Animated Gradients in After Effects Tutorial - Quick, Easy and Effective

Hi I'm Ben Marriott today I'm gonna show you how to make animated gradient effects like this in Adobe After Effects Let's begin this is the after effects project we're working on all the elements already set up here so we can concentrate fully on our gradient bubble there's a bunch of layers shied here like the face and some of the other extra stuff that you don't need to worry about so we can hide them and ignore them one neat thing that I did want to point out is that this distortion happening here is done by using the Bulge effect on our egg layer and I parented the Bulge Center to this null over here and I've also parented that's burned to that null so whenever I move that null the sperm follows and distorts our little egg and you know I thought that was neat we're gonna start out drawing a gradient egg here in Illustrator I just got a black background layer here and the colors already selected out in the swatches over here so let's start by drawing our egg and let's make this 665 pixels now let's select the gradient mesh tool and make some magic I'm going to place two points and here and here in the circle and what these do is they split up the shape into different segments and each one of these segments and points you can attach a color to and it will smoothly blend with colors of the adjacent points and segments now let's select direct selection tool with A click on one of the points around the outside of the circle and just select some colors from over here in the swatch panel now it's important the colors don't clash too much if I was to select red and put a green one next to it the colors can get real muddy in here what I call gradient no man's land let's undo those the center will remain black because in after-effects we're going to use the screen blending mode and all the black will just turn invisible now we're going to add a second bubble so let's copy this with ctrl C and paste in front with ctrl F and let's drag that selection up to the top layer up here we're gonna alternate between these two layers to create that shimmery motion so I need them to be a little bit different so let's just rotate this top layer there we go let's flip between they look pretty different let's move these anchor points as well a little closer to the center so we get more color so one of the layers is gonna be a little more illuminated Done! let's save. let's import that illustrator file we're pressing control I, finding that illustrator file and making sure you import as composition retain layer sizes and click import let's drag these over into assets folder over here So we're gonna head into this comp and we're just gonna need to copy those two egg layers from here and then go into our egg 01 layer over here and paste them there and we can get rid of this bottom shape now as well let's make this top layer visible and we're gonna use an alpha matte to control what's visible on that top layer and we want that alpha matte to be sort of blobby and moving around to do that we're gonna create a new solid by pressing ctrl Y and these settings should be fine we'll call that, umm... blobby matte!! we always label our layers and I'm gonna call that purple cause I like all my mattes to be purple from here we're gonna draw a mask on this solid so I'm gonna make sure our pen tool is selected and for the moment we're just gonna draw an odd shape around here that we're gonna manipulate a little later there we go a bit like ye olde fidget spinner now let's expand this shape so it fills up most of our egg shape and kind of actually spills over in a few of the sections and we can adjust this later now let's make it warp and move by adding a turbulent displace effect --- everyone's favourite effect... the defaults look pretty good here so to make it animate we're going to use the evolution property up here so we're going to add an expression by holding alt or option clicking on this stopwatch and adding the expression time * 250 and that just gonna means... and what this expression does means that it will continue to animate in sort of blobby fashion forever really or until the end of the comp whichever is sooner that looks pretty good let's select alpha matte from that egg II layer and now we can see kind of how it's working we want to smooth a gradient on these lines here so we're gonna go into our matte, press F to bring up the feather property on our mask and let's slide that by, say 120 there we go now if we play that back we can see a little bit of shimmering happening here but we need some more, let's also take this opportunity to extend these egg layers to the end of the comp there we go we want that shimmering to be a little more intense so I'm gonna rotate both of these egg layers in opposite directions so I'm gonna make a rotation keyframe at the beginning and then at the end I'm gonna have the bottom one rotate 360 degrees and the top one -180 (degrees) now let's play back and see how that looks ok that's looking a little more like it now I still want the shimmer to be a little more intense so what I think I can do is go into this blobby matte selection and just change the mask shape a little bit now that's looking pretty good to me so let's pop to our main comp and see what we're working with the first thing we're gonna do is select our egg comp and change the blending mode to screen to make that black invisible and let's play it back here that is looking pretty good now I've got some glow effects with this egg comp as well so let's turn those on and I've got a few glow effects because when I work with glows I think two or three works a little bit better and you can have a little more control over how the glow looks I think the fall-off will look a little more natural so you should have your first glow fairly tight and fairly intense towards the edge of your glow and the second one have the radius a little bigger and maybe a little less intense and the third one the radius much much larger and the intensity really down low so it's just got a bit more of an organic sort of fall off this is also looking a little too bright in the center for me so all we can do is add a curves effect over here I'm gonna bring back to the top of our stack so it doesn't affect the glows and I'm just gonna bring the darks down a little in the middle, not too much there we go and you can see when the sperm interacts with the egg you have this cool effect from the glows now as well now you want this gradient shimmer to loop as well so to do that I'm gonna make a marker on the egg 01 composition using the * way on the other side of your number pad and just mark that one second in I'm gonna duplicate that, drag this top one right to the end of the comps, so the marker hits the into the comp and move this bottom one forward so the market hits the front now the end looks at the front now we just need a fade between these two comps using our transparency property perfect now we have a loop to make the in a bubble of our egg, let's duplicate this egg I comp so it's egg II now we don't the gradients and the colors of this in a bubble to match too much with the outer bubble so let's change the rotation a little bit by selecting all of our keyframes and let's just change it by 60 or so, the number doesn't really matter I'm also going to scale down these comps by pressing S and changing these both to around 83, I think should work so if we're going to our main comp now I want that inner bubble to have the same effects the glows and the bulge that we've already got on our first egg composition so we're going to duplicate both of these egg one comps here let's move them up slightly and let's change the color to orange for kicks so we're those selected, we're gonna click on our egg II comp over here in the project panel hold alt or option and just drag and drop onto either one of those layers awesome let's play that back perfect it's got our glows and a bulge now I do want to make this bulge effect a little subtler so I want to click on this layer and in the bulge property change the bulge height to 1.9, a little lower so it's a bit more subtler and I'm also gonna adjust the curves on this one a little more just to make it a little more darker in the middle I think that should do now I want to copy that bulge and that curves effect so I'm gonna select both the shift press ctrl C and then paste them onto this layer back here and I'm gonna move those up to the effect stack here and replace the existing curves and bulge layers because we don't need those anymore all right, I think that's looking pretty good to me Now I should warn you when you're working with a lot of gradients like this one thing that you're going to run into is bending banding is an artifact in your render when the computer tries to compress your file and reduces the amount of color in some frames and it makes your render look a little like this now to reduce that as much as possible the best thing to do is to increase the color depth of your project by selecting over here where it says 8-bit, change that to a 16-bit may be 32-bits if you're spicy I've never had to go that far and also add a bit of noise to the whole thing so I've just got the noise effect on this adjustment layer and that's set to 5% now let's look at it all together now the project file is available for you to download down in the description box please open it up have a play with this effect it's really fun and it gets a really cool result maybe try and add it to one of your existing animations please upload whatever you make to Instagram so I can see it and tag me @Ben_ Marriott _so I can share it with my audience in my stories thank you so much for watching, please let me know in the comments what else you'd like to see from this channel Would you like more tutorials some process videos maybe some freelance insights I'd love to know and please don't forget to subscribe hit that Bell icon share and absolutely demolish that like button see you next week

