5 Trendy Motion Graphic Gradient Reveal Techniques | After Effects Tutorial

in this video we'll take a look at five trendy motion graphic gradient reveal techniques we'll be taking a look at different ways to create gradient strokes swirls adding grain to the video and stylizing your logo to match the scene what's up everyone hope you're doing well my name is shaw gonzalez from animation deconstructed if you're new to the channel make sure to subscribe and turn that bell notification on so you know when i release new videos i've broken this video up into chapters so that you can skip ahead or come back at a later stage to re-watch something that interests you let's jump straight in inside after effects i have a new composition which is 1920 by 1080p 30 frames per second and 11 seconds long and press ok also just going to zoom up here so we can see about four seconds of our timeline right click new solid and we're going to create some gradient background and to come over to the effects and presets panel i'm going to type in gradient and we're going to drop the gradient ramp onto this holding shift let's just drag this to the top left and to the bottom right and we'll adjust the colors got a few written down here so you can follow along if you want e400ff and the second color is going to be 003cff what i'm going to do is also add a turbulent displace onto this to add some more randomness to this i'm going to take the size up take that all the way to 1000 go to frame zero turn the evolution on and i'm just going to go right to the end here and change that to three revolutions and if we press you can just see our keyframes there and i'm going to go to the beginning here just drag through and see how this looks twirl everything up ctrl d to duplicate and we're just going to change some colors here i want to change these just to sort of like pastel shades of the colors before that should be good and i'm going to drop this one below next thing i'm going to do is just zoom out slightly and we're going to mask this so hold down and make sure you've got the pen tool selected and to click here do something sort of random really come out on the sides here at the bottom and then m three times so we can see the mask properties we're gonna drag up on our feather let's take this pretty high about a thousand should be good and at zero we're going to keyframe our mask and move over and just go to 11 seconds and double click on the mouse rotate it and move it into place around here should be good and then if we actually move you'll see that it doesn't rotate so what we need to do is just copy the first keyframe paste it double click rotate it 90 degrees and move it into place and now if we move through here we'll see that it actually rotates and pulses i'm going to take these two layers i'm going to pre-compose them and call them gradient one move all attributes in two and in our project i'm just going to take that layer and i'm going to duplicate it up three times i'm going to recolor number two and three just adding some different shades and i'll see you back here in a few moments so i've gone ahead and recolored gradients two and three and if you want to use the colors that i've used exactly check the description i've got them written out there in order but just to take a look at the effects got some pastel ones below and some darker ones above and the same for this it's just a lot pinker but feel free to use any sort of colors that you want number four i want this to be completely complementary to gradient one so what i'm going to do is just create a new adjustment layer come over to effects and presets type in cc color offset add that to just the red phase and the green phase maybe -90 take this into the blues and then just add some more green to this so maybe about 60 and i'm happy with that once we've created our colors for our theme we can go ahead and start creating the pulses which we'll animate over the background in order to create our pulse i'm going to right click create a new solid let's choose a black layer call this pulse 1 press ok come over to the shape tools hold down and make sure that you're selecting the ellipse tool holding ctrl and shift let's just click and drag to create a circle and then holding down on the pen tool i'm going to choose my mask feather tool i'm going to drag this in let's just create something a bit more interesting going to click here and drag to the edge so that we've got a soft side and a hard edge then i'm going to press s for the scale turn on my scale so i've just zoomed into my timeline and let's move this over to about 24 25 around about here i'm gonna zoom in a little bit more and then at zero let's take this down to zero percent move over to this keyframe and just oversize this so it scales over the whole image and i'm going to add the rotation by shift r and turn that on and about here i want it to be -1 so it's actually rotating to the left i'm happy with that let's duplicate the background i'm going to track matte and i'm also going to press r for rotation and rotate this 180 degrees now we should have something like this i also want this to fade out after this has taken over the screen so that we can get back to our original background i'm going to create a new mask let's do something like this press m three times take the feather up i want it really soft so maybe 350 would be good also want to invert this so it's doing the opposite and then just the expansion let's start that right about here so mark at about 20 frames let's move over to one and a half seconds and take this right up go back here and just take this right down until we can't see it now if we play through this pretty happy with that select both keyframes and f9 to easy ease moving ahead let's create another pulse and the way i want to do this is actually using shape layers going to double click to create a circle press u twice hold alt and double click on the constrained proportions on the size it'll create a