12 Principles of Animation in After Effects

In this lesson, we're going to learn about the animation principle of solid drawing and how we can use it in After Effects. I've opened up 12_begin. Now, most people think solid drawing doesn't really apply in the modern world. Back in the traditional days, solid drawing was all about creating the shading, and maintaining volume and weight, and all of these things, and light interactions that we take for granted in the 3D and 2D world. For example, After Effects takes care of almost all of the drawing of our images. However, what we need to remember about solid drawing is it is about volume and about depth. And so we can actually apply this to our composites into our After Effects projects. Now, this is a very simple scene we've opened up. You've probably seen this many times before. As we play through, it's just some 3D case drawing on some texts. Now currently, both of these are staring directly at the camera, and our camera angle is essentially at zero. Now, this is not using the perspective, and it is not showing the depth of the scene. So to begin with, let's give our camera little bit more of an interesting angle. So I'm going to come in here and let's rotate this, I believe, on the x-axis. So we can rotate this down a little bit, and you can see that we're already getting some perspective shifting just from that slight change. All right. We can also come into our 3D case here. And let's have the last key frame it lands on rotate a little bit so that it's not ending straight on or it's not ending looking directly at the camera, but instead it is ending at a bit of an angle, again showing off some of that nice perspective lines that we have with After Effects. Now let's take a look at our animation. It still looks pretty solid. The mask is off a little bit, and the solid drawing portion of this, or the text portion, is still a little bit boring. So let's come in here and let's make this a 3D layer. And, again, let's give this a little bit of a rotation to show off that perspective that we're working with. Now with this, we might need to reposition it or rescale this text. And we're probably going to need to come in and modify this mask here. So I'm going to hit the M key, and let's scrub backwards and take a look. And we can see that we definitely need to modify the mask. So let's pull this first key frame forward quite a few frames. And let's now scrub forward. And what we want is, we want the text to be appearing behind the case. So we might need to pull that mask forward just a little bit. Let's maybe ease in and ease out of this so that we have movement that is a little bit closer to how this case is moving. OK. So we can continue modifying this mask. At a certain point, it does go behind the case, so the 3D properties of After Effects will essentially do the job for us. But now we can see we have a much stronger composition. We have some perspective going on, and we have a much more dynamic and interesting shot. Now, to really make this solid, we could add in a little of camera motion. So let's maybe start at the zero x rotation of our camera, and let's maybe go towards the value we had later of 11 later on, so that we start at a lower perspective and then, as this comes in, we see all of that wonderful shifting and perspective changes. So remember that with 3D objects in After Effects, we have the ability to show off the wonderful automatic perspective we have access to. And this ability to show perspective lines and create a so-called solid drawing almost automatically is an incredibly powerful part of After Effects. So remember, the eye does not prefer a flat image. We like to see perspective, and we like to see these kinds of interesting angles inside of our composites. So whenever you can add these kinds of effects, be sure to do that because, as you can see here, this is a much more interesting and dynamic image than the flat one we had before.