Are you ready to make the best motion graphics possible and become a rock star?
If so, here are five tricks in After Effects that will give all your motion design projects that professional edge. All right, this first technique is about creating professional shading and blending to make some very interesting motion graphic soup, if you will. For instance, applying gradients onto your background and perhaps text is a quick, subtle way to create some visual interest. But that concept can be expanded when creating graphics like this star. Just by setting the points to four and messing with the radius value, we can create a really nice baller star. Now, to create some shading, it’s a little bit different. We can just rightclick this layer and go to layer styles and we’ll add our gradient here. This is the best gradient method for shading. This will allow you to set your colors with preferably two colors of the same tonality. And then we’ll be able to go back to our layer styles and add in a bevel and emboss like a boss. Sorry if I say that way too much, but I just like saying it. Just it’s very catchy. But the settings for the style all lay in the color and the blend modes of the bevel and emboss, which should be similar colors to the gradient that you created. And set your modes to screen. This is going to allow you to mix the opacities. And finally, increase the size for the best shading. I think this is a lot of fun to mess around with. So, you know, no exact settings here. However, to take the shading even further, try the inner glow style. And all we need to do is just change the color to one of those emboss colors that we’ve already used and mess with the opacity. You know, no exact settings like I just said. And finally, let’s try outerlow. Choose the other emboss color that we didn’t use and set the blend mode to normal and mess with the opacity and size until you get a nice glow. I suppose looks good. But now finally, let’s apply that OG original glow effect. Increase the radius and this will push up that glow even further. You know, the blending’s all in the layer styles and the animation is up to you. But as a quick tip, we can create custom paths with the pen tool after clicking tool creates mask on your shape layer. And who doesn’t like those squiggly paths? Because all you have to do is when you add a point is click and hold and this will allow you to curve it out. But when your path is created, all you have to do is go to mass path, copy it, and then paste it to your position. You may need to select all the key frames to reposition where the animation should take place, but overall that shape should follow that path, allowing you to create many different duplicates to create an overall unique motion graphic piece and easily produce uniquely cinematic visuals and save time in my After Effects and Premiere Pro templates, drag and drop transitions, animation presets, and powerful motion graphics that you can customize with a few clicks. You can access thousands of templates directly here in After Effects and Premiere Pro where you can edit them to fit your vision in seconds, allowing you to build client ready masterpieces in no time with the link below. And if you do pick up anything, you will be supporting my channel as I don’t do any of those annoying AI sponsorships. So, thank you very much. All right, moving forward with new great ideas is creating 3D orbiting transitions with your 2D motion graphics. So, I have, you know, a handful of different graphics that are already been pre-omposed for some perfect organization. And all I want to do is flip this to the next set of graphics. So, all we need to do is make our layers 3D by slapping in that cube. This will allow us to bring up position by hitting P on our keyboard. And all we need to do is move the Z position forward here to create a little bit of depth. However, it’s great to create some variation by not setting each graphic at the same Z position. And you can scale graphics down to place them back at its original size from our perspective at least. Be sure to follow these steps for both set of graphics. But ultimately, we’re going to want like a simple background graphic to tie both slides together, which can be a box that should also be a 3D layer and place at a Z position of zero. So, you don’t really have to do anything, right? But now, we can go ahead and create a null object, make it 3D, and go straight away to add a key frame for Y rotation. and then move forward to the other set of graphics to set the rotation to 180 degrees. Now this is important. Parent the first set of graphics including the background shape to the null object before that first key frame. Then parent the second set of graphics after the second key frame. And boom. And that’s how to flip your graphics correctly. However, be sure to hide the graphics accordingly by adjusting their end and end points to sweep everything under the rug. absolutely perfect. Keep in mind, you can animate the fill color of your background shape to add, you know, a little bit more lore to the overall transition. All right. Now, to take this concept that we just talked about and juice it even more, we can easily turn boring graphic scenes into random 3D camera shakes. So, again, make your layers 3D and then you can adjust the Z position of everything really quick to have that, you know, nice three-dimensional offset. When that’s done, we can create a camera layer this time around and we’ll add key frames for point of interest and position. Then just move forward here in the timeline and grab the orbit around scene tool. This is going to allow you to change the perspective of the scene directly from the center. Though, keep in mind your central object should have a Z position of zero to kind of keep the eyeballs directly in the middle. Now, when you’re done, you can alt click the stopwatch for these parameters and add the loop out pingpong expression. And I would highly suggest making the key frames easy ease with F9 on your keyboard. Go to the graph editor and pull these key frame handles across like this to create your smooth 3D camera flick. I would also recommend adding graphics to these new open areas to overhaul the detail. But really cool stuff. If you like the idea of orbiting, this is how you make your graphics revolve around a central object. So I have a few graphics here in which you guessed it, you’re going to want to make them 3D layers. This is my central object. And all I’m going to do is position the small objects over the side like so. And now we’ll be able to create a 3D null object and parent one of those side graphics to it. Just one. Then we’re just going to want to offset the Y rotation to help orbit this around just ever so slightly. Then unparent that shape and parent another side graphic to it. And then repeat this process for every shape until you’re done, until it’s like orbiting the entire central object. Great. And when you’re finally done, pairing all the side objects to the null object one last time. And then you’re going to all click the stopwatch and use an expression like time asterric 20 to have this orbit around the master graphic. Great. Now, if you want, you can create a camera layer and use the orbit tool to help angle in a new perspective. However, you may have already noticed that these graphics just don’t want to face us. Maybe we scare them. I don’t know. So select all the side graphics even the central object this time and go to layer transform auto orient and choose orient towards camera. Boom. Problem solved almost. You know there might be some graphics that are still hiding. So all you need to do is just set the wire rotation to 90° and that’s it. You know this is looking really good. You can also create a stroke only circle, make it 3D, and rotate it by 90° that X rotation to create a visual path for your orbiting graphics. Now, we’re on to the final motion graphic, which is the scrolling animation that will repeat forever. I’m actually kind of proud of myself for this one. I went ahead and created seven compositions of the same graphic, just each one has different titles and icons, you know, just basic stuff. But all I’m going to do here to start off is lay out one graphic and vary the size and create a hierarchy and design just with that single graphic. This is going to allow me to add key frames for position, scale, opacity, whatever you want to do. Then all I’m going to do here is animate this in and then follow the design path for each graphic in the stack. But most importantly, I’m going to leave 12 frames of no animation in between each movement so we can actually have it stop. And you can actually just copy and paste the transform properties of the other layers to your main layer here to help save some precious time. Then at the bottom, we’re going to go ahead and animate the graphic out. And that’s about it. I have a lot of key frames here that are all 12 frames apart. Exactly. Now, just add the regular loop out expression to all three key frame parameters. And this should be animated forever along that design that we created. Great. Now, all we need to do is duplicate this animated layer and offset each copy by exactly 1 second. Great. And that should work like so. Now, obviously, you’re going to want to place in your own unique graphic so we don’t use the same graphic every single time. So, to do this, just select one of the layers here in the timeline and alt or option drag your replaceable composition right in. And that’s it. Now, do this for every layer. And that’s how you’re going to be able to create a loopable scroll here in After Effects. 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