Create a Mograph Style Effect in After Effects

Joey Korenman : Hello again, Joey here at School of Motion and welcome to day 28 of 30 Days of After Effects. Today's video is going to be pretty cool and there's going to be a lot of expressions in it, but in the end, what you're going to end up building is a rig that in many ways, resembles MoGraph from cinema 4d, motion, graphics, artists love MoGraph because it lets you do stuff like what's going on behind me with not that many key frames and minimal effort. And it's easy to tweak. And after effects, there are some plugins that can replicate the MoGraph module, but actually this is one of the fastest and easiest ways I know to build animations like this. There's a lot of advantages to doing this way that I'm going to talk about. Now, if you're into making repetitive animations and cool geometric things like this, you're going to like this video.
Joey Korenman : Don't forget to sign up for a free student account. So you can grab the project files and expressions from this lesson, as well as assets from any other lesson on the site. Now let's hop into after effects and get started. So this one is pretty cool. Um, this is something that I I've started doing a little bit more in after effects, which is trying to recreate some of the functionality of cinema 4d inside of it. Uh, for those of you that haven't used cinema four D very much, there is this big area of cinema 4d called MoGraph, which lets you very easily make repeating animation like this. Um, and sometimes I call it cascading animation because it's it's animation. That's simple. Right. But it's just offset, right? So if you just look at each piece of this, like the, these little pink balls that fly out of the center, the animation of each one is very simple, but what makes it cool is they're all offset and, you know, look at these triangles, these blue kind of triangles they're offset too, but in a random way, it's not in this like, you know, linear way.
Joey Korenman : So I'm going to show you how to build a system. And I got to warn you, this is an expressions sort of based technique, but it's actually not as complicated as you'd think. And if you're getting into expressions, this is actually a really good technique to try and use as a way to figure out expressions better. So all we're going to do is we're going to make a new comp and we're just going to call this a dot. So first thing we need to do is create some animation that we can then replicate and create this cool cascading animation with. So let's make a circle and it's very important because of the way this is going to work, that we are very precise with where we put things on screen. So I want to circle right smack dab in the middle of the screen. So I'm going to double-click on this ellipse tool and this is a little trick I use because what happens is it will then put on a lips right in the middle of your frame, right in the middle.
Joey Korenman : And now if I go to the ellipse path and I set the size to 10 80 by 10 80, now it's a perfect circle and now I can shrink it down and I've got a circle directly in the center. And I know, I know for sure that the anchor point is right in the middle. All right. So let's get rid of the stroke. I don't want to stroke on that. I just want a little circle just like that. So let's just do a simple little animation on this. Um, let's have it, let's have it move from the center out to the right somewhere. So let's separate the dimensions, but a key frame on X, uh, let's go forward. I know 16 frames and scoot way over here. Easy ease these. And of course we don't just want to leave it like that. We want to pop in here and we want to add a little character to this.
Joey Korenman : So I'm going to have it. I'm going to have it overshoot a little bit. Okay. So let's, let's have it over shoot and swing back. Maybe it overshoots back the other way a little bit. And really, we just want something that's going to have a lot of movement to it so that when we start cloning it and offsetting the animation, it'll look really interesting. Okay. Let's see what this looks like. Cool. All right. Nice little animation there. Beautiful. Uh, and then, you know, I don't want the.to just appear in the middle. I want it to, I want it to sort of animate on. So, um, let's also animate the scale and let's just, um, let's just go to like, I don't know, frame six, make it a hundred percent there. And at frame zero, it's 0% scaled. Well, easy is this. So now it'll sort of scale up as animates on these cake.