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Creating a circle pop or circle burst in After Effects
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Overview
- You will need a copy of Adobe After Effects, Illustrator & Photoshop CC 2017 or above. 90% of the course will be done in After Effects but a few things are better done in Illustrator & Photoshop. A free trial can be downloaded from Adobe.
- No previous motion graphic skills are needed.
- No previous After Effects, Illustrator or Photoshop skills are needed.
- 48 lectures 5+ hours of well structured content.
- You'll learn to take Excel spread sheets and animate this in After Effects.
- You’ll learn how to make animated pie charts, line charts & bar graphs.
- You’ll learn how to create percentage counters.
- You’ll learn how to animate icons making beautiful infographics.
- You’ll learn how to create 'voice over' infographics.
- You’ll learn all the animation techniques needed to bring your data to life.
- You will have the finished files so you never fall behind.
- Downloadable exercise files & cheat sheet.
- Forum support from me and the rest of the BYOL crew.
- Techniques used by professional motion graphic designers.
- A wealth of other resources and websites to help your new career path.
- No previous After Effects experience is necessary.
- This course is for people completely new to After Effects. No previous animation or motion graphic design experienced is necessary.
- This is a relaxed, well paced introduction that will enable you to produce impressive video for your business or organization. Only basic computing skills are necessary - If you can send emails and surf the internet then you will cope well with our course.
- There is a 100% refund if you don’t find this course useful. Just message me, no questions asked, I’ll refund your payment in full.
Course duration 5.5 hours + your study.
Daniel Walter Scott
Founder of Bring Your Own Laptop & Chief Instructor
I discovered the world of design as an art student when I stumbled upon a lab full of green & blue iMac G3’s. My initial curiosity around using the computer to create ‘art’ developed into a full-blown passion, eventually leading me to become a digital designer and founder of Bring Your Own Laptop.
Sharing and teaching are a huge part of who I am. As a certified Adobe instructor, I've had the honor of winning multiple Adobe teaching awards at their annual MAX conference. I see Bring Your Own Laptop as the supportive community I wished for when I was first starting out and intimidated by design. Through teaching, I hope to bring others along for the ride and empower my students to bring their stories, labors of love, and art into the world.
True to my Kiwi roots, I've lived in many places, and currently, I reside in Ireland with my wife and kids.
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Downloads & Exercise files
Transcript
Hello world, in this video we're going to look at doing a little Star Burst. Watch this, icon up here, watch the little Star Burst. It's this little effect we see, that little star bursty ray thing that appears at the same time as the Icon. We're going to make that in this video.
So the first thing we need to do is draw a shape. Now you can't just go and draw a rectangle, and use this. We need a rectangle, but we need the center of the world in the middle of the rectangle, and it's a lot easier to do that if we just double click up here. I'm going to use the rounded rectangle tool, just looks kind of cool, with that being a little bit blobby. And just double click the Icon. It throws in a rectangle right in the center of that space. It's far too big, we can re-size it, it's no problem.
There's a few different ways of re-sizing things. If I grab the edge, I'm actually scaling it. I want to actually change its physical size. And we do it by, down here on my Shape Layer, under 'Rectangle1', in here there is 'Rectangle Path'. That's its core, 'Size', 'Position', and 'Rounded Edges'. So what I'd like to do is, I'd like it to be a size of about-- I want it to start at a width of about 30, and a height of 0. And what you'll notice is, it gets down to 0 if you don't unlink this. So I want the width to be 30, and the height to be 0 to make sure that chain link is broken, otherwise they're connected. And what you'll see is-- I'm going to zoom in a bit.
You can see it's 30 pixels wide, and 0 high. That's how it's going to start. What I'm going to do is, bring my Play Head back to the beginning here. So what I want to do is animate this, so I'm going to turn on my Keyframe. So at Frame 1, the size is going to be 30x0. And then after about a second it's going to be 0, so it's going to be very thin, but very tall. How tall? I'm going to make it about 60. It really depends on what you want to do, and watch, can you see the difference between the two? Kind of goes bloop.
