Getting Started with Wave and Taper in After Effects

Sarah Wade : Hello everyone today, I'm going to show you all of the magic tucked down inside the shape menu with the new wave and tapered strokes features and aftereffects.
Sarah Wade : I'm Sarah Wade. Welcome to another school of motion tutorial. You won't need any plugins for this. We're going to use all things that already exist inside your after effects. So this is going to be really fun in this tutorial. We'll cover how to utilize the shape menu and after effects, how to create taper stroke effects, how to create wave stroke effects, how to automate a strokes wave, using a simple expression and how to animate faster with the create notes from past script, don't forget to grab the free project files in the link below so that you can follow along.
Sarah Wade : What I'm looking at here is a single shape layer with a person's head, right? So let's say you've got this person and they look kind of like just a stylized human and your client comes and says, you know what? We want this person to have a ponytail and could you make it wave in the wind and just sort of flutter? And you're going to think, oh gosh. Okay, sure. I could frame by frame that I could draw ponytail with a path and I could animate the path. And that's going to take a while, or you can use the awesome features tuck down inside the shape menu to add a wavy waving tapered stroke. So I've got this one shape layer here. I've got a hair group in it already. Uh, I'm just going to make a new group actually. And we'll just call this ponytail.
Sarah Wade : In fact, I'm just going to keep this layer selected content selected. Grab my pen tool. I'm just going to draw, just click dragging to pull out those busier handles. She's got to make a ponytail like that. So I've got a stroke there and a fill. I don't really need, uh, the fill at all. I'm just going to use the stroke. So let's rename this by hitting the enter key. And I call this ponytail and let's go down in here. Let's just delete this fill. All I need is the stroke. And it just looks like a line, not a big deal, right? We're going to make it look like some flowy wavy hair with just a few things. Now, if I dig down into the stroke menu, you'll see that in here below dashes, there's a taper section. We're going to use that. And then below that there's a wave section, which we are going to use in a minute to get our fun flowy motion.
Sarah Wade : So first let's make the stroke the same color as the Herricks. That would look funny if it was a little bit different. Okay, we've got our struggle. We've got our color. That's the basic start shape of our ponytail. Now I'm going to go into this taper section and start playing around. Uh, it's not going to show up with a four point stroke with, so let's go ahead and make that bigger. Uh, I think I like about a hundred hundred works. That's going to be a nice thick ponytail on the window. It looks a little funny, right? But we can change that really easily by going to round cap. That looks a little less funny, but now it looks kind of like a worm coming out of this person's head, right? Not quite the effect we're going for. That's where the taper comes in. So if we go down here, we've got these length units under taper.