Animate Gradients in Adobe After Effects

hello everybody this is evan abrams and today we are animating gradients in adobe after effects this tutorial is inspired by a question from chris blaylock a very chill dude and talented designer in the san francisco bay area he had this logo with a gradient in it and he wanted the gradient to wash over the logo before settling into the final branded configuration of the original logo you know for brand reasons now basically he was looking for a seamless transition from a washing looping gradient that would fade out into the original but for it to be better than doing a crossfade of some kind so i'm going to show you how we can make that happen with a few effects a little bit of a shift in how we think about colors and gradients in after effects but fair warning i am going to be bouncing back and forth between illustrator and after effects for some of these concepts so just a bit of a heads up on that but if that sounds good to you let's get into the tutorial and start animating some gradients this video is brought to you by skillshare skillshare is an online learning community with thousands of inspiring classes for creatives and curious people explore new skills deep and existing passions get lost in creativity if you're looking to learn about animation they've got plenty of classes on that as well as design photography illustration film all great classes taught by experts at the top of their craft experts like dkng studio they are true masters of adobe illustrator and factory graphics and since we're going to be talking about things inside of illustrator in this tutorial i thought it'd be a great idea to tell you about their course geared towards workflow in that app i use illustrator to make most assets that i end up putting into motion for clients so it's really an invaluable tool to be fluent and effective in and i think that the gentleman behind dkng do a great job getting people up to speed with their class skillshare is curated specifically for learning meaning there are no ads and they're always launching new premium classes and it's less than ten dollars a month with an annual subscription the first 1 000 of my subscribers to click the link in the description we get a free trial of premium membership so you can start exploring your creativity and a big thanks to skillshare for helping support the channel so let's begin by looking at a logo with a gradient on it here's a simple one that i've made just as an example we have a shape with a hole in it and a gradient is filling in that shape you can access a gradient's details here in the gradient window and as you can see we have some knots and those define what the gradient is so if we took this logo bring it into after effects by importing the dot ai file we get layers like this in after effects so if we wanted to animate the gradient in some way how are we going to make that happen well your first instinct might be to convert this to a shape layer and we'll see how that goes oopsie doodle clearly that's not going to be very handy for us undo undo undo the gradient information doesn't pass from ai to ae because they fundamentally understand and generate gradients a little bit differently using an extension like overlord can get us closer as you can see here it looks like the data comes over pretty nicely this gradient is now defined by two points that we can move around but that's not really going to get us the looping washing over vibes we're after and we could edit the knots of the gradient itself but let's put that aside for now because even if we use the very powerful overlord extension it's going to fall down with more complex gradients like we're going to get into later on lots of oopsies happening here so that's our problem so to get around these limitations here's a method we might deploy let's call it the scrolling method we can start by making a long comp of just the gradient that will move behind the shape so it appears to wash over it in this case the gradient is linear and runs from blue to red so in illustrator i'm going to take that gradient and apply it to a rectangle that is the same size as the original logo and that'll create one of the panels i need to make this illusion happen then i'm going to duplicate it flip it duplicate it again and create this kind of a panel that runs from the original to something in between back to the original i might even stretch out this connective part in the middle or change it in some ways so long as in the end i come back to the duplicate image of where we started we're going to make a loop depending on the complexity of your gradient and the angle of it this might be different for you and this method will have limitations but bear with me here back in after effects we're going to take this kind of ribbon layer and place it behind that first layer then we're going to use that first layer to define the shape as an alpha matte for that ribbon layer and then we just move the ribbon around with position until we reach the looping point play it through and it looks pretty seamless and accurate as long as we land on the gradient that we're meant to see in the final we could have all kinds of wacky things going on in the ribbon and if you're animating this on doesn't really need to loop at all but thinking about your logo asset as just a shape that defines where we can see this ribbon is going to free you up to make all kinds of changes to that ribbon itself as long as we eventually come to the final arrangement however this may not have the flexibility you're looking for having to make a static layer that just translates might not get you where you want to go so let's look at another idea because all colors that are represented digitally can be transformed with effects we're going to call this next thing the effects method and nothing typifies this kind of transformation more than the colorama effect classic colorama we're going to apply the colorama effect to something we can remap so we're going to remap the values of pixels into the new arrangement and more critically to our needs we can slide the phase of that remapping around so we need to make a new logo or at least a different logo i'm working with a linear gradient that runs from blue to red however i'm going to need to make a copy of this and change that to run from just black to just white because they're very certain and regular values to remap then i'm going to put that layer into after effects then the magic happens when we drop colorama onto this situation and remap those black and white inputs to specific gradient outputs so i will place one knot up here at the top of the circle and one at the bottom of the circle because those are our specific colors the specific knots that we can take from illustrator and you'll notice though we don't have a linear gradient it looks like a reflected gradient that's because black and white end points exist on this circle right next to each other up at the top so think of them like 0 and 360 degrees but we have markers here at 0 and 180 degrees but if i want this to loop seamlessly i need to have this subtle gradient between the poles so to get around this i'm just going to chop the values in half of our actual starting input i'm going to do that with the levels in this case taking that black point down by half and so you can see that the gradient is now