circle it's just to make this a bit smaller i don't want any fill on this i do want a stroke and 100 pixels should be perfect for that stroke start this at zero i'm going to turn the scale on move over to about let's say about 125 add a keyframe we're going to take this one down to zero turn the keyframe on for the stroke width and let's see how this looks pretty happy with that let's go over to the end here and take that down to zero i'm going to select all these keyframes press f9 go to the graph editor make sure that you're in the speed graph select all these keyframes let's just pull this slightly and then pull this one quite a lot so it slows down at the end ctrl shift c call this pulse 2 so we're pre-composing move all attributes into new composition close our graph editor go into this we have to close our gravity editor as well there and then you can see this happening to make this a bit easier to work with ctrl k to bring up your composition settings and we're going to change this to two seconds long and i want to create another pulse width inside this that is going to be smaller with like a glass edge to it so i'm going to select my ellipse tool double click create a new circle u twice and alt double click on the constrain proportions let's make this about 600 by 600 i want a full but i don't want to stroke with this one and then i'm going to move to about let's say we start to set about eight frames i'm going to move this over add a keyframe for stars and we're going to move over let's say about 125 add a keyframe there and i can take this down to zero to see if this is moving yep okay in order to create that soft inner i'm going to duplicate this to solo this so you can see what's happening add a gaussian blur and take this right up and let's take this to about 100. then what we can do is actually alpha invert map this you can already see the look that we're going for but i want to just tighten those edges in so press u on the top shape to get your keyframes let's move this off say about 25 24. let's actually bring this in wanted to end a bit earlier so i'm going to take this right up so something like this i'm going to select all the keyframes press f9 and do a similar kind of adjustment on the keyframes slightly forward and pull these back a bit more close the graph editor and let's take a look at this you can close this go back to your main composition and what we're going to do is duplicate this gradient layer here let's press m and get rid of the mask which is on there and i'm going to hide this top layer it's already alpha matting the top layer so we should start seeing a nice pulse inside there also just want to bring up the rotation it's at 180 right now so i'm going to turn that on it's zero and i'm going to move over to right at the end here and change this to one and zero so this is rotating and giving us a bit more movement now you'll see this breaks our actual circle because it's getting clipped over there but we can easily fix this by adding a cc repeat tile or reptile double click that change the repeat to unfold and then drag on the down and drag on the up and you'll see it actually fixes those holes one more preview just to see the pulse next we can start creating the soft gradient swirls which are happening over the scene and this technique that i'm using is pretty unique so let's create a new solid black and we're going to call this strokes1 press ok and i'm going to create a new mask on here select the ellipse tool control shift constrain proportions and let's draw something almost as big as the height of the composition and select my feather tool and reduce the same sort of thing that i did before just to follow a pattern in this animation i'm going to move this over to about one second so i want these to start after these pulses and some of these swirls to start happening here i'm going to solo the background and just solo this layer so that we're working with this for now first thing i want to do is add a linear white to this so transition linear wire double click that and let's just change this completion say about fifty percent i'm going to take the feather far up let's say about 300 looks good and just change the angle of this something like that next i want to add a transform to this so transform let's drop that below actually make this take that to about zero what i want to do is actually move this position so select this button right here otherwise we might move the anchor points when we move left and right it won't be the position so select the position by pressing over there we're going to move this to the right about over here going to turn on the keyframe for the position press u so that we can see it and i want this animation to play out over let's say about two seconds so move over to three seconds move this back into the center almost around here ctrl shift d just to cut the layer and delete so that we've only got this area here now we can work a bit neater i'm now going to just keyframe my linear wipe so let's turn the keyframe on for the linear wire press u so that we can see the keyframes go over to two seconds drag this keyframe over actually and then go back to one second take this up to 100 and then move over to three seconds and take this up to 100 let's just drag this so we can see it okay that's good now we want to add some rotation and turn that on press u and u again so that we can see this i'm just going to drag this back so that we can see where we're rotating from so i'm going to take this to about 90 degrees right about there and then move over to the end and let's rotate this backwards quite a bit so holding shift make this minus two it just rotates around and let's see what this looks like that looks pretty good but we just want to deform this a bit more and i'm going to use cc power pin this way we can actually control everything from the left and right when we duplicate this up so what i want to do is let's just bring these in so we're following the