Animating an Abstract Wave - After Effects Tutorial

hey what's going on guys I'm Mike from Moloch's back with another video for After Effects and today we're gonna be emulating the Erica of Anderson on Twitter kind of her style which is a really cool style we're not gonna be copying it one to one but we will be kind of doing something similar to what she does if you want to check her out I highly recommend it link down in the description for her Twitter account as well as our patreon account anyways so let's go ahead and get started here in After Effects and see kind of what we can create a lot of what you start with versus what you end up with is just a very small minor changes so just keep that in mind if you don't copy it one-to-one yours will come out a little bit different but that's cool it should come out different on when they're different they look really interesting and exciting for example these two are this one was a happy accident and this was the original so anyways let's just go ahead and get started by going composition new composition and I'm gonna make mine a thousand by a thousand I think that's fine ten seconds is a good length 25 frames per second is good so I'm gonna start out by searching for an effect actually I can't add an effect to nothing so I should probably first create a layer new solid that red color is fine the name red solid seven is good just gonna scale this up actually lay our new solid let me make sure I hit make comp size make two comp size that way it's the full composition and I'm just gonna search for an effect called CC light sweep drag that on and you can see that it kind of gives me a light beam but you can make a pretty easy gradient with this so I'm gonna set this to zero sharp is fine with maybe 265 intensity maybe e 90 edge intensity zero thickness maybe three point four or four is probably fine and I'm gonna set this to cut out so you can see here that it didn't really matter which color my background was but what will matter is how I change this and how I make it move so I'm gonna set a keyframe for centered I'm just gonna drag it over drag it over and I'm gonna go two maybe three seconds and I'm gonna then drag it to the other side till kind of the gradient falls off hit you on the keyboard select all of these and using the motion Mountain mo graphs plug in motion V 2 I'm going to add a little bit of smoothing to these keyframes if you don't have that plug-in you can go to the graph editor make sure this is set to speed graph and you can actually just kind of pull these until you get something that looks similar to this this is just an easy eats but I also want to create some expressions so holding alt I'm going to hit the stopwatch and going to type under here loop out with a capital o and so now this will loop so I can see here that I need to maybe move this over just a bit more so you can see I get some like banding and stuff here and it doesn't really look that great like you get some weird colors banding and stuff like that that's really bad normally but for this we're gonna add so many effects of this that you won't see it later so it's not a big problem so now I'm going to ctrl shift Z and pre-comp this make sure you have move all attributes to the new composition selected and I'm going to name this gradient and I am going to now create a layer new solid so I want to cut this up into even pieces but I want them I'm only actually gonna do halfway so I need to do and need to be a multiple of 500 because it's half the pixels so I'm just gonna set this to 50 and hit OK and I'm going to now move the anchor point to the top so if you don't have this tool you could just press this kind of Pan behind tool or press Y on the keyboard and just drag the anchor point to the top but I have the tool so I'll use it and I'm going to duplicate this 10 times so this is kind of exactly what would what Erica does as kind of the base for a lot of her of animated gifts not all of them but a lot of them and I got this technique from her Vimeo because she uploaded a few kind of real quick kind of tutorials on how she does some of her effects and I thought that this was such a good base to start with because you could do so much with it once you have it so that's kind of why I'm using it so now with the gradient I'm just gonna hit control D duplicate it ten times also and I am going to kind of move these underneath so you notice that these are actually not in order that will create some problems but this one that they were all in order this one they were out of order so I mean I personally think that they look better when they're in order but so I'm gonna just make these in order it doesn't really take that much time and I just think it looks a little bit better both look really good but I think it just looks a little bit better so I'm going to drag these all underneath the red solids and using this search bar I can actually just search for gradient and it will highlight all of them which is nice so that way I could easily select them all and change this to alpha matte so I could just get rid of now this search part and you'll see here that you know nothing looks like it really has changed but at will once I start moving these moving these layers so I'm gonna grab the gradient first one leave that the second one I'm gonna move it over to keyframes and I'm just gonna space these out evenly this happens to be two keyframes which is exactly what she uses or she used in her video but I think that that works the best one keyframe made it happen a little bit too fast three keyframes made it last a little bit too long and I