5.3 Boutique Text: Inertial Bounce Expression

In this lesson we're gonna pick up right where we left off in the last lesson. Continue to build out this layout here in After Effects and start animating these leaves in a fun and interesting way. [MUSIC] Okay, in the last lesson we sorted out the artwork side of this animation and brought it into After Effects. And now we have these leave elements here or these leaf elements, if you will. All broken out into Into individual elements. And I like that a lot better because now what I can do is animate them. And I think what I'd like to do is do like a very subtle kind of rotation on them to make them look like they're kind of blowing in the wind. Before I do that though, I'm gonna continue just finishing out this layout here. And I'm going to basically duplicate these leaves and replace the other flat leaf elements here. Before I do, I'm just gonna solo up all of my leaf layers here and make sure that I have the anchor points positioned where I want them for rotation. So I want the anchor point to be right there. So when it rotates, it does sort of that thing like that. Okay, very good. Let's look at the next leaf here and we'll just put the anchor point about there. And how about that? That's good, that's good and I'm pretty sure that's good as well. Fantastic, great. So the next thing that I'm gonna do is, I'm going to Right click down in the sequence window here and I'm going to do new and I'm going to add a null object. You can also come up to layer, new, null object or use the keyboard shortcut Ctrl + Alt + Shift + Y. So I'm gonna take my null, and I'm gonna drag it over here and just kind of snap it to the corner. Now, if you don't have snapping enabled, when you have the selection tool selected. Can enable it right here with this checkbox, but you can also temporarily enable it or reverse the enabling by holding Ctrl. So if it is enabled, when you hold Ctrl, it will disable. And if it's not enabled, when you hold Ctrl, it will enable. If that doesn't make sense, you can see right now it's not snapping because I don't have Ctrl held, but watch when I hold Ctrl, it's going to want to snap. So I wanna snap this to the corner. Because is you see these other leaf elements here, are kind of positioned relative to the corner. So what I'm gonna do, is I'm gonna name this leaf Ctrl 1, very good. And before I duplicate this, I think what I wanna do is, I want to animate it. Because if I'm kind of thinking ahead, which is hard sometimes when you're building out animations. I know that I'm going to duplicate this and I'm going to move it around my composition to basically replace these other flat leaf elements here, right? And if I do the animation first, that'll save me some steps down the line. And I just noticed, I think I need to increase the opacity here. I think in the last lesson when I was adjusting the opacity, it was actually over the leaf layer underneath them. So, back to animating. What I wanna do is, I wanna have these kind of spring into action here or spring up, and grow. And then I wanna have them kind of wave in the wind by animating the rotation. So there's two kind of intermediate/advanced concepts here that I want to show you. One is, this idea of animating with an expression. So what I wanna do is I'm gonna hit s on the keyboard, I'm gonna bring up the scale property, I'm gonna go maybe ten frames. So I hit Shift + Page Down, and I just went ten frames forward, and I'm gonna drop a scale Keyframe. So this is gonna be the end scale for this particular leaf element. And I'll just zoom up on that so you can see, right? Then I'm gonna go back to the beginning, and I'm gonna set this to zero. So over the first ten frames, we're gonna go from here to there. Not very interesting at all. What I'd like to do is enhance that, with something called Inertial bounce. This is also known as kind of overshoot, if you will, but it's a great technique that will give this some kind of realistic looking life to it. Now, if you're unfamiliar with this, let's just do a quick Google search for Inertial bounce After Effects. And if you go to the, just pick the first selection that's gonna come up. It's gonna be probably graymachine.com/top five After Effects expressions, and you'll find this expression all over the internet. What we wanna do is, copy this right here under Inertial bounce version 1.2, copy this expression right here. So we'll just copy that, we'll jump back to After Effects. We are going to Alt click on the stopwatch, which will allow us to paste an expression in here and just by doing that, that little bit of copying and pasting. Now check out what we have with our animation. This is something much more dynamic. So it's doing this kind of overshoot calculation, if you will. I can actually show you that if I jump into the graph editor here, and we turn on the Post Expression Graph. So this is showing you what the graph is doing here after the expression has been applied. So we see we have this initial leaf scale animation here and then once it ends, so once we get to this point right