation parameters are as follows:

X Rotation = -84
Y Rotation = 0
Z Rotation = 183 approximate

Now, create an expression on the “X Rotation” that reads: wiggle(3,70,1,1,10+time)
Create an expression on the “Y Rotation” that reads: wiggle(2,50,1)

Now all of your layers and bird comp should look something like this.

Once you’ve got your comp and layers looking like this.. and your bird is flapping away in 3D space, we’ll need to create a new comp which we’ll actually have the Particular emitting our flapping bird.

10. Use the Particular Plugin

So, create a new composition like this one and make sure that the background of this composition is a grayish color. We don’t want it to be black or white because our birds will be one of those colors. You can change the background color of a composition by hitting “command/control + shift + B”. Or go to Composition>Background Color.

Create a new solid layer and name it particles.

Create a new solid layer and name it background, turn this layer off for now.

Create a new camera.

Now drag the bird composition from the project window into the “main” composition that we just made. Turn off the pre-composed bird layer by hitting the eye icon.

Make sure all of your layers are the length of the composition or at least as long as you want them in frame. Although the bird comp layer is turned off, in order to see the custom particles that we will be emitting, the bird comp layer needs to “in frame” in the timeline. Your “main” composition should look like this now.

11. Apply the effect to your “particles” layer

Now we are going to apply the Particular effect to the “particles” layer and start emitting our custom particles. Select the “particles” layer and go to Effect>Trapcode>Particular. Now that the effect is applied, twirl down the parameters for the effect. You should see 7 main categories and should look like this:

12. Customize your settings

Twirl down the “particle” tab and lets customize our system. You will want the “particle type” to be set to “Custom Colorize.” When you select that option the grayed out “custom” twirl down should be available now. Twirl down the “custom” tab and have the layer set to “4. Bird” (the pre-comp bird layer). The time sampling should be on “Random-loop” and the subframe sampling should be set to “off.” Because our particle type is set to “custom colorize,” you will be able to change the color of the birds just by simply choosing the color in the particle tab. Your particle tab should now look like this.

Now lets twirl down the “Emitter” tab. Here is what your parameters should look like for this section:

Emitter type = sphere
layer = none
layer sampling = current time
layer RGB usage = RGB - particle
Position XY = 997 , 240 approximate
Position Z = 275 approximate
Direction = directional
Drection Spread = 4
X rotation = 0
Y rotation = 245 approx.
Z rotation = 0
Velocity = 280 approx.
Velocity random = 20
Velocity from motion = 20
Emitter size X = 620
Emitter size Y = 90
Emitter size Z = 145

Your emitter parameters should look like this :

13. Modify the “Physics” of your particles (birds)

Now lets take a look at the “physics” tab of this effect. This is where we can determine wind resistance, wind direction, and turbulence for our flock of birds. You will want the “physics Model” to be set to “Air”. Twirl down the “Air” tab. Everything should be set to “zero” except for “Spin Frequency” which can be set to “0.5″. Twirl down the “Turbulence Field” tab. The more you “Affect Position,” the more irregular the birds flight will seem. The setting I use are as follows:

Affect Size = 4
Affect Position = 225
Time Before Affect = 0
Scale = 2
Complexity = 3
Octave Multiplier = .05
Octave Scale = 1.5
Evolution Speed =
Move with Wind = 80

Your Physics parameters should look like this:

14. Motion Blur
Almost finished now. One last section of the Particular effects that we need to go over is the “motion blur.” I generally have this set to “comp settings” but you can experiment with this on your own. I actually think that these birds look best with no blur on them at all. I think the motion blur actually takes away a lot of the detail in these birds. And I think if you’re putting on a motion blur you do not need to be using the Go Media Vector pack shape. You could then just use a simple shape that you made right in After Effects with the pen tool. My motion blur settings look like this:

15. Tweak your camera settings
You also want to make sure that your camera is positioned in a place where you’ll be able to see these particles. You should have your z depth somewhere around “-250″ My camera settings look like this:

16. Tweak the amount of birds
Now we are going to make 2 keyframes in the emitter tab of the Paricular effect. So at about 7 frames on your timeline keyframe the “Particles / sec” to be about 100. Then move to the 9th frame and keyframe the particles / sec to be “zero”. This will let out no more than 100 particles - or in our case, a flock of birds. Your comp should now look like this :

17. Add a simple background
The last thing we need to do is add in a background. So turn on the “background” layer that had you turn off. Select the layer and go to Effect>generate>ramp. Now within the ramp effect choose 2 nice sky blue colors and create a nice sky type gradient. Now that you’ve done that you are finished and should have created a beautiful flock of birds.

