Advanced After Effects // Analogue Retro-Futuristic Monitor

hey everyone Brady from texturelabs.org here back in Adobe After Effects for some sci-fi glowing green monitor effects if that sounds familiar you may have seen the Photoshop version last month you don't need to have seen that video but Photoshop is a good place to point out some key Concepts so I'll probably include a few clips of the important stuff but this of course wants to be a video effect now two ways to do this one join me for the next 20 minutes on a perilous Adventure through space time and expressions in After Effects it's a little tricky but it does pay off the very very cool effect second way to do this the easy way I built a supercharged template version of this project with a custom controller right here on top you can put any footage or animation below these layers and then use this controller to really customize everything including 15 different pixel styles to create all kinds of different looks I'll link to that below you could download it for just a couple bucks on the texture lab site but it is a really cool project to build let's get into after effects and check it out all right I'm here in After Effects and I'm getting started with an animation that I already built doesn't look all that sophisticated when you see it by itself but that's one of the great things about this monitor effect it can kind of hide the rough edges and elevate your janky looking special effects but I'll give you a quick breakdown of how I built this I took this piece of footage used the Roto brush to create a mad for him and the camera tracker so I could put in a camera and these big 3D planes in the background then on these planes I put some animated texture and type to create this illusion of movement tracked in a few elements on the goggles and gave him the solarized effect using colorama used a tint effect to kind of strobe up and down and make it look like Shadows moving across him a little bit of glow happening and here we are so couple things I'll mention about this composition I'm working in it's HD 1920x1080 and it is 24 frames per second I really like how this effect looks at 12 frames per second but rather than building the composition add an unusual frame rate I'm going to keep this at 24 and I'll just use the posterize time effect over everything at the end and that'll kind of convert it to 12 frames per second but while I'm working on the project I'm just going to keep the preview set to skip one frame so we're effectively previewing everything at 12 frames per second now this effect gets built as a couple of adjustment layers and things on top so you don't necessarily need to pre-render things or even pre-comp things this could just be a whole bunch of animated layers down here but this way I'm going to start with a nice minimal setup okay let's get started first thing I'm going to do is create some glitchiness so I'm going to create an adjustment layer and call it pixelate displacement effect and give it the displacement map effect and displacement map needs some kind of a layer for it to reference so I'm going to create a solid layer and we'll call it pixelate displacement reference and give this one some fractal noise and first I'm going to take the complexity down to just two this can be a pretty simple effect the noise type is going to be block and I'll crank the contrast way up to about 960 and take the brightness down to negative 525 then in the transform controls I'm going to turn off uniform scaling so we can scale the width and height separately I'll leave the width at 100 but take the height down to 25. then let's animate it with just a simple expression on the random seed value so I'm going to alt click or option click on this little stopwatch and in the expression Fields type time times 100 and that'll give us a new random fractal noise on every frame then rather than this being black with this light colored noise in here I want the whole thing to be 50 Gray and I want the noise to give us both some lighter values and some darker values so what I'm going to do is offset the color of this layer I'm going to use this Effect called PS arbitrary map and this just has one dial and if I turn it around to 1 180 degrees we've basically just shifted all the color on the layer okay let's bring the opacity on this layer to zero since it's just a reference and then back here on the displacement map effect I'll point this to the displacement reference being sure to use effects and masks so the reason for making that layer mostly gray is that the gray values will have zero displacement while anything darker or lighter will get displaced so without that PS arbitrary map everything is getting offset but with the base color as gray we're just getting those details being displaced and here I'm only going to use horizontal displacement so I'm going to take the vertical to zero but crank the horizontal way up to 800. okay one more thing on this effect I'm going to add a solid composite effect and I'm going to set it to Black now that's kind of a preventative measure sometimes displacement map will displace the alpha Channel and wrapping pixels around can sometimes help but it can also give you weird results so I'd rather just composite this with black and it might save us a headache later okay there we go we've got some cool glitchiness happening and let's move into making it pixelated now I do want to convey how the effect functions rather than just giving you a recipe like I mentioned did this in Photoshop last month some of you guys probably saw that video so let's do an abbreviated recap because it really is the same principles at work the way this works is we're going to create a mosaic effect and then we're going to Overlay this special pattern tile in a way that lines up exactly with the Mosaic tiles now I say overlay but it's probably not the best choice of words because we're not going to use overlay blending mode we're going to use hard mix blending mode a very key part of the process because like overlay and Vivid light and the other contrast blending modes it cranks up the contrast however hard mix cranks up the contrast so high that when you're combining black and white and gray values it's going to Output completely 100 black and 100 white values so it basically becomes a threshold effect so this particular pattern tile is designed to be used set to