- Hello everyone, this is Evan Abrams, and in this After Effects tutorial, we're gonna be creating some
custom brush-on techniques inside of After Effects. Using these methods, you're
gonna have full control over the motion, the size,
the texture, the density of these brushstrokes. You can use this technique
to reveal layers, or to brush on text. You can do just about anything, just glorp some globs onto your canvas. If you enjoy learning
about this kind of thing, motion design, visual
effects, After Effects, please consider
subscribing to the channel, and turning on notifications,
so you can brush up on your After Effects skills. I've made a terrible pun, so it's time to start the tutorial. Now, before we jump in here, I just wanna let you know this tutorial is brought to you by Skillshare. If you like learning, and I assume you do, because you're watching this,
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and productivity courses. In this tutorial, we're
talking about making fake brushstrokes, but if
you wanna do real brush work, painting, calligraphy, they have experts teaching that on there too, experts like Leah Goren, who's
teaching Gouache techniques. It's perfect for beginners like me, who used to pronounce that word as gauche. And Skillshare is incredibly affordable. Annual plans start at just $10 a month, which is pretty great compared to in person
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sponsoring this video, you can enjoy two months
of free premium membership if you use the link in the description. That link is skl.sh/ecabrams9. Link in the description, click that, and enjoy two free months of Skillshare. (upbeat music) We're gonna be using a
methodology that really closely mimics the way Photoshop's
Brush tool actually works. We're gonna have to start
by creating the shape of our brush head. This is gonna be very subjective, but I'll show you my favorite
technique to make this happen. So, we're gonna start by
creating a new composition, and it's gonna be quite small. It's gonna be 240 by 240 pixels. If you're making your brush head, you only need it to be as
large as the amount of detail that you want in that brush. The larger this is, the more taxing it's gonna be on your system. Also, it's only one frame long. So, you only need the one frame, because the brush head itself is not going to be changing over time. We might modify it,
depending on how hard or soft we think the brush is
pressing at a certain moment. But the shape is not going to change, and we'll give this a
name like Brush Shape. So, here's our single
frame of Brush Shape. What do we make this out of? Well, we start by creating a new solid, and that solid is going
to be black, we'll say. Make it the comp size, hit OK. This first one is just
gonna sit in behind, and act as kind of a plate in the back to help us clean this up later. So, let's duplicate that, and this will be our Fractal Brush. We're gonna use an effect
called Fractal Noise. So, we're going to apply Fractal Noise, and it creates this lovely
cloud of fractal noise, and we're gonna modify this to
look like the brush we want. We're gonna go down to Dynamic. We are going to up the Contrast
to like 1,300, big contrast. I'm gonna lower the Brightness down, and we're gonna Invert this. So, we end up with these
kind of wispy little chunks everywhere, and now
maybe most importantly, we're gonna Scale this down maybe 17, maybe a little bit larger, or smaller, something in that area. That's how I created my brush. But this is probably the
most subjective part, creating this shape. If you wanted to make this a fan brush, you would probably make something
that is narrow and tall, or you might make something that's square if you were making a marker. So, defining this shape
is gonna be very important to the rest of the process. One thing to keep in
mind is that if you want a lot of streaks, a lot of variety, you want to leave these holes, these chunky little holes everywhere. So, certainly the shape of the
brush is not gonna be square. It's gonna be a circle. So, I'm gonna go up here, create a mask, double clicking on the Ellipse tool, twirling into the Mask Properties, and we were gonna bring in the expansion, maybe something like 50. There we go, pinch it in, and now the edge of
this brush is too clean. So, why don't we roughen it up? And we're gonna use Roughen
Edges to make that happen, leaving all the settings the same. We're just gonna increase the Border, the area that is getting roughened up, increase that up to 90. So, now we have this fairly rough brush. So, on top of this, we
need to start clamping down and expanding some of these values. So, I'm gonna create
a New Adjustment Layer to apply some effects
to all of this stuff. The first one is going to be Levels, and that's gonna provide us with this nice little graph up here, and I'm gonna drag the Input Black to after this big hump,
and I'm gonna try to get the Input White around the same spot. So, you can see we're crushing
the values into the middle, increasing the contrast. The next thing we wanna
do is shift the channels. So, shifting the channels
is going to allow us to take the Alpha information