I'm going to go back to 'Fit'. I find this is good because I can see it in proportion to everything else. Especially because now I want to move it. So we're going to set a Keyframe for Position. Make sure your Play Head is here at 0. Move along to this one. Remember to hold 'Shift' on your keyboard and it will lock onto the exact same position as this Keyframe, so that line up. And where do I want it to go? X and Y, Y is the second one. And I want to drag it to kind of, to the negative which means they go up, weird, huh? So it's going to start down there and then move up there afterwards, sort of 2 Keyframes. I'm going to preview it. If you're like me, while you're previewing, it's a little hard when there's all this sort of music playing and everything animating behind it. So what we're going to do is, on our 'Shape Layer' here, just twirl it down so we can't see it. And what I'd like to do is just turn off the Eyeball on these other layers and the sounds off this layers, we'll turn that back on in a second. Just so that we can see this guy in isolation.
So we've got this little guy, he's doing his little thing. The animation is not very nice. So we're going to use the 'U' key, that will show us the Keyframes for this. I'm going to select all these guys and I'm going to right click one of them and go to 'Keyframe Velocity' and change to my famous 75%. Click 'OK'. One thing you'll notice is that, I tried to do them all at one go but I only did one set. I hadn't done these guys because Size changes X and Y. So there's two options in here but Position only has-- we're only adjusting Y. So, it can't do both of them at the same time. So you just have to do these separately. Sometimes you can change them all in one big go, by selecting them all. Sometimes though, you do them separately. Hopefully it will look nicer now. The edge around the blob, nice.
The next thing I need to do is kind of repeat it round in a circle. So I'm going to put my Play Head half way between these two, just so I can see it. And what we need to do is add what's called a Repeater. You do it, I'm going to have to twirl it up, twirl it back up to see everything in here. Make sure you've got 'Layer1' selected. 'Shape Layer1'. Click this word 'Add'. And add this one called 'Repeater'. Repeater is an effect, what we can do here, let's have a little look. Goes three of them, here you go. Have it back in the middle here. What we want to do is open up Repeater and we want to change a few things. One is, how many copies? I'm going to have 13. It doesn't really matter how many you have. You can experiment with what looks good. And you can see now, it's got 13 of them.
By default, what it does is that it repeats its position. 100 pixels to the right. So what we want to do is, go to 'Transform Repeater'. And where it says 'Position' we want to say, actually we don't want to repeat it. Do that 0, so there's 13 of them, all stacked on top of each other now. What I want to do though is, I want to play around with the rotation. Now, divide 360° by 13 little copies, I have no idea. So what you do is, you go 360 divided by how many copies you have. You can do Math in any of these little fields. If you're terrible with Math like me, let the machine do it, 27.7 Awesome, huh.
Now if yours isn't looking good like mine, and it's going to maybe spiraling off, this happens in my class quite a bit, is that you'll not change positions, and it does this, it's kind of cool, otherwise it's kind of weird, so just make sure Position is set to 0. And, there we go. That's our little Star Burst. Now we're going to turn on our Layers and move it, so it's in the right spot. So what we'll do is collapse that one, turn the Eyeballs all on. Turn the sound on for the Blop, the music in the background. And what we'll do is we'll reposition this Shape Layer. Problem is, it's quite hard to do. Where is he? There he is. Quite hard to get your fingers on him. So it's a lot easier to actually twirl this down and I'm going to twirl that right up, and use this one that says Transform.
I'm going to play around with the Position. And I often use Position to drag things around rather than using the cursor like we do in lots of other Adobe programs just because it's so hard to do when it's so small or the Opacity is down at 0. So what I want to do is play my Play head until our little pop up guy appears, there he is there. This little Star Burst needs to start along at about the same sort of time. Now it's kind of close. What we also want to do is play around with the Position so you go over there. And you go down a bit, and you go there. Now we're going to play it, and… how good is that? It's kind of cool. So if yours is doing something weird, and you're like "I still can't do it," you then have to go back to this tutorial and do it exactly step by step.
What you'll find is, say here, in the Shape Layers, there's lots of it, there's 'Transform', 'Position' here. There's also 'Transform', 'Position', and the 'Repeater'. There's also, in the rectangle here, there's 'Position'. So you just got to make sure you follow me exactly to make this one work. The cool thing about it though is, once you've done it once, and you want to use it for another job, just go and copy and paste this Shape Layer to any new Comp, or any new Project you're working on. Or even better, just steal my one. My one definitely works.
I'll save that now and it will be part of what's called the completed files. You'll see a link to it on the screen somewhere. All right, that's our little Circle Pop.
How do you make a circle burst animation in After Effects?