hard mix as the color of the underlying layer gets brighter each of these gray boxes in the pattern at a certain point will cross that threshold from being black to being white this pattern works well as a demonstration but in the Photoshop video we then swapped out this pattern for one that's a little bit softer and creates a slightly more organic effect but it basically works the same and this is the pattern tile we'll be using here in After Effects of course if that was all a little bit too fast you can always check out that photoshop video and it probably does a little bit better job explaining but let's get to building this here in After Effects so we'll start with an adjustment layer and I'll call it pixelate Mosaic control and I'm going to add a slider on here that we can use to control the size of the pixels so here in the expression controls effects I'll just add a slider and rename it we'll call it block size now this of course doesn't do anything by itself but we can link an effect or multiple effects to the slider and control them all with the slider so let's add an actual effect the Mosaic effect so right out of the gate Mosaic functions a little bit differently in After Effects than it does in Photoshop unless you happen to be in a square composition it doesn't give you square tiles instead it subdivides your image into a specific number of rows and columns now obviously this is going to present a challenge when it comes to lining up a square pattern exactly with these Mosaic tiles but luckily we can use the power of Expressions to solve just that kind of problem so let's drop down the Mosaic controls and on the horizontal blocks give this little timer and ALT or option click to create an expression and I'm going to type in this comp.width divided by and then I'll use the pick Whip and drag it to the block size slider okay so this is giving us the width of the composition 1920 divided by 10. 192 blocks wide or if I bring the block size up to 50 then we've got 1920 divided by 50. which is 38.4 but the Mosaic effect is always going to round to the nearest whole number so we've got 38 horizontal blocks so this block size is actually going to be a measurement of how many pixels wide each mosaic tile is because this math equation basically asks how many 50 pixel tiles can fit in a 1920 pixel image and the answer is 38. okay then we're going to need an expression on the vertical blocks as well and this one is going to be this comp dot height divided by and I'll pick whip this to the block size as well so this one asks how many 50 pixel tiles can fit in 1080 pixels and the answer is 21.6 but again Mosaic is going to round that to 22. so now when I drag up the block size the Mosaic effect is going to give us as close to square blocks as it can while maintaining a whole number of rows and columns so again these are not actually perfect squares but they're as close as we're going to get with the Mosaic effect so we've got our Mosaic effect next let's drop this single pattern tile in here and I'm going to rename this pixelate pattern and the first thing I want to do is drop down the transform controls and set the position to 0 0 and the Anchor Point to zero zero and that kind of pins this thing to the top left corner if I scale it up and down it's kind of all measured from that one spot now this pattern tile is 100 pixels wide which is nice because the scale is then also just a measurement of how many pixels wide it is 100 percent is 100 pixels wide 250 would be 250 pixels wide and we want the scale of the pattern to match a single one of these Mosaic tiles so it seems like we could just pick whip the scale to that block size but because the Mosaic effect is not perfectly square and the pattern is a perfect square it's sort of lining up but not really we're really starting to see where Mosaic is not giving us perfect squares so we're going to have to get a little bit more sophisticated with the expression on the scale of this pattern tile so let's think about how many pixels wide exactly is one of these Mosaic tiles right now well the composition is 1920 pixels wide and there are 14 blocks so each tile is going to be the width of the comp divided by however many horizontal blocks there are so the expression can be just that it'll be this comp dot width divided by and then I'll pick whip this to the horizontal blocks value now the scale property needs two values the X and the Y so we need a comma and then we need a formula for the Y scale and this will be this comp dot height divided by and then I'll pick whip to however many vertical blocks there are and then important for this to be formatted correctly we need an Open Bracket at the very beginning of this thing and a closed bracket at the end okay let's try that out pretty cool the power of mathematics this pattern is matching perfectly with the Mosaic tiles but we only have one tile so we need to use an effect to repeat it to tile it out and fill in the whole image for the moment I'm going to bring the opacity down so we can see the pattern and the background and I'm going to use the repetile effect and the question is how far do we need repetile to expand this to the right to fill out the composition you'd think well the comp Is 1920 wide so this could be 1920 pixels or if we want to be fancy we can use an expression for that and say this comp.width 1920 but right now the scale of this layer is down at 37 percent so it's scaling down the repetile effect also meaning we need to compensate for whatever the scale is at the moment and we could do it like this we need an expression that says this comp.width times and then in parentheses 100 divided by and I'll pick whip to the horizontal scale value so now that's always going to make repetile add the entire width of the comp even if this layer is scaled down now if we wanted to be really thorough so that repetile is not adding an extra tile every time we could also include minus width and that's going to subtract the width of that original tile okay expand down is going to be almost the same but it'll go this comp dot height times parentheses 100 divided by pick whip to the scale vertical value close parentheses minus height all right that ought to do it let's bring the opacity on this layer back up to 100 and switch it over to hard mix and check out how that looks okay looking cool the effect is working and we can start to