Easy Animated Trails with Expressions - Expressions 101

🎁DOWNLOAD THIS PROJECT FILE & ASSETS FOR FREE! 🎁
https://som.bz/2wwawsU

Admit it. You love expressions. It's alright... you're among friends, nothing to be ashamed of. The truth is, most After Effects artists want to learn the dark art of expressions, but they don't really know where to start. Lucky for you, Zack Lovatt is on the case.

In this tutorial, Expression Session co-instructor Zack Lovatt will be showing you a simple expression that you can use to create "follow" animations with ease. He also shows you how to build a flexible rig for your new animation rig.

If you're looking for an easy intro to the power of expressions, look no further.

~ - ~ - ~ - ~ - ~ - ~ -

🎓INTERACTIVE ONLINE CLASSES 🎓
Expression Session | http://som.bz/es
All Courses | http://som.bz/2wKsBDu

🧭FREE 10-DAY INTRO COURSE 🧭
The Path to MoGraph | https://som.bz/2VNHb7D

🚴‍♀️FOLLOW US FOR MORE LEARNZ 🚴🏾‍♂️
Website | https://som.bz/2VMjr3N
Podcast | https://som.bz/3czNeCP
Facebook | https://som.bz/3cF3SBh
Twitter | https://som.bz/2PQfSWF
Instagram | https://som.bz/2POOJU7

---------------------------------------------------------------------
Auto-Generated Transcript Below 👇

Zack Lovatt (00:00): Hi, I'm Zack Lovatt. And in the short video, I'm going to show you how to use a simple expression to create a trailing or following object in after effects, let's go Expressions or emotion designer, secret weapon. And once you learn to use them, you can save yourself a huge amount of time and pain. If you're ready to gain a thorough grasp of after effects, expressions, and how to use these powerful tools, check out expression session in school of motion, you can also download the project files I'm using in this video to follow them with or practice with. After you're done watching this video, the details are in the description.

Zack Lovatt (00:43): So let's see, we've got some text here and we want to create a really cheesy retro standard animation thing. All right. So this is what we've got so far. Pretty good. I know. So one way to kind of stagger, this would be to duplicate the layer, open up its key frames. Take them, move them down a little bit in time. I'm going to duplicate the layer, open up its key frames, or let's just move these ones down a little bit in time. Duplicate the layer, open up that. Okay. So wait, let me just do, I think you're kind of getting the idea this works, but it's really annoying. And now if we want to go and change the original animation to be, you know, a different shape or have the keys somewhere different. Now we've got to go through that whole process over again for each of these child lists. That sucks. Thankfully with the power of expressions, we can create a pretty simple rig to help us out through this.

Zack Lovatt (01:41): The premise is still the same. We're going to duplicate the layer and offset the key frames, but we don't want to offset the key things by hand. Luckily, we can use an expression function called value at time to help us with that offsetting the way we're going to do this is to first duplicate the layer like we saw. And for clarity, I'm going to rename this. Let's say child layer, maybe call it yellow. And underneath the position, I'm going to delete these key frames. Cause we don't want it to have its own key frames. We want it to look at the key frames of this layer and then offset it in time to delete those, just like clicking the stopwatch. I'm going to hold option or ultimate click on the stopwatch to get this expression setup. So from here, the first thing to do is to pick whip right up to that layers position. Now, if we click away nothing's happening, well, there is actually something happening or child layer. It's just following the exact same position as the main life. So I'm going to actually make this child Blair let's make it a different color.

Zack Lovatt (02:49): So now we've got the main layer, which is gray up top, the child there, which is red below just to make it a little bit easier to see now what this expression is doing is giving us the value of this last position at the current time. But if we put the value at a different time, we can write dot value at time, put in little brackets and click away. Okay, well, we're getting an error errors. Aren't scary. They're pretty helpful. And can help us figure out what we're supposed to do up here. It says value at time needs exactly one argument, right? Well, we've got this sort of brackets and inside of them, it needs an argument. That's what it's called. When you put something in the brackets, the argument that this function needs is the time at which you want to get the value.

For the full transcript visit: https://som.bz/2wwawsU