running from 50 gray to white which means that that's getting remapped to the two values that i wanted and then i just have to animate the phase and as you can see we are looping through look at it go because the phase is basically shifting all of those input values over by a certain amount then doing so in this case is just taking us around the circle but the fun doesn't stop there because colorama is remapping black and white values we can simply create other values using generative effects like fractal noise for example so above all of this in the stack i'm going to drop a fractal noise in here setting it to be quite large in scale and then maybe adding a blur in there so it's nice and indistinct now you notice after blurring the nice alpha balance the logo get a little weird so i'm going to use the set channels effect to restore the original alpha by setting it to reference the layer itself and it'll just use its original alpha to override anything we're doing to it so you could even put that at the end of the stack if you want to clean up the alpha to the original crisp edges now i animate the fractal's evolution over time as well as animating the phase over time and in the end i'll just fade that fractal down with the opacity property on the fractal noise itself which will fade off only that effect so this can subtly return to the normal looking gradient that it was supposed to be in the original it's all about making procedural changes that we can feather on and off to return us to the original in a seamless way as an aside this is also a fun way to make kind of psychedelic effects let's say we have that fractal noise back again and on the colorama i'm going to tighten up the knots or maybe i remove interpolation entirely to make these really harsh distinctions between the colors and then i'm going to have that input phase rolling through so it's it's going it's looping but you can kind of see how it looks like waves maybe flowing over a surface well if we increase the number of loops the number of times we cycle through that output phase we can get some kind of trippy stuff going on here that looks much more like radio waves or maybe topographical scanning this is a lovely way to make some very visually interesting textures or trippy psychedelia combine that with the evolution of the fractal now we're getting into some lava lamp territory just something to think about before we move on to some other techniques here now there are other limitations to think about especially when we start to bridge into more complex forms of gradients three colors four colors uh freeform mesh gradients the more complex and specific this gradient is the more difficult it is to kind of reverse engineer and then modify the individual parameters of it just have a look at this freeform gradient with with many colors and methods combined into one gradient that a designer might hand off to us for animation yipes thanks a lot but maybe just maybe we can combine some ideas together here to get this moving i want to start with getting the values of all the knots so i'm going to grab those hex code numbers from the gradient panel in illustrator i like to do this rather than using the eyedropper because i might miss the mark i might be off by a little bit and if this is a branded piece i want to be accurate in the best case scenario there's a design document with all these just in a list what a dream that is when it happens but i'm going to be using this to create a bunch of shape layer circles that are the same color as the knots and roughly arrange them to be close to the kind of the final resting place and i'm going to use a blur effect kind of feather out the edges again just trying to get close then i'm going to set keyframes for position scale probably for the blurriness as well since this is where they all need to end up and then i work backwards and getting them moving all over the place scaling up scaling down i might even parent them to a null to have that scale up or down over time or maybe parent some of them to one null that scales up and one null that scales down just really getting wacky with it maybe rotate the nulls while we're at it just to get some directed chaos in here but when this is pre-composed and then we use the original as the alpha matte the impact is much more nuanced and interesting and we can also just fade the whole thing off if we want to return to the exact original and while it may seem like a very abstract way to make a gradient it's also just using the same method that the freeform gradient in illustrator is using we're making knots or in this case circles and we're fading them into each other and moving them around and all right how about just one more one more before you go let's bring colorama back into the mix if i take all of those knots all of those circles those faded circles that i have whirling around and i'm going to set those to be black white and gray now i'm going to apply colorama which will remap those values to our branded gradient knots so we've got the colorama applied to the precomp and we've got these extra knots displayed around the output phase now we're able to kind of get the best of both worlds i can animate the phase moving that around i can animate the knots themselves what proportion of each color we're going to be representing and it brings us an extra level of control to this chaos that we can push all of these things one way or the other so hopefully this can bring a little bit of art direction a little bit of controlled chaos to a project hopefully keeping you on brand and on time and give you a lot of methods to solve these problems well this is kind of just the tip of the iceberg of ideas i think we didn't even talk about using different blending modes on these orbs or getting different kinds of interactions in here or even using other effects to warp and modify the gradient like a vector blur or all kinds of great things everything really just becomes a base for something else to build on but i hope that this gives you a starting place to think about animating gradients maybe in a new way and unlock some creative options for your projects thank you so much for watching i'm evan abrams if you want to find more of me around the internet i'm at ec abrams pretty much everywhere if you want more of this stuff in your life make sure you subscribe and turn on notifications so you don't miss a single one and if you have any trouble with any of the stuff we talk about on this channel let me know in the comments and i'll try to help you out as best i can if you like this kind of thing but live then why don't you check me out on twitch and on behance so we got live shows going on every weekend over there and i think that's pretty much it so until next time stay creative be kind to each other and i'll see you all around the internet

Channel: ECAbrams

Views: 29,093

Keywords: adobe after effects, after effects, adobe, after, effects, fx, mograph, motion graphics, motion, graphics, vfx, visual effects, instruction, tutorial, tut, how to, how, to, help, tips, tricks, after effects tutorial, motion graphics tutorial, vfx tutorial, gradient, animate, animated gradient, logo, brand, gradient flow, cycle gradient, colorama, ramp, fractal, trippy, psychedelic, offset

Id: TlJtqKIZv50

Length: 12min 4sec (724 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 07 2021