Quick Start: Part 2 of 3
In chapter two of Quick Start you'll enhance your project with external strokes, background animation and motion trails.
Learn how to create a color gradient, use the Trim Path effect, tweak duplicated layers for quick and integrated additions, and scale your animation proportionally in real-time.
Want to learn more about the effects/behaviors in this chapter?
Check out Trim Path.
*If your interface looks a bit different throughout this series, don’t worry. We’re constantly improving the platform and deploying new features. If the changes make this tutorial difficult reach out, we're happy to help.
Hey, everybody. Welcome back to the Fable Quick Start course. Our course that's meant to get you up and running inside of Fable as quickly as possible. This is video number two of three. So let's see where we left off at the end of chapter one. So at the end of chapter one, we were left this cool little portal into this wave world, with our rotating moon.
This time we're going to continue down this path and we're going to add a few external strokes, some background animation, and some motion trails for our white ellipse. So if you followed along in section one, you should have something that looks like this. Our very first step is let's add some of those colorful gradient arcs on the outside.
Do that, grab your shape tool and the ellipse and draw a large circle. In the center ish of your screen. Remember, we're going to use our tools in the top right, to center and align it, turn off the fill as we don't need it for this effect. And turn on the stroke.
This number is a bit arbitrary, make it, whichever thickness you'd like, and then you're going to click on the color and choose linear for linear gradient, select the first color and let's make it yellow, select the second color and let's make it our light blue. To introduce some movement, go to the top right in the effects library. And you're going to look for the one that says trim paths. And just as the name states, what we're going to animate is the beginning and ending points as well as the rotation offset of where the beginning and end points live on the stroke.
So here we can use these values.
Check our animation here real quick. And the last thing to do before we check it is let's change the end caps of our stroke from butt to round.
The last thing that we need to animate here is our opacity. We want it to fade on a little bit more subtly. So from zero to 100 at the beginning, and then from 100 opacity to zero at the end of our animation. I'm using about 10 frames here, but you can use this as you like.
Good practice is to keep a nice and organized project. Let's rename the stroke to one, and we'll make the stroke layers green so that they're easily visible in the stack.
Again, control D. Now we have our second stroke and all we need to do to make it feel like it's revolving around our central artwork is rotate it 180 degrees.
Next let's work on these little motion trails. So once again, control D to duplicate. Let's name this one motion trail. We're going to select our gradient fill and set it back to solid. Let's use our white for this one and we're going to adjust the size of the stroke. So it's just enough that it feels like a nice little accent.
Now let's link our height and width properties to scale proportionally. Let's bring it down a little bit until it feels right about in the center of the white orb. Now, one thing we can do here is you're going to drop down with a twirl, all of your key frames on the motion path. You're going to highlight by clicking and dragging all of your key frames.
And then you're going to press alt and hold or option and hold. If you're on a Mac, you'll see your key frames through blue. What this does is it lets you scale your animation proportionately in real time. So you can basically play with this as you're previewing it and see pretty much instantly. How moving those around will affect when our stroke appears, how long it stays on when it fades.
This is entirely up to your own personal preference of how you end up leaving these key frames in place. The goal is to get this nice feeling of the white orb, leaving a trail.
Our next step is going to be to start dropping in some background animation. But once again, let's draw a large circle using our shape tool and align it to the center and use the controller in the center as a little reference point of where the middle is going to set it to white. Let's turn our opacity down to about 20% and then you're going to drag a blend mode and we're going to set it to add.
Now let's just animate the Y position. It's going to start there and at the end, we're just going to invert it so that it travels from the bottom to the top of our screen.
Let's set our animation curve to Quart. Once again, let's rename our background, bring it to the bottom of the layer stack.
We're going to duplicate it and now simply invert those key frames. So we have one that starts at the bottom and moves to the top and the other one moves from the top to the bottom. And now once you play, there we go. Just like that. We've reached the end of section two. We'll see you guys in the next video.
Create and export your first animation in Fable in under 30 minutes