Help animating a snake using trim paths

Question

Hello friends,

I am pretty new at After Effects and I wanted to try to make an animation of a snake slithering in the grass. I'm wagering there's a different way to do this, but I got a decent animation of this using the pen tool with a trim paths effect and adding keyframes to the start and end. It looks OK (for a noob), but my problem now is that I'm not sure how to add features like the snake's eyes and tongue. As of now, it just looks like a squiggly line, but I wanted to make it look more like a snake.

If anyone can help me figure this out, I would appreciate it! I used wetransfer.com to share the project file I'm working with: https://we.tl/t-Aw34Mnw4GS

Thanks so much!

Brian

Mylenium · Answer

Well, simply not how'd you do it and unfortunately you picked a task for which AE has no elegant stock effect or other built in solution. The hard way would be to build the snake as a 2D towel strip pre-comp and deform it using the Puppet Tool and so on, the simple solution would be to buy a plug-in like Trapcode TAO. Of course there's any number of solutions inbetween. If you're not super-obsessive about realism, copy & pasting your path as a motion path for your eyes and offsetting the timing might already be sufficient and you can apply similar logic for other stuff. In any case, it's just nmot a question of "Which function or effect must I use?". There is simply nothing straightforward in AE's default toolbox.

Mylenium

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