Looping Animated Scenes in Adobe After Effects

Learn how to create seamlessly looping animations for websites, social media, or as part of longer, narrated animations.
Animations that loop can be mesmerizing! There’s just something satisfying about watching and making looping animations. But, if you’ve ever thought about trying to make an entire animated scene loop seamlessly, then you know that it can be overwhelming to figure out how to time everything just right.
While this class will have step-by-step instruction in After Effects, it's much more than that. I'll explain the thought process behind the techniques used, to help you think like a motion designer and enable you to apply these ideas to your future work.
In the first part of this class, we’ll talk about the conceptual side of making looping animations and discuss best practices. You'll learn:
the difference between looping animations and gifs
when and where to use different file formats
how to plan out your loop
how to decide how long your loop should be
best practices for looping animations
how to make sure your loop is seamless (and what exactly that means)
best practices when working with gifs
Then we’ll dive into After Effects to animate a looping underwater scene. You can download a partially animated After Effects file (from the "Projects and Resources" tab) so that we can focus on making these animations loop. You'll learn how to:
use different loop expressions (no previous experience with expressions is necessary!)
add overlapping action/follow through to looping animations
loop a composition
offset looping elements within a scene
make sure that every element within a scene loops perfectly
render a video file
render a .gif file
Plus a lot of time saving tips!