#Moving drop shadow after effects how to#

Why bother?Įven if your desktop likely handles animating box-shadow without any issues, your phone may not, and even your desktop may start to stutter when animating a more complex layout. That’s certainly a lot of CSS to achieve the same effect as simply animating box-shadow, just with improved performance. In the «Object’s position settings» pop-up window, you can select the position of the shadow on the timeline. Open the Video Effects menu at the top, proceed to Special FX and select Shadow. This is the critical difference between the two techniques, stripping out all of the other layout styles: To add a drop shadow to the text, take the following steps: Make a click on the text object on the timeline to select it. We minimize the amount of repaints (and work that your browser has to do) by sticking to only changing these two properties during the animation.

#Moving drop shadow after effects how to#

Why are we seeing this effect? There are very few CSS properties that can be animated without constantly triggering repaints for every frame, namely opacity and transform. A super quick and easy tutorial on how to achieve the instant reactive lighting and dynamic shadows using Adobe After Effects, only with a few clicks. There are clearly more re-paints when hovering the cards on the left side (animating box-shadow), compared to hovering the cards on the right side (which animate the opacity of their pseudo-element). If you bring up your developer tools and hover one of these items, you should see something similar to this (green bars are paints less is better): 20,000+ After Effects Templates: - In this tutorial video, you will learn how to create realistic live shadows in After Effects. click the down arrow on the drop shadow compositing options. you could try going to the compositing options on the effect and choosing the mask. But I would not do this as it is going to not look right. On the left we’re animating box-shadow on hover, and on the right we’re adding a pseudo-element with :after, applying the shadow to that, and animating the opacity of that element. You can duplicate & then mask all the face shadowed area feather the masks & then play with the brightness if you want to remove the shadows. The only difference is how we apply and animate the shadow. In this tutorial you’ll learn how to easily add a drop shadow to a layer in After Effects.Here’s a quick recap:Find the layer in the timeline that you want t.

If the two examples look the same to you, that’s the point. Have a look at the demo and compare the two different techniques we’ll be exploring. There’s an easy way of mimicking the same effect, however, with minimal re-paints, that should let your animations run at a solid 60 FPS: animate the opacity of a pseudo-element. Animating a change of box-shadow will hurt performance. How do you animate the box-shadow property in CSS without causing re-paints on every frame, and heavily impacting the performance of your page? Short answer: you don’t.