Animating Abstract Gradients in After Effects

hi my name is oliver in this video i'll teach you how to create this animated abstract gradient using the text animation pack from aedu's in after effects so let's jump right into it so to get started i have this blank canvas and really all you need is a color palette so i picked these four colors we have this sort of beige a blue orange and then this brownish dark color and you can choose the same colors as me or you can pick your own color palette it's really up to personal preference so we can start out by creating the circle that sort of encapsulates the animation do that by going up to the rectangle tool here clicking and holding and just find the ellipse tool then we can click hold down command and control and shift and drag it out to create a perfect circle and when you have done that and you want to line it up just open the align tab and make sure it's all lined up and now we can choose the color for this so i'll go to fill just use the eyedropper tool and here i'll pick the sort of beige color click okay and we can just call this the main circle so now that we have the circle we want to create the gradients within the circle and you may think that this is a hard process but really it's quite simple so what we want to do is create a bunch of smaller circles within this circle and then we want to select all of the different colors now we'll go up to the ellipse tool again and start creating these circles so i'll just drag them out and select a new fill each time so really i only want to select the beige color the blue and the orange and when we're doing this we can actually take the main circle press t as an opacity just turn it down so we can see what we're working with so i have this circle and i can go ahead and create a new one make sure this is not selected when you're doing it though because you want to create it on a new layer and really this is just a process of creating a bunch of different circles with different colors and then we'll see how it looks and we can adjust it afterwards so you'll keep on repeating this and just choosing new colors each time and you just really choose these colors at random it doesn't really matter if there's any specific order to it and it doesn't have to be so i'll just create a bunch of these until i feel like i have enough and then we'll go on with the process so i think one more should be fitting maybe one right here just choose that last color and press ok so now we have the different circles and we can take every single one of these and select them all right click and pre-compose and we can just call this circles so when we've done this we can open up the pre-comp and now we want to animate them so for this step it's quite crucial that all of the anchor points are placed in the center so we can go down here open up the title and action save so you can see the exact center and when i select all of the circles you can see that they're already in the center because when i created them i didn't move them around so that's something you have to be aware of because if i were to move this then of course i would also have to adjust the anchor point by going up to the pan behind tool clicking and dragging it to the center but i have all of them in the sensor now so that's all good and i want to create some rotation for these so we'll just select the first one press r in rotation all the option click the stopwatch and here we want to type in the expression so we'll just type in something like time times and then the amount of degrees that it will be rotating every single second so this could be let's say seven degrees and really you have to play around with this you can see that's quite slow so we may want to go for something like 20 or 25 and now you can see we have a bit more rotation and you just want to take this and copy it select all of the other layers and press rs and rotation and here we just want to alt option click every single one of these and type in a different value so this could be negative 22. so it's in the other direction as you can see then for the next one maybe it's 33 and really i just do this at random to sort of get a random result so maybe negative 15 for this one and you just want some diversity so they don't have the exact same speed and you just keep on repeating this until you have added the rotation expression for every single one of these layers so maybe this could be 31 and the last one should perhaps be negative so that could be negative let's say 28 and now we have some different rotations and you can see that all of these are moving at random and therefore we'll get a random result this is the point of time where you can go in and sort of alter the values so let's say i want to give this a bit more rotation i can do that i could also add some more circles if that's what i wanted to do really there's a lot of possibilities also if i see something like this and i don't think it's rotated enough i could just say that this should be 10 plus time times 40 and you can see that it just has a bit more rotation at the very start so i might put this at 40 and really this is just to change everything up but i think this is fine for now so we'll go up to layer new adjustment layer and we'll just call this the gaussian blur because we want to blend these shapes and the way that we do that is by going to effects and presets searching for the gaussian blur effect and dragging that onto the adjustment layer so here we'll just drag out the blur quite a bit so we have these quite blurry shapes so something like this and then we can go into the main composition and now we can turn up the opacity of the main circle again here just fit it up to 200 percent and now we'll select the circles pre-comp we'll search for the set matte effect drag that onto the layer and here we'll select the take matte from layer to be the main circle so that way it's contained within that circle and right now it may not look that great but we can go ahead and fix this by going into the circles here we may want to adjust the scale so select all of them and press s as in scale scale them up a bit you can also duplicate some of these so let's say you want a duplicate of this one you can scale that up in particular maybe place it on top of the other ones right here and then you can go to the rotation and just alter that expression so perhaps this will be positive and it will be 19 degrees so really this is just about playing around with these we may even want to go in and just amp up that gaussian blur so they really blend in with each other and what we can do now is select the main circle and the circle right click and pre-compose them and call this the main circle now we want to add some effects to make this look good but before we