week I'm starting a new series where I'm going to break down every single

transition in that animation this week the first transition

all right this project is available for download down in the description for you

to dissect further I made this project after going on a plug-in diet where I

stopped using plugins that helped with easing so I could focus on really

getting comfortable in the graph editor and that was probably the time where I

felt my animation skills improved the most so I built this animation a lot

around sort of really snapping eases and sort of smooth transitions just to

really try to push myself to my to my limits at the time

I summed up by making all the illustrated elements in Illustrator which is really only the mug

and the jug the mug I'll duplicate and the coffee bean as well for reference the

circles and those elements were easy enough to make in After Effects just using the ellipse tool

for part one of this project breakdown we really are only

gonna focus on this first transition here so we're going to break down this 1

second of animation in excruciating detail now let's dive into our black cup

pre comp and the first thing you'll notice when we get in here is that it's

all in grayscale it's in black and white that's because they're doing all of the

color correcting and adjustments when the adjustment layer at the top of this

comp called color the 3 effects I have on this adjustment layer are CC toner which

creates a kind of a gradient map that allows you to map selected gray values

to specific color values and because this is straight up brown across the

whole thing I could have achieved a similar look by using the tint effect or

tritone I like to use CC toner because it gives you a little more variety to

the shades save you on this really light brown area to be a little more saturated

you could do that if you wanted or desaturate it it's very easy to adjust

and it gives you a lot more control and the hue in the saturation I just sort of

amping up the contrast and the saturation and in this first section

both of these coffee cups have pretty much the same animation with these

there's one on the right the lighter one just having some extra sort of milk and

the jug added to it so I decided first to animate the cup on the left and then

duplicate that and add the extra stuff to the one on the right after I was

finished with it so let's dive into that first cup so here's what we've got

inside that cup pre comp we start off with our static mug the coffee being

splashed in the coffee cup rotating so we get a sort of top-down

view and then transforming into this sort of circling dot which would be

one half of the Ying Yang symbol that it forms I'm gonna get into

detail on the splash animation in a later video because that is part of the

last transition of this loop so let's start the work area just after that

splash settles and let's shy this layer so they don't clutter our timeline

the main layers we got here is this coffee which is the liquid from a side

view matte for that liquid cup lines which is the outline of the cup and handle

this yin-yang background which is the circular form from the top view the

coffee top which is the top surface of our coffee and the top of the cup here

which scales down from being aligned to the full circle I started by animating

with the cup top because it is the simplest single element that once it was

animated to my satisfaction it would give me some of the most information

about the animation that I could use to help me sort of make and inform

decisions and have a speed and parts of other shapes of the animation let's all

of this so we can just concentrate on this element I also started in Reverse

so I have this circle drawn here and its size is 400 by 400 pixels and then I

keyframed it with one axis of the sides moving down to zero now I didn't use a

scale property to do this and I'll show you why if we bring up a scale property

keyframe it unlink it and if I drag down one axis of the scale it is the same

sort of action of making it thinner but the stroke width would also gets scaled as well

and you get stuck for this sort of hideously looking a variation between

the line width which I almost always hate and what the time you get to zero

it's not even visible anymore so that would defeat the purpose of what

we're going for so let's undo those in the size property does the same things

the scale would do but it keeps the stroke width the same without having to

use any fancy expressions now if we're going to the graph headed up by

selecting these keyframes clicking here let's make some more room for this

you could see we've got a fairly strong ease out and a much snappier ease in and although I

animated this layer first to set the speed for the rest of this section I'm

still going back and fiddling with easing now and then once more elements

were animated simply try out some different speed options the next thing I

animate was the cup lines layer again here you'll see that it has two paths we

have one which is the handle of the cup which makes up a main body of

the cup and I also have in pink here a mask and that's just a mask

subtracting out this top line here because we're making that with an

ellipse tool that we've already animated now the outside path of the cup which is

the bottom one here is animated with only two keyframes so I keyframed its

first position which is a side of the cup and then in

about ten frames when our ellipsis is a full circle I have adjusted these sort

of anchor points to match that circular shape that's all the animation I needed

to do for that path I also use it a plugin called ease copy which is

completely free and one I covered in my top free plugins videos so I can simply

select the keyframes from that cup top ellipse layer and select copy from these

copy overhere and click paste these which copy the ease exactly from those

from the size property to this latest path property this cap handles a few

more keyframes because it has more curves and when you keyframe between two

paths positions each of these individual anchor points here or moving the

straightest path between the two keyframes and that can cause the Bezier

handles at each point to go a little strange and unpredictably in that

movement so I've just added some extra keyframes along the way to keep them on

the right path until the end of this transition I was kind of drawing them

frame by frame which is sometimes just the quickest way then we have our coffee

layer down here which is a black rectangle using this above layer as an

alpha matte this liquid matte layer is essentially a copy of our cup lines

layer just scale down a little bit and giving it a fill as well so it'll matte

out just this internal section which means that coffee liquid layer will stay

confined to this pink area of the cup then we have our coffee top layer which

is essentially a duplicate of our cup top layer which is an ellipse scaling up

with a size property and have its position just moving slightly upwards as

well so it ends up in the very center of that circle and that just gives a little

