Realistic Opening Curtain (After Effects Tutorial)

This tutorial shows how to make an opening curtain animation in After Effects. The optional "Opening Curtain" template offers extra features and is available for $10 at http://creationeffects.com/opening-cu....

Template description:
This 3D theater with opening and closing curtain animation has no pre-rendered elements - it’s made entirely in After Effects so it’s completely customizable. Easily insert your text or graphics, and display it on the curtain, or behind the curtain on the stage.

---

Closed Caption:

everyone this is no love from creation
effects . com with another quick
tutorial for you
this is an opening curtain animation
that I made entirely in after effects
and i'm going to focus on showing you
how to make this part a curtain opening
and it's not terribly difficult although
it is easy to get stuck on the warping
of the curtain to make the motion of
fluid and realistic and the first time I
did it I was probably tweaking it for a
day or so before I was satisfied to do
it really helps to understand how the
graph editor works and after effects so
if that scares you I recommend that you
just buy the template it's super cheap
it's only ten dollars at the moment and
there's a good chance i'll keep it at
that and then you get all this other
stuff with it you get both the left and
right curtain with an opening and
closing animation and it has a velvet
texture and there's the 3d theater with
the stage and the seating and spotlights
and comps for putting in your graphics
so you can easily put something on the
curtain itself or behind the curtain
above the stage and there's also a
controller with slider controls which
let you easily customize the curtain in
the scene
so all of that for just a few dollars
really but if you still just want to do
it yourself you can just follow along so
let's get started
I'm first I'm going to make a new
composition so we'll go to composition
new comp and i'll call this curtain pre
comp and i need to add a solid layer so
i'll go to layer new solid and we'll
call it
curtin and this layer needs to be gray
and needs to be medium gray
so to get that medium fifty percent gray
you can just go in here and type in 81
81 81 and click OK and now the first
thing that we're going to do is add that
that striped curtain texture so i'll go
to effect and noise and grain and add
fractal noise effect so in here
brightness and contrast we can leave
alone in transform you want to turn off
uniform scaling and make the with about
60 and the height can be 1500 and that
gives it the striped pattern
let's also turn down the complexity to
about 2.5 and the fractal type you can
experiment with these and choose
whichever one you like
I like small bumps I think that that's
the most realistic and then you can go
down and also we made this fifty percent
gray this layer and we don't want
anything in this texture to be brighter
than fifty percent gray
so what we can do is change the blending
mode to multiply and that looks really
dark but we're going to change the
colors in the next step
so now what we need to do is put this
pre comp into another cop
so I'll just drag it into the new comp
icon and will call the new comp curtain
opening and let's change the colors so
i'll select that layer and we'll go to
effect and color correction and i'll
choose Colorama and this is a cool
effect that a lot of people don't know
about and what it does is it Maps the
original colors to new colors that you
assign so let's open the output cycle
section and you can see we've got this
color wheel and all these different
colors which we don't need so we'll take
away all but three and I've set them up
so that they look kind of like that and
we got to change the color so this top
one here is mapping the blacks to a
certain color so let's make that color a
dark red
and this one will be medium medium red
and then this one will be a bright red
and I'll even make it a little orange
okay that looks pretty good next thing
we're going to do is add some
displacement to this and make it look a
little more 3d and we can do that by
going to affect and distort and
displacement map
so what this effect does is it displaces
the pixels vertically based on how
bright the image is horizontal
displacement we don't want to do that so
i'll turn that 20 and then for vertical
displacement
i'm gonna i'm gonna make it so that it
it changes the vertical displacement
based on the luminance like the
brightness and i'm going to move this to
negative 30 so you can see what that did
it raised it up a little bit
the darker areas are raised up more and
the brightest areas stay the same
the next thing we're going to do is add
a warping effect to make it look like
the curtains opening and the best effect
for that I think is the and distort go
too busy a warp and what that does
you can see now that you've got all
these different vertexes vertices and
tangents and if you move them around you
can work the image
so what we need to do is key frame some
of these to move over time so that this
curtain looks like its opening so i'm
going to open the effect down here so i
can see my key frames and i'm going to
add six key frames starting at this top
right right
tangent first let's go forward one
second
that's when our curtain will start to
open and i had a key frame for these all
the way down to the bottom right tangent
so that will be our starting position
for the curtain and next let's go
forward
