From the course: After Effects CC 2021: Character Animation Essential Training

Unlock the full course today

Join today to access over 22,400 courses taught by industry experts or purchase this course individually.

Shape layer vs. masks

Shape layer vs. masks - After Effects Tutorial

From the course: After Effects CC 2021: Character Animation Essential Training

Start my 1-month free trial

Shape layer vs. masks

- [Instructor] The tools that are used to create shape layers in After Effects are also the same tools used to create masks. Masks are a powerful way to obscure or reveal a portion of a selected layer. Let's see how they work. In this composition, I've got my character, and he's made up of several different illustrator layers. I'd like to add some texture into my character, and I'm going to to start with the beard layer. And wouldn't it be great if I could just focus in on just this one layer and not really see in the timeline, all these other layers. There is in fact, an easy way to do this. Making sure our timeline is selected, we'll come up over here to edit and go down to select all. Now let's deselect our beard layer. I'll focus in on this column of switches. And this is the shy layer switch. You can see our icon has this little guy. And if we tap on it, you can see that all the selected layers now have our guy…

Contents