Create a Geometric Color Explosion
Tutorial Details
- Requirements: After Effects and Illustrator
- Difficulty: Intermediate
- Run Time: 46:34 min
Final Product What You'll Be Creating
Wes Kandel is back to show us how to combine geometric shapes made in Illustrator and then imported and animated in After Effects to create his very cool Geometrika piece.
Republished Tutorial
Every few weeks, we revisit some of our reader's favorite posts from throughout the history of the site. This tutorial was first published in May of 2009.
Tutorial
Download Tutorial .mp4
File size 293 MB
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By Wes Kandel
Wes is a dedicated husband, father and motion designer. His dad was an accountant. His mom was an interior designer. He loves all things design as well. He is currently based in Orlando, FL. He is Swedish.
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Hi Wes . i try to it with ” M ” letter , but when i try to parent the two part of ” M ” ( i mean ” |\ ” & ” /| ” ) i should parent one piece of work with two piece of objects … so can you help me with this ? ( if you don,t understand of problem , tell me for take screen shot )
Thanks for your great tutorial again .
i am waiting for answer ;)
Go ahead and send me a screen shot, and I’d be glad to help.
I try other ways so , I think my problem solved .
But i have another question … how you parent all expressions of layers with ” Chaos control ” layer . Do you do it separately for all layers ?
Screen shot , if need : http://i42.tinypic.com/eq9k49.jpg
,Thanks again ;)
I tried many ways , so , i think my problem solved :)
But i have another question , How you parent all of expressions of scale and rotations of layers , to ” Chaos control ” ( Minute 29 , Second 23 in tutorial ) ? Do you do it separately for all layers ?
Thanks again for your reply and your great tutorial ,
M.h.Salimi
Wow, even though you showed us basic ground work on how you made this, I learned the most was efficiency and organizing and in depth parenting abilities .
gooooood!!!
FANTASTIC! This song I’ll have right now!
ah I hate it! I LOVE this title animation, but I can’t think of anything original to use it for! I wish I came up with this design!
anyway thanks for sharing!
Love the tutorial…
It’s so cool…I really need to learn illustrator well…cuz this is just an awesome use of it for after effects…
Thanks a lot wanted to know how this effect was done.
Good stuff. Thanks.
When you first are making the triangles in Ai, it looks like you’re using a Snap option to keep the sides of the triangles aligned… what’s that trick?
look good ~~
Nice design. But, to make this effect quicker and easy I would suggest using shape layers to have more control on animations.Also, with proper expressions you can skip parenting all the layers imported which saves time and easy to modify something later on ( which I say as alternative). Regardless, wonderful execution.
Awesome tutorial man, love it! Thanks!
This is sick :) Thank you.
We need more tuts like this! Great one! Probably the best so far.
Can someone help me with the stage involving Illustrator. I don’t really understand, is there a very tiny gap between the triangles, (eg a few pixles) or are they actually touching eachother. If it is the lattar can someone explain how to do it. Thanks!
PS amazing tutorial. keep’em coming!
It doesn’t really matter. But if you’re trying to reproduce the exact effect, then the triangles are touching each other. This can be achieved easily in Illustrator CS4 using the “snap to point” option under the view menu. However, I honestly can’t remember if that snapping option was available before CS4.
We need more like this. Love it, need to try it out
sIMPLY gREAT..!
This tut looks awesome, especially love tuts that combine illustrator and after effects.
Alas downloaded the tut in mp4 quicktime. screen goes blank (green) at 1 min 30 seconds.
nice origami konotation
I really liked the final product, absolutely spectacular. But the tutorial was disappointing; finding out you did most of it all manually especially, very inefficient. Also, seemed like you didn’t know what you were doing often throughout the tutorial on the basics. Work on your general presenting skills as well.
Boohoo, if it can’t be done in 5 minutes, it’s not worth it… Pathetic attitude.
Great tutorial, and well presented. One of the best on this site, even when compared to the awesome tutorials AEtuts used to have frequently.
In the tut you said you applied the wiggle expression to make the camera shake, how did you do that to the beat? I have been looking for a solution for a week, how did ya do it?
It is the first time i am joining this site and in a very short time i understood it as very creative and more informative site leading the whole community towords a possitive and fruitful direction.The site is very beautful and needs beautifull works as it has to improve and servive its hold on sites..
Great tut!
-Another swed
how do you get the look for the triangles? the flashy transparent look? please and thank you~
Make sure your triangle layers are set to add mode.
Sorry, question here. For some reason, after I’ve made my work in AI and I go to import it into AE as “Cropped Layers”, it’s not actually cropping to the objects in the AI file, but seems to be always bringing it in at whatever the document size is (in this case 1280×720). Is there a setting with the artboards/document size that I should be looking out for? Transparency settings? Thanks!
top notch! Thank you for showing us this!
Show !!
