Better Textures For Animations (After Effects Tutorial)

in today's tutorial I want to go over a couple different ways that you can add textures to your animations now I know I've talked about textures before but there are a couple ways that I haven't mentioned now before we get into the tutorial itself I just want to say a quick thank you to today's video sponsor skillshare but more about them later on anyways we might as well hop straight into off effect where we're going to be taking a look at the first method and this one is something I haven't really used myself a whole bunch but I've been loving it a lot recently I don't think it gets used very much in general but we'll start laying out our actual animations so I'm just going to start with a background and we can just create any sort of background really I like a little bit of an off- white color so like an F3 F3 F3 I think that just looks pretty good and then we're going to set up our text and we're going to do keep this super super simple let's just do like comment and subscribe because it's fun and then I'm just going to take my text and I'm just going to center it up right here so it's Center lined and Center that up and I'm going to change the font to something a little bit nicer than this in this case I want something that's pretty fun maybe this font pretty good actually let me just up the quality of that a little bit and then I'm going to use decompose text which is a free plugin to separate the words individually you don't have to do this but for the sake of imitating the animation we did that is how I did it so I'm just going to make sure that I enable approximate position because I just want to be able to have the words on their own layers and if you pick the original position it'll all it'll be a little bit wi so just make sure you pick that and then we can delete our original layer so now we can move our text around and you can select all the layers actually and just make sure you align layers to composition and just Center all that up and then we can maybe take him and just scale it down just a little bit so it's not so big and let's position this around so we're going to start with like comment and we'll create a little bit of fun over here so we'll just lay that out right there maybe rotate these just a little bit just to make it a little bit more janky a little bit more fun and select all except for the end and let's just kind of position it somewhat in the middle here and then for the end text what I did in the example that we we saw I took a rounded rectangle and I just drew around it a little bit and let's remove the stroke from that and just give it a solid fill in this case let's do a black color and then selecting our shape layer I'm just going to search for size and then I'm going to unlink it and just increase it until we get a a shape that roughly covers it and we can place it below the end and let's change the color of the text to be the same as the background so it kind of looks like almost a cutout and then if you go into the shape layer again and just search for rounded you can increase the roundedness of it so that we get a nice pill shape almost I'm going to go back into size and just increase that a little bit you can select both layers make sure you're align into composition and just Center that up so we know that that is exactly where we want it to be and then I'm going to use void which again is a free plugin I'm going to use that so it creates a n that both of those layers are parented to and then I'm just going to scale it down using this and rotating it and moving it around just because that is a little bit easier and maybe even scale that down just a little bit more so now we have that there and what I did in the example itself was create just a little bit of more fness by changing each of these to be a different color just to get a nice nice little bit of some nice Vibrance in there so just select each one and change it to a super bright color and it truly the crazier you go the better it's going to be I'd keep it somewhat in the same realm so if you're doing all bright colors do all that if you're doing pastell colors do that and then I like mixing and matching cool and warm colors so we have red which is a pretty warm color and then I'll just take it and do a cool color next to it and then down here let's maybe do a greenish color trust is super important so you want to keep that in mind as well like this bright yellow obviously is very hard to read so you can maybe drop it down a little bit so it's a bit more orangey and then just decreasing the saturation or the luminance of that color to make it a little bit easier to see what we actually have going on here and I'm just going to hit U to hide everything and I'm going to take my end and my shape layer all that and put it at the very top and we can just change the color of this to Orange just so we know that that's like a separate thing now we can go ahead and add some animation to this so for the text I just want to keep it super simple and we're just going to add a scale animation but before we do that you can select all your layers pretty much and then go in to motion tools again free plugin and just Center The Anchor Point which is just going to make sure that when we scale it up it's going to scale from the center instead of from the bottom which is the typical with a text layer so now we can just hit s on everything to open all of that up and then for the end one we're just going to key frame the void with an all just cuz we don't need to key frame the individual layers of it and just set a key frame for all of that and then move that key frame out a little bit let's go to about 1 second and then right at the beginning we can just set all of that to zero so now playing that back we have a scale animation and we might move this in a little bit closer and then we're just going to add some sexy speed to make sure that our animation is nice and sexy just gives it a nice little bit of momentum right there that is pretty much it for like the animation itself you can