After Effects Smooth Transitions - Animation Tutorial pt. 2)

We're back covering smooth transitions. In the first of this series, we covered our cups turning in 3D space and filling up with milk. So we end with these two circles in either corner. In this transition, they're going to smash together and spin around to create that yin-yang symbol. I've also shied a bunch of our effects and background layers, so we can only concentrate on our main cup compositions here. First thing I want to do is create a new null. You can do that by holding ctrl shift alt and y and that will create a new null exactly in the center, right where we want it. And let's parent both of our cup compositions to that null and rename that null, null rotation, because we always label our layers. Now we want our circles to collide exactly when these small dots reach the smallest point in the middle, which is around two seconds in our timeline. So from here, we're just going to zoom in and drag these both till they both hit the top left corner of this null object. There we go, that's nice and snappy. To add some secondary animation to this impact, we're going to create two rings that radiate outwards from each circle when they hit. With our ellipse tool selected, let's draw a circle around one of our shapes and let's adjust the size and position so it perfectly matches as close as possible to our existing circles. I've got no fill and a four point white stroke on this shape and let's keyframe its size and its opacity as well, right when these two circles meet. Let's also parent it to that null rotation and drag it underneath both of our cup layers. About 20 frames in or so, let's drag up the size to something around 800 and the opacity down to zero, and let's easy ease those two keyframes with F9. If we play that back, we can see it doesn't quite have the impact that we want. So to give it more impact, let's select our size keyframes, go into the graph editor, where all the magic happens. Let's make sure we're looking at the value graph, and you'll see it's ticked down here if we are. The horizontal axis of this graph going across is our time, which is exactly like our timeline, and the vertical y-axis is the value of our size property of this circle. So over those 20 frames or so, it's increasing fairly steadily, even though we've had those easy easings applied. So let's click on this graph and adjust these easier handles. Let's drag this first one all the way vertically upwards, and the second one horizontally across. This means that the size will increase dramatically in the first few frames and then slowly ease into its final size value, slower and slower. There you can see that gives it a lot more impact, as if this energy from this smash is being pushed out into these rings. Once we're happy, we can duplicate that and then drag it over to our circle. Lovely. For Yin Yang, I've created these two shapes in Illustrator, imported them in, and created shape layers from them by right-clicking, selecting Create, Create Shapes from Vector Layers. Let's parent them both to that rotation null, and give that null some rotation to drive the transition animation. Let's press R on our keyboard to bring up our rotation property. Let's make one keyframe at the start, just before they make that impact, one little bit afterwards, set to minus 14, one little further ahead at about 200, and then a final one a little later at 250. Let's select those and easy ease them with F9. Now if we play that back, that's kind of what we want, but the timing's all over the place. Let's go into the Graph Editor and fix that up. The first thing we want to do is adjust these bezier curves to create a nice smooth graph. There, that's a little smoother, but the timing's still not quite right. We do want to keep this approximate shape though, where the rotation slowly builds up in anticipation, and then spins back in the opposite direction, and slows down. From here, we're going to finesse the curves so that basically handles until it feels natural and satisfying. There, I'm pretty happy with that. This part takes a lot of practice, and you can easily spend your whole day in the Graph Editor tweaking the curves until it feels just right. Learning to be comfortable in the Graph Editor is what I think gave me the biggest increase in my animation skills. It's definitely worth learning, even though it can be very intimidating when you start. Now we want our circles to become a yin-yang at the fastest moment in the animation, which is in between these two keyframes here. So let's slide these layers on over. Now if we play that back, even with no additional animation or morphing between the shapes, because we've got that nice anticipation and rotation, and this all happens in the fastest moment, we can just pop in a yin-yang and it doesn't look too bad, even just simply cutting to a new shape. In the middle of a longer animation, you could probably get away with leaving it just as it is. To add those extra morphing frames, let's open up our path properties of our section here. I'm going to keyframe that here as its finished state, and drag the shape layer over a little earlier. And where the fast rotation really starts to happen, with our pen tool selected, we're going to select this point over here, drag that towards the center, and then adjust the bezier handle so it kind of lines up and approximates our circle. Lovely. Let's do the exact same thing to this white section of our yin-yang, and let's duplicate one of our impact rings and increase the size so it matches with the full width of our yin-yang circle. And there we have it. I've made a short playlist of some related videos that I think you'll enjoy if you've made it this far. I'll see you in the next video, and please consider subscribing if you'd like more of these videos every week.