Animate chevron shapes in After Effects to create a dynamic marquee-style motion effect, often seen in racing graphics and digital signage. This article walks through layer selection, pre-composition, duplication, and precise adjustments to shape and alignment using After Effects’ properties panel.
Key Insights
- The article demonstrates how to pre-compose multiple layers—such as the chevron and its reference layer—using the “Move All Attributes” option in order to consolidate and manage complex animations within a single comp.
- Detailed instructions are provided on duplicating and aligning shape layers horizontally, adjusting their scale and tracking properties to replicate a stylized, repetitive motion effect.
- Noble Desktop recommends using guide layers and locking mechanisms to keep reference layers visible only in the current composition, ensuring clarity and control during the animation process.
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So I am in the main composition, shape animation HUD. I'm just going to close out the other ones. There's a little X next to each of these little tabs.
Every time you double click on a comp to open it, it opens another tab, and that can get kind of messy. So I'm just going to close them out back in my main shape animation HUD. And what I'm going to do here is actually animate the last piece of this, which is that chevron that's supposed to be in the background.
It's supposed to kind of animate like a marquee or trailing lights where the chevron simply like animates towards itself. Kind of like you might see at a racetrack sometimes when they have that little racing thing, the drag races have it. So it's kind of cool.
So for that, I'm going to need to turn back on the chevron layer. And what I want to do is basically combine the chevron and the reference, which is this diagonal chevrons right back there. So I'm going to highlight them both.
I click on chevron. I hold down command or control on Windows, and that allows me to select layers out of order. Shift would select everything in between.
Command or control selects only what you click on. If you need to deselect, command or control will deselect as well. So I've got them both.
I'll right click on one and choose pre-compose. I will just call this chevron animation. And again, because I have multiple layers being used to make this pre-comp, my only choice is move all attributes.
Okay. Now the other two choices, adjust composition duration. If my layers had been shorter than the comp length, I could have used that to make a new comp that matches their length.
And open new composition. We just open it right as I'm click OK. It's not a bad thing to open the comp as you just first create it, but I tend to forget to turn it off.
So I'll just manually open the comp as I've done before. Whenever you have multiple layers selected, especially if there's layers in between, when you pre-comp them, they get pulled to the topmost layer. So now everything is actually up here.
You can actually see it's in front of the globe. We'll fix that when we're done. So I'll just open that chevron animation.
Actually, I'm gonna, like so, double click on it and I'm here. Now the diagonal chevrons are just reference. I am going to go to properties and lower their opacity a little bit.
So make them a little easier to see. 50, 54, somewhere around there is actually pretty good. I'm going to, so they don't show up outside of this comp I'm using them in, right click guide layer.
And then I'll lock them so they don't move. So the goal is that we're going to have these chevrons diagonally in the entire comp. And this I'm going to animate towards each other.
But to do that, I'm first going to build them out horizontally. I'm going to build one set and then I'm going to duplicate it. So I'm going to double click on the name of the layer chevron that selects it.
I'm going to copy that. I'll click right next to the chevron. I'm going to paste it.
I need 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 of these. So I'll paste it, which is command V or control V. Five more times. 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. Like so.
I'm just going to use my selection tool to move it over. So a little more centered. I could also use the align command by the way.
And I need to make them look more like that. So for this, I'm going to adjust some settings in the text itself. So the first thing is they're a little taller and narrower.
So I'm just going to go into the character properties in the properties panel. And that layer selected. I'm going to adjust the horizontal scale.
It's actually right there. That's pretty good. Somewhere around 60, 65 would probably be nice.
60, 65, something like that. And they're actually a little too tall. So I'm going to actually squash them down a little bit.
So maybe I'll lower that down to maybe 90%. If you hold down command on Mac or control on Windows while you scrub that value. Click and drag on that value in one motion.
The number will change much, much slower. Okay. If you hold down shift while you do that, it'll change much, much faster.
It's not bad. I'll just round it off to 90, I think. That looks pretty good.
I could probably do a little more adjustment, but it looks pretty nice. Again, the only time I'm ever going to show the reference is now. I see it.
No one else will really see it. Unless there is a need for a specific character. Specific character, exact shape for some reason or another.
Close enough is usually fine. I need to move them closer together. So right here is the tracking property.