Hand Drawn Style in After Effects ｜ Animation Tutorial

Hi, I'm Ben Marriott. I make weekly motion design and animation tutorials, and this week I'm going to talk through how to get that hand-drawn effect from vector shapes, all in After Effects. Let's begin. All right, here is our animation, and this at the moment is 100% vector, and this is made with shape layers and files that I've imported from Illustrator, and I'm going to show you how to apply a hand-drawn effect over the whole thing using a single adjustment layer, and then how to add some extra hand-drawn elements on top of that as well. But first, let's move into another comp where we've just got a single line, and I'm going to use this to explain the principles. Let's start by adding a new adjustment layer with Ctrl-Alt-Y, and let's call this adjustment layer hand-drawn effects, because we always label our layers. Now, there are three elements that I think are most important to a convincing hand-drawn look, the line boil, the line texture, and the frame rate. Line boil is what we're going to address first. Boil refers to the inconsistencies between different frames of frame-by-frame animation. Because they're rarely drawn exactly the same, they appear to sort of boil at the edges where the lines kind of dance. And normally in frame-by-frame animation, there's an effort to try to minimize boil, but here we want to create the look of those inconsistencies. For our boil, we're going to use a turbulent displace effect, and as we add it, it's going to warp our line quite a bit. So let's change the amount down to 2, and the size down to 40, and the complexity up to 2 as well. Let's zoom in a bit to get a closer look. The amount property up here is how far the line will bend, how far away from its original spot it will be at its maximum. If we increase that, you can see it'll perk out more, and the size property here is how large the area of the warping is. It's kind of tricky to explain without them sounding like the same thing, but if we increase the size, you can see that sort of original amount is kind of pushed as well in the other axis. I like to think of it, the size is the width of the wave, and the amount is the power of the wave. A low amount is good for a sort of loose pencil drawing, a higher amount you'll get even looser. Let's stick to 2 for now, and the size of 40 is going to match that too. You should play with these two values until you get the look you want, and you can always come back and adjust. And at the moment, it's very subtle. As we flick it on and off, you can see some slight variance in the line. That's going to become a lot more apparent as we add the animation, which we're going to do now. So let's add some animation using the evolution property. If we click over here and drag out our evolution, you can see our line starts to animate in a kind of bulging pattern. We're going to use an expression to keep that bulging consistent. If we hold ALT or OPT and click on the stopwatch next to the evolution property, it's going to bring up our expression window, and we're going to type in the expression time times 500. Time here is a variable that gives the time of the playhead in seconds, and we're using it here because it's a number that keeps increasing. And we're going to multiply that by 500, so it's going to give us a faster animation. All right, we can see our boil is starting to happen here, but it's still not right. It looks like a consistent wave because each frame is based on a slight evolution of the previous frame beforehand because of our expression on the evolution property. So to make each frame different from the previous one, we're going to need to really increase the speed of the animation. So let's increase this to 1500. Now for playback, it's going to go nice and fast, but it's still a bit too jittery for me at the moment. I only want it to change every four frames. Normally I would add a posterize time effect to the adjustment layer, but that will affect the timing and frame rate of the animation below it, which we do want to be much higher than our boil. So we can add the posterize time effect just to this animation property. And we need to do that in our expression window. I'm going to make a new line, I'm going to type in posterize with a lowercase p. Time with an uppercase T with no spaces, and in parentheses, six afterwards, and a semicolon to indicate that that's the end of the command. This means that our animation with our time times 1500 expression will only show at six frames a second. And now with our comp, it's at 24 frames per second, so that's every four frames, or on fours in the old language. Now to play that back, that's starting to look like a respectable boil to me. Now let's just increase these settings up here to have a closer explanation of what's going on. Now you can see, every six frames, it looks like our line is being completely generated anew, and doesn't look related to the previous frame at all. Now let's go back to our subtler settings. Now let's move on to line texture. Here we want to make the line look like it was drawn with a pencil, and add some variance to the edges of the line. We're going to do that again with a Turbulent Displace effect. So let's just select this effect and duplicate it with Control D, and let's rename this Turbulent Displace Texture, this one Turbulent Displace Boil, just so we don't get confused. Now here we want the size and the amount to be opposite, so we want a smaller size, we're going to change that down to 2, and let's have a larger amount, let's push that up to 30. We also want a higher complexity, so let's go to 4. Now you can see we've got a bit of extra grit to our line. If we zoom in a