In this post I'd like to share with you one of my personal projects and show you how it was put together. I have broken it down to each of the processes to help you understand exactly how it was built and animated. For this animation I have used only Adobe after Effects. For anyone not familiar with After Effects it's a powerful, industry standard, animation and motion graphics software. It bridges the gap between images and real life video. It can be used for compositing graphics and text into video as well as animating images and logos.

In future posts I will talk about and show you some of my video compositions but for now in this post I'd like to share with you the animation side of the software. Below is an animation inspired by Heads Up Display design called H.U.D. Talking Eye.

H.U.D. Talking Eye

• Here is a screenshot of my After Effects workspace. In total I used 48 various layers.

The Tutorial

• I started off with a simple circle made using a shape layer and filled it red.

• I then added an outline and gradient to the circle.

• Next I added a selection of different size circle outlines and random broken lines using several shape layers.

• Here I went on to add the bolts for the each side of the eye. I used simple rectangular shape layers filled and outlined and applied a gradient to give it a 3D look.

• Next I applied a glow adjustment layer over the whole animation to give it that electric light look and feel.

• To animate the broken circles I applied some expressions. These a bits of code that will action certain commands automatically without the need for keyframing each move. These expressions were applied to the Z axis rotations. I will explain expressions a bit more in later posts.

Here is an example of one of the expressions I used on layer 41.

segMin = .3; //minimum segment duration
segMax = .7; //maximum segment duration
minVal = -30;
maxVal = 30;

end = 0;
j = 0;
while ( time >= end){
  j += 1;
  seedRandom(j,true);
  start = end;
  end += random(segMin,segMax);
}
endVal =  random(minVal,maxVal);
seedRandom(j-1,true);
dummy=random(); //this is a throw-away value
startVal =  random(minVal,maxVal);
ease(time,start,end,startVal,endVal)

• To make the eye blink I used a few repeating layer shapes with gradients and outlines.

• Finally to make the inner part of the eye to animate with the audio sample I converted the peaks of the robot voice sample to keyframes and applied them to the scale parameter of the inner eye layer.

This is my first tutorial here on Steemit. I originally uploaded this animation to DTube. It was a bit confusing and messy but I've got my head around it all now and will be posting more there in the future. I hope you enjoyed this basic tutorial. Please leave a comment if you have any questions or suggestions on future tutorials you might like to see.

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ANIMATE IT | New Custom Animated Steemit Gifs For Your Steemit Posts