2.5 More AE Tools

In this lesson, you are gonna pick up right where you left off in the last lesson and you're gonna about some of the shape tools, the pen tool and the text or the type tool. Next time we're gonna talk about the next set of tools which I sometimes refer to as shape tools because these create parametric shapes, things like rectangles, rounded rectangles, ellipse, polygons, and stars. If you are on a selection tool and you hit Q, it's just going to switch back to whatever shape it was on previously. But once you have this shape tool selected, if you hit Q, it will cycle to the next tool. So if it was on rectangle and I wanted to go to ellipse, I can just tap the Q key two more times. Now, I can create a beautiful ellipse or a pentagon or star or rectangle or a rounded rectangle, which I know that doesn't seem very exciting right now. But a lot of really cool and creative things can be done like this, but even cooler stuff with shape layers, they're a lot of fun. And you're gonna see more examples of that coming up in another lesson. You can also use this tool here to create masks on your layers and masks are really useful for revealing only parts of your layers. And you can animate these and do all kinds of interesting things with masks, I'll be talking more about masks in an upcoming lesson. All right, the pen tool is next and that is G, it's G on the keyboard. I know you thought I was gonna say P because that would make a lot of sense but it's actually G is the keyboard trucker. So this does a very similar thing as the Shaped tool which is Q. I can create shapes but here I can create them a little bit more complexly, I can keep adding points here. I can convert these points with these vertices to a or linear point, right? One that has kind of a sharp edge or one that has these handles here which I can click and drag. And so I can make a very complicated shapes with this pen tool which is very similar to how it works on Photoshop and Illustrator and any number of other programs including non-Adobe programs. You can make very complex shapes, you can also create very complex masks. But I just wanted to let's say mask out just this F. Or I could have used rectangle, or I could create a very complex shape- something like this. And you can animate all of these as well so the pen tool is very very handy, I use it all of the time. I'm just gonna delete that mask and delete that very fancy shape that I just made. Because we need to talk about the text tool which the keyboard shortcut is, Ctrl+T. [LAUGH] Tricked you again you thought I was going to be T, T is actually something different in after effects. You have a layer selected and you press T on the keyboard, it brings up opacity, not the text tool. So Ctrl+T on the keyboard, that's what you wanna be looking for. And there are two different variations, there's the horizontal type tool which create stuff like this. And then there is the protocol type tool which is something that I use so infrequently, I haven't had time accessing it. Here we go and, so you can create stuff like that which is vertically oriented, I almost never used that. So the text tool is pretty self-explanatory, you can click inside your composition to add some text, right? Boom, just added some text there, nailed it. If you already have text in your composition, you can use the text tool to make a selection and then alter part of your text if I wanna I don't know change the fonts here and make this even more awesome. I can do that with the type tool which I will probably call the text tool but technically it's the horizontal type tool. All right, let me get rid of all that jazz. And the next set of tools here are things I'm not going to tell you about in very much detail. The brush tool is used for doing brushy type stuff. You can do a lot of cool stuff with it just like you can do with the Clone Stamp tool, which if you've ever use Photoshop, it's one of the first things I think people use Photoshop for. It to just Clone Stamp something out of their photo like an old boyfriend or girlfriend or a balloon or something, I don't know. But you can do the same thing and After Effects and you can do some really complex things. Because you can actually animate both the brush tool and the clone stamp tool and do some really crazy stuff. Same thing with the eraser tool, and erase parts your layer, the Rotobrush tool. This is another pretty advanced tool, you can make selections on footage, just like they did in the old Star Wars movies, where they had to cut people out, or cut objects out and then add effects to them or put things behind them. Very tedious to do by hand, but with the Rotobrush it kind of automates that process, and when it works, it's pretty awesome. And then finally, the puppet pen tool which is another really cool tool. It's something I'm not gonna go into in too much detail but if you want to see how the puppet pin tool works, just Google after effects puppet pin tool and you'll see some really cool examples. Now you are gonna see how all these tools are going to be used in more detail in upcoming lessons for all kinds of really fun and interesting projects. Coming up in the next lesson, you're going to learn about compositions in after effects. So check that out coming up next.