Looping your animation- After Effects
Overview
Daniel Scott
Founder of Bring Your Own Laptop & Chief Instructor
instructorI 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.
So we're going to do some looping. Now, there's two ways of doing it. There's the hard way, and the easy way. The hard way is using scripts. Scripts are fine, and great, if you're happy using code. You'd think looping would be a nice, easy, and simple bit of script but it's not as easy as it sounds, so we're going to do it the way that all visual animation guys do it. We're just going to duplicate the frames over and over.
We've got the length of 10 seconds. If you need to have something looping for infinity then maybe looking at the scripts would do it. We'll do it, we're not going to cover it in this video though, we're going to do it the easy way. Select all three frames. And we're going to copy them. Then we're going to make sure our play head is lined up with the last key frame. We'll do a hold down to make sure it lines up. Yes, 'Shift'. So I line up with this one, and I hit 'Paste'. Easy, unlooped. Hold 'Shift', grab the last one, 'Paste'.
If it's getting a bit mundane, you've got lots to do, grab all of these guys, copy them. I'm just using 'Command C' on my keyboard, or 'Control C' on a PC. We can use 'Edit', 'Copy' up the top there. Now you're a big chunk. Just align him up. If you've loads to do, you just keep copying, and line up the last one, and paste it. Looping, easy peasy. All right, let's hit 'Save'. Let's get on to the next video