Curtain Closing Tutorial (After Effects Puppet Tool)

An After Effects tutorial that will show you how to create a swaying curtain using the Puppet Pin tool.

http://www.danstevers.com

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Closed Caption:

hey guys what's up dan stevers here with
a quick tip for you
I recently finished a video and it was
called the story of sex and in it there
is a cool effect where a curtain closes
and it's two parts of the curtain and
they come in and they kind of been back
and forth real naturally so let's let's
check that out
it was no longer about two people
becoming one sex became about the
desires of the individual a way for
people to get what they want from one
another
to put it plainly sex became a
transaction and so sex straight father
and brother away from God's original
plan
fast forward to so you'll notice in the
video that the curtains
come in from the sides here and there
they're kind of Bend and sway as they
come in
I kind of like a realistic curtain would
and this is a in effect I've been trying
to figure out for a long time trying to
figure out how to do this and make it
look natural and convincing inside After
Effects and it's actually pretty easy
and I'll show you guys how do we do that
alright so in after effects here I've
got this picture of a curtain and so
we're going to drag it into its own comp
here first thing we're going to do is
we're going to get our mass tool and
we're going to draw a mask around half
of the curtain here and i'm going to
select this layer I'm going to hit
command D to make a duplicate of it
I'm going to hit em to bring down our
masks options here and i'm going to
change it from add mode to subtract
so now we have a 2 2 different halves of
the curtain here now going to pre
compose these layers so i'm going to hit
shift command C
and move all attributes into new
composition do the same thing for this
guy
okay so now we've got two halves here so
i'll call this one right
curtain left curtain
ok cool so let's turn off our right
curtain for now we'll just look at our
left curtain
so this effect is done using that the
puppet tool and this is a pretty neat
tool arm
it has a lot of different uses in a this
is a pretty interesting use that I found
for it and it's actually pretty easy to
do so you just select this puppet pin
tool up here and we're just going to
make four pins around our curtain or
near the corners and when we do that if
you hit you while having your layer
selected you'll notice all these key
frames are made one for each puppet pin
that we put in there
so let's go ahead and animate the
position of our curtain because we want
the curtain to be closing in
so go to let's zoom into one second and
we'll hit a key frame
there we go back to zero and then we'll
drag this all the way outside of the
frame so it's completely out
will select our second keyframe and hit
f9 and that will make an easy frame so
we got our curtain coming in here
okay so now we've got to put the bend in
it so I if I total back down my options
here and I go to go to my puppet pins
here actually there's an easy way to do
it just hit the layer and hit you again
I'll bring up my puppet pin keyframes
here and you'll notice that if you don't
have the puppet effect selected you
don't see the pin so you need to have
that selected so you can just select
that there or yeah it's probably best we
just hit it
select the puppet effect there
and so what we're going to do now is
we're going to i think first thing we're
going to do is we're going to delete
these keyframes here because we we don't
want those there and we're going to make
our own key frames now so we want these
two to start bending outwards at the
beginning
there we go so now i'm going to set a
new keyframe for all four of those and
i'm going to drag it over to the
beginning they're actually all i'll
bring it not towards the beginning but a
little bit before the curtain end so
you'll see I want my puppet pins to be
about right about there and then i'll go
down about a second and i'll select the
bottom two again and I'm going to bring
these over now I'm going to bring them
so they sway over because we want as the
curtain comes in we want the our our our
puppet pins to sway over on the bottom
like like the bottom of the curtain is
pretty heavy and you can sense the
weight of it as it continues with its
velocity there
so there we go got that i'm going to go
down another second and I'm going to
swing these back just a little bit just
a little bit there and i'll go down
another second and I'm going to
swing these back just just a little bit
and finally I'm going to go down another
second and i'm going to try and line
this up with where it was before that
are starting point there and there we go
get those key frames made so let's
select all of those key frames that we
just made and hit f9 on them and make
them easy easy
and there we go so i'll hit and bring in
my am my out . there and let's do a
quick render let's say yeah this is
looking ok so there you go that's um
that's pretty much the effect there now
you could either app you could either do
the same thing that we did to the other
side of the curtain here which is what
I'd recommend if you want to look
natural but I if you don't care if it
looks symmetrical on both sides
I could just pre comp this left curtain
I can move all attributes in there
and I could duplicate that layer now and
i'll hit s to bring up the scale
unlink the scale their set this to
negative 100 and now I there you go we
got we got both sides of the curtain
coming in now
here you go
and that's pretty much the effect guys
and I like i said it's pretty easy to do
and yeah you guys can play around with
it you can try adding it an open
keyframe so you can have them close like
this and then slide open like it does in
my video but yeah that's the gist of it
guys and I hope that was helpful and
i'll see you guys later