circle about there and i'm going to do the same here holding shift round about there and then i'm going to create almost create like a triangle in the middle here just something like that and this should distort this slightly so now that we've got that there i just want to move this transform over slightly more and that's looking a lot better to me i want to use one of our other gradients so let's choose let's choose this pink one gradient three drag this below the strokes and i'm going to choose alpha matte let's just move this over so it matches at one second and see i'm pretty happy with that i'm going to cut this ctrl shift d and now just recolor these two layers so that they're the same choose a green and then i'm going to duplicate this up and i'm going to adjust a few things with the strokes so let's move four just to see what we're doing press u i'm going to change this transition completion to zero that we're getting a full ball i'm also going to go over here transform let's change the scale of this to about 80 percent this will give us almost like a ball on the end of our transition we just have to play with the rotation we just take this down so that we can see what's happening just playing with the transition completion and then i'm going to change the rotation to about 180 i think just want this to end a bit sooner so let's move this back to about 215 and see how that looks take this down to 100 as well i just want to change one more thing let's select our gradient and change this to overlay and just press play okay i'm pretty happy with that and we're going to create two on the other side so let's select all these layers ctrl d to duplicate let's drag them above and move these over to say 120 and i'm just going to hide these two layers i'm going to hide that top one so that we're just working with this layer here moving forward i want to have more of a stroke to this so i'm going to select the layer that we're actually working with press the m key so we have to see our mask duplicate the mask double click and let's drag this in about there and then drag it in and i'm going to create that change this mask to be subtract and you should see this kind of nice rounded edge happening now i want these to come in from the other side so i'm going to select the power pin and let's just swap this around move that up move that down and then do a similar thing over here it should be okay next thing i want to do is press the transform and we're going to press u to get our keyframes move over here and i want my transform to start over here start it on the circle i'm going to copy and paste that and then just move into the middle here somewhere just move this out i just want to adjust this so that this actually goes around this way so i'm going to change the rotation of this if you want to see what's going on just change your transition completion so you can see it a bit more clearly let's drag around here so i'm going to make this -145 and let's just drag this back a little so i can see what's happening and then i'm going to make my end here it's actually going to the positive on this side too and let's just see if this is rotating the right way yeah i'm pretty happy with that take this back up to 100 the transition completion same at the end here and we can actually make this about 30 something i want to do is just move this transform to about here so it seems like it's going off and then coming back in and then maybe change our angle of our wipe a bit more to the bottom right to see how this looks so all these things can affect the way that these lines are created so your wipe angle and your rotation of your transform now for the top one let's just turn that on and we can copy a few of these attributes let's copy the power pin let's also copy our position keyframes press u come over and then paste onto the position and then our rotation let's copy this paste our rotation let's also change our angle let's move over here see how this is coming on you need to just change this rotation to about there let's take the scale back up to 100 to see how this looks let's unsolo everything i'm going to select all these layers and let's just easy ease all these keyframes pressing f9 and give this one preview okay i want just one more so i'm going to select this bottom again duplicate take this to the top and i'm going to move this over to around 215 two and a half seconds i'm gonna do a few things here let's get rid of the power pin i just want this to be like a half circle over here we're missing some information so let's actually turn off the position keyframes and we just want this to be static and move into the middle here let's just make this one second long so press u select all these keyframes hold alt and just drag in and then we can just bring these in again so you can see where this is happening over here what i'm gonna do is just select this mask press m duplicate and i'm gonna make this really tight holding ctrl and shift about there and just drag this in but there should be good and change this to subtract we should get something like this let's just move this even further down to around here let's also change the gradient three to this blue one over here that should be good just to add some more interest is just select this gradient and this gradient here press r and let's rotate this 180 this over here is just rotating way too fast so i'm going to open this up starting on 90 let's take this to zero so i've just adjusted the rotation so that it comes in and does this kind of highlight across there if you're founding this tutorial helpful make sure to click that like button this is a great place to work off of and now i'm going to create the gradient strokes moving throughout the scene and it's going to follow an infinity kind of symbol pattern create a new composition let's make this two seconds long and i'm going to say infinity loop press ok and i'm going to zoom out slightly and we're going to use the pen tool to