didn't really like it too much so now I can just highlight all of these layers and hit ctrl shift C again make sure move all attributes to new composition and pretty comp three works so I'm just kidding okay I'm gonna actually drag this down and hmmm well let me actually let me see let me rotate this by 180 and search for a effect called mirror the reason why I had a rotate this by 90 degrees is because I didn't do this right so I'm gonna make that 90 what I mean by that is I actually wanted this piece to go first so all of these should have gone the other way again it would have probably looked fine if I left it like that in fact I'll do both just so you could see you later I'll go back and toggle but well I guess I won't really have a choice because okay let me um let me just live with this and not rotate this and we're just gonna see kind of what that looks like I wanted it to kind of again be pointed but that's fine this is we'll just keep moving so I'm gonna get rid of this line here give me some proportional gridlines and I'm gonna move this gradient up until it hits that point just so our centerline is the same thickness and I'm going to scale this up by maybe one zero five and then Center that up there it's 105 enough wow it's like perfect I'm a frickin genius I didn't mean to do that I just happened to be a genius so now I'm going to duplicate this layer and recall that our our main gradient layer the keyframes were three seconds apart so I can't actually make this three seconds apart because if i zoom in here you'll see that due to 25 frames per second I can't actually get in between the two seconds there's like I have to choose which side of the hill I want to be on so I'm just gonna choose this side of the hill it's gonna make the loop a little bit funky but hopefully not too funky okay so I'm gonna come up here to like five seconds somewhere after the beginning and I'm gonna move my work area over and I'm gonna start by going to three seconds in it and on the keyboard and see if this loops well I'm sorry move over three seconds in it and on the keyboard not two seconds so I think that that looks fine it's not perfect but it's but it's pretty good so I'm going to just right click this in trim to compchomp comp to work area so I just only have this work area and I'm gonna pre-comp these down to pre count four okay now we could start adding some cool stuff to this and make it look even cooler so I'm gonna first add a glow to this whoops I'm searching my project which I don't want to search I want to search my effects and presets and add a glow to this and I'm gonna set this to maybe twelve the intensity of one I think that that's fine and I'm also going to add a twirl and I'm gonna set this to who 360 and the radius maybe be a hundred so I think that looks pretty cool so right off the bat I mean that looks pretty cool as is but there's definitely a lot more that we can do to this so I'm gonna create layer new null justement layer and add on here a lens it's actually one of my favorite effects because it really just messes and messes up and does crazy stuff to your animations just like 35 and I'm gonna add some noise set this I'm gonna crank this up pretty high to like 25 and I'm gonna add a tint and the black is fine because actually that's a matte so the black I don't really need to change but I already have a color save that I want to choose and it is that one so there it is so that looks pretty frickin cool and that's pretty much it you can actually do that this is the inverse of that because of the direction of my arrows let me show you what happens if I mess with these a bit so let's say [Music] so let's just say that's what I ended up with so it actually didn't make that big of a difference you maybe grab these so that's like really soot kind of exotic it kind of looks like it's almost got like an Indian or Hispanic theme to it wow that's actually really cool so I'm going to leave that like that what I'm going to end up with doing is creating a layer new solid and create a black background and then I'm just gonna change the tint here oh whoops it still made it like that little shrinky dink one someone and then map black to maybe I don't know some like crazy color like that maybe I'll map the pink too I don't know this is like really hideous but the point is is that you can kind of do any color scheme that you want and it loops perfectly so anyways guys I hope you enjoyed this video I hope you learned something new definitely go check out Erica of Anderson's a Twitter account as well as our patreon where you'll see stuff like this all day long and it's all super good even better than what we just made it's really simple to produce I think but the outcomes are just so amazing as artistic and she does a really great job so anyways guys if you enjoyed this video please be sure to give this video a like if you want to download this project file you can over on our patreon account anyways guys thanks for watching [Music]

Channel: MOBOX Graphics

Views: 130,380

Keywords: mobox, after effects, tutorial, motion graphics, after effects tutorial, motion graphics tutorial, after effect abstract wave, abstract waves, animated abstract waves, abstract animation, beginner after effects tutorial, motion graphic tutorial, flow animation, wave animation, vintage background, loop background, abstract background, adobe after effects, video tutorials, after effects basics, how to use after effects, filmmaking tutorial, how to make better videos, loop

Id: C2cfUBNJehs

Length: 13min 46sec (826 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 11 2018