30(ish) Clicks — No. 7

Hey Fablers, and welcome back to another Fable Academy 30(ish) Clicks. In this series, we focus on making really cool graphics in as few clicks as possible to help you get up and running inside of Fable in no time flat.

In this particular episode, we're going to make this kind of cool, graphical looking element. It can be used for things such as FUI, also known as fancy user interface. You'll see things like this in every type of glass surface, touchscreen, commercials, television, all over the place.

It's a very commonplace type of graphic these days, and this is a great first example to get you started. So let's just dive right in.

Our first step is to make sure that our desktop is set to 1920 by 1080, make sure that the background is enabled. You'll see that because it becomes a solid color. Let's set our background color, make sure it's pure black.

Now, first thing we're gonna do is go to the top left. Choose our ellipse tool, make a larger ellipse. Center it using our alignment tools in the top right.

Next let's turn off our fill here on the right. Turn on our stroke. Let's set that stroke to 10, so we can really see what's going on here.

With our ellipse selected, we're going to go up to our effects library here, and we're going to punch in trim path. Click, drag, and drop.

What we're going to do here is now at the beginning of our timeline. We're going to set right at zero seconds, a keyframe for trim start and trim end. Let's make sure that it's set to 100 in both cases.

Then let's move up to about a second and a half right about here. We're going to set now our trim start and our trim end at 0%.

And yes, I know what you're thinking. This makes everything disappear. You are correct. We're going to fix this next.

We're going to drag the first keyframe of the trim end, click drag it, and let's move it to somewhere in the middle. And so now we get this cool staggered start and end. So let's play this real quick.

This is what you get. Next, we're going to highlight our two starting keyframes here. The first both with the trim start and the trim end. And we're going to go up here to the right and under velocity, we're going to click on quick influence.

We're going to set the influence in to 100% and the influence out to 30%.

Now you can adjust those values as you see fit.

ALT+] to shorten our first layer here to exactly one and a half seconds. So now we've got this. This is going to serve as our base for the rest of the effect.

Cool. So now we're going to collect our layer, duplicate it, using CTRL+D or command D if you're on a Mac. We're going to take this second layer, and we're going to go up here to the top right, and let's set our scale to about 70%, both in the X and the Y.

Next we're going to choose our rotation, and we're going to set that to 90%. Then we're going to drop down our keyframe visibility and we're going to select all our key frames. Hold down alt, and then drag these to be one second.

Once again, select our layer. ALT+] to shorten that guy up.

And now let's adjust these as well to about a half a second to really emphasize this offset. Now ALT+[.

Our keyframes jumped. No worries. Just select them and slide them over. And now let's hit play to see what we got. We're starting to get this cool offset of moving graphical lines.

Then we're going to take this second ellipse that we have again, duplicate it. We're going to then set the rotation on the top right here to minus 90.

We're going to set our scale to 50, both in the X and the Y.

Then choosing our two front keyframes up here in velocity. We're going to set the influence in to 100 and the influence out to 5%.

You can just click and drag the slider over right about there.

Take a look at this one more time. Now we're starting to get somewhere. Looks pretty rad.

Now let's go somewhere right around here, about 19 frames in. Let's take our pen tool and we're going to draw a line that connects our two smaller ellipses. So go from here to here. Press escape to create our shape.

This is shape one. We're going to set our color to white over here on the right.

And let's set our stroke width also to 10, so that this matches what we had going on.

We're going to hit edit path. Let's adjust these a little bit just to make sure they're nice.

Now, once again, go to our effects panel. Select our trim paths, drag and drop. And what we're going to do here is at 0.5 seconds, we're going to set a keyframe on trim start and on trim end. Set them both to 0%.

Then halfway between here, probably around one second, we're going to set both of these at one hundred. Then we're going to move the trim end keyframe forward by one frame.

So this guy right here, let's see what happens with that.

Kind of bopping around a little bit too quick. So what we might try and do here, is just stagger that keyframe a little bit. So with that, it makes a little bit more sense now,.

You can adjust these as you see fit.

That looks pretty cool.

Let's duplicate our line here. I don't really like the cap, so we're going to make this round cap.

Let's duplicate our line. And now with this new line, we're going to slide these forward a tiny bit, our end keyframes. This is going to give us kind of this cool little double slide effect with a little bit of a tail drag. If you notice it's a little bit more subtle, it makes it feel a little bit nicer, more like a laser type beam thing happening there.

And one more time, let's go over here with our two front keyframes selected, we'll go up to velocity. Turn on quick influence, set our influence in to 40% and our influence out to 100%.

We're going to set this stroke here to 20.

There we have it. A cool little FUI style animation. Happy Fabling.