Animate one rounded rectangle so it changes size and moves outwards, then use a Repeater to arrange copies around a circle. Set the Repeater’s Position to zero and its Rotation to 360 divided by the number of copies, then line up the finished burst with your icon’s entrance.
How to Create a Circle Burst Animation in After Effects
Key Takeaways
Build a starburst from one animated rounded rectangle.
Make the movement feel smoother with 75% keyframe influence.
Use a Repeater to space rays evenly around a circle.
Avoid spiralling copies by changing the correct Position setting.
Position, time and reuse the finished burst in other compositions.
A little circle burst is a lovely way to give an icon’s entrance some extra pop. The icon appears, a ring of small rays shoots out around it, and the whole thing feels a bit more lively.
The nice part is that you only need to animate one ray. Once that looks right, After Effects can repeat it around the centre for you. The main thing to keep an eye on is which set of properties you are changing. Shape layers have several controls called Position, and they do very different jobs.
1. Create a centred rounded rectangle
Start with the Rounded Rectangle Tool. The rounded edges give the rays a softer, slightly blobby look, which works nicely for this little pop.
Rather than drawing a rectangle by hand, double-click the Rounded Rectangle Tool icon. This creates a rectangle centred in the composition, giving you a useful starting point for the circular arrangement later.
It will probably be enormous. That is fine. We are going to change the rectangle’s actual dimensions, rather than scale the whole layer down.
Expand your new shape layer in the timeline.
Open Contents > Rectangle 1 > Rectangle Path 1.
Find the Size property.
Unlink the width and height using the chain-link control.
Set the width to 30 pixels and the height to 0 pixels.
Unlinking those dimensions matters. If they stay connected, changing one dimension also changes the other, which is not what we need here.
At this point, you have a shape that is 30 pixels wide but has no height. It will not look like much yet. That is exactly how the animation should begin.
2. Animate the size of your first ray
Move the playhead to the beginning of the animation and enable the stopwatch beside Size. This creates your first keyframe.
Use these two size states:
At the beginning: width 30 pixels, height 0 pixels.
About one second later: width 0 pixels, height 60 pixels.
The rectangle now changes from a flat horizontal shape into a tall, thin one. Between those endpoints, it has both width and height, so you get a visible little ray. As the width reaches zero, it disappears again without needing a separate opacity animation.
The 60-pixel height is a starting point, not a rule. Adjust it to suit the size of the icon and the look you want.
If you have zoomed in to inspect the tiny shape, switch the composition magnification back to Fit. It is much easier to judge the next part when you can see the ray in proportion to the rest of the composition.
3. Move the ray outwards
Changing the size gives us the little stretch. Now we need the ray to travel away from the centre.
For this part, use Position inside Rectangle Path 1. Leave the whole layer’s Position alone for now. We will use that later to place the finished burst over the icon.
Return the playhead to the first Size keyframe.
Enable animation for the rectangle path’s Position, keeping its starting position centred.
Move to the second Size keyframe. Hold Shift while moving the playhead to snap accurately to the keyframe.
Reduce the second Position value, the Y value, so the rectangle moves upwards.
Negative Y values move things up in After Effects. It can feel a bit backwards at first, but that is the direction we want for our first ray.
There is no fixed travel distance here. Move it far enough to give the burst the spread you want. Once the copies are rotated around the centre, that upward movement becomes outward movement in every direction. Cool, huh?
4. Isolate the animation and smooth the keyframes
It is hard to judge a tiny ray when text, icons and background animation are all moving at the same time. Temporarily turn off the visibility of the other layers and mute their audio. You can turn everything back on once the burst is working.
Select the shape layer and press U to reveal its animated properties. You should see the Size and Position keyframes.
To soften the movement:
Select the Size keyframes.
Right-click a selected keyframe and choose Keyframe Velocity.
Set the relevant incoming and outgoing Influence values to 75%.
Confirm the change, then repeat the process for the Position keyframes.
Applying this separately is important. Size and Position can present different controls in the Keyframe Velocity dialogue, so selecting everything at once may not update both sets as intended.
Adjust Size and Position separately so both parts of the movement get the same easing treatment.
Preview the ray again. It should feel a little smoother and less mechanical. A small stretch, a little movement, and a pop. You can supply your own blip noise for now.
5. Add a Repeater to build the circle
Move the playhead somewhere between the two keyframes so the ray is visible. This makes the next settings much easier to judge.
