How to Animate Impossible Shapes in After Effects - Advanced Tips from Sander van Dijk

🎁DOWNLOAD THIS PROJECT FILE & ASSETS FOR FREE! 🎁
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** Watch Part 2 of this tutorial on Sander's channel! **
georegulus.link/tutorial-penr...
Sander van Dijk has worked with some of the top studios and brands in the world. His unique and clever approaches to using After Effects has earned him a reputation as an incredible animator and problem solver. He has also helped create some incredible tools for motion designers, like Ray Dynamic Color. In short, he's pretty good at this stuff.
In this tutorial, Sander, who also teaches Advanced Motion Methods, will take you through the process and workflow he used to animate a very tricky piece of geometry, the Penrose Triangle. Animating "impossible" shapes like this one can leave you wondering... where do I start?
After this tutorial, you'll know.
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Auto-Generated Transcript Below 👇
Sander van Dijk (00:00): Hello, my name is Sander van Dijk. And in this video, I'm going to teach you how you can make this. It's actually one of the elements that was used in a blend manifesto animation. I'll be sharing how I approach this animation and show you some handy techniques that you can use in other projects as well After effects is a very deep tool and it can take years to master. But if you're looking for a way to get to the next level as an animator and check out advanced motion methods, where I teach you exactly how I've used after effects on projects, for some of the biggest brands in the world, also, you can download the project files I'm using in this video to follow along or practice. After you're done, watching details are in the description. Now let's get started.
Sander van Dijk (00:48): So first of all, how do we get a shape like that? It's actually really difficult to draw. So luckily I've actually included the file where it's already done. So you could just grab that if you don't want to draw this thing on your own, I would like to challenge you to try, because it's actually really hard if you want to, uh, hint, uh, what we, what I can do is I could just show you how to do this with a square, because it's a lot easier to do that with a shape like that. So just draw a square, hit command C command after paste it in the same place. And then let's just create lines for now.
Sander van Dijk (01:22): So you have lions here and then the outside shape, uh, let's make some around corners for those. And then what you can do is you can just, you know, move these shapes like this, and you can start to see the effect already occurring, right? Duplicate that once more like this. And now you could see this shape starts to form, you know, you have two options. You could either go completely to the edge or you could do like halfway. So there's lots of different ways to go about it or to recreate the shape. So if you end up doing this tutorial, try to do it with a different shape, uh, just to see, uh, what new challenges that brings. And maybe you can eventually share that with the community as well, so that everyone can learn from each other's creation.
Sander van Dijk (02:10): Alright, now let's get this into after effects. So there's a couple ways you can bring things into after effects. One of the easiest ways is to just grab a shape like this, copy it, go to after effects, go to your pen tool, click anywhere in the field and just hit paste. And then that will, that way it will come in. Now, there are some challenges with like, as far as where the anchor point is. So if I just copied this shape and I paste it into after effects like this, we showed a title, same thing right now, it's in the center over here. But then when I paste, uh, another object like this one, that's obviously not going to line up. So, uh, you know, it kind of does whatever with the anchor points. So that's why I actually have this shape that you see here around it, because if you use that shape as well, so you click here and you click on that.
For the full transcript visit: som.bz/3aTA5mm

[@laravarouqa7830]

Wooaaaa the last tip about setting keyframes on the time remap pre comp and easing that timing is GENIUS. Thank you so much!

[@funglam7395]

So many top workflow tips in one short video! Incredible work. And you’ve convinced me to get Overlord plugin too

[@WAVELOSS]

This is the first video im seeing and i can tell i will learn a ton so THANK YOU!

[@yoonhak6958]

This is awesome. Thanks so much for sharing!

[@aim__freakz8499]

Thanks for the great tutorial and for the file! :)

[@alanoorchannel4469]

creative design process, lots of new tricks that really help ... need perseverance to make it happen ... thanks for sharing your knowledge

[@jeepeng]

i've learned so much, thanks!

[@mennamahmoud4230]

Another way to import these shapes into After effects is to put each one of them on a separate layer in Illustrator from the beginning , and using ZL-Explode shape layers you can turn the vector layers to shape layers with a click of a button.

[@visualsbywlroo]

Always wanted to know how to do this. Thank you for the clear tutorial!

[@visualsbywlroo]

imwlfy why are u stalking me

[@alinazari_me]

Great tutorial . Thanks

[@rishabhc493]

thanks man!

[@JoeBodego]

Thanks for this

[@Boipelo]

Thanks!

[@NusrathUllah]

You are Genius @Sander van Dijk

[@daniellafrance]

Thanks very interesting

[@filipemecenas]

Yeah Thats really cool thanks !!!

[@artur_ry]

Cool!

[@freestuff-motiongraphics]

Nice!

[@mnitant]

this is soooooooo gooooood

[@andrearusky]

very coo tutorial! thank you!! what are your favourite scripts and plugins for after effects? Seems like your after effects workspace it's busy with many script! cheers!

[@fedor3000]

u are kind of a legend for us AE users 😅❤

[@jorgeluiscespedesmamani7059]

I thought the legend is and will be Andrew Kramer. But Zander is awesome as well.

