Tutorial: Spider Web Animation in After Effects

So here’s a tutorial that may mimic a certain theme you’ve seen before. I show you how to create a spider web in Illustrator and then animate it to catch text in After Effects. It’s not limited to just text, you could make it catch anything, even footage. Here’s a link to the font I used. I’ve also included the web I created in Illustrator, in case you don’t have that application you can still follow along. I know it’s a big file, but After Effect’s continuous rasterization was messing up the effects added to the web, so I made it big enough to not require scaling it up. Lastly, I forgot to mention one little part that makes the web a little more realistic, but I didn’t want to go back and redo part of the tutorial since it was already compressed by the time I thought of it. A spider web has slight variations in the thickness of the web, or it at least appears to. It probably has to do with how the light hits it. So there’s a way to achieve this: Just ad a solid with fractal noise as a track matte above your web. Set the track matte to luma with some setting seen here on this screenshot. It just adds a little variance to the web.

Spider Web Animation Tutorial from Mike on Vimeo.

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