Okay here and After Effects, we have our reference, or our mug, or our cup that we're going to make. And what I did is I changed the name of this competition, you'll see down here it says coffee cup class. And I altered that. But this is going to be its own composition. That is the entire cup itself, and the animation of the cup is going to happen in this composition. And what I do when I create stuff, is I want to create as few layers as possible, so that it doesn't just become this huge jumbled mess because as you get better at animations, you are going to end up with layer after layer after layer, just a bunch of layers, sometimes into the 50s 80s, hundreds of layers.

That's not uncommon, but you still want to be very concise and very organized with your layers. Because the more layers you have, the easier It is to get lost. I'm trying to if you can start with these simpler animations like this and get into the habit of making stuff very organized and as concise as possible, it will really help you as you get better at your animations. So this coffee cup class and this for the class of I named it that this is going to be everything for our cup. Now we need another composition. So I'm going to hit this composition button right over here on the left hand side, underneath my project and create a new composition.

Everything stays the same for what we've already created. So I have this it happened 23.97 615 seconds, which I know is going to be longer than we probably need. But we will start there 16 by nine, and I'm going to name this coffee main. And I'm also going to put class on this just so I know. Okay, so there we have this. Now, another thing that's very, very helpful with organizing is over here and you can create these folders.

Hit this, and I'm going to call this Skillshare class. Now within that, I'm going to grab my coffee main class and my coffee cup class holding down the command key, obviously, and drag that into Skillshare class. So now I have all those. This right here is my reference image, which I'm using for all of them so it can stay there. This is my coffee comp. So this is what I've already created, the one that you've already seen.

So this Monday coffee main, this whole animation here, this is one that I created. And since we're here, we're talking about layers. If you notice that this entire animation is only these few layers, I have this background. And I have Monday without the a Monday without the A to the second one. And there's a reason that I have these two different ones. Right.

So there's that there's that, and then the coffee cup. Now that's the separate layer. So which we're going to be creating. So if you open this one up, this is where all the animation happens. And you can see all of these layers that make up the cup. Now, I don't want all of these layers in this main.

So think of think of, if I had all of these layers, and in this and all these animations, it just would be extremely cluttered. And so that's why I take stuff down into as few layers as possible and use your pre comps are pre compositions. Those are extremely helpful to keep your main animation very clean. This is what's I did a great job here. And we'll get into why I have two of these. There's this this first one actually ends you can see it ends right here.

And then the second one starts. The second one is animated animation. As we go here and see this animation part. So, there's a reason I did that, but we'll get to it. So we're back in here, we get rid of this. And we'll keep this one open back in here.

Something else I want to point out here. Before we get started is this. I like to have my transparency visible. The reason I do that is because most of my animations that I create are not standalone animations. A lot of them are for videos that I'm creating, whether it's a documentary or educational video, which is a lot of what my company does. But we are creating animations that are going to go over the top of a video so they need to be transparent and they need to have an alpha channel.

And I just get used to working like this. Because then I know if it's my actual background or if it's not. Now you can click this little button here and it toggles between transparency. They're not. And I've just gotten used to work in this way. And I've gotten used to working this way in Photoshop as well, which is where I started.

And it's just what I'm used to, if you're not used to, it's no big deal, just hit this transparency and you'll be taken to whatever color background you've created for your competition. And you're good to go. So whatever you're comfortable with, I'm gonna leave mine This way, just so I know what's what. Okay, so here we are. With this, we're going to create this flat icon, but we're going to give it some depth. What I love about especially in this method is instead of making it in Illustrator, or Photoshop, and then bring it into After Effects, and you have to convert it to vectors, Illustrator is vector, but you still have to create it in vectors in After Effects in order to animate it.

So certain animations. You can't, it doesn't translate unless you convert it to vectors, even if you made an illustrator and it's a vector file. So Keep that in mind. That's why I try to build as much as I can in After Effects for stuff like this, just so that I have full rein of however I want to animate it, I can get this all made in this one program. So we're going to make this entire thing out of shape layers, and give it some depth all within those shapes. So first thing I want to do with this file, it's the size I want.

It's way bigger than we need, but that's perfectly fine. You always want to go bigger than you need. And I'm going to lock it so I'm gonna lock this back layer. We're going to build this entire cup out of using the pen tool. Now if you haven't ever used the pen tool, don't be too scared of it. It can be intimidating at first, but if we click our pen tool, things to keep in mind if you've never used this notice go through it quickly with the pen tool and with the shape tool.

