2.1 Envato Elements

Hi everyone, and welcome back to the rainy window effect course. In this lesson, will introduce the Raindrop map, and learn how to download assets from Envato elements. So you'll see here that we've got this Raindrop map file. And this video is made up of the, sort of, squiggly lines and squiggly dots, which will make up the, sort of, rain effect for our raindrop animation. And you'll see how these, sort of, squiggly lines are, sort of, traveling down the screen, as it were, as if it was traveling down a window. And we'll turn this into our rainy window animation. So let's get started by creating a new project, by going to File, New, and New project. And this will create an empty project for us to start with. Next, we'll want to create a new composition. So, let's go ahead and go to Composition, New Composition or ctrl N on the keyboard. And in this new window, we want to adjust this Composition Settings. So, at the top here, we can give our composition a name. So let's name this composition, RainDrop Map. And in this area here, we can adjust things, such as the size of the composition, the frame rate, and how long the animation is going to be. So you can either choose from the preset options here, so if we go down this menu, you'll see we've got the list of options here. If you know what sort of video you want to create, or we can create a custom one. So let's go ahead and put 1920 by 1080 pixels here, we'll want to put the frame right at 30 frames per second. And the duration of the project, we want to put at 10 seconds long. But we can always change this later on as we work through the project, cool. And once you're happy with the settings, go ahead and click OK. Now, this is the first composition we will create for this animation, which will consist of a black and white animated sequence, which we just had a looked at, which we'll use to control the rain effect, called the RainDrop Map. So now that we have the first composition set up, we can begin to export some of our external files into the project. In this case, we want to import our background photos or textures into the project. So let's go ahead and have a look at Envato elements, as it has a massive library of photos and film footage, that you can use for your own project. A good one to use for this sort of animation, would perhaps be something like say, a city skyline. So let's go ahead and check that out. And we can browse all these photos here, that we can click and download for our project. So if we click into here, for example, we can take a look at the sample footage here. And see what that looks like. And then if you like it, you can download the preview by clicking on the download Preview button here for a low res version of the video or footage. Or if you're a member, just download the video, excellent. So we can browse through the library and refine the categories on the left here. So if you can look here, we can browse through all the different items here. So let's go ahead and look for the items that we want. So let's go ahead and go to graphic templates. And we want to look for a sign, so if I click on Sign here, and search for a sign. You can see now, that we've got all these signs that we can click in to. And you can see for this picture here, we can easily use this one for our project. And we can remove the image, the sort of, sign here in Photoshop to make our own. So let's go back and just, sort of, browse through what we have here, and again, we've got this sign collection here that we can use for the project. But for this particular project, I'm going to use this image here. And for this sign, we can create a, sort of, neon light science or replace this image here. And once you've acquired the chosen photograph of the footage, we can import them into the project. So quickly jumping into Photoshop here, I'll show you how to open up your chosen file from Envato elements, and how we can edit it so that we can use it for our project. So go to File, Open, find where your chosen file is, where you've downloaded it. Open it up. And then from here, you'll notice that we've got a few different layers that we can switch on and off, for our image. So you can see here, that we've got these effects that they've given us here, which is made up of these Folders here, that we can choose from. So we can choose different types of filters, that we can use for our photo, like so. So let's go ahead and choose that one. And then you can also choose to remove the design, or the text here as well. So let's go ahead remove that. So click on the I icon here, to make it nice and plain. And also, we can choose to make it either night or day, which is pretty cool. So once you've finished editing the files here, or editing layers here, we can go ahead and save it, by going to File, Save As, and then save it as a JPEG, excellent. And then once you've saved that, we will go ahead and import it into After Effects. That's it for this lesson. In the next lesson, we'll learn how to create the raindrops, that's for a RainDrop map. See you all there.