Crazy Patterns with Time Displacement, Gradients, and Repetile in After Effects

so you might know that you can use a time displacement to make some kind of cool slit scan effect like this [Music] or a ripple like this whoa but you might not know that you can use it to control some kind of big array of patterns like this which is what we're going to be taking a look at today so let's get into it [Music] so let's go over what time displacement is i'm going to make a new solid and throw down some radio waves this is going to be our animation that we're working with here and this could be anything this could be an image this could be some footage this could be your fortnight edit whatever doesn't matter this is just some content that we're working with so now i'm going to make an adjustment layer here and we'll call this time displacement and i'll add a time displacement now this is looking a little uh wacky right now because this time displacement layer you'll notice it's trying to reference itself right now which is illegal okay you can't do that it needs to reference something else so we're going to make a new solid and i'm going to call this gradient because we are going to put a gradient ramp on this now this gradient ramp is where all the magic is going to happen we're going to control time with this gradient ramp so i'm going to drag this to the bottom so we can see visually what's going on i'm going to with my time displacement layer i'm going to target the gradient and i'm going to also select effects and mask because the gradient is an effect okay and i'm going to change this gradient here so that it aligns with what i'm about to say okay ready this is called presentation so something i thought for a long time was that black was no time displacement and white was maximum displacement but once i saw this video by mobox graphics i realized that i was actually using displacement maps wrong okay and it's a different kind of spectrum where it's actually in the case of time displacement 50 percent gray is no time displacement with black and white are both sides of the spectrum where black is backwards in time and white is forwards in time so if i change this time displacement here you can see this effect take place see if i turn up the displacement you can see the shapes of this radio wave are bending forwards in time towards the white areas moving away from the black which are going backwards in time and if i change this gradient here maybe i change it to a radial ramp we can just start to move this around and just really see these effects in action black is backwards white is forwards and it can be kind of hard to wrap your head around looking at it like this because we're breaking the space-time continuum but you can just play around with it and get some crazy effects and again black backwards white forwards if i change the white to 50 gray here by typing in here 50 gray now these are actually words 50 gray is just not really having um any time distortion it looks like it is but that's just kind of that's just how it works okay so now what if we take this idea and we move it onto something bigger like a pattern that we want to manipulate using time that would be really complex to do by hand let's see what that looks like so i have this unit that i want to use as a pattern it is a 100 by 100 pixel composition with this just pattern that i want to repeat so this is just a circle that animates to an x that transitions to a square in this 100 by 100 pixel square and the math here is going to be a little bit important so i'm doing everything in just simple numbers because it's going to be simple on me later but it can be pretty much whatever you want as long as it's squares or rectangles so in my main composition here which is going to be 1000 by 1000 i'm going to pull my unit out so since this is 1000 by 1000 and this is 100 by 100 i can go 10 by 10. that's my basic unit here and so you might think that you have to make 100 copies of this layer right to fill this gap but what we can actually do is just align this to the top corner and add a repetile to this so that's what i'll do and i'll just expand this right and then i'll expand this down oops expand this down there we go and so now we have our pattern that's just going across this whole composition the problem obviously is that this is all just happening together and we want to control we want to offset this and we're going to do it using time displacement so let's do that so let's go ahead and make our gradient first create a new solid we'll call this gradient or add a gradient ramp cool i'm going to drag this to the bottom so we can have a visual representation under it now if we add our new adjustment layer on top call this time displacement and we add our time displacement on top to this layer we target that gradient layer and we start messing with time whoops we need to also do the effects and masks we could start to get cool effects here like this and and you would want to hide this gradient layer too um we could start to get some cool effects here what's gonna happen is i'm gonna keep the gradient layer on just so we can have a very visual learning experience and you can start to mess with this gradient what's going to happen is your actual shapes themselves are going to get distorted inside here so you can see our x's are bending with the gradient and so that could be cool that could be what you want but that's not what i want what i want to happen is i want them to stay perfect inside of their compositions not to not themselves to bend so what i'm going to add to this is a mosaic and it's i already did this before so it already happened but um i want this to be the amount of blocks graded out that my composition is so in this case it's 10 by 10. so this could be whatever yours is you know you could have tall rectangles or whatever but this is going to be 10 by 10. so now we can mess with our time displacement and things are going to change perfectly according to our grid and we can move around this gradient now and it's just going to be perfectly in line with this time displacement very cool and we can make this a radial ramp to have kind of more more of a circular effect and just so we know now that white is forwards in time black is backwards in time and 50 gray is neutral so we can just mess with our gradient knowing that and play with our our time effects and do whatever kind of effect that we want and we can start to do some really cool things and this is now just a very simple way to kind of have these cool time patterns that would be extremely difficult to do by hand otherwise but wait there's more we don't have to just use a gradient to control everything we could make this into a different kind of source and use whatever we want so what if i pre-compose this gradient i'll just leave all the attributes there for now and i'll just call this source so now what if i click into here and i drag in this really nice footage that i took of just kidding i didn't take this of say i wish i took it this nice footage of santa dancing and now if we go back to our pattern comp and let me turn off the gradient ramp now all of our layers are being triggered by santa dancing and these are really kind of freaking out because i think that they're just excited to be dancing with santa this is a little bit too crazy but we can there are things we can do to you know edit this make it less crazy we could drag this footage out you know 250 percent we're not really seeing it we can um you know desaturate this i think so that we're just working with different values we could edit the levels on this so that we're getting more white more black something like that just more extreme values we also probably would work this want to hide the source maybe or maybe that's what you want to go for you want it to be spazzy but you know if you if you want to just work with footage and you don't want to animate a gradient or something you know this is this is something that you could do we could we could you know maybe bump up the maximum time displacement here to really make it feel whatever whatever you want to go for this is the part now where you you take this and and do your own stuff so yeah let me know if you guys found this tutorial helpful if you want to if you like this let me know your thoughts and if you make anything cool with this let me know tag me on instagram i'd like to see what what kind of stuff you make thanks for watching oh yeah also i have a new class out called motion design upgrade and the critics are raving about it check it out links in the description below thank you

Channel: Motion by Nick

Views: 33,979

Keywords: motion graphics, time displacement after effects, time displacement, after effects pattern, after effects time displacement, pattern after effects, displacement after effects, pattern animation after effects, after effects, displacement map after effects, after effects displacement map, after effects pattern animation, crazy patterns, crazy effects, cc repetile, motion tile, slit scan after effects

Id: 96ZM-s6yHEg

Length: 10min 54sec (654 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 24 2020