Animating Diagonal Hatch Lines in After Effects with Shape Layer Repeater Effects

So in this lesson, we will be actually animating those little diagonal lines that we had in the line bundle, the ones we hid. So in a previous lesson, we made the animated lines bundle right here. I'll just double hit to open it.

And there were these hatched lines, one and two. I'm going to turn them back on. And if you look at it, I'll deselect this.

They're basically just like this shape repeated over and over again. I'm pressing and holding Z on my keyboard, and I'm going to click and drag to zoom in on that area. If you have the current version of the application, you will be able to do this scrubby zoom behavior.

If not, when you use the zoom tool, you click and drag to draw a zoom area around what you want to zoom in on. And you'll also be limited to very specific magnifications in the previous versions. If you haven't already done so, you should definitely upgrade just to get this feature.

It's great. Okay, so I'm going to convert this. And I'm only going to make really one of these.

And I'm basically just going to like duplicate it to use the other one. So I'm going to right click on this, create shapes and vector layer. If you don't have a two-button mouse, which is an old Mac thing, by the way, you can hold down control on your keyboard and click to get that menu.

Okay, it's calling hatched lines outline. I'm just going to rename that to hatched lines. Okay, so I'm going to look at this.

I'm going to the properties panel. And there's group one, two, three, four, five. And group one is the first one.

So the way this was made in Illustrator was one and then out from there. So I'm just going to basically delete all the other groups. So let's highlight them in the properties panel and just delete on my keyboard, backspace, whatever you have.

Okay, so what I would like is to basically be able to use this repeater effect that exists only for shape layers to animate just the lines extending and coming back. So I'm going to find that in my layer panel. I'll open the properties for that layer with a little arrow.

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Add is where I add the shape layer only effects and its repeater. Okay, and by default it'll go to the right by that much. Okay, I should probably turn the hatched lines one back on, lower its opacity, use it as a reference.

So let's knock it down to that. That way I can figure out how far apart they belong. I'm going to right click on that layer and say guide layer so it won't show up whenever this comp is used anyplace else.

It'll only display here. I'm also going to lock it so I don't move it around. Okay, okay.

And then with the repeater I'm going to open it up. I cannot do this in the properties panel unfortunately. It is something I only do in the timelines.

I gotta open up its options. I'm looking for transform repeater and it's the position instead of a hundred. It's like so three for a hundred.

I'm just going to scrub that value, hover over the number and drag. If you hold down command on Mac, control on windows, then scrubbing changes much slower. So I can basically get it to do like that for me if I'm careful.

And the number for that ended up being like negative 28. And I just need three, four, five, six, seven, eight more. So I need eight of these.

I need to be five more, but eight total. Like that. I notice it doesn't line up exactly.

So I'm just going to hold down command or control and scrub position a little more. They kind of like take their final position like that. That looks good.

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No one's going to see the original reference image. So unless there's a reason for it to have a very specific separation, no big deal. So the advantage of this is that I can then animate this however I like.

So I could animate the number of copies. I could animate the opacity changing. So for example, you could fade these out.

So they start off lighter. It's kind of cool. Okay.

It's up to you. Now what I want to do is change the end opacity. I'll make that end opacity not zero, but I'll just make it lighter.

So maybe it's like 20%. Okay. And now I am going to turn off the original reference.

So that's actually what I have. It fades out. And what I want to do is animate the repeater going from one to eight, basically.

And I want this not to be randomized. I actually want it to just grow and extend back and forth. I want to ping pong it back and forth.