from, say, the Luminance, turning everything that
is black into transparent. And then, to get rid of all
this little, subtle gradation in here, this value shift
from black to white, we can just take all of
these other channels, and set them to fully on. So, now, everything is white, and everything is either
opaque or transparent. Now, you're probably wondering, well, why did you have to put
that black solid back there, if you're making everything
transparent anyway? Well, without the black solid back there, things get a little bit wacky. It starts to look kind of like this. So, the black solid helps us clamp and control values back there. So, in the end, we end up
with this as our brush shape. Now, of course we've just made this brush entirely procedurally
inside of After Effects, but you could use all kinds of methods. You could just take a photo
of some dobs on paper. You could actually go into Photoshop and take some of those brushes, and just click once around the screen. However, you do it, it's totally fine. Personally, I like to
keep things procedural inside of After Effects,
in case I wanna come back and make a change. Keeping things
non-destructive and flexible is one of the things I enjoy
about After Effects in general. But now that we've got this shape, we need to do something with it. Let's smear some paint around. We're gonna make a new composition, and we're gonna be working in an HDTV 1080 24 frames a second composition. I'm only mentioning the frames per second because that's gonna feed
into some calculations we have to do later. I'm gonna call this the Basic Stroke, and we'll do a more complex one as well, but let's just start with a Basic Stroke, and let's keep this on
for maybe two seconds. So, we're gonna bring our brush
shape out onto the canvas. Wonderful, and I'm gonna
bring up my Proportion Grid, and I'm gonna start it over here. So, what happens when
the brush hits the paper? Well, it's gonna smear across. We're gonna keyframe its
position as it moves across. We're gonna keyframe its opacity
as it touches the canvas, and we're gonna keyframe
its, and we're gonna keyframe its scale, 'cause as a brush
gets pressed into the canvas, it kind of expands, and as it
lifts off, it gets smaller. So, we're gonna keyframe all those things, and we're gonna use an
effect to make sure that all the instances, every
frame of this, hangs out. So, first, with this layer,
we're gonna go Layer, Time, Freeze Frame, and then drag this out, drag it out, so that this brush lasts for all of the two seconds, and I think starting at frame
five we're gonna call up the Position, Scale, and T for Opacity. And you know what, let's get
Rotation in there as well, because the brush will probably
rotate as it goes along. So, we're gonna put
keyframes for all of those, and let's go ahead to maybe frame 35. You can see over here our
time and then our frame number below it is at 35. So, we know that we're taking
30 frames to go across. Keep that number in mind. It'll come in handy later. So, at this point, I would
like the brush to be over here. So, I'm just gonna drag it across, and that's setting a new keyframe. Then I'm gonna easy
east that by hitting F9. I'm gonna probably go into
the Graph Editor here, and maybe drag this handle a little bit, you know, get that
influence up a little bit, so that it's slowing
as we come to the end, nice, gentle brushstroke. Wonderful. The Scale, I think it will
start a little bit smaller, maybe around 70, and then
we'll probably end here. Maybe we'll end at maybe
like 90 or something. So, it's like the brush is
getting pushed into the page as it goes across. Opacity-wise, I think the
Opacity is gonna start at zero, right, 'cause there's nothing, and then a few frames in,
we're gonna be at 50%, and then we're gonna keep going. We're gonna run out of,
we're gonna start to run out of paint on the brush. Maybe we'll go down to 30. Oh no, we're still
running out of more paint. We keep running out of paint. I'm gonna go down to 20%. So, this is just going along. Oh, we're running out of
paint as we get to the end. Okay, good, and Rotation-wise,
let's just have this rotate 45, 45 degrees, as it whooshes across, and we'll probably ease that as well. So, hitting F9 to ease that. So, right now, this is not
a brushstroke, not at all. This is just a weird clump moving across. So, we are gonna go New, Adjustment Layer, and we're gonna add an effect
on here called the Echo. Now, what the Echo is
gonna do is gonna create more instances of that
brush as it goes across. So, the first thing we wanna
do is change the Echo Time. This is the difference in
time between each echo. I know just from doing some
math that I want this to be negative 0.003, which is
gonna be very close together, and we need to figure out
what the maximum number of echos is between here at the start, and here at the end. So, we have 30 frames, and
the echo time is .0003. If we do a little multiplication,
a little bit of division, we come out to around 420 if what you need to go from one to the other. So, at 420, by the time we get to the end, the next frame is when we start to lose those first brushstrokes. Now, something that's kind of important is you can see these