let's go forward four seconds to the
five second mark and let's move these
keyframes into position
this one this middle one needs to stay
in between these two move it to about
there and i'll move this one over here
make that one stay in between these two
in the middle
so this is the general shape that you
kind of want you can see it opened and
it is swinging now so that the bottom is
further over to the left and now it's
going to swing back so we want to go
forward
let's go forward two seconds and make it
swing back
ok that's pretty good and let's go for
another two little more than two seconds
and we'll put it in its final resting
position
so now if we were to play this back
it's not going to look very good yet but
something magical happens when you start
to offset these keyframes and it starts
to give it the look of real cloth here
you would want this part to be moving
first and then this part would would
have some drag so it would follow
so what we need to do is offset these
keyframes these top two are for these
two points here on these are going to
stay moving at this constant speed and
the bottom ones are the ones that are
going to come and they're going to
follow the motion of these
let's move them over just a little bit
i'm going to zoom in a little bit
that's the basic pattern that we want
with all of these sets of keyframes so
i'm going to do that over here too
and as you get further to the right you
don't want these to be spread out as
much
so this last one
this group of keyframes will be pretty
close to each other ok and then one
other thing we need to do before we
preview this
this should look okay except the motion
is not going to be very smooth because
we are we're using linear keyframes here
we want to change these too easy these
keyframes i'm going to select all of
them and i'll right click and you can't
see it but i'm going to go down to
keyframe assistant and then choose
Eazy E's and we're just going to hope
that looks good
I'm gonna play it
ok you can see some weirdness right here
and that was something I it took me a
long time to figure that out while I was
doing that but I figured out that you
can fix that in the graph editor
let's just select one of these at a time
and in here this little icon here you
can choose the graph type so click that
and then you want to be editing the
value not the speed so it make sure that
edit value' graph is checked and zoom
and i'm gonna make it so we can see this
better
and if I yeah if you select the one of
these most all these have a problem here
you can see that they dip down
we don't want anything like that corner
there we want everything to look really
smooth and you can't just drag this up
it wouldn't work
what i've discovered is that if you just
add a new keyframe there and you can do
that by holding down your command or I
guess that's control on a pc and then
switch it to the pen tool and then you
can click to add a new keyframe and then
delete it and that smooth it out a
little bit but we're going to do it
again right here and there you go now
it's smooth let's go back and do that
with these other ones too
ok now let's play back and see
so it's not looking too bad you can
tweak that to your heart's desire and
make it slower
faster give it more swing or whatever
you want to do
we're almost done here something else
that you want to do is change the
quality from eight to ten I was seen
some angles in there and it wasn't very
smooth so if you change that - 10 that
will fix that and then the final step is
to make the texture of the curtain
change a little bit over time as the
curtain moves and we can do that in the
curtain pre-comp here first thing we
want to do is figure out where we want
that that texture to start changing so
if you select this layer and then reveal
the key frames by pushing the euchy you
can see the animation starts here so
we'll go there and then go back to the
curtain pre comp and we want to see this
fractal noise effect down here so i'll
open it up and scroll down to evolution
and we'll add our first keyframe let's
set this to 0 and then we need to go to
the next set of key frames right around
there and we'll go back here and change
this by about 330 302 the next set of
key frames
that's fine and we'll make it come back
in the opposite direction you can see
what it does when we change this value
to the texture
let's bring it back down from 302 about
220 and we'll go to our last set of key
frames here
actually we'll make it go a little past
that and we'll bring the texture back up
to about 280 or something like that and
we want to make these ease
so we'll select them all right click
go to keyframe assistant and he's ease
and that's it
let's preview it and see what it looks
like
all right I think that's pretty good and
you would probably want to move this
over and then it would open from the
middle and then you could duplicate this
layer and bring it over here and flip it
so that you would have a right curtain
as well or you can just buy the template
you know it's only ten bucks you get a
lot of stuff with it and all the work
would be done for you and it's all
customizable so you can tweak it as much
as you want
so that's it remember to subscribe if
you want to hear when I come out with
new effects
I'm always working on something like VHS
effects or glitch effects or the newest
big one which was artifacts and you can
also like the facebook page for creation
effects and stay up to date that way
thanks for watching