Eternally scrolling bushes, V2

To finish up the animatic (for now, at least!) I had a shot at replacing those circles with actual bushes to see how the effect would look and, most importantly, whether it would still work...

I apologise in advance for the informal tone of this post. I do try to maintain some level of relative professionalism, but when trying to explain something relatively tricky I find that if I don't laugh (or make crap jokes), I'll cry...

I started, most logically, by drawing a bush. It is, beyond any shadow of a doubt, the foliage equivalent of the Mona Lisa — try not to weep at my artistic ability.

I actually only drew half a bush and then mirrored it — a precaution to ensure that it did definitely loop seamlessly. I'm sure it would work with an asymmetrical bush, but I didn't feel much like running that risk!

With the bush happily drawn and imported into After Effects (as a layered composition, natch), the next thing was to apply the Motion Tile effect (found under Effect > Stylize > Motion Tile)

The Tile Center parameter is the one of interest — as said before, this will give us the seamless "conveyor belt" effect. I wish I'd thought of describing it as a conveyor belt when I was first trying to find out how to do this. Would've saved a lot of time.

Slap a keyframe on there, then we need to ensure we get a seamless loop. To do that we need to make sure that the position of the bush is exactly the same at the first and last keyframes — the easiest way to do that is numerically. Right clicking on the parameter gives you the "Edit Value" dialogue box, which gives you a greater degree of control over the movement of the tile.

In this instance I chose to use "percentage of source" as the unit of measurement. I guess you could do it with pixels but I can't handle that many numbers. The objective here is to have it move in equal increments and complete one (or two or however many you want) cycles and end up exactly where it started. Theoretically, we could just insert a very high number and that would pretty much play as long as we need it to, but for simplicity I wanted it to scroll just once. I could then loop the animation using just an expression.

Anyway, in order for it to end up exactly where it started, we need to set the ending value in multiples of whatever our beginning keyframe is. Confused? Me too, but trust me, it works! So in this instance, we're starting at 50%, so our last value needs to be a multiple of 50.

150% in this case, would be one complete cycle and a half. The bush in the first frame is halfway off the screen, so ending on another half value will lead into the next bush (which will also be halfway off-screen) and continue the cycle. The next screenshot illustrates that better:

So you can see that by duplicating this bush layer many times and aligning them next to each other, we'll get a side-scrolling loop of as many bushes as we possibly need. Hooray!

The bushes are inside their own composition, so I just dropped those onto the main composition (containing the rest of the scene) and activated the 3D layer switch.

I then just tweaked the Y and Z rotation/orientations to try and roughly line up the bushes with the edge of the path. It's at this point that the first problem becomes apparent — being 2D objects rotated on a 3D axis, they're very, very flat. Not a good look. I'm not sure how we can get around this — the only thing that springs to mind is to simply draw the bushes at the correct angle/perspective to the path, but I'm not sure how that would affect the looping, or indeed whether it would still work at all. Definitely something to experiment with.

I also used the Corner Pin effect (Effect > Distort > Corner Pin) which works something like Photoshop's perspective transform to squash the bushes down as they got further into the distance, but that in itself is a problem — the more you transform it, the more distorted the bushes become, leading to pretty ugly/low quality images. Not cool.

To get the bushes on the other side I just duplicated this composition and flipped it around, adjusting the rotation to match the other side of the path.

I used the same effect to animate the path, using this seamless tile texture I stole off the internet:

I quickly desaturated it and scaled it horizontally to fit the width of the path and used the same combination of motion tile (moving it on the Y axis instead of the X) and corner pin to get the perspective right. It's quick and lazy but it sort of works and it serves to give us an indication of what we need to do. It's now just trying to replicate this effect in a style that matches the rest of the backdrops...

Jae did suggest using textures over Jazzy's flat colour backgrounds, so using a loopable ground texture might slot nicely into that. Again, it'll be something we need to experiment with before reaching a final decision.

The very last thing I did was try to get the bushes/ground to stop when the crow does — After Effects has a feature called "Time Remapping" which, to steal Adobe's description, distorts time for a range of frames within a layer. This basically means that you set a couple of keyframes to mark the section you want to mess with. It's possible to speed up, slow down or even reverse entire sections (endless possibilities for lip sync!) but it's confusing and irrelevant (for now) — the most straightforward use is to add "holds" or pauses. Basically, to freeze-frame.

Simply right click on the layer you want to alter, go to Time and then Enable Time Remapping.

I marked the point I wanted the ground/bushes to stop moving — in this case, just as the hang glider is obscuring the screen — and set down a keyframe. We want this position to be held for the entirety of the animation, so copy the keyframe and paste it right at the end of the sequence. Because the values are the same, it'll hold there. Forever.

I didn't want it to judder to a halt too suddenly, so for the first "hold" keyframe I applied an "Easy Ease" effect just to soften it slightly. I could then just copy and paste these keyframes onto the bush layers (after enabling time remapping).

The finished scene:

Again, multiple issues — squashed bushes and random cutoffs that even the crow couldn't disguise! For all intents and purposes, though, it sort-of works. Hopefully these problems will be something we're able to work around... it will, with any luck, be a simple case of altering the artwork for best effect.