How to Create a Toon-Shaded Look in After Effects

Learn how to create a toon-shaded gooey effect in After Effects using advanced compositing techniques. Break down complex effects into multiple layers, gaining precise control over the final look. Master tricks for achieving a cartoony style, including cell-splitting animations and goopy transitions. Explore creative ways to use effects beyond their intended purposes, thinking like a compositor to achieve unique visual results. Follow along step-by-step to build a custom toon-shaded composition from scratch, learning valuable shortcuts and workflow tips along the way. Discover how to manipulate shapes, keyframes, and properties to create smooth, organic animations that go beyond basic presets.

Joey Korenman : What's up Joey here at school of motion and welcome today, 24 of 30 days of after effects in today's video, we're going to talk about breaking down an effect into multiple layers inside of after effects and using a composite mindset to achieve a specific look that you're going for. On top of that, we're going to learn some cool tricks about ways to make things seem a little goopy, a quick shout out to Mount. MoGraph another amazing tutorial site, because one of the tricks that Matt showed in one of his videos I used in this video, because I thought it was great. So go check out Mount MoGraph. Don't forget to sign up for a free student account. So you can grab the project files from this lesson, as well as assets from any other lesson on the site. Now let's hop into after effects and get started.
Joey Korenman : So in this video, I'm going to show you a few tricks and I don't normally like to just show tricks, but what's what I'm hoping that everyone gets out of this is that one of the things you can do in after effects is you can use effects in ways that they're sort of, I don't know, they're not really intended to be used. And if you think more like a compositor, you can get so much control over the way your image looks. Okay. And so specifically what I'm gonna talk about is how to get this kind of cartoony look, but have complete and total control over it. You know, after effects is designs to, to try and almost prevent you from, from using it the way that I like to use it sometimes because it tries to hide complexity from you, by making things simple. There's a cartoon effect that you can use, but if you really want to dial in a look and be very specific, then a lot of times it's better to just roll your own stuff.
Joey Korenman : So we're going to start out, I'm going to show you how I did this kind of gooey popping thing. Um, and I have to, I have to first just say that this is, this effect is not something I figured out how to do on my own. I sort of, you know, I learned the basic trick a long time ago, and then, uh, I saw a Mt. MoGraph video, um, which did this cool little trick that I stole where, uh, you can get these holes in there. So let's hop in, let me show you how this thing is all put together. So let's make a new comp we'll just do 1920 by 10 80. All right. So here's what we're going to do. I'm going to start by making a circle and the way I usually do it, I just double-click, the ellipse tool makes a giant ellipse, and then I tap you twice to bring up my, uh, my size property.
Joey Korenman : And let's just make this like a hundred pixel or maybe 200 pixel and I don't want to stroke on it. So I'm going to turn the stroke to zero and turn the fill on. So there we go. So we have a white ball right there. All right. And I'm going to name this ball one. And, uh, so what I want to do is I want to have this thing split, right? Like a cell or something like that, and this is pretty easy, so I'm going to duplicate it. So there's two of them. I'm going to hit P and I'm going to separate the dimensions, and I'm gonna put a key frame on X position for both of these. So then I'm going to jump forward. Let's say we want this to take a second. So let's go forward one second. Right? So by the way, the way I move around so fast as a page down and page up, move forward and backwards frames.
Joey Korenman : And if you hold shift does 10 frames. So if I want to move forward a second it's shift page down page down, and then 1, 2, 3, 4 that's 24 frames really quickly, keyboard shortcuts are important. So let's move these, then let's move them in equal distance, right? So, uh, for, for this ball, uh, why don't we add 300 pixels to it? Okay. And this is a cool thing you can do in after effects is just select a value and type in minus 300 or plus 300. And this is a way you can be very, very precise with your values. Okay? So this is what's happening. Wonderful. We're done. Look at that. Perfect. So what I want is I want it to feel like at the beginning, these things are, are joined together and they're pulling and pulling and pulling and pulling, and they can't quite make it.