If you use
after effects, you need to try this tool. Say, I want to animate this logo,
but I want to animate each of these shapes individually. Your first instinct might be to go ahead
and create a mask for each of these shapes You don't want to do that. There's already a feature built
into After Effects to do that for you. All you gotta do is select your layer. Go up to layer and go down to auto trace. This will bring up a box. And what this feature does is it automatically traces
and creates a
mask for each of the shapes. This works best for images
that don't have a background like PNGs. You'll want to leave the channel on Alpha,
and the only thing you might want to adjust is the tolerance. The lower the number,
the more accurate it'll follow the shapes. If you raise this up, as you can see,
it doesn't really follow the shapes all that well. So we want this to be accurate,
so we're going to keep it one. Go ahead and hit. Okay. And it creates a mask for each
of those shapes for you au
tomatically. You can then take those masks, convert them into shape layers
and animate them from there, This also works for images
that don't have a transparent background. For example, say I want to get the squares
inside of the Microsoft logo. If I go ahead and go up to layer
auto trace, you can see that it's just doing that outside
because that is the shape of the image. You can then mess around with the channel,
go down to red or green or blue, and you can kind of see
what shapes will be cre
ated. Blue seems to be pretty good. It's getting almost
all of the shapes that I need. So I'm going to go ahead and click okay. And as you can see, it's created a mask
for the outside and these three boxes. But I still need the blue square. So what I do in this case is
I go to effects and search in color key. I like to key out the other colors so that way when I do auto trace,
it only has one option to choose from. I added three color keys
and I'm going to key out the other squares and then when
I go up to layer auto trace,
I can then change it to red. As you can see, the blue box, I mean, it's kind of hard to tell,
but the blue box is now highlighted. I go ahead and hit. Okay. It created a bunch of masks.
I don't need all of them. I just need this one
so I can go ahead and delete those other ones. there you go. I now have a mask
for each of these shapes, even though this picture
did not have a transparent background. I can then delete the color keys. I don't need those anymore. I can
then take these masks
and convert them into shape layers and animate them from there. If this tutorial helped
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