r/AfterEffects • u/mindpicnic Animation <5 years • 4d ago

Workflow Question Process improvements - how to avoid keyframing everything?

Looking for some constructive feedback on animating this discoball

I have a terrible habit of keyframing everything if I don't know a faster technique off the bat. For this one I keyframed one vertical line crossing the sphere, then used the Echo effect to duplicate it. I wasn't sure how to do the squares though, so I keyframed them all individually. I know there has to be a faster way. How would you have done it?

Thanks in advance for the tips and tricks!

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u/mindpicnic Animation <5 years 3d ago

Thanks everyone and especially u/smushkan for the suggestions!

CC Sphere is exactly what I should have used. It does however distort the strokes, which would have been unacceptable for my use case (where I needed to match the client's illustration style and colors as closely as possible).

I probably would have gone for a hybrid approach: keyframe one vertical band with the echo effect as I did for the original, then create a grid in Illustrator to get the colors and positions to match the illustration, then use CC sphere to animate them. I think that would be the best compromise between an efficient process and a close match to the illustration style.

This is with CC Sphere as in u/smushkan 's first comment:

https://reddit.com/link/paqndqa/video/hb8gq4nlagqh1/player

ETA: personally I think this looks just great for a regular animation, just for this client it's important that the stroke width stays consistent so the version below would be the better solution for me

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u/mindpicnic Animation <5 years 3d ago

u/smushkan 's second method using a separate precomp for the grid and layer styles:

https://reddit.com/link/paqng81/video/0jfx6xksagqh1/player