It's me again.

Super excited for the second ever edition of AE Pro Tips! There was an amazing response to the first one - huge thanks to all of you who replied with the kind words and helpful feedback! You are dope.

Some real juicy ones this week - hope you find them useful!

~Chris

PS: I'll be experimenting here and there with these emails as I refine the format, so stay tuned for more!

AE Pro Tips of the Week

1. Animate paths with as few points as possible

Tony Babel shared an amazing workflow tip for animating complex rounded shapes with shape layers.

Instead of trying to animate bezier curves and tangent handles, animate with as few points as possible and then add Round Corners to your shape layer.

by Tony Babel

If you're familiar with 3D modeling, it’s quite similar to the concept of subdivision surfaces - keep your vertex count low, and add smoothing later.

Simpler, cleaner, and easier to work with. As someone who loves to animate paths in shape layers, I have been using this workflow whenever possible.

(here's how you apply Round Corners)👇🏼

BONUS 🕺🏻

For more fun, link your path points to Nulls using the Create Nulls from Path script and you have some amazing animation control and potential.

I just posted a <2 min tutorial on how to use the script if that floats your goat.

BONUS BONUS 🕺🏻🕺🏻

TJ Peters shared a follow up with a technique that blew my cranium.

If you apply Round Corners to a full shape, you can use the Convert Vertex Point tool to re-introduce sharp corners. WHAT

by TJ Peters

2. Get faster Previews with Shortcuts

You can set Preview presets and map them to different shortcuts in your Preview Panel!

In the Preview Panel, select the Shortcut dropdown and adjust your preview settings. It autosaves and you're done!

You can set up to 7 different presets.

I only use 3 presets - I mapped Spacebar & Numpad 0 to do the same thing so I can have the same functionality without a full extended keyboard when I work on my laptop.

This was first brought to my attention by Dan Savage with his hot tip below. If you're animating on 2s using posterize time, skip every other frame on preview! Simple, but genius.

You can also use this for heavy comps - previewing on 2s or 3s to speed things up (especially for the rough stages of animation)

by Daniel Savage

3. Drag & Drop Properties to create Live Text Reference Layers

Click and drag a property onto the Comp Viewer window to auto-generate a live text layer reading the value.

I love using this one to debugging expressions - sometimes you just need to see what your values are!

by Good Boy Ninja (80% pretty sure that's not his real name)

How does this work?

If you're new to expressions, the drag and drop workflow above is just a shortcut to a simple workflow that will be helpful to know!

Let's recreate that workflow manually

• Create a new text layer
• Twirl Down Text > Source Text
• Option/Alt + Click on the stopwatch to add an expression.
• Instead of typing an expression, drag the pickwhip to the property (on the other layer) you want to read. This will apply a simple expression that links your text value to the property value.
• That's it! Your text layer now reads the value and updates whenever it changes.

If you want to copy the format from the drag and drop workflow, you modify your expression to include the property name, separate dimensions, and more.

Radical!

Other cool stuff for you cool people

An Inspiring Behind the Scenes

Last week I shared the promo video for Anubis. This week, Reece Parker posted a behind the scenes look at making it. I love seeing the process of people at the top of a trade - inspiring and educational!

The animation examples are obviously great, but I really enjoyed reading the descriptions of action in the storyboards. A good lesson in visual language for animation direction.

See Anubis BTS

Ian Hubert making crazy stuff again in Blender

You probably have already seen this, but if not, you should. I've been following Ian Hubert's blender stuff since I was basically an infant...

but he keeps getting better

Random cool Instagram pick

I really like Tom's style and I want to share it with you. The end. This isn't even a recent post by him.

@tomthinks on Insta

TRUE FACT 💡

Did you know that friends who share AE tips with each other are 85% more likely to end up millionaires?

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That would make me feel nice inside.

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The end.

I LOVED getting all the replies to the last email. You all are awesome.

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