Expand the shape layer’s contents, find the Add menu and choose Repeater. This shape operator creates copies of your animated rectangle, so you do not have to duplicate and animate every ray yourself.
Set the number of copies
Open Repeater 1 and set Copies to 13.
Thirteen works nicely for this example, but you can experiment. The important thing is to use the same number in the rotation calculation below.
Remove the default sideways offset
Open Transform: Repeater 1. By default, the Repeater offsets each copy by 100 pixels to the right, creating a row.
Change its Position to 0, 0. All 13 copies will now sit on top of one another. That is not the finished effect, but it is the correct intermediate step.
Rotate the copies evenly
In the Repeater’s Rotation field, enter 360/13.
After Effects can do arithmetic directly inside numeric fields, so there is no need to work it out yourself. The result is approximately 27.7 degrees between copies.
The general rule is simple: 360 divided by the number of copies. That distributes the rays evenly around a full circle.
One animated rectangle becomes a complete circle of outward-moving rays.
Preview the animation. All the copies inherit the original rectangle’s size change and movement, giving you the complete starburst.
6. Fix a burst that spirals off to one side
If your rays wander away in a spiral rather than forming a neat circle, check Transform: Repeater 1 > Position first.
Leaving the default sideways offset in place means each copy is both rotated and shifted. The result can look quite interesting, but it is not our little circle pop.
A leftover Position offset makes the copies drift instead of forming a centred burst.
Reset the Repeater’s Position to 0, 0, then check the animation again.
If something still looks wrong, go back through the property hierarchy carefully. These are the three Position controls used here:
Rectangle Path Position: animates the original ray away from the centre.
Repeater Transform Position: controls the offset between copies and stays at zero for this circular arrangement.
Layer Transform Position: moves the entire finished burst around the composition.
They share a name, but they are not interchangeable. Getting those three controls straight is the biggest part of making this setup behave.
7. Position and time the burst with your icon
Turn the other layers and audio back on. Now you can fit the circle burst into the full animation.
Expand the shape layer’s main Transform group and adjust its Position to move the entire burst over the icon.
I find the numeric Position controls much easier than trying to grab a tiny animated shape in the composition panel. It is especially awkward when the shape is between visible states or has disappeared at an endpoint.
Next, scrub to the moment the icon appears and shift the burst layer along the timeline so its animation starts at roughly the same time. Preview the entrance, then adjust the timing and placement until the two feel connected.
The aim is a quick accent around the icon, not a separate event happening somewhere nearby. A small timing adjustment can make a big difference.
8. Reuse the finished circle burst
Once the effect works, keep it. You do not need to build it again for every job.
Copy and paste the completed shape layer into another composition, or bring it into another project and reuse it there. Then adjust its overall position and timing to suit the new icon.
That is the useful part of this setup: one animated rectangle, one Repeater, and a reusable little pop.
Key Terms
Rectangle Path: The controls that define the rectangle’s actual geometry, including Size, Position and Roundness. Changing its Size is different from scaling the whole layer.
Keyframe: A saved property value at a particular point in time. After Effects calculates the values between keyframes to create the animation.
Keyframe influence: A control in Keyframe Velocity that affects the easing around a keyframe. This setup uses 75% influence to soften the motion.
Repeater: A shape operator that generates copies of a shape. Its transform settings determine how each successive copy is positioned and rotated.
Layer Transform: The controls for the entire shape layer. Use its Position to place the completed burst without changing the internal ray animation.
FAQs
Why does my circle burst look like a spiral?
Check Position inside Transform: Repeater 1. It needs to be 0, 0. A non-zero offset shifts each successive copy as it rotates, causing the rays to drift away from the centre.
How do I change the number of rays?
Change the Repeater’s Copies value, then update its Rotation to 360 divided by that new number. Keeping those values matched gives you even spacing around the circle.
Why is my rectangle invisible at the start or end?
The starting height is zero and the ending width is zero, so the shape disappears at those endpoints. Move the playhead between the Size keyframes to inspect the visible ray.
Which Position control moves the whole burst?
Use Position in the shape layer’s main Transform group. Rectangle Path Position animates the individual ray, while Repeater Position controls the spacing offset between copies.
Written by Daniel Walter Scott — Founder of Bring Your Own Laptop & Chief Instructor