here, the expression is doing kind of an overshoot. So we go past our scale and we go up and then it swings down, and we get this sinusoidal wave with a decay in the amplitude, which is the height of the wave here. And it has a very natural look to it, because this is essentially a lot of things operate in the real world, which is very cool. Now, if you don't like the exact movement that we're getting here. We can modify some of these parameters here and we can type in, I wouldn't mess with the amplitude too much. But a lot of times I take the frequency, the default frequency of 2. And I knock that down to 1.5, because I think two is just a little too much and I don't really like it. So I prefer to see it around 1.5. If the overshoot animation or expression is lasting too long, and I think it is, well we can do is turn up the decay, and this will cause it to, well, decay faster. It'll cause that Post Expression to stop more quickly. So let's just turn this up to 6, and then hit Enter on the number pad there. And you see now we get a little bit of overshoot. But it dies very quickly, and if we look at the graph editor, that's going to reflect that. So we just get a little bit of overshoot, we get a little bit of bounce back and then it settles very, very quickly compared to where it was before. This is going a lot longer. So this is all personal preference. I think I like it somewhere around 5. But, to kind of get a more uniform look for all of these rather than tweaking every single leaf. What we can do is just think ahead a little bit and I'm gonna add some slider controls to my leaf controller layer here. So with my leaf controller selected, I'm gonna come over to the effects and presets. Type in a slider control, I'm gonna grab a slider. I'm going to call this freq, for frequency. I'm gonna duplicate it, Ctrl D and I'm gonna call this decay, I don't really need to mess with the amplitude, these controls should be fine. So, in the expression what I'm gonna do, is I'm going to select 1.5 and then I'm gonna grab the Pick Whip and I'm going to Pick Whip up to frequency. And then I'm going to grab the decay. I'm just going to select that 5 there and I'm gonna use the Pick Whip and Pick Whip up to decay. And If I run it back now, it's not gonna to do anything because both of these values are set to zero, and that's no good. So, I'm gonna set the first one to 1.5 in this to 5. That way if I want to globally kind of change that, I don't have to run back through all of these expressions, which is gonna be quite a few. Especially when we duplicate all five of these leaves, that's going to be 20 different layers, we're going to have to go through. So this is going to be a lot quicker. So now what I can do, is I can grab that scale expression. So let me bring that up, I'll hit s and I'm also going to toggle the post expression here from the graph editor so that I don't see that. And I'm just going to copy these, actually, I can't do that. I was gonna copy the Keyframes but that's not gonna work, because if I bring up the scale properties on all these layers, all the scales are actually different. So I'm gonna do something slightly different. I'm gonna select just these four layers. I'm gonna drop a scale Keyframe right here. Come back to the beginning and set all of them to zero. Then on my leaf number four here, the second copy of this, I'm just going to right click and choose Copy Expression Only. You can just see that on the bottom of the screen there. I'll just bring this up, show you one more time, Copy Expression Only. And now if I just select these Keyframes here and I hit Paste, it's not gonna Paste the Keyframes. It's gonna Paste the expression to the scale properties. And so now all of them should grow and do that very nice overshoot animation there. Now if you wanna get a little bit more life out of this, what we could do is you can change the distance between the Keyframes. So if we shorten this, we're gonna get a, well, it's gonna be quicker and we're gonna get a more drastic kind of overshoot there. But we can also kind of smooth out the beginning here by just selecting these Keyframes and hitting F9. That's also gonna give it a slightly different look. Now having them all come out at the same time, doesn't really look too hot. So what I would probably do, is offset these by maybe a frame or so, like this. So that they kind of come out in a staggered way there, which you won't really be able to see at the start of the animation. But you'll see it at the end of the animation when they're all kind of moving in that what seems to be a random way. Which is not random at all, but it has a nicer look to it, and that's great. This Inertial bounce expression can be used in a bunch of fun in different ways. You can use it on scale, rotation, position, in a bunch of other properties, to come up with some really interesting looks. Now, coming up in the next lesson you're gonna learn about the Wiggle Expression. And that's gonna help to create this really nice subtle, leaf blowing in the wind effect. So check that out coming up next. [MUSIC]