Here is the entire Go Media show reel that features use of the bird animation throughout:

[kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/lQtCv-XLa7I" width="425" height="350" wmode="transparent" /]

Introduction

Like most Flash Motion Graphics designers, I am regularly perusing the web for design inspiration. I don’t know about you, but when I saw complex design elements like plants and tribal shapes grow on screen right before my eyes, I wanted to know how they did it. I assumed they were really good with shape tweening, but if you’ve tried to execute a complex shape tween, I’m sure you discovered quickly that Flash’s current shape tween renderer is about as predictable as Ohio’s weather. So the next best bet was masking a finished design and then revealing it magically as if it were being illustrated in real time. Sure enough, after testing some theories, we zeroed in on this process which we’ll now share with you!

Requirements:

This Flash tutorial requires a working knowledge of Flash’s GUI (because we’ll use most of it) as well as an understanding of Vector art and manipulating it with the pen and arrow tools. You will need Adobe Flash and in this case, I’ll be using some Vector resources from Go Media’s Vector Packs. Adobe Illustrator is handy for manipulating Vector resources, but it is not required. You can import most any type of graphic file directly into Flash.

I must warn you, shape tweening is a tedious process and your comfort level with the tools will also make an impact in how efficient it is for you. The tutorial here teaches you the technique of how to accomplish a multi-tier animated mask, but does not walk you through every single minute detail, nor the redundant steps to finish it. To complete the animation like you see above, may take 2-4 hours or longer so its probably better that we demonstrate for you these fundamentals, so you can take what you learn here and apply it to your own project. You should be able to complete the foundational work of this tutorial and gain the knowledge we’re sharing with you within an hour!

Alright, that being said, lets get started…

1.) Open Flash and create a New Flash Document. Name it “growwings.” Set the canvas size to 350h x 500w and then save it.

2.) Make sure your Frame Per-Second (fps) rate is set to 30. 30 is about the perfect speed because it’s the approximate rate of video too, so its versatile for most flash motion graphics work.

3.) Create your vector art. If you don’t have much experience creating complex shapes in Adobe Illustrator, we recommend getting Go Media’s Vector Packs or finding other vector resources that have already been created. For our tutorial we’ll be using a wing design from Wings Set 1 of the first Vector Pack set and then later a “sexy” woman silhouette from the “Sexy Vector Pack” in set 2.

• a. Open your vector art in Illustrtator. In this case, we are using the wing1 vector pack.
• b. Copy your vector art to the clipboard(Edit>Copy or Ctrl+C)
• c. Paste your vector art into a new Illustrator document (if it’s not blank already)
• d. Export your file to .swf (no HTML required) for most vector, you can leave the defaults “as is”
• e. Import your .swf into Flash into your gowwings.fla Library (select File>Import>Import to Library)
• f. Once your .swf is loaded into your library, drill into it and select and Copy the right half of the vector wing art in the .swf to your clipboard (ctrl c or Edit>Copy)

Quick Recap: At this point you should have a new Flash Movie created called growwings.fla, where you’ve imported your .swf vector resource to its library and now you have drilled into that .swf in your library and copied the vector shapes to your clipboard.

4. Create a New Symbol

• a. Next, Return to your stage and select Insert>New Symbol (or press ctrl f8) and create a new Movie Clip object and name it “wing”. You will be automatically brought to the first frame of your new movie clip object.
• b. Paste the contents of your clipboard to the stage

5.) Now is a good time to decide how long we want the movie to be. I am going to say 4 seconds, which would be equal to 120 frames since the fps is 30

• a. Now click on frame 120 and right click, and select Insert Keyframe, or simply click f6. This should give you a 120 frame long timeline of just the right side of the vector wing

• b. I recommend naming your layers! Did I remind you to name your layers? NAME YOUR LAYERS!! Organization is key to efficiency so try to make habits of naming digital entities at all times! Lets go ahead and name the current layer “wing”
• c. Lock the layer wing by clicking the little lock icon left of its timeline

6.) Add a new layer by clicking the Insert Layer icon in the bottom left of the timeline panel and name it “actions”

• a. Go to frame 120 and right click, and select Insert Keyframe, or simply click f6.
• b. Open the Actions panel while still highlighting the now frame 120 of the actions layer and add a “stop” command ( stop(); )

7.) Highlight the bottom layer (wing) and then create a new layer by clicking the Insert Layer icon in the bottom left of the timeline panel and name this layer “m1”

8.) Select frame 24 of layer m1 and put a keyframe there (select Insert Keyframe, or simply click f6)

9.) Select the Pen tool

• a. Open the properties panel and set the stroke weight to 15

10.) Select frame 1 of layer m1 and set a start point with the pen tool at the thick top left part of the wing and then proceed to set an end point with the pen tool about an eighth of the total length of the thicker horizontal top part of the wing art. For this first part of the exercise we’ll be isolating this part of the wing.