Channel: Ben Marriott

Views: 77,686

Keywords: after effects, after effects tutorials, animated gradients after effects, animated gradients, gradients, motion design, after effects shine, motion design tips, motion design effects, adobe after effects, adobe, mograph, motion graphics, motion design process, motion graphics tutorial, easy after effects, animation tutorial, simple after effects, beginner after effects, tutorial, motion design tutorials, Adobe creative cloud, adobe illustrator, adobe illustrator tutorial, 动画制作, 教程

Id: J85xDAVU-WY

Length: 10min 29sec (629 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 12 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/Robot_House]

I really hope you enjoy this one. I would really appreciate any feedback you have. My new mic just arrived this morning so expect the audio quality to improve. :)

[u/TheBigScaryBear]

I dig it! That bulge tip was awesome too, learned a ton. Nice work!

[u/midway4669]

I love how you get right to the point and provide subtle tips and tricks throughout. Bravo, I’m looking forward to more from you.

[u/Day_Eater]

Thank you for your time and energy put into this tutorial

[u/MicrobialMickey]

Hilarious with the monkey. bahaha

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great tips !

[u/[deleted]]

Awesome tutorial! I definitely learned a few things. Subbed!

[u/FinancialMaxipad]

This is a great tutorial thanks so much. Lots of great things to learn while achieving the main goal. Keep it up!

[u/meanelephant]

Can I just say I admire the bravery it takes to be in front of literally green screens in /r/AfterEffects

[u/2cool4school_]

I really loved your intro. How do you create that "shape growing out of a shape" (after the click on the dolphin) effect?