Expanding Shape Layers

Getting the Project Files

1. Download the project files
2. After the download has finished, be sure to unzip the file if it hasn’t been done for you.

Triangle Creation

1. Go up to the Pen tool on the top toolbar.
2. To make a triangle, click on the lower right side of the composition to set a point, then the top middle, then the lower left. Finish by clicking the initial point to complete the shape.
3. Go up to Fill, click the box next to it, and click the strikethrough box. This will keep the middle of the triangle transparent.
4. Click on Stroke color and set it to white.
5. Change Stroke to 8.
6. Click on the triangle layer within the layer stack itself, and hit Return (Mac)/ Enter (PC) to rename it Triangle 1.

Keyframing the Triangle

1. Hit V to use the Selection tool.
2. Make sure the Triangle 1 layer is selected.
3. With the Playhead at the start of the Timeline, hit S for Scale.
4. Hit the stopwatch next to Scale on the Triangle 1 layer to start keyframing.
5. Change Scale to 0.
6. Move the Playhead in about 20 frames, to 0;00;00;20;
7. Change Scale to 655. This will automatically set another keyframe.
8.  Drag a marquee over both keyframes or Shift-click both of them to select them.
9. Right click on any selected keyframe, and navigate to Keyframe Assistant > Easy Ease to smooth out the animation.

Duplicating and Modifying Layers

1. Hit Cmnd-D (Mac) / Ctrl-D (PC) to duplicate the Triangle 1 layer. It will automatically be named Triangle 2.
2. Repeat the previous step to create a third triangle layer.
3. Select Triangle 2.
4. Move the Playhead to 0;00;00;03.
5. Hit the left bracket key to slide this layer over by three frames.
6. Move the Playhead to 0;00;00;06.
7. Select Triangle 3.
8. Hit the left bracket key to slide this layer over by three frames.
9. With Triangle 3 still selected, go up to Fill and change the color to black.
10. Select Triangle 2, and change its Fill to white.

Precomping and Layer Visibility

1. Shift-click on each triangle layer to select them.
2. Right click on any selected layer and navigate to Pre-Compose.
3. Name the Precomp “Triangle Precomp”.
4. Drag the Triangle Precomp to the bottom of the layer stack.

Video Transcript

Hello. This is Tziporah Zions for Noble Desktop. And in this tutorial, I'm going to show you how to create this expanding ship's animation in After Effects. We're going to be using a series of sheet layers with just a few keyframes to make this cool, kind of like expanding effect. So this is what it looks like when we're going to be done with the project.

You can see the effect right there. And this is a great transition effect. That's very good for introducing other elements into your piece. You know, like objects and shape layers and, you know, like going from like frame to frame and to scene. In this case, we're going to be using text, but honestly, anything goes with this. It's also like super quick to make and it's like really easily reusable.

So it's very useful for transition effects. We're really just confusing shape layers available within the program. And at the end, we're going to be switching on like the visibility of a couple of these premade layers. So we're not going to be using anything external. So and you could find this product file in like the video description below. All right.

So let's get started. So with this Playhead at the beginning, just make sure that like no other layer is selected, if that is just click anywhere in the interface. Now we're going to head up to the pen tool up here and we're going to be drawing a triangle shape. So just a point up at the top level, right or left?

I'm sorry. And lower right and then up to the middle just to get that nice triangle effect. And now we're just going to be changing a couple of settings almost triangle to get a particular look. So the first thing we're going to doing is head over to like this box next to stroke. This refers to the outline essentially.

And we're going to get this thing to be white. And then we're going to get like where we want the first triangle we have to like be empty. Sorry about that. So we're going to click on the word fill and then click like this little strikethrough box and Astros that's going to get rid of the film. So we have like this triangle outline and then the first one we're going to want like a thickness of eight.

So you see that I like click the number next to stroke over here. I'm going to put an eight and get that in there. All right. So that's my first triangle. And I'm just going to make sure that I'm using like the selection tool over here instead of the pen to. So I just don't end up drawing anything else by accident.