They have a fill here and a stroke. For the most of what we're going to be doing. We're not going to be using The stroke, but you can either click on it, and it will bring up the stroke color. And same was fail, you click on the actual color and brings it up color swatch. If you click on fill, then you can choose what type of fills, there's none, the solid color or linear gradient or radial gradient, you can also change your blend mode, your opacity, everything can be changed here. And this is the same with stroke.

So if you go into stroke, all those same things apply here. When I'm building my shape, I want it to just be a stroke. And so you can also hold down Option and just click on the color and it toggles through everything. So it toggles to no fill. So I went no fill and a stroke. I don't want it to be a really thick stroke, because I'm only looking at the area or the lines like this is kind of me drawing it with a pencil.

So five pixels will be perfectly fine. It's white, which is good. So the pin the way it works, so you can just click around and it'll make some extremely lines like this. Or you can click and drag and it gives you Bezier handles. And then you can bend that line, however you like. Here.

If you let go and then hold option, it gives you this little V, the vector tool, and you can move that busy. Now this is helpful if you get to a corner and you need to make a sharp turn. So if I need this to go sharp this way, but I do not want to change the angle of this line. Now I when I make my next line, it's going to come off at this angle. And I can move this around and it's not going to affect that other line just like I could do here again, there is an effect. Now if you want to go back to let's say this one and change this angle or change this one.

We grab that and drag it around, it can move it you can move those wherever you'd like. To move them and if you hold down Option here I can drag out and get those handles again. So now I have handles on this side and on this side that I can manipulate that I can get a nice little curve there. It takes a lot of practice do not give up on it when I first started with a pen tool is extremely frustrating, but it is very, very helpful to do odd shapes. Also in Photoshop it's extremely helpful as well if you're cutting out shapes or doing compositions in their in comps, it's it's an amazing tool, and something that you definitely definitely need in your repertoire. Now let's get to it.

So we're just going to start and we're going to outline it does not have to be perfect. Obviously, it's going to be stroked down so we're just looking for something that's similar to what I like to do is every time I click is drag out just a little handles just Kind of in the direction of where I'm going, when we get to here, this cup. Now keep in mind at the top of the cup is actually underneath this ridge, it's not to the bottom of here, if you go to the bottom of here and draw this out, and then we put the lid on, those have to line up perfectly, otherwise you'll have a gap. But the way we're going to animate it, the lids going to come and snap down on top of this cup. So we need to draw it to the actual where the cup would be.

So I'm going to go right to the about the center of here of this line, just kind of guess this and here's a place where I'm going to hold option and just draw out. This busy, I'm holding down option right now and I'm going to draw out this little Bezier handle because I want this to be perfectly straight. So I don't want to drag it out because it will bow this line but I only need this one to come out and kind of an angle straight out. So now when I click on this side, I'm going to kind of guess up Here, probably this one, I need a little bit of a bow to it. So I'm gonna pull this out here like this. Now I'm going to drag this handle up holding option down holding option still and drag this one up a little, we're only looking at the blue line there, because that line will snap to it once we let go.

And that's kind of the curve it is a little bit of a curve not a lot, I mean just enough to give it that hint that it's a 3d object and we need to take this straight down this side here like that. Are Here pulling down Option No, this needs to come out a little bit. It's probably going to come up like this. Maybe we'll see that option here. This one's gonna need to come to are going to bring this all the way around. Here is about right actually looks pretty good to me.

Just kind of guessing where these are, if this is wrong, if this angles were wrong or you didn't have busy handles, when it comes to looking like that, you just option, get these handles and drag it out and down till you get that curve. Again, it doesn't have to be perfect. part of the fun of it is the time when it's not perfect. Okay, so there's our cup, if we want to unlock this and just look at that, that's about the shape of our cup looks good. So let's choose this shape layer, and Enter. And we'll call this just our cup.

There we go. That's the start. Now again, this isn't filled in yet. These are just the lines but that's holding you right now, that cup. This cup has a lip on it. And because this cup has a little lip on it, in order to hold this lid on, then we need to create that it's kind of doing some work.

Find roots here. Then we need to create that little lip. But I don't want to go through the pencil and just trace around here and make this one big thing. So what we're going to do is within this with cups selected, so this is shaped one, if you want to name it cop, you can, you can just click shape one like this and say no cut main. And what we're going to do is click on the outside here, once with our pen tool, and we're going to click once here. Now I didn't bow this one.

And the reason I'm not bowing is I don't really need two for one and for two because it doesn't need Bode, we don't need to add all those extra pieces, all those extra pieces to it so it's not that big of a deal. But this doesn't look right. As you can see, it's like okay, but that doesn't look like a lip at all. So if I hide this And I can turn my background on. This doesn't look like a lip. What we're going to do is come up here, this is shaped one, so see it's added to the same layer.