do this i'm going to start here and we're going to create a really rough drawing of our figure 8 something like this and just adjust these points so that your center is right about in the middle here whole idea here is that i want my stroke to actually go on the outside here and leave the scene and then come back in and you don't need to make these rounded at all we'll actually add an effect to do that i'm going to change this to stroke i'm going to take off the full let's change the stroke to 266 so this is pretty thick and i think that's the thickest we'll have it i'm going to press u twice and then just pull up the stroke and drop it back down so that we can change the line cap want this to be round capped and then i want to add a trim parts to this drop that down and we're going to drag this right up about 98 should be good now what i can do is just offset this so we can see we're going to be going this way here so i think that's a pretty good place to start i'm going to switch this around so we're rotating forwards going to go to about 25 i'm going to turn this on at zero and let's move forward to about 110 and i'm going to rotate this let's say all the way around here and then once it comes back somewhere around here next thing i want to do is actually go to the add and we're going to add a round corners and we're going to drop this down just drag this right up initially you will see that it doesn't actually affect anything so what we need to do is drag this above our trim path and it'll start affecting about a thousand should be perfect let's go in here and just see how everything's going okay now we just need to actually adjust our offset i want this to come about here because the next thing i want to do is actually draw a circle so this actually does a circle over there before we do that let's just um actually control the size of this and the stroke width of this so i'm going to come over here and turn on the stroke width press you twice so that we see everything i'm also going to turn on the start so that we can make this longer and shorter it looks like it's motion blurring press u so we see our keyframes so that will be twice and then i'm going to move forward so let's say about 15 frames and i'm going to keyframe the stroke width and the start let's take this back to about 93 something like this and i'm also going to come back here and just take the stroke width down to zero you can see what we're trying to achieve here so this is passing i want this to go over the logo at some stage and reveal the logo so at about 24 i'm going to take this a lot larger so 320 should be good and then move forward i'm actually going to move this over to here and then move this over to here to see how this looks okay and then back down to 98 over here and 266 i'm just going to copy this and paste the keyframe and let's give this a preview let's just cut this down and i'm going to create a circle so select a circle make sure you don't have the layer selected and then i'm going to draw this to go to the add trim paths let's trim this down to 98. let's also drop down the stroke and change this to round cap then we just have to offset this to around here and also just change the angle of this point here kind of match up i'm pretty happy with that i'm just going to cut that right over there and then pull this over and we should see something like that let's turn on the offset keyframes and let's move over to two seconds i'm going to drag around and i want this to kind of end in the middle here again so 1 and 94 and then let's just also keyframe the stroke width at about one second 20 frames take this down to zero might just move this out slightly so around here what we can do is actually just take this back as well 95 to have it a bit thicker swirl everything up and give this one preview let's now drag this into a new composition and i'm going to call this infinity a let's move forward i want to add a few effects to this so that we can get a softer kind of line which will work with our gradients so i'm going to come over here type in echo and if you haven't seen my gradient motion blur tutorial yet make sure to check out that link i'll leave it in the description uh it uses echo as well it's only three minutes long uh but it is a really unique technique let's just change a few things here i'm going to say zero stay in the negatives here so that the negatives mean that the motion blur will go to the back so it's negative 0.010 and then i'm going to decay this about 0.75 let's add a whole bunch of these so we make this longer let's say 18 copies and then i'm going to add a gaussian blur and just drag this up now i just want to create the hard edge on this gaussian blur again so duplicate this delete and let's just adjust a few things i don't want any decay on this um and let's just take take that up to one and then just take up our copies so that it just fills up this area i'm going to take it up to about 50 and then i'm going to adjust the echo time which will bring these in again so let's say about zero five so half of that that should be good enough i'm going to select the bottom layer and i'm going to track matte alpha matte and we should get a lot softer stroke okay now that we're done with that go back to the project we're going to duplicate this rename this to infinity b and this will be really quick we're going to move forward until this goes off the screen and at about this point here we're going to cut these two layers ctrl shift d and just swap them around just so that we have something a bit different next thing i want to do is right click new create a null object select all these layers parent it to the null right click on the null transform and we're going to flip horizontal now we should have a totally opposite animation to the other one back in the main com let's start these at about one and a half seconds i'm going to drop a and b right to the top just move these over and i want four copies let's actually just