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By Steve Holmes in After Effects,Tutorial
Tuesday January 27, 2009
Animated swirls are all the rage in the motion graphics world, and there are some pretty cool things
that can be done with them. But creating and animating such elements is really not as difficult and
time-consuming as it would seem, even if the shapes are detailed and intricate. Bring on the swirls!
[To download a preview version of this swirls in after effects technique, follow this link. All files are for
personal use only.]
1 CREATE ILLUSTRATOR SWIRL
Lets start out in Adobe Illustrator CS3, by far the best tool for creating such design elementsand as
youll see, hugely important in providing the actual animation paths for us also (yes, you read that
right!). Create a new document called Swirls at 720540 pixels, and set the Color Mode to RGB. Click
OK, then using the Pen tool, create the main stem for the left side of your design. Then switch to the
Spiral tool to draw the swirl on the right. With the Direct Selection tool, select the right end point of the
Pen tool path and the left end point of the swirl path and go to Object>Path>Join to create a single
path.
8 REPEAT PROCESS(ES)
Now switch back to Illustrator and do the same process for the remaining strokes: Target one of the
paths in the Layers panel, copy it, switch to After Effects, select the corresponding layer, paste the
path as a mask, then nudge it into position if necessary. When all the paths have been copied and
pasted, switch back to Illustrator, close the file, and do not save the changes.
10 ANIMATE STROKE
Now drag on the End value and youll see your stem drawing perfectly back and forth. See, I told you it
was easy, didnt I? All you need to do now is animate the End value across time. At 0 seconds, click the
Stopwatch to set a keyframe for the End value at 0%, move along the Timeline to 2 seconds, and set
the End value to 100%. Then Control-click (PC: Right-click) the second keyframe and choose Keyframe
Assistant>Easy Ease In. Youll notice the line is actually erasing itself at this point, but that will change
in the next step. Note: Depending on how you created the shape, you may need to animate the Start
point instead.
11 SET MASK
Very cool indeed! Theres one more step, however. If you go to Composition>Background Color and set
the color to a blue, you can see all we are doing is using a white stroke to hide/reveal a black stroke
which is no good if you intend to composite these swirls on a different background. Back in the ECP,
simply set the Paint Style to Reveal Original Imageperfect! Youre animation should now be drawing
the line instead of erasing it, as well.
http://layersmagazine.com/animated-swirls-in-adobe-after-effects.html