little check, check, check, all these little marks here, we're gonna try to smooth that away using a bunch of other effects. But if this kind of situation
is becoming untenable for you, you might need to increase
the Number of Echoes and decrease the Echo
Time to get these things scrunched closer together. But we are approaching
more of a brushstroke look. This kind of looks like
a brushstroke, right? I think so. Some other things that
we wanna add in here is the Echo Operator is gonna
be set to Composite in Front or Composite in Back. We don't need it to be
adding to each other, and the Starting Intensity can be .3. It doesn't need to be so intense. This will preserve some
more of that detail of that brush shape that we worked on. So, now we need to stack
some more effects on here to kind of smooth out some of this. The first one for me
is of course a Gaussian or Gaussian Blur, however you
wanna pronounce that word, and just a little bit of blur on here makes that checking kind of go away. So, it looks a lot smoother,
a lot more consistent. Well, now, it's a bit too blurry. So, I'm gonna use a Levels adjustment. I'm gonna drop some Levels on here, so that we can kind of clamp these values. So, I'm gonna go to the Alpha, and I'm gonna squeeze these
values into the middle, squeezing the values. Now, how much you squeeze these values is gonna be pretty subjective. Actually, all of this is subjective. If you want it to look exactly
like mine, that's fine, but you really need to
play around with this to get the exact look
that you are looking for. And of course, Levels is only
one way to clamp the Alpha. You might use a mat of some kind. You might use Curves instead. I like Levels, Levels is nice and simple. It has this graph, and quite frankly, if you're gonna be using a
lot of instances of this, you wanna be using the
simplest effects you can. Finally, I'm gonna drop on
here another Roughen Edges, setting the Border down to two. I'm gonna set the Edge
Sharpness down to zero, so it doesn't look too crisp-ified, and this is kind of what we end up with. This is the situation we end up with, this streak blorp-ing onto the screen. You're gonna wanna play
around with these values to find what makes the brushstroke look that you are specifically after. One thing that I like to add in here, just to give it a little bit more depth, a little bit more texture to it, is in the actual brush
shape I like to add a Ramp, a Gradient Ramp, in here, just
because when you're applying paint to a brush, if
you've mixed the paint, if it isn't one solid color of paint, then you're gonna end
up with some variation from the top to the bottom of that brush, or you might swirl it
around or do something. But bringing that kind of
dimensionality into the stroke can be very helpful. Well, whoop-de-doo, we now
have one straight stroke line. That's fantastic. You can use it all sorts of places, like over the top of this frame, but I think we can do better. Let's get a little bit more advanced, and start moving that brush around in a little bit more of an exciting way. So, there are really
only three more things I wanna cover here. One is how to re-time
this and composite it. The second is how to do something more interesting than a straight line, and the third is how to
colorize these things. So, let's make a comp to
throw these things out on. So, HDTV, okey-doke. We'll just take our Basic Stroke, and we'll drop it out here. One of the first things is
you need this to last forever. So, we're gonna go Layer,
Time, Enable Time Remapping, and we want to control how fast each of these strokes comes on. If you're going to put a
whole bunch of them on here, and you want some
variety, you wanna be able to quickly alter the
speed of these strokes, the best way to go about
it is to double click into this composition, go to the endpoint when the stroke is resolved, return to your assembly
composition, here called Comp 1, and we're gonna set a keyframe
in the time remapping there, and then we go back inside, and set the playhead at the beginning. Go back to this comp, you'll
see the playhead has moved. Set a keyframe there, then delete the inside
and outside keyframes. So, now when you extend
the endpoint of that layer, this is on forever, and
if you pinch together these two keyframes, then
you're pinching together the animation, and you
can extend the animation, if you would like. Oh, that's nice and smooth. Let's say you want something
a little bit more exciting than just a straight line though. You wanna really affect the
character of this stroke. Well, I'm gonna go ahead and
duplicate the Basic Stroke. Duplicate, and let's
call this, I don't know, like an S Stroke. So, let's say we were going
to write on the letter S, well, we're gonna go
into the S Stroke here. We're gonna alter the positional path that this brush travels. And if you want a little guide out here, let's say you are gonna do some texts, then just go ahead and
type out your letter, make it nice and large, so
you can see what you're doing, knowing of course that you can