add a little bit more flare like for example to the end if you you hit all to open up the rotation and then add an expression by Alt clicking the stopwatch and then you can type in something like a posterized time which're just going to slow down the animation a little bit set it to something like six and then add a wiggle expression to something like 1 comma 10 and that's just going to give us a nice little bit of Wiggle on the rotation of that so it just adds a little bit more movement and for the other text layers I might add the same expression but just to the position value instead so you can right click on the rotation with the expression and copy expression only and then open up the position of the other layers so I'll just command V to paste that onto there and now we should just have a nice little bit of movement in the text itself so it's just going to look a little bit more fun and you can always adjust the wiggle parameter you can hit double e with nothing selected to open up all your expressions and then you can change the wiggle to something like let's say 1 comma 3 instead which is then going to decrease the amount that it moves and if you want it to speed up you can then increase the first parameter here to something like 15 so now it'll move a little bit faster and less position that will it'll move each time and then if you want to then do that for all of them you can just copy the expression and this time since we copied it from the position parameter if we just paste it onto the layers it'll automatically go to the position one if we would have done that with the rotation it would have gone to the rotation instead so now we just have this nice little bit of Animation here and that is pretty much it for this main bit now we can take all of this and let's pre-comp it and just name this text pre and hit enter and then we can add another scale animation so once this comes up like that then we can hit s right here and key frame the scale and go forward and let's just zoom in a little bit like that and just add sex0 speed so now we get another little bit of movement in there so it comes in and then again and then what I did in the initial title animation that I did is what I added an Optics compensation and that's just going to let you get a little bit of like a fisheye distorted lens so you can see here how it kind of bends the text and the closer it is to the top the the more distorted it gets so if you increase this even more for example you can see it becomes more and more distorted so that's something super fun you can play with and you can always enable this to continuously restor Rize we're just going to keep all the quality of the layers because we are working with text and shapes so it's the best to do it that way because otherwise it's going to become blurry for no reason we might as well use it when we can now as you can see it does affect the background just delete the background for now and then we'll add it later on when we've pre-med all of this for now let's just do that and H change the background of this to a white so we kind of get kind of get a sense of what it is that we are looking at now there are a couple different ways you can add texture like actual overlay textures or you can even add what I like to call Visual texture which is kind of what we did with the Optics compensation it's not really a texture in itself necessarily but it does add some visual to it that I think can be classified as a texture the position where the little expression we did or the rotation expression I would also classify as texture so it's just seeing it in different ways but the technique that I actually want to show in this that I was talking about earlier is using an overlay texture in a bit of an interesting way to create some distressing in the text so I'll go into my final window and I have a whole bunch of textures that we're going to use today but the one I want to take a look at first is this one you can see it looks pretty gray but actually a bunch of black and white values and it doesn't really matter but you do want to make sure that it does have black and white values for this to work and I'm just going to leave this above everything else and then we are going to use that as a track M so now if I link that to my my text to my track mat here doesn't really look like much is going on but then if we change it to be a Luma mat instead of an alpha mat it'll look at the black and white values of that texture and you can even go in and adjust it more by adding something like a curves or levels and you'll see how that changes it and essentially what we want here is just a nice separation between the black and the white values so you can see the difference before and after it looks less gray more has a bit more contrast but we're going to hide that for now and I'm actually going to scale this down cuz it's a little bit too big and I just want just a little bit of texture and then you can see how we get a little bit of like cutouts in the text whereas if you were to just use this as an overlay texture it wouldn't really give you the same Vibe I'm also going to add a levels to this and I'm just going to decrease the whites a good bit so we get just a little bit less cutouts so we just want a little bit of texture and it almost looks a little bit half Tony but I really like this because it adds that distressing to the text instead of just being an overlay text I just feel like it gives it some different depth than what you would usually get if you were just to Overlay the text itself now to the text itself I want to add a different type of texture that I've talked about before which is Echo and that's again one of the things I would like to classify as a visual texture it's not a texture in the traditional sense but it does give it a little bit more of a textured feel I'm just going to set that to negative 001 increase the number of Echoes and then change it to composite in back or composite and front really depends on the type of look you're going for in this case Cas it's not going to matter too much