do that we need a background so we'll go to layer new solid and we'll just choose that beige color from up here call it bg and place that behind everything now we can also hide the colors for now and now we want to really emphasize this circle so we want to add some highlights and some shading so it really stands out from the background so we can zoom in a bit just to see what we're working with then we'll go to layer layer styles and here we'll just select the inner glow so you can see we have a bit of a rim light here and we really just want to exaggerate this so we'll go down to the size and just increase it right here and now you can go up and instead of blending it with the screen you can blend it with overlay and this is just really to make the color sort of pop more and i like this a bit more than the other option and you can play around with the opacity if you'd like maybe you want a bit more highlighting or you want a bit less that's really up to personal preference so now we want to add the shadow and we do that by going to effects and presets searching for the drop shadow and just applying that to our main circle so you can see it adds a bit of a drop shadow but we want a bit more distance we also want some softness and because the light is hitting from the top left we really want it to be pushed down here just add a bit more softness and we don't really want it to be that visible so the opacity should only be something like 15 or maybe 10. and really you just have to play around with these settings a bit to make it look like you want it to look and this is also by adjusting the opacity and really just putting it all the way down because we don't want it to be that visible and now to really make the background pop we'll go to the background layer go to effects and presets and here we'll search for the gradient ramp so add that onto the layer here we'll just disable it so we can color pick that background color for both of them like this and then the start color will just make that a bit lighter and the end color will make that a bit darker like this so give it a bit more contrast and just a bit darker sort of like this and then instead of having it going from the top to the bottom we'll make it diagonal so the light should be coming from here and then it should be the darkest down here so we just want something like this and we can try and play it back just to see what we have gotten so far so as you can see this looks great and we'll go ahead and add the text animation so we'll go to window then we'll go to the ae juice pack manager just open that up so if you want to buy this package you can go down in the description and there'll be a download link and that way you can also support my channel then we'll go down and find the text animation package open that up so as you can see it loads up 20 different text animations here's the first one that's a box drop so that's quite a simple one there's some more complex ones and if we go further down you can also see that we have some sort of hot or some glitchy ones there's actually one where there's glitches applied on top of it so i think that should be all the way down here as you can see so this is also quite cool and really there's just a bunch of different options and then you can go in and adjust the settings for all of these presets so you can make them your own so what i'm going for is something quite simple to match this animation so i'll just go for the box drop but before we can use this we need to create the text so i'll select the text tool click and then i'll type in my text so that's going to be abstract and in this case i'm using a font called champion and i'm using the benson weight so the lightest version and this is just a very condensed font so i'll just make it a bit larger and then i'll try to align it in the center here so after i've done that i'll just select the box wrap preset and double click it and it will just apply it to my text so you can see it goes through it and creates this pre-comp so if i play it back from the start here you can see that we have this animation and now we enclose down the pack manager and sort of adjust this preset so i'll go to the very start then i'll right click go to time enable time remapping and i'll just find the point where the text animation is done so right around here and add a keyframe and i perhaps want to drag it out a bit so the text animation lasts a bit longer then i select the keyframes and press f9 to easy ease them go into the graph editor and here you can see i'm working with the value graph and i really just want to make it happen fast at the start and then deaccelerate so you can see in terms of value it moves really fast at the start and then it sort of slows down a bit so we try and play around with this play it back so as you can see now it's a lot quicker at the start and then slows down so now i just want to copy the colors and go into this pre-cum with the text and adjust some of these settings so as you can see there's this controller layer and here i can select the colors so i just want the main color to be white but the second color i want that to be the same as our blue that we have in our color palette here so i can just select that right here and then if we go through this i just have to zoom in here there's a few settings in terms of the glow and the tracking so if you see here turn down the glow you can just see that the text or especially the blue part doesn't glow as much and i really just want that to be zero because i don't want any glow in this animation now the tracking is just how far the letters are apart but i really just want them to be up close and then the line spacing doesn't really matter because we just have one word here so i can go back into the main composition and now i want to animate the circle to be very large at the start and then scale down so i'll go to the start select the main circle then i'll press s in scale and add a keyframe i could just drag this out and then at the start here i'll just scale it up so it fills the entire frame and because it's already blurry in here you don't really notice that the quality is going down so select the two keyframes press f9 to ecem go into the graph editor and just make it deaccelerate so have it quick at the start and then deaccelerate and this may not be enough so we can add a keyframe here in the middle just drag that a bit more to the left drag it down and adjust sort of graph so it's just really accentuated here at the start and as you can see the animation just happens quicker and now we want it to distort a bit because right now it's pretty clean around the edges and we don't want that it has to be a bit abstract so we'll select all of the layers that are contained within the circle right click