11.) Select frame 6 and enter a key frame

• a. Use your open arrow/sub-selection tool to select the end point arrow and drag the end point to about a quarter of the way up the top of the wing we’re isolating here

• b. Select frame 12 and enter a keyframe then again with your open arrow tool drag the end point about half-way up our shape. Please note, you may have to adjust the curve angles along the path to ensure our stroke is flowing along with the shape we’re isolating
• c. Select frame 18 and enter a keyframe then drag the end point to about ¾ up our shape

• d. Copy frame 18 (right click>copy frames)

• e. Paste the frames to frame 24 (right click>paste frames) and proceed to pull the stroke’s end point to the end of the shape

12.) Now you will click on each key frame and convert the pen tool lines we just created into fills

• a. Select Modify>Shape>Convert Lines to Fills for each keyframe line art you just created in layer m1

13.) All of the art along the timeline in layer “m1” should now be Fills. Select frame 1 and then hold down shift and select frame 18. You should now have frames 1 through 18 highlighted along the timeline.

• a. Open or go down to your Properties panel and and select the tween dropdown and select Shape. This should turn frames 1 through 23 along layer m1’s timeline into a shape tween. If you have done this correctly, you should see the frames highlighted in green and arrows connecting the keys.

14.) Now right-click layer m1 and select Mask. You should see the layer mask function lock layers m1 and wing, where m1 is now masking the wing layer.

• a. We’ll go ahead and test our progress by selecting frame 1 and pressing enter on the keyboard. You should see the shape tween we just created grow from a quarter to the full length of the shape we isolated. If you setup your strokes similar to the way I did, you’ll probably see parts of the smaller intersecting shape showing along the animation? The shape tween is one of the most volatile functions in flash. You have to be brutally exacting about the strokes you created along m1, to get the shape tween to flow well. You may find yourself moving points (using the open arrow tool) around along your key frame shapes to try and tighten up the tweening. One trick to “fine-tuning” a shape tween is to add more keyframes along the tween and adjusting the new new keyframe shape’s points to help the tween flow the way you want it to. I am going to add a few more keyframes where needed and move some of the shape edges around to get it flowing closer to how I’d like it.

15.) Now we are going to repeat the same technique we just performed, only this time isolating the intersecting shape…

16.) Right-click on frame 1 of the ‘wing’ layer and select Copy Frames

• a. Insert a new layer by clicking the Insert Layer icon in the bottom left of the timeline panel and name it “wing2” and then right-click and paste the contents of the clipboard onto frame 1. You should now have a new layer exactly like that of the existing layer ‘wing’ with the new name ‘wing2’

• Next, insert another new layer, this time calling it ‘m2’ and add keyframes at frame 6 and at frame 36

• a. Select frame 1 of the wing2 layer and click/drag it over to frame 6 and then go ahead and lock the layer

17.) Now we revisit the pen tool to start the same process, where we draw a line along another shape we’ll isolate in our wing design.

• a. Select frame 6 of the m2 layer and use your pen tool to draw a line from the starting point to about 1/8-1/4th of the way along our shape. I’m going to change the stroke color and reduce its weight to 5 for this thinner part of the wing.

• b. Since the shape we’re isolating has a little more to it than the first one, we’re going to segway the keyframes every 3, rather than 6. So, select frame 9 and add a keyframe and then proceed to bring your pen’s end point further along the path, maybe twice the distance as previously.

• c. Go ahead and repeat this process every 3 key frames or so until you’ve reached the end of the isolated shape and then copy and paste the final keyframe contents over to frame 36

• d. Now, select each Keyframe you just created and go up to your top tool bar and choose Modify>Shape>Convert Lines to Fills. This will convert all of your vector lines into fills

• e. Select your last keyframe of layer m2 (in my case its 30) and then hold down shift and then select frame 6, so you have them all highlighted. Go down to your properties panel, click on the drop-down menu for Tween and select Shape. This should give your frames 6 through 32 shape tweening, therefore the layer’s frame timeline will be green with arrows connecting each keyframe.