little bit and flick this on and off, you can see it a lot more clearly. And if we zoom out, you can see we've got a nice subtle dance to this line now. Now we're going to add a Posterize Time effect to this adjustment layer. So let's set that to 12. This means that the animation under this will all run at 12 frames per second. Traditional frame-by-frame animation was mostly done at 12 frames per second, because not only was it much less time consuming, because you only had to draw every other frame, but it gives the animation a sense of character and texture to the movement. Similar to how high frame rate video footage tends to look a bit too fake and too real, if you've left your motion smoothing setting left on your TV, you'll know that everything looks like a soap opera, higher frame rates in animation certainly aren't any worse than 12 frames per second, but 12 frames per second is so tied to hand-drawn animation that it helps give that illusion. I've got a little bit of movement on this line, that's it animating at 12 frames per second. And if I remove the Posterize Time effect at 24 frames per second, you can see it's a lot smoother. But if you turn it down to 12, it just looks a little more textured, a little crunchier, and I think it works well for this effect. Let me know in the comments if you like a lower frame rate like this for animation, or if you prefer a buttery smooth 30 frames per second or higher. And for more line texture, we can apply the effect Roughen Edges. And you can see as soon as we add it, it's already doing a lot of work here. Now we're applying this directly to our line shape layer, because this won't work well on our adjustment layer, it will add a nice variation and a tooth to the edge of our lines, but it only affects the edges of an alpha channel of a layer, so on an adjustment layer it will do nothing. It can look much nicer than a Turbulent Displace effect set to a low size, but it does take up even more rendering power, and it isn't as easy to adjust when you've got a lot of them on a lot of layers, and not on a single adjustment layer, without going to the trouble of setting up a controller layer with linked expressions. So I see this more of a sort of optional extra if you really want that extra detail. I like the edge type for a pencil effect to be set to Rusty, but do have a play around with all of these options and see what effects you get. Let's set the border down to 1, just so it doesn't cut into our line too much and break it that it does at sort of higher values, which could definitely be useful in mimicking other line textures. For our pencil, let's stick down to 1, maybe 1.5. Yeah. Let's also set the scale to 200, so these dents in our line happen further apart. Now let's copy this adjustment layer with CTRL-C and head over to our pencil composition. Alright, here's our pencil composition, and as soon as we turn on that adjustment layer and add our Roughen Edges effects, you can see we've got a nice bit of grit to this animation now. Now this is looking good, but I think we can add some more life to it with some paper textures. I'll go through the full process of creating these in my Looping Textures tutorial. So I've got three textures up here in my project. Let's drag down the paper texture here. This is just a looping four frames of a piece of paper, and we're going to set that to Multiply, so that gives the look that everything here was drawn on top of this sheet of paper. We're going to add another Texture Light up here, which has these sort of speckle effects, and I'm going to set those to Screen, and this is going to mainly cut into these sort of black fills here, which gives those added extra grit. Now I'm being pretty subtle with these effects here, especially with the one on the Multiply layer, because if you go too heavy with the Multiply, it can start to look real sort of grungy. If we duplicate it a few times, you can see it gets a bit too intense, and that's not quite the look we want here. I like it subtle. And I've also got this sketchy pencil texture as well, which I'm going to drag in. I'm going to scale this down to about 50%, so we've got a nice tight pencil scribble, and I'm going to chuck that over our fill colors here. So we've got one for our yellow here, and first we're going to parent that pencil's texture to this yellow layer, and select Luma Matte Inverted. So now that yellow layer is only visible through these pencil scratches, and it gives the nice illusion that this was drawn every frame, filling in this yellow by scribbling with a pencil. And let's duplicate that for our other colors too. Now this is our final result, and you can see how valuable this can be, especially at the end when we've got a fairly static image, and you need to hold on it without much going on. The looping textures in the boil add so much life to a still static frame, and it sort of gives the illusion that a lot more is happening than there actually is. So with just a few effects that you can easily copy, paste, and adjust, we've turned this into this. So the project file for this is available for download down in the description. I've removed some of the textures, which I've purchased and don't have the rights to sell on, but I do recommend you make your own textures. It's relatively simple, and you will end up using them all the time. If you use any of the techniques you've learned here, please tag me on Instagram at ben underscore merit underscore, so I can see what awesome stuff you make. Please let me know down in the comments what other effects you'd like me to break down. I'd love to hear from you, and please don't forget to subscribe, hit that bell icon, share, and like. I'll see you next week.