GREAT!
who plays the song?
From Sudamerica!
Wow, this tutorial is incredible. It really shows how simple animations can make an incredible overall effect.
You’re a really good “teacher” too, you should consider making more tutorials. You sound professional, and you have just the right amount of comedy in the video. Not too much that you sound retarded, and not too little that one would fall asleep while watching.
Incredible work, I love the whole thing. Thank you for coming up with such a great idea. I learned a lot about organization, and how to turn simple animations into something incredible. Again, thank you.
hi. Thank you for good tutorial.^^*
I studed this tutorial
I have question~!! Please answer me
You made Scale Control and Rotation Control in”chaos control” Layer
I can’n serch Scale Control and Rotation Control
Where is the control tool?
I’am a beginner.ㅠㅠ
I waitting for your answer.
좋은하루 보내세요^^*
Hi Wes,
I’m trying to tackle this as my first AE tutorial as I have a future project in mind where I can utilize the possesses you’ve shown here. It’s been going ok so far but I’ve hit a wall when trying to parent a layer master position to a position controller (null object).
I get the following After Effects warning: Object of type layer found where a Number, Array, or Property is needed…
I’m wondering, did you just rename the base triangle layer to master? Are my ai layers saved correctly? Like I said a wall…
Any help, would be very much appreciated. Regards, Paul.
Hi, I seem to have a problem, when I place the individual letter comps inside a main “text” comp, each comp appears as a single layer, unlike yours which appears to show each individual vector layer? I’m also a bit confused with the step where you parent the individual triangle layers of each letter to its master, after they’ve all ready been parented in the previous step..
Tell me what kind of music? title track pls)
Hi there,
I’ve gotten to the part of chaos control with all the appropriate sliders but when I move the scale & rotation sliders esp the scale slider my letters doesnt grow out in time of *100, all the triangles just scale out to the same size not that cool looking weird shape. Please help! I took so much time getting to this point and feel so frustrated. I’ve looked all my layers and meticulously organized all the layers & files up this point.
Hope to hear from you!
-S
Can you tell me how you made the shapes have a slightly opaque, but very bright appearance? I can’t seem to get it…
My vectors won’t continuously rasterize?!? I’m following this tutorial for a school project that’s due tomorrow aaahhhh!!! please someone help
Hi man, first of all congratulations for your work!
Hey I’ve started a composition but I have a silly problem… In the tutorial at the 10:56 min. you scale your paths from 100% to 0% and every piece scales (beacause all are linked to the red is that I think), then you choose the red layer and put a key frame, fodward 5 frames and then put another key frame to scale to 100% and ONLY the red scales, but when I’m doing it all the pieces scales to 100% :S:S:S I think it´s ok because are linked to red but in the tutorial only the red scales, don’t understand :(
I really hope you answer this is a kind of frustating
Thanks!, regards from Mexico
Awesome tutorial man! the only thing I miss in there is the camera and zoom movement displayed in the “final product”. Otherwise a really appreciated tutorial :) Keep em coming!
Hi, I m not sure what you mean about layering the 4 compositions? How long does each comp go for and does each one start in a new position as the other ends? thanks
Thanks for this, the final version looks incredible and great choice of song :D.
I also agree on you making more when time allows.
An awesome welcome into 2012 Mr Kandel
Very well explained. Thanks for sharing your technique.
Hello can you help me to tell me, what font type you created in this tutorial
Hey a really great tutorial.
Maybe you could reupload the source files?
Hello,
I loved the tutorial, just wanted to know, what is the font you used?
Regards
http://www.dafont.com/belfast.font
Thank you for such a comprehensive and easy to follow tutorial.
It seams to be quite common to say: “amazing!” or “love it!”, but what stuff is realy totaly amazing and I do love it!!!
Thanks a lot!!!
The download link isn’t working
Hi there,
just wanted to say i loved the tutorial, the techniques and everything.
And mostly the way you explained everything :)
this is my piece of it… thanks a lot…
https://vimeo.com/36655401
Hey Guys,
when seeing this i thought it would be nice not to have the work with the color assigning.
Wrote a little Script. Should work well on all paths :)
greetings
Tony
var docRef = app.activeDocument;
var rdColor = new RGBColor();
var paths = docRef.pathItems;
rdColor.red = 0;
rdColor.blue = 0;
rdColor.green = 0;
for (var i=0 ; i < paths.length; ++i)
{
rdColor.red = Math.round( Math.random()*255);
rdColor.blue = Math.round( Math.random()*255);
rdColor.green = Math.round( Math.random()*255);
paths[i].fillColor = rdColor;
redraw();
}
forgot to say what it does (if its not obvious). It selects all the paths (triangles in this case) in your active document and gives them random colors.
g
Looking nice
But i got a problem. I don’t have de Slider Control or the Ramp.
So where can i download them?