5.5 Boutique Text: Layer Control

[MUSIC] In this lesson, we're gonna pick up where we left off in the last lesson, duplicate some layers and relink expressions. [MUSIC] If you've been following along in the previous lesson, we've done some really cool things. We've done an inertial bounce for the scale, we've done a cool wiggle expression. We've linked that all to a leaf controller here, so that when we duplicate this, it's gonna do a lot of the animation heavy lifting for us. We don't have to do a lot of Keyframe Animation. In fact, it's very little Keyframe Animation. So the next step in the process here is, I want to link all of these layers to my control leaf layer here. My leaf control layer so that, I can move them all together. Once they are all linked, what I'm gonna do is I'm going to select all six of these layers, and I'm going to duplicate them. And then I'm gonna hit control and bracket to bring them to the top of the layer stack. And I'm going to change the color of all of these so I can keep track of them. And then what I'm gonna do is, I'm going to just select my leaf controller layer here. And I'm going to, I think rotate that around. And that's going to go on the bottom corner here. And I'll just turn on the other leaf layers to just make sure. Yep, that is correct. And I'll turn those off, cool. And again, I'm gonna grab these and I'm going to duplicate them, hit control, and bracket to bring them to the top of the layer stack. And I'm gonna change the color here to aqua. I'm gonna select only the leaf controller three here. And then I'm going to, maybe rotate them down like this. And I think to match the original, I might need to flip the dimension on these. Let's see if I enable my leaf layers here, yeah. So on this one right here, I'm going to just take the x dimension. And I'm gonna flip that and then rotate it back around and that should line up. Perfect, great. And then I'm gonna take this layer right here, duplicate it. Again, control and bracket, change the label here. Let's do green. And I select only the leaf controller here, bring it down to here, snap that and then rotate that into position. So these two here that are in the upper right hand corner and the bottom left hand corner needed to be flipped to match the orientation of the other leaves. You can choose to do that or you can just leave them how they are. Now I don't need these leaf reference layers in here anymore, so I'm gonna get rid of them. And let's check out what we have so far. Ooh, very nice. Look at this. That's looking really quite nice. Now the one final thing that we need to check here is that everything is being linked up correctly. Sometimes when you duplicate things, the expressions no longer link properly. And so there's just a small little thing that we need to do here to change that. So if you look at my leaf controller two here, we need to just go through in the expression and change this to two for the leaf controller. Because currently is being linked to the first leaf controller. Now, does that really matter? I don't think it does. You could have all of these controlled with one leaf controller, kind of a master leaf controller if you will. But if you want individual control over all of your layers, you're just gonna have to go through and update just a few of these here. And it should just take you just a second. So on all of these leaf layers right here, we're just gonna have to update. If you hit u u, and it's actually easier if you hit Tilda with your sequence selected here, and then we'll just bring that up here. And you can just go through and any time you see leaf control one, just change that to two. And then the same thing right here, bring two. And then two, two and then two. .And so now if I want to make an adjustment on the decay of these leaves, may be just trying to download a little bit better. Or change the wiggle parameter just a little bit, maybe I want it to be 0.55 or something like that. I can, and I can get individual control on all of those layers. Like I mentioned before, for this particular Animation, I don't think relinking is 100% necessary. However, it's a good thing to know because for some of your Animations that you will build, if you have properties that are linked in some of the duplicated layers and they don't relink, that's gonna present a problem. So you're going to need to know how to resolve that issue. Thankfully, this very tedious and annoying task can be made much easier with the use of a third party script, like so many things in After Effects. If you go to aescript.com you can find a script called Duplicate Layers in Update Expressions. And this will take out a lot of the work that I just showed you how to do manually when you duplicate the layers. But it's good to know how to do it manually as well. Now coming up in the next lesson, you're gonna learn how to do the right on technique that's used all over motion graphics. So check that out coming up next. [MUSIC]