After Effects Apprentice: 13 Paint Roto and Puppet

3h 22mIntermediate2016-11-11

Authors

Chris Meyer

Principle at Crish Design

Trish Meyer

Principle at Crish Design, an award-winning graphic design studio

Course details

In this course, Trish and Chris Meyer introduce a series of creative tools inside Adobe After Effects. The centerpiece is Paint, where Trish demonstrates how to use the Brush, Eraser, and Clone Stamp tools to draw on a layer, remove portions of it, or repeat elements around a composition. These tools can be used for artistic purposes as well as to repair problem areas in footage. Chris shows off the Puppet tools for distorting layers, and the incredible Roto Brush, introduced in After Effects CS6, which allows you to separately define foreground and background elements so that you can replace backgrounds and selectively add special effects.

Learning objectives
Creating, erasing, and animating brush and clone strokes
Using Paint to reveal a layer over time
Creating animated distortions to flat artwork with the Puppet tools
Replacing backgrounds with the Roto Brush

Skills covered

Motion GraphicsAfter EffectsRenderingMotion Graphics and VFXVisualization and Real-TimeLimited SeriesAdobeAECProduct and ManufacturingAnimation and Illustration

Concepts

0. Introduction

01 - Welcome
02 - Software versions and exercise files

1. The Brush Tool

03 - Setting up
04 - Brush tool basics
05 - Duration options
06 - Channel modes and other settings
07 - Animating strokes

2. The Eraser Tool

08 - Erasing different channels
09 - Eraser tool modes

3. Painting to Reveal

10 - Examining a finished write-on animation
11 - Creating a reveal stroke
12 - Finishing the reveal

4. The Clone Stamp Tool

13 - An introduction to cloning
14 - The cloning process explained
15 - Using clone presets
16 - Editing and animating clone strokes
17 - Time-shifting clone strokes

5. Roto Brush Quick Start

18 - Basic Roto Brush setup
19 - Creating a matte

6. Screen Replacement Using the Roto Brush

20 - The Roto Brush workflow
21 - Choosing a base frame
22 - Defining the base frame
23 - Adjusting propagation settings
24 - Making corrective strokes
25 - Creating multiple spans
26 - Refining the matte
27 - Exploring Motion Blur and Decontaminate Edge Color
28 - Applying Refine Edge in AE CC
29 - Refine Edge Matte in AE CC

7. The Puppet Tools

30 - Overview of the Puppet Pin tool
31 - Distorting a layer
32 - Keyframing a puppet animation
33 - Motion-sketching an animation
34 - The Puppet Overlap tool
35 - The Puppet Starch tool
36 - Deforming multiple shapes

8. Idea Corner

37 - Teaching a puppet to write