And also, with this new shape layer selected, I'm going to hit if you're using a Mac, it's return enter on a PC to rename it. And I'm just going to name it. Try and go one just so I keep track of all my layers and again, my plate is at the beginning because we're going to start confirming this thing.

We're going to start putting in some animation. And then let's hit on the keyboard to open upscaling on how big this thing is going to be. And then we're going to hit this like a little stopwatch to start inputting our frames at the beginning. We want the setting to be just zero. So put that in the middle, and then, like, we're going to drag it in a bell.

I'm going to put it in about 20 frames ish. And then I want this to like, I want the scale to be, like, real. I'm going to put it six, five, five line And the reason being like, if you look at the playback, as I scroll through the timeline, I don't want it to just like go back to its original size.

I want this thing to like you. It gets bigger than the frame, the get bigger than the composition window it's in. So it looks like it's coming towards us and we're like passing into the triangle. So that's the reason why I have made it so big. And now I'm going to, like, drag this marquee box over. You overlook the keyframes you can like you know, shifts like both of them, but basically, like, select both of these keyframes.

You're going to right click on either keyframe head to keep from Assistant Easy. And what this does, basically, it adds like smoothness to the animation that wasn't there before. It's a little bit more of an organic feel. All right. So I've got my play had like just a couple of frames and so I could get a visual on the triangle that I'm working with.

And depending on your machine, you're going to hit either command or control D to duplicate the layer. And it's all like it are all sorry. It automatically renames the layer to a triangle, too, so we don't have to rename it. And let's do that again because we're going to get three triangles. So here we go. And let's hit all let's get all our triangle layers selected.

We're going to hit you on the keyboard to display all the animated keyframes. And obviously being duplicates, they all look the same. So now I've got my playhead at the origin for a reason because we're going to want to overlay and like overlap each of these expanding animations with each other. So I want them to be about three frames different from each other.

You see what I mean as we start animating these and see. So now that I've got like a visual on which keyframes are visible because I hit you, I can now shift each one over a little bit. So I'm going to select Triangle two, which deflected my previous selection by clicking Enter in the interface. So then we've got Triangle two and I'm going to move the Playhead in about three frames on my machine.

I've hit page down three, you know, three times you could find your Playhead over three years, even type it in over here and I am going to hit the left bracket on my keyboard to get that animation starting three frames later. And then the first one, right. So now they overlap. See that Very cool. And then the last one, also three frames later, I'm going to put mine in six frames and I'm going to select Triangle three left bracket.

Awesome. So now they are all overlapping with each other. All right. Now, the last thing that we're going to be doing is we're going to be changing the fill of the last two triangles. So there's like some contrast with an animation. So I've got my triangle two layers selected. I'm going to head up to fill. I am going to want this one to be fully white.

For this particular effect. You can see that. And then triangle three, I'm going to get that one same thing up till make black. So that way within the playback. Check this out. You see, it looks like a bit more contrast within that animation for like a slower playback. You'll see I'm going through this frame by frame, but yeah, you could see there's like a little bit more contrast within that animation.

So last thing I'm going to be doing is selecting all three triangles, right-click on anyone, head over to compose Name this. Triangles. Triangles. Thank you. And I still neaten up the layer stack. And if you want, you can actually like duplicate this layer and you know, shift them around the timeline to get more of an overlapping effect.

But this is for my purposes, just neaten up layer stack. I'm going to drag this down under the open up layer, going to turn on the visibility for those two. All right. There we go. This technique is great for like hopefully putting together a fun transition effect for like slideshows, presentations, video essays, title sequences, and like you don't have to stick to triangles, you know, like try different shapes.

You can do like a comic book speech balloon shape, you know, like one of those like POW shapes, even an illustration could fit into this technique and like knowing how to like repeat and shift over on the timeline, like repeating layers was like super useful for like speeding up animation processes. So, yeah, that's all for this tutorial. I hope you've enjoyed learning how to make these expanding shapes effect in Adobe After Effects.

And this has been Tziporah Zions since from mobile desktop.