Create a Chrome Type Effect in After Effects | After Effects Tutorial

hey in this tutorial we'll be creating the shiny looking chrome type all in after effects and with no plugins [Music] okay so let's create a new composition let's call it text pre and i'm going to make it square 25 frames per second and 5 seconds long now let's select the type tool and create some text and let's use the align tool to center it now i'm going to scale it up so it fills the frame a bit more and then stretch it vertically too now to get that really extreme stretch look we're going to apply the transform effect and then only affect the lower part of our text by using a mask let's go to effect distort transform then let's deselect uniform scale and increase the scale height now let's select the rectangle mass tool and draw a mask around the bottom half of our text then let's select our text layer and hit e to reveal our effects and inside the transform effect hit the plus sign next to the compositing options and now the transform effect will be only constrained to the mask now we just need to tweak the position of the mask so that the edges match up now as you can see our text is sitting a bit too near to the bottom so let's move the text layer up and then tweak the position or anchor point of the transform effect so that it all lines up again okay now this is looking good as it is but it's a little bit too chunky so we can go to effect matte simple choker and increase the choke amount to reduce the thickness of the letters and finally to make the form of our letters feel a bit more random we can add a turbulent displace which will help give them a nice wavy look by tweaking the amount and the size it can vary how much we distort the text and i found leaving the size at 100 and dropping the amount to 30 works well here okay so now we have our text let's drop it into a new comp and we'll call it chrome free to build the chrome look we're going to need a gradient texture map so let's create another new comp and this time we'll call this one gradient pro let's create a new solid and i'm just going to call it grad for gradient and i'm going to use fractal noise to create our gradient map so go to effect noise and grain fractal noise now instead of this noise pattern we want something that resembles streaks and that will help create a nice looking chrome effect so we can go to the transform box and deselect uniform scaling and now scale the height until we get some nice streaks then let's go and increase the contrast as having a nice variety of dark and light areas will really help sell the effect now let's bring the gradient pre-comp into our chrome pre-comp and we can hide the text layer and then let's just rename the gradient to chrome now to create the base metal effect we're going to start off by applying cc glass so go to effect stylize cc glass now cc glass helps create a glass look by applying shading based on a bump app that you can define so we're going to use the gradient map itself as the bump layer so make sure this is set to this layer now if we tweak the softness height and displacement values we can create a really nice looking metallic look and i found by leaving softness to 20 height to 50 and displacement to 250 we get great effects but it won't create too much distortion later when we come to add some color then under lights we set this to use ae lights as we'll be adding some lights to our scene in a little bit then finally in shading let's just leave everything default apart from specular which we can increase to 100 and this will just create stronger highlights next we're going to add cc blobilize which is in the distort category and cc globalize is going to give us a nice curvy metal look so first let's set the blob layer to our text pre comp layer and then we just need to change the property to alpha instead of lightness then the softness controls how blobby the contours of the shading will look and the cutaway tweaks the size of the alpha channel so we just need to basically play with these values until we get a look that we like okay that's looking nice now let's again set the light to be using ae lights and for the shading we can leave it all as difficult for now okay so now let's add some lights to our scene so let's go to layer light and i'm going to use a parallel light and making sure it's white and i've set the intensity to 150 and straight away you'll see if we move the point of interest around we get some really nice lighting effects on our text this first light i'm going to move to the top left of the text and move the point of interest so that we get some nice dramatic looking lighting then let's duplicate this light and we'll move it over to the right side of the text and again we can play with the position of the point of interest until we get a look that we like now a quick and easy way to be able to move these lights around is to parent them to a normal so let's create a new normal and we'll call it light control make it 3d and then we'll parent our two lights to it and now we can rotate and move our knot around to easily control the lighting on the text and of course we can animate it so let's go to the start of our timeline and rotate the null around the y axis until the lights are behind our text making everything go black then let's go forward one second and rotate the node back until we get some light being cast on our text next i'm going to move forward to around four seconds and rotate the null around so the lights are sort of in the opposite position and then finally i'll go to the end of our timeline and rotate the null even further until the lights are back behind the text again making our text blank now let's jump