18.) Did I mention your layer m2 should mask the wing2 layer? If you haven’t already, right-click layer m2 and select Mask from the drop-down.

• a. Go ahead and leave the MovieClip by selecting Scene 1 at the very top of the Timeline panel. Once you are looking at the empty canvas of Scene 1, drag your wing movieclip onto the stage.

• b. Press Ctrl>Enter on the keyboard to preview how your animated mask is coming along. (On mine, I didn’t love the timing of when the smaller intersecting shape started, so I moved the starting point to frame 10 of the layers m2 and wing2. Really all of these starting and ending points are arbitrary, so don’t hesitate to move them around as you see fit!)

19.) At this point you should have the basic understanding of how this is going to playout. To avoid redundancy, I am simply going to tell you that the steps you just went through SHOULD BE REPEATED FOR EVERY SHAPE YOU WANT TO ISOLATE IN THE DESIGN.

What this means is that you will duplicate the “wing” layer for every shape and isolate that shape with a shape tween that flows from the starting point to the ending point of the shape. The layers we call “m” should always only contain the shape tweens and they should always Mask our foundational design. (Note: Don’t try to combine the shape tween layers into one. As I stated before, the Shape Tween function is one of the most volatile in Flash and if you try to build more complex shape tweens, you are going to be in for some headaches, even with the Shape Hints tools).

• a. So go ahead and repeat steps 17 through 18 over and over again, each time isolating a different shape of our wing. Keep in mind, you may have to manipulate the weight of the stokes you lay down and their points before and after you convert the lines to fills, to get it just right! Also don’t forget to LOCK EACH “WING” LAYER. Also LOCK EACH MASK SET whenever working on another so to avoid messing them up accidentally.

• b. A good technique for when the shape you are isolating has other shapes intersecting with it is to have the intersecting part start at the time when whatever earlier mask comes across it, so you don’t have unusual chunks of the intersection showing up along either of the masks.

Once you have done the whole wing you’ll end up with something like this:
Masks Unlocked

Masks locked.

As I stated before, the keyframes and the starting and ending points for each shape you isolate is subjective. You may have some shapes “make themselves known” earlier than others.

20.) Return to the stage.

• a. Select your wing movieclip on the scene 1 stage and select Copy>Paste
• b. Select the new wing and select Modify>Transform>Flip Horizontal
• c. Bring the starting points close together (the only visible parts of your movieclip) and align them vertically and then select them both and Convert to Symbol (f8). Name the symbol “wingpair”.
• d. Change the Align panel setting “To Stage” and then Center your grouped object horizontally on the stage. Position is vertically about a quarter of the way from the top (basically to keep the animation from running off the stage).

22.) Next, to spice things up, we’re going back to our Vector Pack resources and will open the Sexy Vector Pack from Set 2 and grab this silhouette by Copying it to your clipboard.

• a. Return to Scene 1 of growwings.fla and create a new layer above your current layer that has the wing movie on it. Paste the contents of your clipboard to the new layer and name this layer “sexy”. Select the new object and select Convert to Symbol to convert it to a MovieClip object (f8) and name it “silhouette”.
• b. Name the wing layer “grow”
• c. Next I am going to select each movie clip object, navigate down to the properties panel and tint the silhouette and the wingpair to a light grey (#cccccc).

• d. Change the canvas background to the darkest grey (#333333).
• e. Now, I’m going to add a little more depth to the background by grabbing the Cathedrals from the Architectural Series Vector pack in Set 1. Add a third layer to your stage and copy and paste the three Steeple Catehdral vector design to it. Convert it into a Movie Clip object and scale it to fit across your canvas.
• f. Last, rotate the wingpair object counter-clockwise to help it line up with the silhouette’s shoulders.

Voila!

Love, Chris

Conclusion:

Here’s a summary of what we just did, the art of “UNVEILING”

• a. Find a vector design to “unveil” in front of your user (our wing)
• b. Mask your vector design with a shape tween where you isolate one section of your design at a time, animating your masking shape from a small mask to a larger mask “unveiling” the masked vector design
• c. Replicate your vector design as the masked object, where each time you unveil another piece of your design, repeatedly, until all the end results of all the shape tweens make up your entire vector design!

Dowload the Source File Here (INCLUDES THREE FREE VECTOR DESIGNS!)