dial it in we do have some areas where the Mosaic blocks are going solid white and that's only going to happen when the underlying layer is full blast white so what I'm going to do here is add an adjustment layer down here just with a levels effect and it's going to be below the pixelate pattern I'll call it pixelate levels use a levels effect and just take the white output down a little bit we can use this levels to really dial in how much contrast we want in those pixels how bright the blacks are and everything so we basically got our pixel shapes but there is one more bridge to cross before we give this some green glowy color because right now this is cool we can adjust the Mosaic size we've got these nice close-up pixel effects but if the block size gets too small we run into an issue and what's happening here is that this pattern tile is scaled way down right now to five percent so it's only five pixels wide and then repetile is trying to fill in thousands and thousands of pixels and repetile hits its Max at 20 000 pixels so we just can't fill up the whole frame long story short the scale on this layer is just too small so I'm going to make an adjustment to this expression on the scale property the horizontal scale part of this I'm going to add times four and then on the vertical scale part add times 4. so now rather than being five percent this layer is scaled up to twenty percent and reptile is able to fill in the whole frame however the pattern is now four times too big so what I'm going to do is add one more effect in here the CC Tyler effect I'm going to move this effect up so that it hits before the repetile effect and I'll change the center point on the effect to zero zero then it seems like we need to go to 25 percent on this effect but for whatever reason CC Tyler is always exactly one percent off so we actually need to be at 26 percent don't ask me why but now we've got the same look without scaling this layer down quite so far and if we want we can make the pattern tiles really really small side note you might be tempted to use CC motion tile to do the same thing CC motion tile can tile things and expand them but motion tile especially down at these tiny sizes gets really really heavy it takes a long time to calculate each frame and it introduces a whole bunch of other problems so I don't recommend it okay let's take the Block's eyes to maybe eight or ten and then actually I can even set a keyframe here so that when we get this close-up shot the blocks get bigger maybe it'll go to 20. let's take a quick look at that in motion looking cool let's get into some final effects I'm going to put another adjustment layer on here and call this one pixelate wide time so right now each of these little pixels can light up and then turn off instantly but I'm going to use the CC wide time effect and super subtle I'm going to set forward steps to zero and backward steps to two and that's going to create just a little bit of an echo I'll even bring the opacity on this adjustment layer down to 50 it's a little detail but it feels a little bit more like an imperfect cathode ray monitor that takes just a moment to cool down okay let's add another adjustment layer for some glow effects so first of all I just want to blur everything a little bit and in this case I really like the look of fast box blur instead of gaussian blur it's a little bit more linear kind of preserve some of the horizon and vertical details but it can be down at like 0.2 and then of course some glow I'm going to bring the radius up to 20 and the intensity down to 0.6 and then let's add another glow this one the radius up at 80 and also intensity 0.6 all right then let's give it some color and I'm going to do this on another adjustment layer by itself just so it's easy to find and adjust and I really like this CC toner effect and on this tritone setting seems to give you just enough control to dial in a color palette that's not just a single Hue but has a little bit of variation in it I'm making these colors get just a little bit warmer as they get darker and I'll even take the Shadows value here the blacks and lift those up so that even the Black is Black is a little bit green then more effects let's create an adjustment layer for grain and sharpen a lot of you guys probably know my noise and grain simple recipe just a little bit of noise maybe three percent then again gaussian blur at two and that makes the noise not quite so sharp although I am going to add one effect to sharpen everything right back up the unsharp mask bring the amount up to 100 and I'll bring the radius up to two pretty subtle difference especially for YouTube but it does help to give the image a little bit more definition okay finally as I mentioned at the very beginning we've been previewing this at 12 frames per second since I have the preview set to skip one frame but before rendering anything I'm going to want to add an adjustment layer with the posterize time effect and I'm going to punch in 12 and that's going to hold each frame for two frames and create that low frame rate look even though we're in a 24 frames per second comp all right well that is the whole thing it's been a journey but the fun part is actually trying some animation and some footage with these layers on top don't forget you can skip all of the labor and download this template I created with a custom controller to access all these properties in one place makes it easy to add keyframes to all the details there are a few extra features in here two different styles of displacement and of course these 15 pattern Styles definitely worth checking out I'd love to turn this into a plug-in at some point so if you're watching this in 2024 maybe check up on me and see if I did that in the future in any case hope you enjoyed this video thanks for watching and I will see you next time

Channel: Texturelabs

Views: 352,357

Keywords: after effects tutorial, adobe after effects, crt, monitor, digital monitor, vintage, retro monitor, vintage monitor effect, crt monitor effect, sfi-ci, lo-fi, scifi, lofi, texturelabs, glitch, glowing green, special effects, cyberpunk, analog, glitchy, tutorial, after effects templates, animation, video effect, pixelate, pixelated, video game effect, 1980s, 1960s, pixel art, pixel art animation

Id: -8eDk8aCJlY

Length: 18min 32sec (1112 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 03 2023