bit of extra parallax during these two frames while it's in transition

I'm also animating the scale property of the shape as well so when it gets to

this top-down view it's going to continue scaling up very gradually to

fill up this entire shape and then quickly scale down and reveal this yin

yang background that we've got now if we look at this scale property in the graph

editor you see it's scale starts at 100 and then creeps up very slightly until

it reaches its peak here and then just quickly sort of accelerates and scales

down really fast and during that scale down is where we have this cup handle

disappear as well you can see I've got a couple of key

frames with its path just sort of shrinking into the mass of the cup if

you need to get rid of any elements in a transition you're doing it's great to do

it during the fastest movement where your eyes being directed towards another area

there's a go frame-by-frame you can see how this path sliding in very

slightly towards the cup but because this movement is so fast and dramatic I

think we could even get away with just cutting away from that handle

and not having it transitioning inwards at all so there we have one cup rotating in

faux 3d space now let's go into the composition for the other cup which has

all the milk and the color changes inside this composition was an exact

duplicate so it has the exact same animation with some additional elements

added this milk jug here is just that pass that we've imported it from

Illustrator and the only animation we've got on that is its position values and

its rotation that way we've got it sort of swinging from the right pulling up at

the same time it's rotation is sort of making this top line sit absolutely

vertical as it exits out the screen and then we've got our milk pour main layer

here which is parented to that jug now this one in particular can be done a

variety of ways in After Effects and because this project is two years old

I'm not exactly sure that this is really the best way to do this but I have this

anchor point attached at the very top here it scales all the way up to 200% as

it gets longer so I'm increasing that scale to make it pour down into the cup

and then when the jug releases it I have its position sort of moving downwards to

fall into the cup and then I have this mask here making it disappear as it

enters with a nice rounded edge and I've got these two layers on top and this

first one is a circle with a mask to create this sort of rounded edge as the

milk pours and the second one is a small circle for a rounded cap to this sort of

milk pour which sort of follows the downwards into the coffee now this

section in particular looking back could have been done a lot more effectively

with maybe just a single shape layer and animating the path every few frames

I think striving for efficiency is great I'm certainly much more of a stickler

for that now than when I animated this but the result is really what counts in

the end sometimes you've got a hack a few shape layers together for a few

frames just to make it work and I think that's completely fine if you do that

and then I've got a duplicate of that layer called a milk pour in coffee which

is exactly the same but for when it appears inside the coffee which is just

as the darker fill on it and I've got a lighter coffee in coffee layer down here

which is sort of the milk as it appears inside the coffee and sort of has this

gradient as it pushes upwards now this took me a few times to get right

originally I had the gradient coming outwards from the top of the pour here

which seemed intuitive at the time but it just really didn't look right so

after watching some reference and kind of thinking about what was wrong with it

I discovered that you know the coffee is gonna get lighter from the bottom up as

the milk sort of settles at the bottom and then dilutes upwards so to animate

the milk rising I think I have this mask let's change

the color to something pink so you can really see it and that sort of Rises

from the bottom and I just have two keyframes on that Matt's path and it

goes from the bottom here right to the top and also animated the feather on

that mask as well so it's a lot more feathered as it starts diluting and less

feathered when it's just first poured into the coffee here I've also added

some keyframes to the fill effect here so it starts off being pure white and

then as it gets more diluted it becomes gray until the whole thing is this gray

color here also apply to fill effect to our coffee top layer here so that fades from

black to white as well now those little elements like the changing of the the

fill and the gradient and where they are the coffee rises up from those aren't

all essential elements but I really think that they add a lot to the

animation they were by far my favorite things to animate and when looking back

on it now those are the little touches that I like the most and I think they

really help sell the overall animation and here's what both cups look like an

action I've also keyframe the position of both

of these comps here so the white comp moves down and the black column moves up

so they end up diagonally sort of opposite facing each other and here's

what they look like in context of the whole animation

and that was a long time for me to explain one-and-a-half seconds of

animation now you can see why I'm breaking this up in two parts now next

time it may not be next week I'm probably gonna do a few more tutorials

in the meantime before we get back to this project the next time we do I'm

gonna cover this yin yang transition that we've got going on here but if you

can't wait until then this project file is available for download down in the

description now if you use any techniques of processors from this video

please tag me on instagram at ben_marriott_ because

I'd love to see what you make please let me know down in the comments if you'd

like more of this series where we go in-depth into a very specific very

detailed minut the minutiae of an animation I'd love to know you think