[Music] Hey, what's going on internet? This is Josh Noel from Sunduck Film. Welcome to our channel. If you're new here, be sure to hit that subscribe button. So, this is a very fun tutorial because we're going to talk about how to create any sort of icon animation that you can create inside of After Effects. So, if you use After Effects often, there's definitely going to be a time when you're going to have to work with icons and you want to make sure that you know what you're doing so you can do a really great job for the project. So, we're gonna talk about everything you need to know about icon animation in this video. So, without wasting more time, let's jump into our tutorial. Let's get started. All right, so here we are in After Effects. And our first technique, we're going to talk about how to get any icon that you want to create. So, what you're going to want to do is check out our link in the description. It's going to take you over

to this website called freepik.com, and you're able to download free vector files. If you just type an icon at the top, which you won't have to, you can come here, take a look at, you know, hundreds of icon templates, and download them for free. And once you have, you know, the icon template that you want downloaded for free, when you have the file downloaded, you'll usually get an Illustrator file or an EPS file, encapsulated PostScript file. So what you want to do is just open that up with Adobe Illustrator, the Illustrator file preferably. But if you only get the EPS file, uh, you just open up Illustrator. It's just the same as the Illustrator file. So what you're usually going to have to do is select the icons that you want. So for example, I want this clock right here. So I can click and drag and select this. Or if everything gets selected at once, just go to Object, Ungroup. You might need to select that multiple times, but you want to keep doing that until

you can just drag select the icon that you want, and then when you have the icon that you want, what I usually do is I just copy it, go to file, new, and I'll go ahead and create a new document 1920 by 1080. It doesn't really matter, click create, and I'll just paste that in there, and then I'll just hold down shift on my keyboard and make it a little bit bigger size. Really, once again, doesn't matter too much, but you know, I like to have it nice and large just for preference. So once you have this isolated, I'll show you how to change colors real quick. So you go up to object and you click on ungroup until everything is completely isolated. So now I can select one object and it's all by itself, but I want to be able to change the color. So click on a group of objects here, hold down shift to select multiple of them, and I can absolutely go and change the color. So a little bit brighter there, and then when you're done, go up to file, save.

as and just save your file um wherever you need to. Okay, and that's how you can get any icon that you want for Adobe Illustrator. So here we are in After Effects, and I want to import our file. So what we'll do is grab our saved Illustrator file, which is clock, and I'll import it right into our project window. And then we'll go ahead and bring this into our composition. And as you see, it's a single file inside of After Effects, meaning that we can't animate these properties individually. So what we're going to want to do is right-click our layer, go to create, and click on create shapes from vector layer. And if you want, you can delete the original clock layer because we don't need it anymore. And then we can open this up, go into contents, and you see each of the groups here represent each, you know, object on the vector layer. So that is really cool. So now, meaning that we can animate everything individually. So that's how you can set up your icons.

inside of after effects and pretty much use any icon that you want. So for a second technique, I want to talk about how do we animate everything on here and make this fully animatable. So what we do is with our shape layer open, we're going to want to start finding specific objects on our layers. So this check mark right here, maybe I want to animate this in. I have to find those groups, which are these two right here. Okay, so then we can open up both these groups, go to transform for both of these, and we can add a keyframe for position, which does it for both of them because they're both selected. Move them forward in time, those position keyframes, and then I can just move this off screen here with the x position. So now this check will be animated onto our screen, and that's really cool. And if I want to move the clock around at all, I can just hit P on my keyboard for position, and it moves the entire object around, and I can scale it. And one thing I like to do is make

sure that anchor point is in the center of our layer. Just to kind of keep that safe, so grab the pan behind tool here at the top and just move the anchor point. And I can scale this down and it moves everything together, and that's nice. And then of course, we want to make these position keyframes easy, easy keyframes by hitting f9 on our keyboard. And I'll just make this animation a little bit quicker. So everything's gonna depend on what icon you have, but I'm gonna go through a few techniques here to just kind of get you started so you can do whatever animation you want. Remember you can download this exact icon. I will have that link in the description so you can follow along with what I'm doing. But for example here, if you want to take the hand of the clock, we obviously are going to want to rotate this around. So we want to find this group, which is group three. We'll open it up. We're going to transform. And one thing we want to do if you're doing any rotation, you want to