always shrink down this asset when you composite it, but it's
very difficult to expand it. So, we're gonna put this giant S out here. We're going to set it to a Guide Layer. We are bringing its Opacity way down, and now we are just going to draw this on. Let's have it go from maybe
the top to the bottom, awesome, and I'll change these to
linear keyframes, just for now, and that is not the
direction we want it to go, but I'm gonna set a
keyframe here in the middle, and now I'm gonna use
my Convert Vertex tool to alter the bezier
handles of these points, so that we can get this into
kind of the shape that we want. Maybe like this, maybe like that, and now, we can just
kind of play this back, and see if that is the
kind of character we want. Ooh, very ghostly indeed. What I might do in this case is I might go Layer, Transform, and we're gonna Auto
Orient along the path, so that we get these nice long streaks along the curvature here. Might increase the
Rotation at the end though, just so we get kind of a nice
little spiral shape going on and something else I'm
gonna do is I'm gonna take this middle point, I'm
gonna right click on it, and I'm gonna say Rove Across Time. It doesn't have a strict place in time, but it does have a strict place in space, and now we've got something. Because I eased the position
at the start and end, it's got more paint there, 'cause the brush is spending
more time at the start and end. This kind of looks like a cool snake, now that I think about it. (Evan laughs)
Very, very cool, okay. That's the kind of thing that you can do by messing with the Position. If you start messing
around with the Opacity, you're gonna start to
get more thick areas, looks like there's more
paint being applied in them, and if you start messing
around with the Scale, then you're gonna start to
get fatter areas of the line. So, let's say if we just go here, and we try to thin out this top part, and then it gets thicker
here at the bottom. (Evan laughs)
That's pretty cool, and then maybe thins up
a little bit right there. I'm into that, that's pretty neat. You do want to be careful, though, that if you start making
the brush go too fast, you end up with, again, this
kind of checking situation, and then you'll probably need to go into those effect stacks. You might need to increase the blurriness to try to make that go
away and then clamp it, or you can just try to slow it down, just try to slow down
how this thing is going. Don't make it cover as much distance. Don't stretch it out too much. But that's how you make kind
of more nuanced brushstrokes. When you're compositing all
of these things together, I highly recommend you simply
duplicate an original stroke, one that's already out on the timeline, and the Alt drag your other
strokes in to replace it, because then all of that
time remapping information is already preserved in there, and hopefully that works out. You can composite a
whole lot of these things on top of each other
and around each other, and it's very versatile, and not super taxing on the machine. But let's get into colorizing this stuff. I like to make use of an
effect called Colorama. In the intro example here
in the Brush On Letters, you see everything's black and white, and then when things finally
got composited together, I re-colored all of these strokes, and we use something called
Colorama to make that happen. You're able to remap the inputs. In this case, we're taking
the Alpha information and then we're combining
it with the Intensity. So, the black and white levels as well as the transparency levels, we're averaging those together, and then we are remapping those values to this kind of tri-tone,
that's going from dark to bright to kind of mid, and that's how we get this kind of discoloration going on. But the really important thing
is you wanna click down here in Modify and uncheck Modify Alpha. So, you can kind of see
how chunk-ified it looks if you do modify the alpha. Don't do that. We spent so much time having
this nuance of transparency, all of these details. Please leave them alone,
and do not modify the alpha, unless you want to be remapping them, and exploring more with Colorama. So, that is it. Hopefully you didn't
brush off this tutorial. Thank you so much for watching, for spending some time with
me here on the channel. If this is the kind of you like learning, then consider subscribing,
and turning on notifications, so you know when we get
new tutorials up here. I'd love to see what you
make using those techniques. So, maybe send them at me on Twitter. I'm @ecabrams on there,
or @ecabrams on Instagram. That's usually where I
am around the internet. If you have trouble with
this tutorial though, please let me know in the comments. I will try to get you through. Try to get to all the
comments when I'm able. Also, if there are other subjects
you'd like to see me cover on this channel, get at me
and we'll try to get to it. If you want to get your
hands on the example file that we worked up during this tutorial, it's available at evanabrams.com. You can find that in the
cards, or in the description. But that's it for me. Thanks again for watching,
and have a great day.
