Intro to Expression Rigs in After Effects

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Expressions in After Effects can automate repetitive tasks, build flexible rigs for animators, and allow you to do some amazing things that are impossible with keyframes...and they’re not as complicated as you may think.
This tutorial comes from our Advanced Motion Methods course, and in it Nol Honig and Zack Lovatt will teach you how to use expressions to build flexible rigs, plus some more advanced tricks you can start using right away.

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Partial, Auto-Generated Transcript Below 👇

Joey Korenman (00:00): After Effects rigs like this one are built using expressions. This tutorial comes from our advanced motion methods course and in it, Nol Honig and Zack love it. We'll teach you how to use expressions to build flexible rigs, plus some more advanced tricks you can start using right away. Let's keep,

Nol Honig (00:24): I know you're all really eager to get going. So let's jump right into after effects. I do want to jump in and talk about expression controls, which some of you might know about, but others might not. And they will definitely help out when dealing with the big rig that we've set up for the end of this tutorial. Okay. And also expression controls are awesome. I love them. They're really great for people like me, who aren't necessarily really good at coding because they allow you to just kind of click and drag and you know, the code is written for you essentially. So it's a lot easier in many cases, right? So let's talk about expression controls.

Nol Honig (01:02): What I've done here is I set up a little comp with an orange square and a blue square and a controller, which I've made a guide layer. That is just a null object. Okay. So if I select this and I go up to effect, you see that there are all these expression controls up here. You've probably played around with some of these, the ones that I want to talk about today, which I find most useful in my own workflow though. I use all of them. I'm going to talk about angle control, checkbox control, and slider control. Okay. Let's start with angle control. I think that's the easiest to comprehend right on. So when I click this on, I get this kind of familiar looking angle control, right. And I can call this like square rotation or whatever, just make it easier to understand what this is for.

Nol Honig (01:42): Okay. So now obviously, if I want to link, actually I lied. I got to take this and I'm going to lock it up here so that this effect control panel stays there. Okay. So I'm going to take these and I'm going to press are to reveal the rotation property. And it's very simple to affect these squares rotation using this angle control. Okay. All I would have to do is option or alt if you're on a PC click on the rotation and then pick whip up here to the angle control, I think you all know how to do this probably, but just in case, it's not clear. Now when I roll this angle, control this square rotates, right. And I can do the same thing for the blue square. Um, I can option or I'll click on this. And now we go over to this angle control and now both will work through this one control.

Nol Honig (02:30): Okay. But actually what I want to do in this exercise is show how I can set things up, for example, so that the squares rotate in opposite directions, which is slightly more complicated, but not actually that hard because in this case, all I'd have to do is just choose one of the squares or the other, and then get in here in the code and then just type times negative one. Okay. And now I believe they would twirl oppositely. Yes. Which is really fun and cool. And just in case it isn't totally clear. Let me just explain the math that's on underneath the hood here. Okay. So if I set my square rotation to 61, for example, then down here, my orange squares rotation is at 61 as you'd expect. And the blue square is at negative 61. And the reason why that is, is because of this code in here in which I have multiplied it by negative one.

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