make sure that the anchor point of that layer is going to be right at the point where it should be rotating at. So, right there in that corner is good. Then what we can do is I'll click the stopwatch rotation and type in time asterisk 60 and just click off of it. This will allow it to be animatable without adding any keyframes. And I can always make it quicker by increasing the number, so maybe we'll do like 120, and you know a little bit quicker. And now we have constant animation on our icon, which you should try to figure out how to do depending on the icon that you're using. Now there's gonna be some objects that you're probably not gonna wanna animate. So for example, I'm not gonna really wanna animate the interior of the clock, which are these, you know, handles here. I'm gonna kind of just keep those the same. But maybe there's some other elements that we want to animate. So maybe I can animate everything here at the top. You can see boom right there.

awesome. So what we could do is just open up these groups, go to transforms, and I can add a keyframe for scale, which has it for all the other layers. And I don't have to go through each group and open them. And like I said, scale down to zero percent. And you know, you get something like that. And I can grab group 14 and then grab the pan behind tool here. And then, you know, I can always move our anchor points all these layers so they stick to the clock. And then we hit u on a keyboard to bring the keyframes. And then just hit f9 to make them easy keyframes. And I'll offset this a little bit. And so we have just a little bit of animation here. But I want to animate the entire thing in. So we could just go into our transform property. And you know, we can do like a position keyframe. So I can move that over. And you know, move it over here. It doesn't really matter. You do scale. It doesn't really matter what you do. But now we have this clock.

animated and for our third technique. I'm going to show you how we can turn this into a 3D layer. And for fun, we could actually turn this into a 3D object. So we can turn this into a 3D object by clicking 3D layer. And hit and go up to composition and composition settings. And we'll go 3D render and set this to Cinema 4D. Click OK. Come here geometry options here. And we can increase the extrusion depth. Maybe to 30. 20 doesn't matter. And now if we say set the Y rotation offset by a little bit. You'll see that there's actually a little bit 3D geometry to this. Which is really cool. And we can continue to increase that. So I think that's really dope. Add a keyframe for Y rotation at 45 degrees. Move to the end of our animation. Say five seconds. And maybe set this to like negative 21 degrees or something. So then there'll be a little bit of 3D, you know, geometry on

this is so cool. And then if we want, we go to Layer > New Light and click OK. And that will kind of help with, you know, lighting and shading. You might need to move the light around depending on where things are at. You can always hit P on the keyboard for position, move it over. Doesn't matter. You might need to duplicate it and just move it over to the other side. So, you know, it all depends on the type of shading that you want. But it does add a nice touch if you work with lighting and just keep it very simple. So when you have your icon animated in also in 3D space, if you choose to do that, it should look something like this. And if you want to learn how to do great title animation or how to create seamless backgrounds, I will drop a couple tutorials that we've done recently on doing these techniques. Really awesome. But you don't have to do this stuff from scratch. So for example, we have our motion graphics starter pack with 300 plus elements ranging from backgrounds

ranging from backgrounds to accent motion graphics and titles. And I can come in here and bring in a background out of our currently 60 plus backgrounds and lower the opacity of this layer to blend in perfectly. And if we want to quickly spruce this up, we can go into our motion graphics folder and find our axiom which graphic which we have clusters in here and within the drag and drop we're able to just enhance this composition for x and graphics really quick. And it just adds a lot more production value to our composition. And then on top of our accent graphics, we have plenty of amazing accent titles and other titles, up to 90 of these currently. So as you can see, we have an accent title already put together in a pack as a preset. You just change out the title really easily. And of course, you can always bring in your own background out of our pack or use your own background. So if you want to check out our motion graphics starter pack with all 300 plus elements that we're constantly updating, you check our

link in description to get rid of our pack so you can start saving a tremendous amount of time on your projects and produce great work. So that's our tutorial on creating icon animation inside of After Effects. You should have no trouble creating whatever icon that you need to do for your project. Hope you found this video helpful, and if you're new here, be sure to hit that subscribe button because we post multiple post-production tutorials every single week right here on the channel. You can also hit me up with my social media networks. Those links are in the description. And always be creating.

3 Icon Animation Techniques in After Effects | Motion Graphics Tutorial

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