[@Okay_justcallmekim]

SANDER D GOAT

[@hosseinasgari1489]

nice man

[@mqms71]

The Dutch master at work 😎

[@austinpinilla7409]

OMG!!!! YEEEESSS!!!!!

[@morales-motion]

Amazing! Thanks Sander!

[@rge2760]

I feel like Sander left an easter egg book recommendation for those paying close attention. Just picked up copy :)

[@EvaNagedesign]

The book at 00:32? I can't see the title. Any chance for help? :)

[@1polyron1]

I'll try and look for the book but could you give the name of it just in case?

[@sujanjoshi9462]

How to add overload panel in illustrator?

[@vonhenge]

I am importing the components to AE with Overlord, but anchor points are aligned to the centre of the components, rather than the AE stage, so when I rotate them they do not align. Any ideas on why this is?

[@Szaleto]

Wow

[@ObscureHedgehog]

Overlord is nuts!

[@panoskoutelas9542]

if it helps you can keyframe transparency to 0% at the first frame so all the imperfections will not be visible and on the second frame set transparency to 100%

[@esauvargas3647]

I cut the first frame off, kinda does the same Xd

[@alexandrumoraras]

@@esauvargas3647 Yea, and even if its not a perfect match, cutting it or bringing the opacity to 0, will seem natural.

[@dvoob]

This is funny because I spent a few hours trying to recreate this after watching the project this was in. Most of the time spent just trying to recreate the shape in illustrator without any gaps!

[@pennedarts]

Why? You can just use cut-out command..

[@georegulus]

Good effort! Those who look at it will think it's easy, those who try realize how hard if could be haha. It's possible though.

[@dvoob]

I was messing with this months ago, the project files weren't available at that point. The shape is from a commercial project the instructor made over a year ago

[@shivaprasadeernala9836]

Can anyone say me the books names showed at the beginning of the video

[@remotefaith]

John Martineau - Quadrivium: The Four Classical Liberal Arts of Number, Geometry, Music, & Cosmology Frédéric Brenner - An Archeology of Fear and Desire Frédéric Brenner - Diaspora: Homelands in Exile Three books from Phaidon’s contemporary artist series, I think one is tom friedman, the other is olafur elison and I cant make out the third... Robert Frank - Moving Out

[@shivaprasadeernala9836]

@@remotefaith Thank you very much. For taking time and let me know

[@xxxxxx-bc4xc]

Could you please make a tutorial on how to make the shape ...

[@haridi489]

Can i start with this cours i have a bit exprince

[@schoolofmotion]

Hi there! You certainly can :) We still have a few seats left in our Advanced Motion Methods course head over to som.bz/2wKsBDu to register for the Spring 2020 Session!

[@hrisscu]

Is this copyright free ?

[@Malanu00]

Why copy pasting your shapes from illustrator ? Why did you not just imported your illsutrator file in after effect ?

[@andydv3239]

because he wants shape layers he can manipulate further. Importing from illustrator directly gets you "baked/flat" layers with no control points.

[@nuloom]

@@andydv3239 well.. you can expand them into shape layers with literally 2 clicks lol

[@JoeBodego]

tried it and no animation

[@uvinduharshana1169]

Is Animate a good option for motion designing????

[@schoolofmotion]

Adobe Animate is a great software that is awesome for a Motion Designer to know however, Adobe After Effects is a much more robust and industry standard software.

[@uvinduharshana1169]

@@schoolofmotion thank you

[@Eyeshotify]

Still can't make that shape though....

[@nuloom]

it's pretty difficult. I'm very proficient at Illustrator, and it took a whole bunch of figuring when (before this video came out), i wanted to recreate this exact animation. I obviously won't explain the entire process in a yt comment, perhaps i could make a video on it, but i can tell you that it helps if you make a circle and then draw out your initial triangle out from that circle's centre point. This is for the rotation tool later, because with smart guides on, you can snap your rotation to the centre of that circle, which you can make into a guide with cmd+5, later define your contours with other triangles and rotate them 120° around the centre point of the circle by hitting r for the rotate tool and option-clicking in the centre of the triangles, which your rotation tool wouldn't snap to if you didn't have that circle in place, and the rest is just adjusting corner and shapebuilder/pathfinders

[@alexandrumoraras]

Ok so I thought it would be some hidden thing to not go through the work of animating the path points, but it seems that there is no way to do it. They need to give us a tool like Trim Paths but for the Fill...

[@snakedogman]

10:30 you know there's a built in scale comp script that does exactly that but faster :)

[@alexandrumolnar3d]

Can you give me more info about it please 😁

[@Samman-799]

@@alexandrumolnar3d it's under: file > scripts > Scale Composition.jsx // make sure you have no locked layers, otherwise it wont work

[@samstringer]

lol how to make this shape on after effects... nevermind its really hard.

[@LetTheWritersWrite]

13:31 This right here is the reason why people are fed up with Adobe. Why can't AE have the same design capabilities as Illustrator. Or better yet, why haven't they combined the best of AE, Premiere, PS, and Illustrator into one software like Davinci Resolve has ? This workflow is ridiculous. Nothing against the author of the tutorial, although on a separate note, his teaching wasn't all that great and definitely didn't convince me to pay for a course if this is how he teaches. A lot was left unexplained.