From the course: After Effects Weekly

Animating an emoji - After Effects Tutorial

From the course: After Effects Weekly

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Animating an emoji

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Hello and welcome to After Effects Weekly. I'm Eran Stern and these are my blowfish and robot emoji friends. Both of them are pure vector shapes animated automatically here inside After Effects without any key frames. So I'm guessing you want to know how to do it yourself with your favorite emojis. So luckily I'm here with all the details. So we're going to start by switching to Adobe Illustrator. Here inside Illustrator I'm going to create a blank document, the size doesn't really matter. For conveniency, I'm going to create a web page which has similar dimension to an HD composition in After Effects. So I'm going to press Command + 0, and the first thing that I want to do is show you how you can get those emojis. So assuming that you're using the latest version of Illustrator, you already have them here inside. And to see how they look, you need to switch to the Text tool. And then go under Type and choose the Glyphs, and this is going to show you the Glyphs panel. Currently, it is set to the Myriad Hebrew font. So I'm going to click on this down pointing arrow, and I'm going to scroll up until I see the EmojiOne font. Once again, this is built in into Illustrator, as well as Photoshop, and we will see in a moment why this is so important. So I'm just going to click somewhere over here. And I'm also going to take the font size to something big, let's go with 72 to begin with. And then I'm going to hunt for my favorite emojis. So I'll start with this robot guy, I'll double click in order to apply. And as you can see for some reason, I'm not sure why, we are not getting this emoji. And this can happen with a couple of characters. Once again, I don't know why this is happening. You can see that in this case, this bald guy is actually working quite nicely. But I want this robot as well as this blowfish, near the animal category. Here it is. So I'll double click again. And we can see that it doesn't work. So, I'm going to close this Glyphs panel. And if this is happening to you with your favorite emojis, don't panic. I'm just going to select everything, backspace to delete it, then I'm going to switch to Photoshop. Now I already have that same document open here, but it doesn't really matter the size of the document. We're only going to use Photoshop as a bridge, because here each and every one of those emojis will work. So the principles are the same, I'm going to start with the Type tool. I'm just going to click somewhere and delete this place holder text. And then, in Photoshop case, you need to go to the Window menu and ask the Glyphs panel to show up on screen. And I've already set it up to show us the EmojiOne font. As well as double click on those guys, so they are saved in this shelf. But you can see that they are over here as well. So I'm going to double click on the robot first, and then double click on the blowfish. And then we can say goodbye to the Glyphs panel. Select both of them, they are still live type, then copy them to memory. Switch back to Illustrator. Make sure that you have a blinking cursor. If not, just select the character and click anywhere. And then use Command or Command + CTRL + V to paste those live shapes. Now I'm going to switch to the Selection tool. And I'm going to scale them to be bigger and beautiful. And now here in Illustrator, you can right click on this live text and choose Create Outlines. And this is actually going to separate them to individual groups. As we can see, if you're going to fall down the layers. Now if you want to animate each one individually inside After Effects, then we need to select this layer. And then go to this Options menu and choose this command, Release to Layers (Build). And this is going to create separate layers from those groups. So now we can take the blowfish, click on it, drag it upstairs, so it will be under Layer Number 1. And then take Layer Number 2, and just make sure that it is on the top of the hierarchy. And then we can also name them. So I'm just going to call this one Robot, and I'm going to call this one Blowfish. And now, I can just move them to place. Each one is now on it's own layer. And then go under File and Save my creation. So I'm going to save it on the desktop, and I'm going to call it emojis. I'm going to accept the defaults. And now we can switch back to After Effects, import those shapes, and animate them. So here inside After Effects, I'm going to close this composition and double click on the gray portion inside the project file. Navigate to the desktop, where I saved this file, and then I'm going to say Open. And make sure to import this as a composition and I'm going to maintain the Layers size. Now I have a new composition named emojis, after the document inside Illustrator. And I can see both of my shapes. So I can select both of them over here, right click. And under the Create menu, choose Create Shapes from Vector Layer. And now each one of these is an individual shape that I can animate here inside After Effects. So I have complete control on all the individual groups and elements that we've seen before. Now for this instance, I'm just going to select the robot outline. Select the contents of it, and under the Add options, I'm going to add the Wiggle Transform path operation. This is going to help me to wiggle the shapes automatically by setting up few options here under the transform of the wiggle. So I'm going to scroll down. And for this guy, I'm going to change only the Y position to 20, and I'm going to give it a little bit of a rotation. So let's go with 7°. Now if I'm going to press Space bar, we can see that After Effects is using the Wiggle Transform automatically to animate, according to what we've set under it's transformation. And we can do the same thing, or something similar, to this blowfish. So once again, I'm going to select the Layer. Then I'm going to make sure the contents is selected, because I want to apply the Wiggle Transform to everything. And now I'm going to expand all its options. And in this case, let's be more modest. I'll change the Y position to 10 pixels, and the rotation to 3. And I will change the wiggles per second to 1, which will create kind of a different animation. And of course, you can test other things as well. So if you want, you can go either here to the Add menu. This is the same one, or to the one that I just showed you in the timeline. And you can try different stuff. For example, Offset Path, if I'm just going to turn it down. And then Change the Amount, will create something like this. And of course, you can animate it. Now you can also try the Zig Zag effect, which will create this number. And of course you can control the size as well as the points and other good stuff. So tons of possibilities here, under the Path Operations. And of course, if this wasn't obvious, you can also extrude these shapes by converting them to a 3D. And then change the rendered to Cinema 4D. But this is a story for another tutorial. For now, I'm going to settle with this lovely animation. All made using the built in EmojiOne font with a little help from Photoshop and Illustrator.

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