but you can see the difference in the end so uh in this case we'll do composite in front cuz that looks a little bit better and we might even increase this to something like 50 just so we get a nice bit of Trail in there just a nice little bit of texture in there it looks a little bit funky with the Echo and then the little bit of motion that we have in the layers itself so you can go in and turn that off or even just key frame the echo so right here when it kind of comes to an end you can just key frame the echo time and the number of echo hit you to bring up that go one two frames forward just a few frames and just set both of those values to zero and then you won't have that anymore and you can add things like posterz time which is another great way of adding some texture to it by slowing it down a little bit and feel make it feel a little bit more handdrawn and this is one of the things that I like doing and I think is a way to separate your work is adding a lot of different layers of textures so don't only use one or the other but combine them to create a cohesive look but that is pretty much it for how I created that little bit of course couple more things you can add to it and spice it up now before we get into the second way of adding some textures which I'm looking very much forward to because it's super fun I want to talk a little bit about skillshare which is also today's video sponsor depending on where you are in the world summer is finally here and that usually means that a lot of us have a lot more free time on our hands whether you're in school or if you even got some summer vacation from work that free time doesn't necessarily mean that you have to stop learning though the summer is a great time to pick up a new skill we have more daylight which means more hours we can do stuff and personally I'm looking to develop a couple of skills in some unexpected areas I very badly want to start a clothing brand and to do that I kind of need to know a little bit about that world so I'm really looking forward to diving into the world of creating Tech packs and learning how to design clothing in a way that actually makes sense other than just slapping things on mock Ops luckily skillshare has me covered skillshare is the largest online learning community for creatives they have pretty much anything you can imagine of whether you're looking to learn how to make Tech packs like myself or if you're wanting to dive deeper into motion design graphic design design you can even learn about cooking or business which just makes the platform so great you don't have to only learn about one thing you can pick whichever you want and you can even bounce between different things not only that but you can always be confident in the quality all the classes on school share are taught by industry professionals and you can rest assured that whoever is teaching that class knows what they're doing and that information that you're going to be learning is going to be relevant when you get out into the real world I highly recommend using the link below which is going to give the first 500 people one month free of skillshare to see what they have on the platform figure out what you want to do now if you want to do a little bit more about textures learning how to make your own and developing that skill set there's actually a clause I'd recommend for you there's a class by Brad Woodward called collect make and digitize a guide to custom textures which covers how to make your own textures and I thought that would be super helpful in relation to this and it's something I really enjoyed watching myself as someone who's working on building their own library of textures but that being said I want to say thank you to Scola and make sure you head to the link in the description where the first 500 people to sign up with that link get one month free of skill share and explore a little bit around and make sure that their summer break is productive now with that being said let's hop into the second technique this one there's really two ways that you can go about it there's the super cool and handsone way which is a little bit more tedious but we'll give you the best results and there's also the cheating way I'll make sure that I cover both for the sake of everyone that you know you might not have a printer and a scanner but you still kind of want to look one thing you do want to make sure of if you're doing it the tedious way whether you want to do this with a video or an animation is that whatever timeline you're working in you want to decrease the frame rate so in this example if I hit command K to bring up my composition settings you can see I have it set to 12 frames the reason I want to do this instead of using posterized time for example is because with posterized time you're still going to have all the frames except you're just going to have a bunch of duplicates So to avoid that we're just going to decrease it of the composition itself we're just going to give the same look but with less pictures once we export it you can even drop it down to something like six if that works better for your specific animation or video but in this case I I think 12 frames looks pretty good and then I've just marked off this little section which is just a ball coming turning around and it just cuts before it finishes up the animation the reason I only want to do a short bit of this is this sequence alone is a good few frames but I also think the transition between a digital animation and then going into a lot more hand crafted like tangible textures looks super sick and I really like the switch of the look and it just adds a little bit of visual interest we are going to take this and we're just going to export it as a PNG sequence and it's super easy you just go on to composition go into add to render queue and then open up your render settings like in the output module you just want to make sure that you select either jpeg sequence PNG sequence whatever you want to do in this case I have a background just I'm just going to keep it so I'm just going to select a