Animate Textures with Displacement Maps | Adobe After Effects Tutorial

inside After Effects there's an awesome tool called the displacement map and you can use it to displace the contents of one layer with the contents of another my name is Justin OD show and in this video I'm gonna show you a few cool examples on how to use it so to begin I've got a blank composition open and I've got a couple random textures that I've gotten from the internet now this works on photos or videos I just want to animate this still-frame photo because I think it looks cool so for this first example we first want to create our layer that's going to serve as the displacement map so I'm going to generate this all from scratch and after-effects by going to layer new solid I'll press ok and then on the right hand side in our effects and presets panel I'm gonna search for one called fractal noise you should find it in the noise and grain section and I'll drag it on to this black solid that we just created this is a very powerful tool in itself and could warrant a whole separate tutorial but the cool part about this is you can generate all different kinds of noise and gradients so first for the fractal type I'm gonna use smeary but you can really experiment with many different ones for the contrast I'm gonna increase it a little bit till the blacks get a little bit darker and then within the transformation options I'm going to increase the scale so it's a little bit larger and I'm also going to decrease the complexity of it because I want things to kind of be smooth and liquidy or inky so once I find a balance between dark and light and the smoothness and texture that I want the last step we have to do is to animate it now rather than manually animating this with keyframes and using the evolution setting to cycle this wheel over time I'd rather just use an expression to keep it animating over time without me doing anything so I'm going to drop down the menu of the effect controls on the black solid and under the fractal noise effect I'm gonna find the evolution setting and under that stopwatch keyframe I'm gonna hold option and click and that'll allow me to add an expression and I'm just going to type time in here and I'm going to use the multiplication symbol and use 20 so this will make it so that every one and we'll move 20 degrees forward in the evolution so basically we just have an infinite loop going here every second is 20 degrees you can make it slower or faster depending on how fast you want your displacement map to be moving so feel free to get creative with your results yours may look much different than what I have but we have our basic displacement map now I'm actually going to move this solid underneath the textures that I'm trying to displace and now I'm going to go to whatever texture I want to displace I'm going to go to the effects and presets panel and find the displacement map effect it's in the distort folder and add it on to that layer now we have the option to choose the displacement map layer and in this case we'll just use that black solid that we just generated so or in order to actually see anything since our black solid is not a video itself and we're actually working with the effects on that layer we want to make the source to be including effects and masks and then we want to adjust the horizontal and vertical displacement levels v is pretty gentle but we can make it go all the way up to 50 or 100 and you can see the effect getting stronger now I'm also going to change displacement map behavior to stretch map to fit because sometimes your images or different layers can be different sizes than each other in this case the picture was bigger than solid and now if I press play I can see the beginning of that liquidy displacement happening based on the fractal now by default it uses the red and green color channels to displace but you also have a whole bunch of different options such as displacing by lightness or hue or saturation which can give you different varied results and you can see if I just copy and paste this same effect onto any different texture we can get the same cool displacement going but the cool part about displacement maps is that they work with any combination of layers the same results could be achieved with text layers so for example if I type that out and paste in the same displacement effect you can also do this using videos so I have some cool liquidy textures that I found on a stock footage website I can displace my textures with just simply these footages for another really cool effect I think may be even cooler because it's more organic and realistic and you can even displace videos with other videos other pictures or even themselves these tools are very flexible these are just some fun different examples to show you how they work but you can use them in many different abstract or functional ways you can also find the displacement tool in Adobe Photoshop so if you want to learn more about it there I've got tutorials as well if you like this video leave a like on it below let me know what you thought in the comments and subscribe to my channel here on YouTube so you don't miss any of my future videos thank you so much for watching you

Channel: Justin Odisho

Views: 148,985

Keywords: adobe after effects, after effects, after effects animation tutorial, after effects animation, after effects displacement, after effects displacement map, after effects displacement map tutorial, tutorial, after effects tutorial, how to use displacement map in after effects, after effects fractal noise, fractal noise, fractal noise loop after effects, fractal noise loop, after effects time expression, after effects expression, justin odisho, ae, adobe

Id: 4uQlymVXMPU

Length: 5min 26sec (326 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 03 2019