And then I'll open up the contents of my tapered stroke layer inside the contents. So switch to the pen tool, click on one path, hold command, and draw a box around all of them, then copy and I can turn that layer off. All I have to do is select all of the paths. So nothing crazy magical going on there to get these paths into my tapered stroke preset. This is lettering that I traced by hand over top of a font in illustrator. Now, just to be clear after effects, didn't just automatically trace a font for me. Click and say, create shapes from vector layer.

I'm going to bring out some texts that I made an illustrator and I'll right. So let me show you what you could do with this preset. And just like that, we have a single shape layer, tapered stroke with a bunch of really powerful controls.Īnd you'll probably notice right away that one of the improvements of this preset over the expressions rig that I taught is that all of the controls are contained in a single effect instead of each one of these controls being its own expression controller. All you have to do to use it is make sure that you don't have any layer selected and DoubleClick. And then inside my animation presets, we have the tapered stroke. Then I'll come back to after effects and go to that same menu and say, refresh list after effects will refresh. I'll just go to the root preset folder and paste. And that'll automatically take you to the presets folder for the version of after effects that you have open. And the way I like to install presets is just to come into after effects, open up the animation presets and go to any existing preset, click on it, and then go to this menu and come down to reveal and finder. I have mine right here on the desktop, so I'm going to copy it. Once you have the preset, you'll need to install it. So make sure that you go sign up for that free student account. All you have to do is sign up for a free school of motion student account, and that'll give you access to not only this preset, but all of the other lessons, project files, plus a whole ton of other great stuff. That's super easy to use to download the preset.

But this preset takes all of the work out of the equation and puts it all into a nice little package with compact controls. You might've already seen the two-part lesson that I have on school of motion, where I show you how to code this rig from scratch using expressions. And today I'm extremely excited to be walking you through the free to download tapered stroke preset. Hey, this is Jake Bartlett for school of motion.

After effects effects and presets