JPEG sequence and then we can pick where we want to save it with a location selected I'm just going to hit render and then it's going to render everything out and we should get a nice little folder with a bunch of images so if I go into my folder where I set to print it we now have a beautiful 14 IM that we're going to print out the easiest way to do this is using something like Google Docs or Pages if you're on Mac or word or something like that and putting them all into a document and what I want to do here is lay them out in a way that makes sense and then I'm just going to do one by one so I can make sure that I know what image is what you do want to keep the size of all this the same but don't go too small because then it's going to be super hard to work with six to8 on each page is going to be pretty good for a workable size but I'm going to do all this and then I'm going to meet you over at the printer where we are going to finish this off so with all of them printed out we can start just having some fun with it you can do whatever you want to and I'm just going to add a little bit of scratches hand there add a little bit of pin strokes and whatnot you just want to have fun and make something that looks cool and then also think about how it would look put all together think of it as a handdrawn animation once we have all that sorted out we just want to go ahead and scan it like I've done or you can even take your phone and just take pictures of each frame and then send it to your computer I scan them air Dro them to my main computer and then I just adjust the cars a little bit in Photoshop to get the look that I want now we can go back into offo effects and I have my four scans right here and I'm just going to drag them all into off the effects and this is just going to make it super easy to put together now that we have all these in here so I'm just going to start with the first one and let's just solo the very first one and essentially what we want to do here is rotate it we can just select the mo action rotate it and just rotate them 90° and now we just want to scale them down boop boop boop so we can see it in the screen here and I'm just going to make them a little bit smaller than what they actually have to be and for this first one we want to crop out this first little frame here so I'm just going to select my rectangle tool and I'm just going to click and drag to cut that out and we can rename this Frame one duplicate it and then we can unsolo it and move it over and hit M to bring up our mosque click the mosque path and just move that over to select frame two and we just want to make sure that we do indeed have the full frame in here so that looks pretty good let's just put it roughly around here and then we can duplicate that that'll be frame three again unsolo that hit M to bring up the MOs p and let's just move it down in the corner over here so it should roughly be close to where we need it we just need to adjust it just a little bit like that so now we have this cut out as well and duplicate it again unsolo that so we're only seeing frame four hit M to bring up the M PA and move it over this way way and let's Center that up somewhat make sure that is in and we just want to repeat that process for all the frames and once we have that we can start laying them out and actually recreating the animation that we originally made now we have them all cut out so they are only one frame per layer so we can take them all and let's just go back to the very beginning and then we're just going to hit option and close bracket to just chop them at one frame and we can move them forward to begin right where our marker started cuz we know that is the sequence that we working with and then you can either use something like motion tools to stagger them in the correct order or you can just do it manually it's not too hard but we're just going to do that boom and now we have an animation that looks like this so let's play back real quick and we can already see how cool that looks with just the added bit of texture but now let's open this up so we can see the full animation so we have the regular animation and then it cuts into that and then goes back into what the animation actually was so we get a little bit of texture cut now we don't want all this white background ha so scale it up to match the edge of our canvas you just want to go select your layer you're going wire to bring up your ankle Point tool and then you can move it to the center of whatever this is just to make it a little bit easier you just want to scale it up until you have it lined up pretty good and it doesn't need to be perfect you just want it to get pretty close sometimes if it's a little bit too perfect you just lose a bit of the effect of having it being something handrawn and it just gives it a natural wiggle almost instead of adding it as like an adjustment layer later on and just like that we can now play it back and we have the initial animation cuts into the textured one and then we get the nice juicy little transition in there and it just looks I mean you really can't go wrong with this look it looks so beautiful but there is a little bit of a way you can cheat it you obviously won't be able to get as much texture in there as we have right here but we can simulate it just a little bit we'll just do that by let's hide all of this so we can just see what it looks like without this animation and the way we're going to do this is just simply by adding a whole bunch of textures to this I'm going to open up my little project fold ahead and we're going to add a whole bunch of them so let's start with just a simple paper texture I'm going to add that on top and just change that to multiply and that will just give us a nice foundational texture for well making it look like it was on paper actually and you can see we get some super nice texture in there already we can add an adjustment layer and I'm just going to add a transform effect to it and let's just simulate just a little bit of that jumping around that we got with the printed out one and we'll