alternate these with each other and i'm going to work with the first one we haven't used the gradient too too much so let's drag this in drop it right about there also just going to ctrl shift d to cut it so we keep our timeline neat and drop this below b and then duplicate this three times drag that above there and i'm going to unsolo those so i'm going to use the alpha matte on this let's show our background so we can see these don't actually like the off the hard edge too much on this but what i'm going to do is actually add a gaussian blur onto the infinity layer so double click there just drag up slightly something like that and let's press s and let's make this minus 100 so that we're actually just flipping this whole image let's show the one above and change this to alpha matte just to change a few things i'm going to press scale and say minus 100 and let's see how this looks looking pretty good let's do the same here alpha math changes to overlay and i'm going to do the same to the top here so turn this on alpha matte scale let's make this minus 100 and change that to overlay let's just play this through select all and turn off the solo but just make sure that you select the gradient the first one that we did infinity and copy that gaussian blur to all the layers so that we soften this and then i'm just going to preview one more time let's wrap this up with a quick but effective logo styling technique and then add the animated grain over the whole scene okay so i've got a logo composition here same size as the other one just five seconds long and i've just got a circular logo um i want to create a soft glowing kind of look on this logo so that it fades in nicely and goes with the rest of the animation where i'm going to do that is let's just bring in gradient 4 which we haven't used yet i'm going to add a motion tile to this so motion tile i'm going to change the tile width to 50 and then just mirror the edges here let's also bring this in so that we're using a bit more of another layer i'm going to come over here and change where the center is around here should be good turn on the tile center move over to five and just tile this off into the purple let's just duplicate this logo and then what i want to do is just track map this we hired that logo you can see that we've got this happening here with this selected i want to create the soft light sweeps on top of the logo so i'm going to select vegas and this will drive this effect need to take the segments down to one change the blend mode to transparency so let's just change the color of this to white and then i'm just going to test this quickly the rotation change the length to 0.5 let's move over to three seconds and just keyframe that length move to the beginning and let's take that down to zero and then i want to turn on the rotation drawing on quite nicely move over to about five right to the end there let's rotate this around i think one and one eighty should be perfect i'm going to add a gaussian blur drag up on the 70 let's add a set matte to this that we're just cropping inside here i just want this really to glow but more so i'm going to adjust the vegas let's come over to the width drag this up let's say about 17 i want the start opacity to be zero and the midpoint to be one let's see how this draws on it's looking a lot better i'm going to duplicate this gradient and it should automatically alpha matte on that let's turn that off and i'm going to change this layer to additive and solo it this isn't bright enough let's just also add a cc composite this way we can duplicate this layer on top of it and just set it to add to sell this effect let's create a new adjustment layer and we're going to add a camera lens blur and change the blur radius say 20 and change that to additive and just change the opacity of this to about 50. that's looking a lot better just take a preview of this i just want to add some text to this so i'm going to right click new text drop this below our logo right over here i'm going to duplicate our gradient and alpha matting that and we're just going to fade this in going to keep this pretty simple this tutorial is already very long so about one second i'm going to take that to zero i'm gonna move over to two seconds and i'm gonna fade this in just select both keyframes and f9 close this down move back to our main composition and i'm going to find a place where let's bring in the logo right about here take my logo and just drop it right at the bottom and move this into place press the t key opacity let's turn this down to zero let's move forward move forward 20 frames let's drag that up select both keyframes f9 and just need to add the grain to this whole thing and what we do is layer new adjustment layer and i'm going to come over to effects and presets we're going to add some vibrance just to pump this up let's take this to about 30 and 25 and then just add some hls and i want to use this noise hls auto this way we don't have to actually animate the noise throughout our animation going to change the uniform to grain change the lightness to two and already you can see the grain happening and let's just do a final preview for this if you're interested in seeing more videos like this take a look at either of the videos pitching up on the screen above me right now keep animating and until next time you

Channel: Animation Deconstructed

Views: 958

Keywords: motion graphic gradient reveal after effects tutorial, motion graphics after effects, motion design after effects tutorial, after effects tutorial, motion graphics, after effects, gradient after effects tutorial, fluid gradient after effects, gradient after effects shape, grainy gradient after effects, animation deconstructed, motion graphics logo animation after effects, motion graphics logo, after effects reveal, after effects opener tutorial, motion graphics tutorial

Id: DO1b1ZUHcSQ

Length: 29min 37sec (1777 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 01 2021