This is important. This goes back to wanting to create as few layers as possible. So if I know the shapes are going to be connected, and they're going to always stay connected like the top of this cup, the lip of it with the rest of the capitals will never be separated. I do not need to make them different layers. Just make them different shapes on the same layer. that avoids you having to parent things something getting unpainted, now I'm moving this cup and this isn't moving with me.

That's what we want to avoid. And we're using as few layers as possible. So we're going to use one layer, it will create this entire cup. So here's shape one, if you want to rename it, you can This is the lift whatever you'd like there. So now that I have lip selected, I'm going to go up here to stroke and just increase the stroke till it looks about what I want it to Look like, turn this back on if you want how wide Do you want it? Simple, right actually 18 just because a little bit OCD, I'm gonna go 20 Okay, so now if we go into lip and into stroke, the pen stroke, go down here to line cap, it has butt cap, we want to click on that and go to round cap.

So it rounds it off. Super simple. Nope. Click off of that. Now it actually looks like a cup with a rounded lip. And all of that is one layer.

Because this is one layer, I can move this wherever I want, and everything stays exactly how it is. I can animate it however I want. It's all only happening to that one layer. And it acts like it's just one piece because essentially it is just one piece. And that's exactly what we want. So I've created that cup.

One last thing we don't want it outlined. So you can come into here and go to stroke and click the eyeball polka die out and they will go away. And uncut mean as well stroke through that and turn on the fill like this. So now it's just filled and click on cup up here, and we can click this and you can just choose a color. What I'm going to do is use the eyedropper, and I'm going to go in here and kind of pick this white ish. It's not pure white, when it kind of a little more on the blue side.

I'm going to go about mid part of this. You can make this whatever color you want, but I don't want it to appear white. I want it off white just a little bit. There you go. That is our cup. Looking good.

Ah, I see something I did screw up though, because this lip is not a solid, it's just a single line, we can't fill that. So if you do that and it disappears, you wonder why where to go. It's because if you can't fill it, it's just a single line. It's filled just by the stroke. So we hit stroke. And with the stroke, we're going to have to go into here.

The stroke, the color of this eyedropper, just I got that color matches exactly. And now everything shows up. There we go. Okay, before we get to the shadows and adding depth to this with our drop shadows and all that stuff, going to create the lid and This rap and I'm going to do that the exact same way, I'm going to use the pen tool, go around this lid and redo the entire lid itself. And then I'm going to add this right here in the exact same way that I did with this lip right here. Actually, before I start, that's something I want to point out is do have nothing selected in your layers.

If you have something selected in here, and you start using the shape tool, it adds it to that layer. That's how we ended up with our lip and our cup main here, which is fantastic for what we need for the cup. But that's not we want for the lid, we do not want to connect it to the cup and we do not want this wrap connected to anything either. We can parent them later if we want to. But we want them to be their own separate thing because in reality, all those things are separate. That's another great way to think about it is in the real world.

Are these things physically connected. If they're physically connected, make them one layer. Okay, so I'll get those created and then we'll come back with shadows and adding more depth. So here we are with the cup completed. We have the wrap, we have the cup, and we have the cup lid, this lid again, you can see this little bump right here in this area. So this bolt right here, this is the line that goes straight across that is for that line.

So if we go off and on you can see they're just about the same size. That'll work perfectly fine. We might shorten up the cup one just a little bit, which I'm going to do right now. I just grabbed this lip going here to lip path and then that highlights just the path of the lip itself. And we grab this holding shift. I'm going to pull this in just a little bit.

Grab this one and pull it in policy in yourself. And I hit v to switch to my selection tool to go from my pencil because the pencil wanted me to create the handles. So I just hit letter V, which goes back to the selection tool, and I pulled this lip in just a little bit. The reason I want that is because when I do this lid, in reality, the lid has to be a little bigger than the actual cup. So I want that need that to be that way. The cup is on top.

And I actually am going to go in here, too. The shape here, which is that lip, and I'm going to make its path just a little bit bigger, I'm sorry, the stroke, make the stroke on the sub to probably 22. Let's see how big that is. There we go. I want to make sure that it covers up that layer underneath if it's not completely covering that layer up underneath, we're gonna run into some issues. Not positive, fully covering it up yet.

So going back in here, I'm gonna grab the shape to the selection tool shape too. And I'm just going to move it up just slightly just to really make sure that it's there we go. Now it's covering the entire thing. Like Okay, so there we have everything built. Now we're going to add shadows and shade and get some real depth going in to this year, make sure you save