Motion Morph After Effects Tutorial: How to Animate a Clock into a Bowl of Noodles
Hello again, Joey here at school of motion, welcome to day nine of 30 days of after effects. What we're going to talk about today, it's kind of not the sexiest thing, but it's reality. What I'm going to show you, how to do is to morph the letter a into the letter B into the letter C and it may sound simple, but in order to really control it and to make it feel good and animate exactly the way you want, it actually takes a lot of manual labor. And that's something I find a lot of new motion designers kind of shy away from everyone's looking for the plugin. Everyone's looking for the trick. Sometimes there's no trick. You just have to do it. And in order to do that, you have to understand animation principles and you have to really understand after effects. So we're going to dive in and I'm going to show you some strategies, some ways to think about it and slowly but surely, we're going to beat this animation into submission until it feels good.
motion morph after effects download
Now, if you really want to take your animation skills to the next level, please be sure check out our animation bootcamp course, which will pound these lessons into your skull over the course of several weeks in a fun way though. Now let's hop into after effects and get started. So there's a little bit of a trick to this. Um, but learning that part is actually the easy part. Um, what's a little bit more difficult and what really sells this type of morph is understanding some animation principles and, and using those to, to just make the motion feel a little bit better. Okay. Um, so first, why don't I show you sort of the, the basic idea of how to do one of these letter morphs? So let's make a new comp, uh, and we'll just do 1920 by 10 80. And the first thing you're gonna want to do is just, you know, type out a letter.
Um, and it, this doesn't have to be a letter, a, this could be any shape that, you know, you created an illustrator or after effects doesn't really matter. Um, as long as it's a vector shape. Okay. So you've got an a and a, we'll want to turn that into a B, so let's also type out a B, and then we'll want to turn that into a C. Okay. So those will be our three letters that we want to morph between. Um, and first thing you need to do is, you know, right now this is just a, this is just like a type layer. Um, and what we want to do is turn that into a vector shape because then we can use after effects is built in a twinning. So we can sort of morph between shapes. So let's select all of these, go to layer and just hit, uh, up.
Um, one the morphous kind of happening in this weird way. Um, and also our hole on the AA is gone. And that's because we've basically got this, uh, this third path here on the a, which we don't actually need is sort of filling the hole back in. Um, and so let's start by just turning off path two and three. I'm gonna turn off the visibility of those. Okay. So let's just deal with the first part of this morph, the basic shape. So what's happening is after effects, looks at each mask or each shape, and it interpolate between the shape and this shape. And what I want you to notice is one of these points on this shape looks a little different. It's this one here. I don't know how well you guys can see that, but, um, there's a little circle around this shape. Okay.
See how it just shoots out a little bit. Um, and it's a little bit, a little bit fast. I'm just going to move the ending key frame out a little bit. Yeah, there we go. All right. So the aid of B transition is actually working pretty well for me, and there's a lot of personality to it. And you know, it kind of feels like it's obeying the laws of physics. And, you know, the, the thing is, you know, I, I showed you guys the trick to get an aide, a morph into a B, but really to make it feel good, you have to understand animation principles and you have to understand what makes the animation feel good. Um, and you know, I, I'm going to get into that a lot on school emotion because to me, I think, you know, the fundamentals, they're the hardest things to teach, frankly, but they're also the most important.
Um, unfortunately, because of some of the limitations of, of key framing masks and after effects. Um, if I key frame, if I put a key frame here just to fix one little thing, it's actually going to have a key frame on every single point. So you want to make sure your animations more or less done, and then you can go deal with those little details. Okay. So let's see what other little things we could do when this thing kicks back like this. Okay. Um, first of all, I want to offset it. So this is the rotation key frame. That overshoot should be delayed by a couple of frames. So it's follow through, right. It's it's um, I have another tutorial on the site it's called animating follow-through and after effects, watch that it explains the principle, um, pretty simply, um, it's a lot harder to deal with when you're doing complicated shapes like this.
That's looking good. There you go. Okay. Maybe it's a little smaller, um, make that a whole key frame, go to the next frame and then just move it completely out of the comp like that. Okay. So now the two holes just kind of go away. Right. And there's so much going on that it just kind of makes sense. Right. It kinda, you're just tricking your eye. Cool. Um, you know, and you know, we've tweaked a lot to get it to this, to this part, but, um, I mean you could go even further, you know, the way that those two holes kind of leave. Um, it feels a little bit, it doesn't feel like extreme enough. And so what I might want to do is, um, grab these key frames here, go into the curve editor. Um, and in the curve editor, you have to be in the speed graph to work with mask points on, you know, that's just kind of an unfortunate reality of after effects.
So anyway, I hope, uh, hope you guys learned some tricks and I hope that, you know, this kind of opened your eyes to maybe a different workflow and after effects and actually using after effects as a true animation tool, which a lot of times you kind of forget that, you know, yeah. You can just put two key frames and have a layer move from here to here. But when you want to have something feel alive and have a ton of personality, you really gotta get in there and, and get your hands dirty. Um, so I hope this was useful. Thank you guys. And I hope to see you guys again on the next episode of 30 days of after effects. Thank you so much for watching. I hope that was eyeopening sometimes after effects just can't do all the work for you. You have to get in there and you need to really add a bunch of key frames to make things, do what you want.
Morphing is the transformation of an object into another one. There is always something to morph in a project, for instance, morphing one icon into another, or making a transition between scenes. Truth is, nicely done morphings are one of the secrets to the best motion design animations. Normally this would be a tedious task but not anymore!
something to morph in a project, for instance, morphing one icon into another, or making a transition between scenes. Truth is, nicely done morphings are one of the secrets to the best motion design animations. Normally this would be a tedious task but not anymore!
features it can provide. And of course, morph something! Super MorphingsEasiest Shape Morphing Script!$45Add to CartBuy It Now 100% money back guaranteeIf unhappy with the tool, you can request a refund within 14 days after the purchase and get every cent back. Tool purchased before the actual starting date refund can be requested up to 14 days after the first installation. Note: not applicable if purchased with a discount coupon
Silhouette's core is a powerful node-based effects tree that delivers film-grade results. View and edit any combination of nodes for complex compositing, matte manipulation, keying, color correction, grain management, look development, morphing, warping, and much more.
Step 12: Now, we will use a media encoder to export since we can keep working on the project while the encoding and rendering will happen in the background. If we choose to export from after effects, it would not matter in small projects, but it can take a long time depending upon the settings in large projects.
We have successfully completed the basics of morphing in after effects as we have converted shapes from one form to another. Similar techniques can be used to achieve advanced morphing of faces and images.
By default, an effect starts playing when you click the mouse during a slide show. If you have multiple effects, you will need to click multiple times to start each effect individually. However, by changing the start option for each effect, you can have effects that automatically play after the previous effect or with the previous effect.