and pre-compose and just call this the animation main then we'll go to effects and presets and search for the turbulent displays just drag that onto the layer and here we really want the size to be quite large and the amount to be quite small and when we do this you could say that the displacement is not that detailed because we have made it so large in sort of the size and and just lowered the amount and as you can see if we were to drag this up it still isn't that detailed but if we were to drag the size all the way down to let's say 20 you can see that it's much more granular this sort of displacement here and that's not really what we want so we'll just go back to what we had before then we'll alter option click the evolution type in time and then times let's go for maybe 75 so this is just sort of animating the turbulent displays and this can be way too much i don't know that yet but we'll just sort of take a look so as you can see maybe the animation speed is a bit too extreme so put it something like 45 but also the amount of displacement or the scale of the displacement is also too much so we'll just lower these sort of values and we'll try and play it back again and as you can see now it's a lot more subtle and it looks a lot better we just have that tiny bit of distortion that we wanted and now we can really try to make this entire animation pop so go in and adjust the colors the first thing i'm going to do is create a vignette and what this essentially does is that it takes these sort of corners and makes it darker and that way you sort of focus more on the center of the animation so we'll enable the colors go to layer new solid we'll just call this a vignette and then we'll pick that dark brownish color click ok just disable the colors again and now we want to sort of mask this out because we don't want it to be dark all over the screen so go up to the ellipse tool here and just double click and that creates a perfect circle because we have this square composition and instead of add we'll just select the subtract so we have the dark edges and now we can go ahead and open up this mask and then we can adjust the feather so the more you feather you can see the more it just evens out that sort of vignette so we want quite a lot and now we have to adjust the blending mode and if you don't see this you can go to toggle switches modes and just click on that and we'll go for the overlay option here and that way you can just see that it really ups the sort of contrast and saturation instead of just making it darker so this is just a bit more interesting to look at then we'll press t as an opacity and we can just lower this so it isn't that extreme so you can see this is width and this is without so this just really helps to focus on the center of the animation and now we can go ahead and make some adjustments to the overall colors so go to layer new adjustment layer and we'll just call this cc as in color correction and when we go to the effects and presets we'll just search for the curves so the curves is just an easy way to adjust the colors and contrast and i don't really want to do that much i just want to make a point here in the center and drag it down a bit to just really emphasize that contrast you can see this width and this without and you can go even further with this and search for the brightness and contrast drag that onto the layer and you can just add a tiny bit more contrast if you'd like and you can also turn down the brightness or you can turn it up a bit if you'd want so you can see this is width and this is without so this may be a bit extreme and you may not even want to use this effect so i just want to make it very subtle and now you can see with the color correction we have done this is width and this is without so that's really just emphasizing the colors and the contrast in this animation and we can try and play everything back so as you can see right now it's quite boring at the start because of the way that it enters the frame and also it just stops moving all of a sudden and that's also boring so we can start out by adding a tiny bit more displacement like this then we'll go to effects and presets and search for the optics compensation drag this onto the layer and if you increase this has to be quite high you can just see that it sort of looks like this fisheye effect but if you reverse it you can see it sort of distorts towards the edges so we can go to the very start set this to something like 140 add a keyframe press u to see that sort of keyframe and just go a bit ahead to where we want to show everything again and we just set it to zero so that way we take the keyframes press f9 to ecem go into the graph editor and we just wanted to decrease mod the start and then sort of de-accelerate in that animation so maybe something like this so as you can see this is maybe habiting a bit too quickly so we can essentially just drag it out and maybe increase it here at the start and try and preview it again and that way you can just see that you get a lot more interesting result here towards the end and if you really wanted to you can also add a bit of scale animation to the entire thing so just select the layer press shift and s add a keyframe go to the very end and then you can just scale it down as much as you'd like so maybe go around 80 and you can just play back the entire thing to see what you've gotten and as you can see we just have a lot more movement throughout the entire thing because we have that subtle scale animation and in my opinion it really just does a lot and really adds a lot to the entire animation if you want to support the channel you can go and download the age use text animation package there'll be a link down in the description and if you enjoyed the video make sure to leave a like post a comment down below and tell me if you have any questions for this tutorial or any suggestions for future tutorials if you create anything from this make sure to share it with me on instagram and oliver gandolf and make sure to subscribe to the channel and turn on notifications to get notified when i upload future videos that's all for now till next time

Channel: Oliver Randorff

Views: 27,283

Keywords: motion design, mograph, motion graphics, animation, 2d animation, 3d animation, animated, after effects, adobe after effects, gradients in after effects, how to make gradients, adobe gradient, moving gradients, after effects color, gradient tutorial, gaussian blur, smooth gradients after effects, gradient ramp, gradient banding after effects, easy gradients, animated gradients, how to animate gradients, text animation, text after effects, motion design process, moving text

Id: KIJ0l9nNE3g

Length: 20min 55sec (1255 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 27 2020