into the graph editor to make this rotation nice and smooth so select the first keyframe and we'll set this to easy ease second keyframe we'll set that to easy ease in the third keyframe we'll set to ease out and the last keyframe we can set to easy use then we just need to tweak the handles to make this line nice and smooth great now we can play this back and see how it looks and as it's quite a heavy effect we can set this to half resolution okay this is looking good and it's a great place for us to start adding some color so to add the color we're going to be making tweaks inside our gradient precomp and to make things a lot easier we can open two comm windows at once so we can see what the changes we make to our gradient are doing to our text so to do this just click this padlock here to lock this window and then go to our gradient pre and we'll just drag this window to the side now to add the color i'm going to use colorama as it will allow us to assign color values to the different luminance values we have from our fractal noise so effect color correction color armor and straight away you see we get this crazy effect so if we jump into the effect settings you'll be able to see what's going on so we're defining an input value here which in this case is the intensity and then mapping some color values to the input based on the output cycle here and you'll see that colorama has some great presets already for this output cycle that once applied will give us some really cool effects but for this i'm just going to define my own colors using the hue cycle as a starting point so now we can just go into these colors on the wheel and set what colors we want to want to appear within our text i found by alternating between dark and lighter shades you can get a really nice metallic effect you may also find that once you define the colors that you don't like the look of certain areas of the text so you can jump back into the fractal noise and play with the evolution and the contrast and brightness settings to refine the look okay so now let's go back into our chrome pre comp and make some color adjustments to increase the metallic look of the text so i'm going to add a lumetri effect and first increase the contrast to give the color of a text some more depth then we can boost the highlights a little bit more drop the shadows a tad and then boost the saturation but essentially we just want to play with these settings until we get a really nice psychedelic metallic look another thing we can do is add a unsharp mask effect so go to effect blur and sharpen and sharp mask and what this is going to do is add some extra sharpness and definition to the color bands in our gradient and we can increase this amount until we get a look that we like okay so this is looking good so now let's add some final bells and whistles and i'm going to drag our crane pre-comp into a new comp and i'm going to call it chrome main now the first thing i'm going to do is create a black background so let's create a new solid and we'll call it bg now let's add some glow so let's create a adjustment layer and call it glow then go to effect stylize glow and we're actually going to use two instances of glow for this so on the first one let's reduce the threshold to around 20 so that more of the colors in our text will glow then we'll increase the radius to around 60 and drop the intensity quite low to around 0.3 now let's duplicate this and this time let's increase the threshold to around 80 and increase the intensity and radius until we get this really nice soft big glow around our text another thing we can do is add some nice highlight flares so let's duplicate our chrome text layer and first we just need to isolate the bright parts of our text so go to obsolete and luma key and we'll leave it set to key out darker and then we just increase the threshold until we're left with only the highlights now go to effect blur and sharpen and cc cross blur so let's increase the radius of both x and y to around 200 then we can just de-isolate our other layers and set the blending mode of our glare layer to add then finally let's just add another glue to give this a little bit more of a boost and then to refine the look if you want you can jump back into the luma key effect and we can just tweak threshold which will easily alter how much of the glare effect we get next i'm just going to add some noise so we'll create a new adjustment layer and then add a noise effect and we'll just set this to around five percent and finally let's just do a slight bit of color correction so i'll create another new adjustment layer and we'll add a curves and i'm just going to bring everything down a little bit so it's not quite so bright and then i'm going to add a hue and saturation effect just to tweak the hue so it's a little bit more blue okay and there we go and now that we've got the base effect built it's really easy to jump into the gradient precomp layer and tweak the gradient map to be able to get all sorts of different metallic looks thanks so much for watching i hope you found this useful if you like this tutorial then why not check out my neon text tutorial thank you and see you next time

Channel: Mograph Mill

Views: 32,152

Keywords: after effects, adobe after effects, after effects tutorial, after effects text tutorial, motion graphics, mograph mill, motion design, motion graphics tutorial, motion design tutorial, animation, graphic design, after effects text animation, after effects animation, chrome type, chrome, metal text after effects, chrome effect after effects, chrome effect photoshop

Id: a3lZxeNM7Mk

Length: 11min 29sec (689 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 17 2021