just set the scale to something like 102 and then all click the position of it go down into the expression box that it's opening up add a posterized time set it something like three and then a wiggle 222 comma 2 and that's just going to give it again that little bit of Wiggle in there I already have a little bit of texture applied to the main Circle itself you can see in here I have a Tabet displays but you might even want to crank that just a little bit increase the amount of this just a little bit just so we get a little bit more of it in there maybe decrease the size of something like one make it it a little bit rougher and then we're going to use a bit of the technique that we used in the first example as well we can take this texture right here and add it into let's just take the main Circle and then we're going to track mat it to that texture and change it to a Luma map so we get some of that nice cutouts in there let's just scale this down a good bit just to fit the frame and then we're going to add a levels to this and just drop this down a good bit and increase that a little bit so we get just a little bit of that cut out in there you can see how that's already starting to look pretty good we just want something that's pretty contrasty and just knocks out just a little bit of that then we can add some animated textures I highly recommend making a bunch of these with textures that you use pretty often I have some different protocols I have some different overlays that just make it super easy to add all of this to it and I'd say let's add this poster texture in there as well and what I've done is I've actually added the best blend mode in a bracket just to make it super easy when I add it or when I share it with people add that in there maybe decrease the opacity of it just a little bit and let's put that below the adjustment layer as well you can always add a curves to this and adjust the look of it just a little bit we can also add some more texture so something like this maybe we can take one of these let's add this one in the drag that in and I'm just going to solo this for now and I'm going to hit P shift all shift s to bring up the rotation scale and the position at the same time key frame all of it and then go forward a couple frames let's do 12 frames right here and then just move it around a little bit boom and this is just basic animating a texture but we will use this to drive a displacement map and then we can select them all and then right click on them and then go toggle hold key frame and we can add a loop out expression if we want to Loop it indefinitely just Loop out and right click and copy expression only and just paste it right in there and you can even go for a couple frames and just copy and paste the first key frame and that I just found that usually works a little bit better just move that up and sometimes you get a little bit of weirdness when you do this so that copying and pasting those initial key frames usually works the best you can select all of them and then holding alt you can click and drag the key frames to change the pacing of it which is going to change the speed of it so this is just a little bit faster this is a little bit slower and we just want something that's somewhat chaotic but we can unhide that and unhide all of that and then below our textures right here we're going to add an adjustment layer and let's add a displacement map and we are going to select the texture fabric one that we just used effects and Moss and let's just hide these textures for now so we can get a little bit of a better idea of what it is that we're actually doing you can see it's already driving it just a little bit here so without it and with it and just move this around around a little bit just to get a little bit more texture in there take the background and just increase it a little bit so we don't bleed on the edges another thing we can do is if we look at one of these frames you can see that the color palette is it looks a little bit more limited there's some dithering going on and we can simulate that just a little bit above our adjustment layer I'm just going to add another adjustment layer and I'm going to add an effect called posterize not posterized time just posterize and that's just going to limit the amount of numbers in our composition that should give us some pretty cool looking colors in here you can see how that just changes the way that the colors are being read so higher number means more colors a lower number means fewer colors so you just want to play around with this until you get some pretty cool texture in there something like that looks pretty cool you might even increase it a little bit more to something like eight anyways that is pretty much it for this tutorial just a few different ways that you can add some spice to your animations my personal favorite is printing them out scanning the mech in and then adding them in I just think it gives such a nice Vibe break you see a lot in music videos not much in animations which we should do more of cuz it's sick but with that being said I just want to say thank you for watching thank you to skillshare for sponsoring this video as always you can head to the link in the description sign up with them first 500 people can get one month free to skill share and try that out learn something new during the summer you can also get the project files for all of this in the description below by heading to my patreon patreon.com my Paul and uh yeah I hope you learned something new hope you enjoyed watching and uh I'll see you again next time peace out

Channel: Mapal

Views: 14,702

Keywords: Mapal, Berenson, Videos, Stream Packages, Overlays, Edits, Editing, Pictures, Video, Picture, Vibe, Vibes, Denmark, Danmark, English, Vlogs, BRNSN, photography, tutorial, sony, a7iii, tamron, tips, tricks, helpful, after, effects, animation, after effects, cinematography, story, story telling, studios, mapal studios, modern, grading, davinci

Id: saHOiEL-pCs

Length: 25min 30sec (1530 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 11 2024